(Display Name not set)March 2004 Archives

Gotta love the New York Press alternative weekly for its list of 50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers. Among those on the receiving end of its full-bore contempt are movie director Sofia Coppola (50), ad man Donny Deutsch (40), liberal pundit Eric Alterman (39), author James Frey (30), anchor woman Diane Sawyer (23), Dean of the Actors Studio James Lipton (17) and a host of bankers, politicians, media moguls, corporate chiefs, lawyers, professors, pro-smoking activists, bloggers, gossip columnists, actors, comedians, publicists and reporters.

Topping the list is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, now a businessman. Rest assured, the luminaries who made the list are not likely to gaze upon its wonderful screed. They would gag if they did. Here, for example, is what it says about James Lipton:

It's not just that his sycophantic interviewing technique has transcended butt-kissing to become all-out analingus, or that he's sullied the stage where Pacino performed Mamet with paeans to Ben Affleck. It's not the fey cadence and maddening British affect. It's that Lipton has become so obsessed with full-penetration starfucking that he's allowed the Actors Studio to deteriorate into a fifth-rate factory whose graduates aren't prepared for a two-liner on "Law & Order." In the days of Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, the Actors Studio was considered more important than the Yale School of Drama; today it competes with continuing education classes at the Learning Annex. Memo to Lipton: Taking it from Jay Leno and Ethan Hawke isn't doing much for your students. And you look ridiculous.

About James Frey:

It still boggles the brain that so many fell for this brawny brat's 2003 rehab memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." Clearly there's a huge audience starved for dimestore, parodic Hemingway machismo. And Frey, the self-proclaimed "greatest writer of his generation," is the man to give it to them. He boasts about getting in real old-time fistfights with his fellow junkie patients and about beating a priest almost to death for daring to touch Frey's very masculine thigh—classic 1930s retro-prose, homoerotic and homophobic at once. His characters are as anachronistic as his writing; there's a steelworker "as hard as the material he works with" and endless tearful farewell scenes with a fisherman, who actually says, "I ain't much for words, kid." Frey's fellow patients all talk like outtakes from a Spencer Tracy movie, pasted into Frey's poorly written, 400-page ode to his family-funded self.

About Diane Sawyer:

The queen of broadcast journalism infotainment, Diane is ABC News' incessant ingenue that we hope one day interviews a hungry Siberian tiger. As Good Morning America's 50-something going on 30-something blond and blue-eyed eternal debutante, she coyly sucks pudding from Wolfgang Puck's spoon, creams over celebrities and moguls of any stripe, cries like an insipid crocodile for the victims of fêted daily tragedies and bats her eyelashes while touting her Nixon-White-House-past. For her current multi-million-dollar-per-year contract, Diane guarantees an overdose of saccharine sufficiently strong to send viewers into a coma, but not strong enough to flush the fourth-place network's morning ratings out of the toilet.

About Donny Deutsch:

Deutsch represents the latest trend in that most loathsome of New York traditions: the selling of adolescent greed, egomania and narcissism as charisma and depth of character. The chief of David Deutsch Associates says he only hires "Jews, chicks and fags," and is known for tearing off his shirt during office hours and saying—without irony—things like, "I can kick the ass of any CEO in advertising!" Think Steven Seagal meets Charlotte Beers. The "Elvis of Advertising" has been dabbling with a CNBC talk show and even told New York magazine that he'd consider running for mayor. Qualifications: good at selling shit, does lots of pushups. Look out, Bloomie.

About Rudy Giuliani:

For running around the streets of Lower Manhattan without visibly crapping himself, Giuliani was elevated from the world's most hypocritical goon to He-Man, Master of the Universe. Forget his violating federal handicap laws, his wars on rent control and community gardens, his refusal to test DNA rape kits until the five-year statute of limitations was up, or his corporate real estate giveaways—Rudy is now considered a Great and Heroic American Mayor. After office, Rudy wasted no time cashing in on his immaculately conceived new stature, riding into a post-mayoral sunset of private sector millions, five-figure lectures and flattering rumors about his political future in the GOP. It was toward this last end that Rudy came out in defense of Bush's Ground Zero campaign ads last month. And why not? He's co-chair of the Republican National Convention host committee, and the tragedy saved his sinking ass too.

Congratulations, Rudy. Though we prayed you'd fade away, your insistent grandstanding, lingering influence and threats of future public office leave us no choice. For actions past and present, you are hereby crowned 2004's Most Loathsome New Yorker. If we didn't have a rule against it, you'd probably be here for life.

Alistair Cooke did not make the list, I am happy to report.

The American fondness for Alistair Cooke, whose death at 95 was reported yesterday by the BBC, seems to have no bounds. Appreciations praising his journalism -- to say nothing of his charm, wit, intelligence and erudition -- have appeared everywhere today, filling many column inches. 

Like just about everybody else, I too have a sweet recollection of him: "Short of burning his golf clubs, the surest way to lose Alistair Cooke's affection is to describe him as a television personality." That was my lead for an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, written nearly 22 years ago, which sticks in memory as if it happened yesterday.

The embarrassing irony, not lost on Cooke, was that Knopf had just brought out a book he'd written with a high-sounding title -- "Masterpieces" -- tied to the television series "Masterpiece Theater," which he had hosted for 10 years. But at least the book's essays on authors and subjects dramatized in the series were steeper than his cozy comments at the top of each program. At 2,000 words each, they offered his views of Dickens, Austen, Balzac, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Zola and James, and his critical ruminations about such programs as "Upstairs, Downstairs," "I, Claudius," "Lillie," "The Duchess of Duke Street" and "Edward and Mrs. Simpson."

