NOTES FROM THE SURFACE

James Wolcott puts it aptly in LIPSTICK FASCISM: "Conservatism and sadism have become indivisible." (The stimulus is Ann Coulter's comment in re: Gannon/Guckert: "Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.") Meantime, Bob Herbert reminds us this morning in his column: "It's Called Torture."

I'm a great admirer of Louis Menand's take on things -- usually. This morning I'm not so crazy about his lukewarm take on Hunter S. Thompson in the New Yorker, but I can live with it. Not so with Stephen Schwartz's hatchet job in The Weekly Standard, which is something else entirely. It concludes: Thompson "was flattered to be described as chronicler of 'the death of the American dream.' In reality, he described a nightmare from which America awoke years ago."

Well, Schwartz must still be having nightmares. I remember him as a teenage freak who used to come into the City Lights Bookstore in 1966 and '67, spouting Surrealist doctrine and declaring himself the San Francisco incarnation of a Surrealist movement that didn't exist. His freakishness consisted of a three-piece suit, not some hippie garb, the intense babble of an academic proselyte and a self-regard bordering on the autistic. (He eventually converted to Sufism.) He was wrong then. He's wrong now. And my bet is he'll always be wrong.

Postscript: If you cared about last night's Oscars show, here's why you shouldn't have.

February 28, 2005 10:18 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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