CONNECT THE DOTS

Seems the U.S. State Department is bringing the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra to Washington, where it's booked at the Kennedy Center for a free concert Tuesday evening with D.C.'s own National Symphony Orchestra, featuring Yo-Yo Ma. ... Didn't know Iraq had a big band, did you? Must make our Maximum Leader proud. Strange he hasn't talked it up. Or maybe you thought it was called the Occupied Iraq Symphony Orchestra, given that the Iraqis lack sovereignty. ...

What puzzles me, however, is where did they get all the visas? You may recall the visa wars the Bush administration has been waging, making it difficult or impossible for foreign artists from "enemy" nations to enter the United States. Did the State Department decide to give the Iraqis all the visas they've been withholding from the Cuban musicians or the others they've turned down? ...

Now that Tom Cruise is playing Nathan Algren in "The Last Samurai," maybe he will start a Hollywood trend of naming all film heroes and heroines for American novelists. ... For starters, how about Joe Updike and Fani Morrison, to star in a movie titled "The Human Saint," based on a novel by Phyllis Roth with a screenplay by Paul Bellow, Ashley Tan and Tommy Kushner, to be directed by Mark Nichols? ...

Speaking of the real Kushner, Tony by name, has he been sanctified yet? Except for Andrew Sullivan's rank demurral, the tsunami of publicity in the run-up to Sunday's HBO version of "< FONT color=#003399>Angels in America" would make you think so. I love the play as much as anyone. Well, maybe not as much as Frank Rich -- nobody could -- but does Kushner really want to be seen wearing a halo? ...

We will rue the day: "People the law forgot." Read it and cringe. ... And let's not forget to color Tina Brown purple: Her lede this morning -- "It's odd how fast grandeur becomes gloomy when the miasma of misfortune sets in" -- sets some kind of record for awful.

December 4, 2003 11:01 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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