Americans who occasionally got to read syndicated versions of Cooke's newspaper articles in the Manchester Guardian, before he retired in 1972 as chief correspondent, know how well he wrote. But they rarely got to hear his 15-minute BBC radio broadcasts, "Letters From America." To miss those was to miss the fact that his limpid prose -- whether on television or on the printed page -- was a function of radio, which he called "literature for blind men."

Cooke much preferred radio to television "because the pictures were better," he often said, quoting the remark of a 7-year-old boy that he'd heard of. "You are in charge of the picture," Cooke elaborated. "If you stand up against the Empire State Building on television and tell its history, which is ghoulish and funny, viewers are saying, 'He looks a little tired,' or, 'He's not as thin as he used to be.' Whereas if you tell the story on radio, your words create the picture, and that's what I love. The voice does the whole thing."

More with less -- it was a theme that ran through Cooke's conversation. In literature he always admired such writers as Daniel Defoe and John Bunyan for the simplicity of their prose, "and some of the early Hemingway because he planed down the language like nobody since Dryden." His appreciation of Dickens, a volcano of creativity with no time to polish, was the main exception.

Because Americans of my generation knew him best from "Masterpiece Theater," I asked him whether he thought the series had any lasting value, especially since it had become the butt of jokes as a stilted trend-setter for middlebrow taste. Cook took the point. But his comeback was a fascinating, if typically name-dropping anecdote about the historian George Kennan's evaluation of "Upstairs, Downstairs," the long-running soap opera that Cooke said was "'Masterpiece Theater' at its best."

"We were at a kind of farewell party at the British Embassy when Lord Ramsbotham was leaving his post as the ambassador to the United States," Cooke said. "I asked Kennan, whom I'd known for 30-odd years, what he was doing and everyone was naturally attentive, because he is a most distnguished statesman and so on.

"He said he was doing this history of British diplomacy from 1897 on, and he had just seen some astonishing documents that had become available. But then he got off this remark that he had found something better than any of it. And we all said, 'What?' And he said, 'I've come on one thing showing, step by step and more clearly and more ruthlessly than any diplomatic file, that it was the upper classes, not the lower, that cracked. And that is the television series, 'Upstairs, Downstairs.'"

Apparently the three U.S. senators in the group didn't know what Kennan was talking about, Cooke recalled, "since members of the Congress never watched television." Their wives, who did, were a little ashamed to admit they were familiar with the series, he added, not forgetting to point out that if George Kennan found "Upstairs, Downstairs" more useful than documents from which history books are made, then "Masterpiece Theater" surely had lasting value.

So much praise of Cooke requires balance from a skeptic. So here it is, by Jess Bravin, who once wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "Nothing soothes America's cultural inferiority complex like having an Englishman tell us we're great. Unfortunately, all too few Englishmen seem willing to do that; even the colonies of British rock stars in New York always seem to act like they're slumming. Face it: There's no way an Englishman can say 'Big Mac, please' and not sound like he's making fun of us. As a result, that rare Englishman we do manage to turn can ride the waves of New World gratitude to stardom. How else to explain Richard Dawson? Or, indeed, Alistair Cooke?"

This morning The Wall Street Journal reported: "The federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund rejected an application from Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in 2002 by Islamic extremists in Pakistan." But she is still pressing her case, according to The New York Times.

I long ago made the argument that Pearl's death was part of 9/11, though it did not happen on that day, and should be so honored. Let me now suggest that the Journal volunteer to pay what his widow and son might have received from the fund (nearly $2 million, tax-free).

Preferably, the payment should come out of the pockets of Peter Kann and Karen Eliot House, the multimillionaire husband-wife team that runs the Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones. They can afford it.

Kann, as chairman of the board, chief executive officer and editorial director of Dow Jones -- he is also the former publisher of the Journal -- received total compensation of $9 million over five years through 2000, according to forbes.com. His total compensation that year alone came to $2.4 million, which is peanuts compared to 2003. 

The Daily News reported last week that Kann received a 58 percent hike in pay, to $2.1 million last year, plus an estimated $2.6 million in stock options, for total compensation of $4.7 million. House, who took over from her husband as publisher of the Journal in July 2002, "upped her pay to $877,000" last year, a raise of 32 percent, the Daily News reported.

The Journal has already set up a fund to help Daniel Pearl's widow and young son. But it's not enough. Further helping to compensate them for their loss by paying what the 9/11 victim fund would have paid might go a long way to earning some of the good will Kann and House have lost among the overwhelming majority of the Journal staff.

Their hard-nosed attempt to reduce health benefits and hold down pay raises have made them look like nasty penny-pinchers and worse to Journal reporters, who are currently in negotiations with the company for a new union contract. So I wouldn't hold my breath. But maybe Kann and House will prove me wrong. Showing good will to the Pearl family would certainly help earn them the public's good will.

Preaching to the choir has its rewards. Easy rewards -- like a warm bath of egoism, the sort Miss Piggy takes when she preens in the mirror. It's great to get feedback from readers, even when they agree with me. I admit it. John Keene, a man with impeccable judgment, was kind enough to drop this email my way:

I am writing to express my appreciation for your arts blog, and to weigh in on Mr. Ed Ettel's comments on politics and the arts, and his critique of your column.

