REPULSKI'S REVENGE

A reader writes, "Pardon me, boy, is this the Ugly Hombre's Station?" (Click the keys to start the morning off right, but pardon the instrumentation.) He continues:

Alas, I've seen it before, the Calamity that comes when a Lifetime of Happy Dreams is crushed against the Rocks of Despair. Yes, we mistake Hapless Twits for villains. We choose the Wrong Folks for enemies in a hot Hong Kong fantasy of Karate Rage: Carson, who only made multitudes smile and never hurt anyone he didn't know, and the pathetic Thomson, once valuable but now a Bloviating Jackass. Shame on you.

What you need is blood. I can sense it. And the Sacrifice of Flesh in a Righteous Cause, which brings so many satisfactions: the surprisingly easy penetration of the knife or pick, the sudden limp collapse of your victim, the simple taste of his crimson as you lick your hand. Yessir, there's much to be said for taking a life.

You need a Target of Note, or you'll never find peace. I suggest Joe Lieberman. He should be Easy Prey, walking his $3,000 dog on the sunny Connecticut street where he lives, lost in his smarmy world of kindly self-approval. Then you can leave an insider's signature, the mask of PIG placed on his still grinning face, just as Guy Grand would do if he were still around.

-- Repulski

He adds that he's begun a round of steroid therapy. By spring he expects to be either Steve Reeves or Grandma Moses.

January 26, 2005 6:02 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 26, 2005 6:02 AM.

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