Dirty Stockings: 2006

We live now in the dirty stockings of Adolph. That's how we saw it. No surprise there. As we await the Bullshitter-in-Chief's next maneuver to cement two legacies of his regime -- the genocidal war in Iraq and the BananaRepublic -- here's a year-end review of some political postings favored by readers:

To Our Pipsqueak Leaders
Bad Bargains
One More Ventriloquist Dummy
No. 1 With a Bullet
'I Am Me and Rummy's He ...'
Frankly, He's a Toad
Deja Prevu, or Just the Facts
President Neuman
No Parking for 9/11's Fifth
Tears of Bullshit
On a Bicycle and a Prayer
Banana Republicans
Pants on Fire
No Full Stop
Pass the Milk, Please
And Still Counting
The One True Person of the Year

Tomorrow: Postings on arts and culture.

Postscript: Ah well, tomorrow came ... and went. Mebbe later.

PPS: Later has come.

The staff fell down on the job this year. It posted only 160 or so items since last January, and just a fraction had something to do with arts and culture. Tant pis. To its everlasting credit, however, the staff did take note of some admired writers, artists, filmmakers and assorted crackpots for work they did, mostly long ago, and for the issues they raised. It was a narrow "some" -- William S. Burroughs, Nelson Algren, Norman O. Mustill, Henry Miller, Willy Wyler, Mary Beach, William Osborne, Ernest Hemingway, John Bryan, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron. Other notables were loathed.

Help yourselves:

Memorial for Mary, Au Revoir
Picture This
Forward Nails Lauder
Master of the Cosmodemonic
Deep Focus, Es Claro?
Dead Reckoning
For the Love of Algren
The Copycat and the Original Cat
The Good Old Bad Old Days
'Wild Side' Still Rocks
Forever and a Day
Repulski's Revenge
Hello! (Is My Boat Comin' In?)
Music of the Spheres
Take Two: Bill Burroughs & Tony Balch
Wo ist Die 'Opera Toilet'?
Like Father, Like Son
Human Wrongs
A Different Kind of Bushwack
William Styron, RIP
VPo + America - Blacks = (Classical Music x Cultural Racism)²

December 26, 2006 8:23 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 Straight Up | published on December 26, 2006 8:23 AM.

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