As I need not remind you -- but will in the interests of making a brief point -- artists have, for thousands of years, used their works in part as vehicles and means of commentary, including political commentary. In fact, some of the greatest artists whose lives and works have graced us -- to name just a few, Plato, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Beethoven, Goya, David, Wordsworth, Shelley, Diderot, Zola, Wagner, Hogarth, Eakins, Twain, Tolstoy, Schoenberg, Picasso, Kollwitz, Grosz, Mann, Celine, Bulgakov, Grass, Brecht, Neruda, Hindemith, Dylan, Gutierrez Alea, Soyinka, Saramago, Spero, Kruger, Gordimer, Oe, etc. -- have taken overt and obvious political stands in and through their work, and have created political artworks. That is, they created enduring works of art that were identifiable political and ideological stances, and yet not mere vessels of propaganda.

Whenever people make the argument that art and politics cannot and do not mix, I feel it's best, in addition to addressing the particular nature of their critique, as you artfully did, to point out even a few of these numerous examples, as well as to reinforce the point that all art is political (and certainly ideological), whether it proclaims its politics or not. Mr. Ettel's argument on this particularly topic doesn't hold up, especially against the verdict of the history of the arts -- and of artworks that have lasted and are still enlightening us, thousands of years -- or even just decades or years -- after they were produced.

Please keep up the excellent writing, with the 'tude (!), and let's hope that it reaches those outside the choir, including some who might just have tired of the shenanigans of the current administration, which I like to think of W Ltd. (With an emphasis on the "limited"!)

W Ltd. -- perfect. I can use it. Gracias.

Let's see if the Biblical flogmeister can make a movie out of "Psalm 2004," now playing the email circuit:

Bush is my shepherd,
I shall be in want.
He leadeth me beside the still factories,
He maketh me to lie down on park benches,
He restoreth my doubts about the Republican party,
He guideth me onto the paths of unemployment for the party's sake.
I do fear the evildoers, for thou talkst about them constantly.
Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy deficit spending
They do discomfort me.
Thou anointeth me with never-ending debt,
And my savings and assets shall soon be gone.
Surely poverty and hard living shall follow me all the days of my life,
And my jobless children shall dwell in my basement forever.

I don't believe I'm Bradley the Buyer, "best narcotics agent in the industry," as William Burroughs put it. But in a very polite way, Ed Ettel, a Straight Up reader, pretty much says I am in an email message, while he (without knowing it, I'm sure) is the District Supervisor who calls Bradley on the carpet. Mr. Ettel wrote:

Jan, please accept a critic's viewpoint. Including articles with obvious political slant, such as your "WELL, THERE'S ONE TERRIBLE PILOT" March 24 entry in Straight Up, diminishes the value of the Arts Journal. I hardly think it lives up to representing "some of the best arts and cultural journalism in the English-speaking world."

Here's the passage from "Naked Lunch" that his message brings to mind. It comes when Bradley the Buyer receives a summons from the District Supervisor (the ellipses are Burroughs'):

Bradley, your conduct has given rise to rumors -- and I hope for your sake they are no more than that -- so unspeakably distasteful that ... I mean Caesar's wife ... that is, the Department must be above suspicion ... certainly above such suspicions as you have seemingly aroused. You are lowering the entire tone of the industry. We are prepared to accept your immediate resignation.

What is exercising Mr. Ettel -- a political point of view in an opinion piece -- ordinarily would not trouble him, I presume (more below on that presumption), if ArtsJournal had a different mission from reporting and commenting on arts and culture. His message continues:

I am a longtime supporter of the arts, but when artists become political advocates, or worse, it demeans their art. Because of their bias, most of the media has also lost credibility in recent years. Our culture is something we all share, and unfortunately our U.S. culture seems to deteriorate daily. We all share part of the blame for this deterioration, including our politicians and business people, but the activities in the arts and media are equally to blame.

By his reasoning, Mr. Ettel would also have to object to Frank Rich's typically excellent weekly column, which begins on the front page of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. It is nothing if not a political column and, for my money, is the section's saving grace. By a nice coincidence, moreover, in yesterday's column, "Operation Iraqi Infoganda," Rich cites the same Wall Street article I cited in "WELL, THERE'S ONE TERRIBLE PILOT" to illustrate our Maximum Leader's fictionalized derring-do on 9/11.

Rich also cites Richard Clarke's testimony, as I did, i.e. "A SILENCE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS" last Tuesday, and our Maximum Leader's interview last month with Tim Russert, as I did, i.e. "A TRULY LOUSY INTERVIEW" on Feb. 8, and "FROM ROBUST TO BUST" on Feb. 10.

What Rich neatly sums up in two words as a "maladroit performance," I described as "canned replies" that "begged the questions ... and should have come stamped with a generic product label: 'Oval Office house brand,'" all of which was delivered by a politician who "cocked his head like a bantam rooster and moved his lips like a sock puppet. This is considered 'presidential'?"

Mr. Ettel's message concludes:

But I left out one part of your mission, your 'tude. I guess that is where the problem with your article really lies. Do you recognize this?

Maybe the best reply to that is to quote from New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent's column in the Week in Review, "The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact," which also appeared yesterday:

The opinion writer chooses which facts to present, and which to withhold. He can paint individuals he likes as paragons, and those he disdains as scoundrels. ... Opinion is inherently unfair.

Mr. Ettel is, I'm sure, a very nice, well-meaning person. But some people just don't get it, and I regret to say he's one of them. His presumption is that art and politics do not or should not mix. Mine is the opposite. They carom and caress. They clash and co-exist. Take your pick.

Postscript: Kriston Eller, a reader from Cincinnati, writes: "I would argue that when art and/or culture don't mix with politics, you don't really have art and/or culture. You might have fashion or decoration or pleasantry, but without some sort of deeper meaning -- and meaning is inherently political in at least one of the many senses of the word -- you don't really have art." 

