FLIPPANCY HAS ITS REWARDS

If I don't say it, nobody else will: It's gratifying to see the editorial page of The New York Times taking advice from Straight Up. Yesterday's lead editorial began like so: "It was good news when President Bush flip-flopped on intelligence reform and endorsed giving the proposed new post of national intelligence director some real authority." (Boldface added.)

Last Thursday, a Straight Up item, ON FLIP-FLOPS AND SHARP SHIFTS, led off like so: "How come when Kerry does it, it's called "a flip-flop," but when the Nincompoop in Chief does it, it's termed 'a sharp shift from an earlier position'?" The question referred to the lede in the Times's top news story that morning.

I suggested the lede might have read: "President Bush flip-flopped on Wednesday, saying he wanted to give a new national intelligence director 'full budgetary authority' in a U-turn from his position five weeks ago when he declined to go along with a major recommendation of the Sept. 11 commission." (Boldface added.)

Because there's a difference between news and opinion, it was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion (although offered seriously). I knew the Times could not have written that in a news story. Nor could the other papers -- The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times or the Chicago Tribune -- whose news ledes I rewrote that day.

On yesterday's evidence, however -- and in the cause of honesty and candor -- let me repeat myself: Flippancy has its rewards. The evidence might just be a matter of coincidence, of course. But to concede that would defeat the purpose of this item, wouldn't it?

September 15, 2004 9:58 AM |

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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 September 15, 2004 9:58 AM.

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