MUSIC TO MY EARS

Living With War album coverHave you heard the song, "Let's Impeach the President," on the new Neil Young album (due out in May)? I haven't. But the song title sounds catchy.

[April 28: Click to listen to the album's songs. They're being streamed in sequence. "Impeach" comes seventh.]

Young has a better opinion of the American people than I do. He says, "I think there's a conscience in the country, and I don't think it's being spoken. Only a part of it is being spoken." Yeah, well. As written here, during the 2004 election campaign:

On the third anniversary of 9/11, the best way for Americans to honor the dead is to look to the future by realizing that the upcoming presidential election will be a referendum not on the candidates for the White House but on the conscience and convictions of the electorate itself.

After the election, there were signs of conscience. Remember the truly sorry hit magnet? Sincere but powerless. Come the November mid-term elections, we'll find out whether that has changed. Maybe the price of gasoline will strengthen America's conscience. In the meantime I'm joining Young's army. This is my enlistment form. Click the album cover. It will take you to the video clip of a great CNN interview with Young. (Just ignore the "ShowBiz Tonight" intro blather.)

Postscript: Could impeachment happen? Not likely. But "the Illinois State Legislature is preparing to drop a bombshell," blogger Steve Leser reports. Apparently, "a little known and never utilized rule" of the U.S. House of Representatives "allows federal impeachment proceedings to be initiated by joint resolution of a state legislature." Voilà: Illinois House Joint Resolution 125. We'll see if it passes.

April 24, 2006 8:34 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 Straight Up | published on April 24, 2006 8:34 AM.

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