Shane Hockin also weighs in: "I might agree that your blog entry on Bush's statements upon finding out about the attacks on the WTC is a little misguided (I can relate to poorly timed bad humor in times of crisis). But I must totally disagree with Mr. Ettel's assessment that art and politics do not mix. I think what he REALLY meant to say was that art and politics contradictory to HIS political view do not mix.

"On the contrary, where would art be without political bias? Were not Michelangelo's works affected by the political climate of Rome during the Renaissance? Do not Andy Warhol's works make great political statements? What about the art of political cartoons? Are they not art because they have political messages?"

We always knew David Remnick was an A.J. Liebling buff. He reminds us once again with "Reporting It All," a sweet piece in the current issue of The New Yorker honoring the centennial of Liebling's birth. The magazine has also put online from its archive a terrific piece by Liebling himself, "Ahab and Nemesis," about the sweet science.

What surprised us, though, was that Remnick revealed his person to be such an old-fashioned writer in another piece for the current issue, "After Madrid," his Talk of the Town commentary about the Madrid train bombings. "In recent years," he writes, "Osama bin Laden has concealed his person from spies and Predator drones but has hidden his intentions and his sense of historical mission in plain sight." Impeccable idea. Peccable style. Concealed his person? So 19th century. What's wrong with concealed himself? Yes, we're being picky, picky.

More was said by the stunned silence following Richard Clarke's defense of his sworn testimony yesterday before the 9/11 commission than all his sobering words. Yet none of the reports that I have seen in the print press or on television has captured the impact of that moment, let alone mentioned it -- -- except, of course, C-SPAN3's complete telecast.

After Clarke's dramatic opening statement -- an apology to "the loved ones" of those who died on 9/11 for the failure of the U.S. government to protect them, and for his own personal failure as counterterrorism coordinator of the Bush administration -- the most significant moment came in his reply to former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman. Clarke had "a real credibility problem," Lehman said, because his testimony differed from what he wrote in his just-published book, an angry attack on the Bushies entitled "Against All Enemies : Inside the White House's War on Terror -- What Really Happened." 

Everyone has reported that Lehman, like his fellow Republican, former Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson, wondered whether Clarke was merely "an active partisan selling a book" during a presidential campaign. Everyone has reported that Lehman wanted to know how Clarke resolved the difference between his 15 hours of private testimony and his book. And everyone has reported Clarke's explanation:

"No one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," Clarke said. "The reason that I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is that by invading Iraq -- something I was not asked by the commission -- but by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

They say that when cross-examining a witness in court, it's wise -- imperative even -- to know in advance, or at least to anticipate, what the witness will reply to a question. Otherwise the answer could backfire. Clarke's reponse to Lehman was the perfect demonstration. The misguided invasion of Iraq, which was the elephant in the room, had trumpeted its presence. The stunned silence following his reply could not have lasted for more than 10 or 15 seconds. Yet those seconds seemed like an eternity.

The hush that descended on the hearing room was unique in a day of voluble testimony from various witnesses, including CIA Director George Tenet. It brought the drama to a climax. News reports recorded the words, but not the silence. TV clips excerpted the words, but not the silence. Maybe you had to be a drama critic to appreciate it.

Postscript: Well, well. The moment registered with Randall C. Archibold in a sidebar. He quotes Julie Talen, who watched the hearing from her Soho apartment: "Did you see that moment of silence?" Talen is identified as a writer-director. Figures.

Interested in the 9/11 Commission? Watch this morning's hearing live now on C-SPAN3 on the Web. (If necessary, look for the third link down in the "Watch/Listen" box. You have the option of RealPlayer or Windows Media.) CIA Director George Tenet is testifying at the moment. Former Bush anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who is under attack by the administration for his account of its failures in the war on terrorism, testifies later today. Watch yesterday's CNN interview of Clarke -- scroll down to the video box, then click on "Bill Hemmer talks with"-- and see if Clarke doesn't make a credible eyewitness to events he writes about in "Against All Enemies : Inside the White House's War on Terror--What Really Happened" and why the book wasn't published earlier, before the presidential election campaigns. At 1:30 p.m. ET, you can watch Clarke testify before the commission on C-Span3 on the Web.

Postscript: A reader writes that Scot J. Paltrow's devastating Wall Street Journal article about gaps and inconsistencies in government accounts of what happened on 9/11 -- which I referred to yesterday and which I said was not available online -- is in fact online here. I stand happily corrected. Don't miss the chance to read it.

Now we know why our Maximum Leader won't testify under oath, privately or publicly, before the 9/11 Commission, as others are doing. It's not because he wants the executive branch of the federal government to maintain a "separation of powers" between it and a 10-member panel partly appointed by the Congress. It's because he wouldn't know the truth if it walked up to him and said "Howdy."

It's because he might be asked about what he said was his immediate reaction on the morning of 9/11 (when he was in a Florida grade school to promote his education bill). Did he really say what he recalled saying? As he saw an airliner fly into the World Trade Center tower, our Maximum Leader said: "Well, there's one terrible pilot."

It's hard to believe, but it sounds typical of him: the callous frat-boy's smirking reaction, a remark so crude it testifies not just to his insenstivity but to his flat-out stupidity. As reported yesterday by Wall Street Journal reporter Scot J. Paltrow in a lead, front-page article (which is not online, unfortunately), here's the complete picture:

At [a] Dec. 4, 2001, town-hall meeting in Orlando, Fla., Mr. Bush said, "I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly myself, and I said, 'Well, there's one terrible pilot.'" Several weeks later, he said essentially the same thing at another public event in Ontario, Calif.

