NEWS YOU CAN USE

More headlines from the torture front: "General Is Said To Have Urged Use of Dogs" and "Abuse of Captives More Widespread, Says Army Survey." It wouldn't surprise us, given those headlines, that the administration arranged to take our minds off them with today's alert: "U.S. Warns of Al Qaeda Threat During Summer," but there's "Nothing Specific."

We're glad somebody noticed:

A senior diplomat from a country on the Security Council complained recently that the United States needed to provide consistent signals about Iraqi sovereignty. As an example, he said [Colin] Powell's recent statement that the United States would pull its forces out if asked after June 30 was at odds with Mr. Bush's statement that the United States would persevere and not allow itself to be driven from Iraq. "It's a complete contradiction," the diplomat said.

We're also glad somebody noticed Mr. Nice Guy's shortcomings as an author and as a columnist. Ever since reading his breakout book "Bobos in Paradise," which felt like a padded magazine article, we've had our doubts about him.

Back in October we put it gently when we said he was "still trying to find his rhythm" as a columnist. In November we described him as "increasingly irritating" but admitted he "got off a funny satire about Wal-Mart's lad-magazine ban." In December, when we were into purple prose alerts, we called him a "swiftly rising purplemeister" both for his writing style and his politics.

OK, you know we're talking about David Brooks, who claimed "Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in [the] struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror." We hoped then that when the "triumph over tyranny" did "drain the swamp of terror," it would also do a clean-up job on the purplemeister's prose.

The last time we mentioned him, in February, we were struck by his assertion that the White House nitwit is inarticulate, "like most of us." We took that as an insult, believing as we do that in the inarticulate department the nitwit is peerless.

May 26, 2004 1:33 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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