CONNECT THE DOTS

Looking for an upbeat way to begin the weekend ain't easy ...

Not when another helicopter has gone down in Iraq, this time killing six American soldiers ...

Not when the death toll has risen from 15 to 16 in Sunday's helicopter shoot-down ...

Not when Shrub's rush to war in Iraq looks increasingly like a high-level conspiracy to ignore any other option ...

Not when Jessica Lynch says she feels "used" by the U.S. military, which "lied" about her and "manipulated" her story ...

Not when the independent 9/11 commission may have to subpoena Oval Office documents Shrub and his minions are still withholding from its investigation of intelligence failures involving the 9/11 attacks, because Shrub has reneged on his promise to cooperate fully ...

Not when Der Gropenfuhrer of Culifornia says he'll hire a private eye to investigate charges made against him by women who claim he sexually assaulted them, but < EM>he may not turn over the results to the state's attorney general because he distrusts him ...

Not when mendacity was the theme of the week and not just the refrain of both Tennessee Williams' southern-fried patriarch, Big Daddy, and Big Daddy's son, Brick the Thick, in the flawed Broadway revival of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" ...

POSTSCRIPT: It is Saturday morning. Words that might as well be emblazoned in Times Square -- "we have here another depressing example of official mendacity" -- pop out at me from this morning's lead editorial in The New York Times. Read it: "The Fruits of Secrecy." It's about more of this week's lies, i.e., Bush's broken vow to protect the environment.

November 7, 2003 11:27 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on November 7, 2003 11:27 AM.

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