Also as reported by the Journal, he couldn't have seen what he said he saw at that moment, because the classroom TV where he was waiting "wasn't even plugged in, according to [the school] principal." In fact, the president's recollection is "just mistaken," his spokesman now says. Probably just as mistaken as his claim that he was the one who put the military on high alert, following the attacks when, in fact, it was four-star Air Force Gen. Richard Myers who "raced back" to the Pentagon's command center and -- "with smoke spreading into the cavernous room" from the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon -- "ordered the officer in charge ... to raise the military's alert status to Defcon III, the highest state of readiness since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war."

Also as reported by the Journal, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett now says our fearless Leader was merely providing "a description that the public could understand," when he claimed he'd given the order, and was speaking in "broad strokes." Tellingly, neither Gen. Myers nor the Pentagon would comment. Not incidentally, Bartlett is the White House point man attacking the credibility of Richard Clarke, the top anti-terrorism expert who worked for our Leader and has just published a devastating insider's account of both his personal lack of leadership in the war on terror and his administration's prosecution of it.

Also as reported by the Journal, when our fearless Leader was flying around the country in Air Force One on 9/11, first to Louisiana and then to Nebraska, instead of returning to Washington, it was on a fool's mission because a rumored threat against the president's plane was false. But our fearless Assistant Maximum Leader Dick Cheney's office is still claiming "it couldn't rule out that a threat to Air Force One actually had been made." Which sounds just like Cheney's familiar mantra about still not being able to rule out finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Even Bartlett now admits "there hadn't been any actual threat" to Air Force One and that "word of a threat had resulted from confusion in the White House bunker."

What an embarrassment it would be, if our fearless Maximum Leader had to fess up to all this under oath.

Meantime, the Journal's editorial page, ran true to form and totally contradicted the reporting staff in a lengthy editorial. It didn't argue that the confusion about that day, the gaps in what we know, and whether the attacks could have been prevented, be cleared up as soon as possible, or at least by the official deadline of July 26. Instead, the lead editorial yesterday urged the 9/11 Commission to stall. If its members "really wanted to make a public contribution," it said, "they would shut down and resume their probe after the elections."

Actually, we have a better idea. If the commission really wanted to serve the country, it would go on a duck-hunting trip with Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia before issuing its conclusions. That would surely guarantee an unbiased report.

From time to time we post the poesy of Leon Freilich, a rhyming punster from Brooklyn. Just to show we're not completely illiterate, we searched the Web for a more avant-garde form of poesy (a word so quaint). Here tiz: A poem that keeps making the e-mail rounds and doesn't rhyme. It was reportedly assembled by Washington Post writer Richard Thompson from actual sentences mumbled by our Maximum Leader:

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It's a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.
Rarely is the question asked,
Is our children learning?

Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.

Families is where our nation finds hope,
where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

If you've seen this before -- we know it's old -- our apology. We felt that nobody would mind a bit of whimsy, even old whimsy, on a Monday morning. Also, we realize a few of the lines are too bizarre to believe, their provenance notwithstanding. But everything that comes from our Maximum Leader sounds inauthentic.

Dieter Roth, a great and prodigious artist who rebelled against the establishment, is too little appreciated in the United States. The only show of his I ever saw was at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago a couple of decades ago. But I've admired him for many years, ever since knowing some of his associates, the poet Emmett Williams, for instance, and others who were part of the Fluxus group in the '60s.

Now, at last, he has a posthumous retrospective -- he died in 1998 -- at New York's Museum of Modern Art, entitled "Roth Time," with installations as well at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center. Have a look at the very cool online exhibition.

Some other Roth stuff to look at: 58 works of his at the Tate in London; two collages in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at The University of Oklahoma, "Games After the Play or Before the Play" and "Are You Seriously Looking for Ernestine...." and "Rubber Stamp Box" at the MCA in Chicago. Oh, here's a postcard series, "Six Piccadillies" and what they cost.

More poesy from Leon Freilich:

THE RELENTLESS JAYSON BLAIR BOOK BLITZ

Bliar, Bliar,
"House on fire!"
Give it a rest
And go retire.

A reader from Florida, Shane Hockin, writes: "Thanks for the link regarding the [military] defense attorneys for the Guantanamo detainees. It was very interesting. I work for prosecutors, so it is not very often that I get to say something nice about defense attorneys, but those guys are what the system is all about.

"I believe in the defense-attorney ideal to assure people a fair trial, though occasionally we end up with guilty parties on the street. I hope these guys can give us justice, and I admire their honesty. It would have been easy for them to take their money, do a shoddy job, and make the government happy." He adds: "The link to the animated music was pretty cool, too!"

With the Defense Department using emergency powers to extend active duty for a short-handed army in Iraq, it's worth noting that the Pentagon may be "Oiling up the draft machine." Legislation pending in the U.S. House and Senate -- H.R. 163 and S.R. 89, identical bills introduced last year by Democrats and now quietly backed by the Bush administration -- would re-institute a military draft. Here's a short summary of the pertinent information. Meantime, $28 million has been added to the 2004 budget of the Selective Service System to prepare for a draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

Paul Gigot, editor of The Wall Street Journal's deeply, archly conservative editorial page -- he's known in the trade as Paul Giggly, or in some quarters as Paulie Giggles aka Paul Gidget -- is probably gnashing his teeth over a reporting staff that keeps turning out uncomfortable stories that run counter to the editorials.

In a stunner reported this morning by the Journal, the five U.S. military lawyers designated to represent the Guantanamo detainees in the first U.S. military tribunals since World War II "have launched a surprisingly vigorous assault on the system that hired them."

