NEWS-RELATED ACTIVITIES PROGRAMS

It's hard to know which is the bigger news-related activities program: the Oscar nominations, the weapons inspector David Kay, the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, or the author Carrie Fisher? And that's not counting Martha Stewart.

Let's see. ... In the wake of Sunday's Golden Globules, this morning's Oscar nods seem slow off the mark, suprises notwithstanding. Meantime, Kay, who finally admits the United States won't be finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is making excuses for our know-nothing Maximum Leader, claiming he was duped and abused -- OK, misled -- by the intelligence community.

Asked if Mr. Gee Whiz owes the nation an apology for the gaps between his warnings and Kay's findings -- OK, an explanation -- Kay said in an interview with National Public Radio, "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people." And if you go along with that, Dick Cheney has some WMD to show you.

Fisher gets my vote. She signed books last night across the street from Lincoln Center in a publicity event for her latest Hollywood novel, "The Best Awful." The bookstore was packed with fans and celebrities who are fans. Even that furious glitteratus himself showed up. No, it was not the great author-about-town Jay McInerney. "As Ms. Fisher signed her last autograph, Salman Rushdie slipped into the room ..." < FONT color=#003399>Anthony Ramirez reports. If anybody wants an explanation for my vote, I apologize in advance.

January 27, 2004 10:47 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 January 27, 2004 10:47 AM.

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