Allying themselves with human-rights groups, the five members of the Advocate General's Corps -- JAGs as the military lawyers are called -- "have attacked the tribunals [authorized by the Bush administration] as inherently unfair, contrary to international law and susceptible to political influence," Jess Bravin reports in a front-page article.

Ultimately, the JAGs are expected to challenge virtually every aspect of the administration's policies on Guantanamo detainees, from the denial of protections of the Geneva Conventions to the interrogation methods used in extracting statements. As the first trials draw near, the JAGs' approach could force the administration either to answer in open court or risk undercutting its longstanding promise that the tribunals will be "full and fair."

Unless you pay a pricey subscription fee, you don't usually get a chance to read The Wall Street Journal's articles online, especially not its top stories. But you can read this one by going here.

And because we believe in music and art, click this.

Is it too much to hope that the subtleties of Ian Buruma's straightforward essay, "Killing Iraq With Kindess," could form the basis for a Bush policy reversal on the war in Iraq? Of course.

Amid the Irish tunes and the St. Paddy's Day celebrations and all the world's parades, when even the Chicago River turns green, the U.S. presidential campaign has gone from attack ads to attack limericks.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie released this tribute to Democratic nominee John Kerry:

There once was a man from Nantucket
Whose misstatements could fill up a bucket.
Oft the truth he has bent, Like his "Irish descent."
Of his record he says, "I'll just duck it."

The Democratic National Committee responded in kind:

There also was a Yank from Connecticut,
Who utterly lacked any etiquette.
He claimed Texas blood,
Threw the truth in the mud,
Think his word is his bond? Don't bet on it.

And Straight Up reader Leon Freilich released this non-limerick attack on Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, where the 243rd annual parade down Fifth Avenue honoring the patron saint of Ireland steps off clan by clan at 11 a.m. ET in an unbroken tradition that began on March 17, 1762.

WHERE ARE THE SINS OF YESTERYEAR?

You can't smoke inside, you can't drink outside:
What's happened to the bar?
Once it was another home,
Now it's just bizarre

Inside-outside, outside-inside:
The place makes gray matter spin;
The suddenly hapless smoker-drinker
Takes it on the chin.

Why couldn't the city in all its wisdom
Tackle an enterprise zone
Or grime in the streets or subway malfunctions--
And leave bad enough alone?

When the mayor replies with his brand of poesy, we'll let you know.

Yes, Virginia, Saddam Hussein posed an "immediate threat" to the United States. That's why we had to invade Iraq. That's what our Maximum Leader and his minions told us in the runup to the Iraq war. Now, however, they deny they ever said it. Really. You were dreaming if you thought you heard them say it. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeated his disavowal last Sunday: By golly gee, Rummy said, he never said there was an "immediate threat." Watch Rummy make that claim in this video clip, courtesy of MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group, and see him get caught in his bald-faced con.

Abbie Conant will perform William Osborne's "downtown" music tonight at REDCAT in Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Hall complex in Los Angeles. Her program, "The Wired Goddess and Her Trombone," will include the world premiere of "Cybeline," a music theater collaboration with Osborne, as well as "Pond," another of their collaborations, along with "Hysteria" by Cindy Cox, "Love Song Without Words" by Nancy Kennan Dowlin, "HUM 2" by Maggi Payne, and "Impossible Animals" by David Jaffe.

Later today, ArtsJournal editor Doug McLennan will post a commentary on American and European cultural funding by William Osborne, the composer-social activist-musicologist whose "downtown" music will be performed Tuesday at REDCAT in Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Hall complex in Los Angeles. The commentary is typical of Osborne -- probing, thorough, scholarly and provocative. Get a preview of it now: "Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill."

Among other things, Osborne takes on what he calls "the Hip-Con argument" that "classical music must enter the market place in order to survive." The notion was embraced at ArtsJournal by the critic Gary Sandow in his self-named blog on the future of classical music. For a variety of reasons, Osborne finds the "suggestion that classical composers should tap into the fringes of the pop market ... interesting, but of limited value." Read his commentary. It's filled with serious ideas.

Reflecting on Ernest Hemingway's "fierce and foul-mouthed tirade" against his literary rivals in a 1925 letter going on the auction block, a reader who calls himself Clark Kent writes:

Hemingway's letters -- 900 pages or so, and a hell of a lot left out -- are great fun. He's relaxed, funny, mean-spirited, paranoid, vicious when crossed, loaded with insight -- on Nelson Algren: "...he has everything but magic" -- and very vulnerable. Some of the the letters are great -- his note to the Gerald Murphys on the death of their son -- but basically they're wonderful half-drunk ramblings from an extremely lonely man, the kind of stuff wemight write given an extra 20 IQ points and an audience of grateful toadies.

OK, Clark. I've got no argument with that. Except the part about Algren.

The inaugural season at the Walt Disney Concert Hall is not all Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic or, for example, Alfred Brendal and Midori giving separate Beethoven recitals. Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins get into act. Even Arlo Guthrie and the Klezmatics made it onto the hall's eclectic schedule.

But for cutting-edge music, dance and multimedia performances, it's the programming at REDCAT (the catchy label for the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater) that provides "an intersection of cultures, disciplines & viewpoints" in the building that Frank Gehry built. And it's REDCAT'S Musical Explorations Series that offers the kind of counter-programming you don't find in the main hall, such as interactive computer-based music and electronica.

The series embraces "downtown" artists: the New Century Players, Morton Subotnick, the California Ear Unit playing the music of Mel Powell and, coming Tuesday, trombonist Abbie Conant in a multimedia performance featuring the music of William Osborne. Her program, "The Wired Goddess and Her Trombone," will include the world premiere of a music theater piece, "Cybeline," as well as "Pond," another of their collaborations, along with "Hysteria" by Cindy Cox, "Love Song Without Words" by Nancy Kennan Dowlin, "HUM 2" by Maggi Payne, and "Impossible Animals" by David Jaffe.

A married couple, Conant and Osborne are both New Mexicans who have lived in Germany for the last 24 years. For 13 of those years, from 1980 to 1993, Conant was solo trombonist of the Munich Philharmonic and since 1992 has been a full tenured Professor of Trombone at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen.

Earlier in his career, Osborne, who had studied with George Crumb in Philadelphia and Franco Donatoni in Rome, wrote original music theater productions with texts taken from Samuel Beckett's "Endgame," "Happy Days," "Ohio Impromptu," "Rockabye" and "Acts Without Words" for The Wasteland Company, which he formed with Conant "to explore women's roles in music theater." Beckett was notorious for not allowing anyone to monkey with his plays. He not only gave permission to use the texts but upon meeting Osborne in Paris in 1986 regarded him as a kindred spirit.

I first came across Osborne in 1997, not as a composer but as a social activist who was instrumental in pressuring the Vienna Philharmonic to revoke its historical policy of excluding women from its ranks. Reporting on the issue in the Los Angeles Times, I used Osborne as one of my sources and subsequently wrote a magazine article for the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University about his activism. He worked largely via the Internet to organize protests against the Vienna Phil, posting thousands of e-mails around the world, and he wrote scholarly articles tracing the discrimination against women at the VPo and other orchestras.

Full disclosure: I am now a friend of both Osborne and Conant.

When I asked him to enlighten me a bit about "Cybeline," he was in the midst of rehearsal. To save time, he referred me to his program notes -- both the
short version and the long version with extensive notes. Here's an excerpt:

Cybeline is about a cyborg trying to be a talk show host to prove she is human. It is about nature, virtual reality, biotechnology, and the mass media -- and about finding the heart and poetry in technology as it also contemplates its horrors. What does a fifty-year-old structure of silicon have to teach a five-billion-year-old structure of carbon?

Cybeline has two modes, on-line and off-line, abruptly separated by a loud buzzer. Her producers/programmers toggle her between the two. When on-line, the pace of her talk show host routines are relentless, emulating the frenetic character of video cuts used by commercial television. When off-line, she enters a dream-like world where the music is partially determined by computer programmed random operations that allude to the "music of nature." The music is thus different for each performance.

During the off-air random music, Cybeline hears almost imperceptible random whispers coming from all around her that become increasingly present as the work progresses. She is not sure what they are, but prefers to think of them as the voices of goddesses. The voices, which are made from hundreds of sampled whispers, are collages of her memories, fragments from Native American poems, our own poetry, the Old Testament, and other sources.

Bill points out that "Cybeline derives her name from the Goddess Cybele who was brought to Rome from Phrygia in 204 B.C. Her temple stood on the Vatican, where St. Peter's Basilica stands today, up to the 4th century A.D. when Christians took it over." He notes that "Roman emperors like Augustus, Claudius, and Antoninus Pius regarded her as the supreme deity of the empire" and that "Augustus established his home facing her temple." And he adds these fascinating details:

In the 5th century, Christians relentlessly destroyed the religious beliefs surrounding Cybele, especially her embodiment as the Mother Earth. St. Augustine called her a harlot mother, "the mother, not of the gods, but of the demons." Churchmen believed the powers of "witches" came from the same sort of contact with the Mother Earth. Arresting officers often carried them to prison in a large basket, so their feet would not touch the ground.

For the last 30 years, he writes, his and Abbie's collaborations have been pieces for chamber music theater, a genre that "hardly exists in Western culture because it is extremely difficult to successfully combine theater with the sparseness of chamber music. Even efforts by composers such as Schubert and Schumann are little more than melodramatic curiosities."

Bill explains:

In opera, the orchestra pads the drama, epic sets and pageantry blur over the superficiality of the plots, and the acting need only be sufficient for people looking through binoculars. The focus is on singing and occasional orchestral fireworks. In chamber music theater, complex scripts have to be delivered with convincing theatrical skill even if combined with utterly precise timings and inflections dictated by the music. Cybeline compounds these problems with an abrupt collage of styles, moods, video and twelve tone music. This leaves a burden on the performer to develop new performance practices and techniques that hardly exist.

To create a genuine integration of the arts we write our own texts and music and produce and perform the works ourselves. We also created the video for Cybeline. Though our orientation is not specifically technological, we incorporate many of the most recent developments such as surround sound, video and live electronics. Our artistic concerns are generally social, so we try to combine our experimentation with styles that are moderately approachable to a broader public.

But that's as much explaining as he will do:

Beckett once said that his theater is an "enigma wrapped in a mystery." The beauty of theater is that its iconic meanings are left open to each individual's interpretation, so we generally avoid "explaining" our works. We continue to find new meanings in them even years after their completion.

What else is there to say but "amen," and if you're in Los Angeles or anywhere nearby "get thee to REDCAT" Tuesday night for their performance. Tickets are available online here: "The Wired Goddess and Her Trombone."

One of the great American novelists of the 20th century, Nelson Algren is always associated with Chicago, where he grew up and gained fame as its most ardent chronicler -- Carl Sandburg, Saul Bellow, Richard Wright and James T. Farrell notwithstanding. Algren's notorious love-hate relationship with Chicago went beyond the city's limits. It filled his novels -- "The Man With the Golden Arm," "A Walk on the Wild Side" and "Never Come Morning," to name just three -- and his long-limbed, undersung poetry.

Below are a few excerpts from a 28-page poem, entitled "Ode to Kissassville," which to my knowledge has never been properly published. (To get accurate line breaks, enlarge your screen image to the max.) Filled as it is with sardonic humor, lyrical grace, and an outrage that is more timely than ever, "Ode to Kissassville" would make a wonderful chapbook. It was written more than 40 years ago and centers on Chicago but surely applies to the current state of our Banana Republic.

The poem once appeared as an epilogue in 100 copies of a 1961 reprint edition of his prose poem "Chicago: City on the Make." The edition now in print from the University of Chicago Press, with an introduction from his old friend Studs Terkel, does not include the epilogue. 

"Ode to Kissassville" begins:

Hog-Butcher, Stacker-of-Wheat, Freight-Handler, Piano-
Mover, Tall bold slugger set vivid among the little soft cities and
All-Around-Rotating-Fink-To-The-Nation
Where else
(Contentedly at rest before the evening telly)
Could I watch PROFILE OF A SECRET WAR:
TASK FORCE TUFF KEEPING CHICAGO STRONG AND AMERICA MIGHTY
(WGN-TV assisting the forces of law and order
By entrapping two derelicts into a feeble attempt at mugging)
What other city could show me eight armed cops
Beating the living bejesus out of two defenseless winos
In Living Color?

Show me another city so proud to be alive
That it can fit two citizen-dress men into false bra's
And tight gowns
Then send them down Skid Row bravely swinging handbags
And hips rolling.
What New York's police would like to do, Chicago's really can
In that contented evening hour when we learn to Trap Our Man.

It has stanzas such as this:

The perch -- the alderman reminds us well --
Have disappeared.
The underwater population now consists
Of bloodworms, sludgeworms
And fingernail clams.
Yet once, where Marina Towers' twin-atrocities now stand
The Pottawattomies hunted down both banks
And the river flowed cleaner and more deeply then.

And this:

Under the terrible burden of destiny
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs
Who has never lost a battle
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse
And under his ribs the heart of the people --
Hurray for our side.
If my City of the Big Shoulders
Stormy, husky, bawling
Yipping, yapping, yessing, crawling
Would only stop giggling like a farm-boy wearing earrings
On North Wells Street for the first time
Maybe we could find out what kind of joint we're living in.

And this:

Again that hour when taxies are deadheading home
Before the trolley-buses start to run
And snowdreams in a lace of mist drift down
And paving-flares make shadows on old walls
When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel
All those whose lives were lived by someone else
Who never had a choice but went on what was left
Return along long walks where thrusts of wintry grass
By force of love have split the measured stone.

If by chance a publisher reads this and is prompted, inspired or brave and crazy enough to bring out a "Kissassville" chapbook, please let me know.

Our famously disengaged Maximum Leader may be a know-nothing statesman, but when it comes to getting elected, Elisabeth Bumiller reports, "Friends who have talked with the president in recent weeks say he is consumed by the campaign, the polls and Mr. Kerry." With all due respect for the office Bush holds but none for the office-holder and his obsession, let him consume this: The Dishonest Dubya Lying Action Figure. A reader writes: "It's the funniest  thing I've seen since the last Bush interview." Have fun with it.

Urban legends and similar inventions have to start somewhere. But tracing how they began is usually guess work and finding the identity of their authors generally leads to a dead end. So it was a pleasure to hear from George Hunka, who nailed down the origin and source of the anonymously written list in Newspaper Wit and Wisdom, which described major American newspapers and their readers in funny, unflattering terms.

When I googled the list, the earliest trace I found of it on the Web was Sept. 17, 2000. And I discovered no author I could name. Hunka, the blogger of Superfluities, writes: "September 2000? I can do even better than that. This little joke appears to be based on a piece of dialogue from 'A Conflict of Interest,' an episode of the BBC series 'Yes, Prime Minister' that premiered on December 29, 1987." Here's the script:

Jim Hacker (The Prime Minister): "Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;
And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey (The Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet):"Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?"
Bernard Woolley (Hacker's Personal Private Secretary): "Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.

"The source is here,"  Hunka adds. (He thinks this list is "funnier, too.") It's from The Yes (Prime) Minister Files.

By the way, Wit and Widsom's American list struck a chord with Straight Up readers. One of them, Leon Freilich, suggested these additions:

The Washington Times is read by people who realize it's the revealed word of God (translated from Korean).
The Star is read by people who can't read but who recognize celeb faces.

Freilich now enters the annals of the anonymous, unless some chronicler of urban legends and similar inventions chooses to preserve his name.

Terry Teachout blogged about Wednesday night's ArtsJournal.com gathering at the Landmark Tavern in Manhattan. It would be nice if the site's future turns out as predicted in his report.
Here's what The New York Sun reported Friday in
The Knickerbocker column.

A reader writes: "I don't know where this is from, but I thought you'd enjoy it."

Pentagon officials now believe they have been unable to locate Osama Bin Laden because he has been hiding in a place where:

1. It's easy to get in if you have the money;
2. No one will recognize or remember you;
3. No one will realize that you have disappeared;
4. No one keeps any records of your comings and goings;
5. You have no obligations or responsibilities.

The analysts are still puzzled, however, as to how Bin Laden found out about the Texas Air National Guard in the first place.

We not only love it, we're certain it will not be used for political advantage in any Bush campaign ads, unlike the exploited 9/11 attacks. You can see those here.

We know there's nothing new under the sun. Ditto on the Internet. < FONT color=#003399>Newspaper Wit and Wisdom turns out to have been around for years with minor variations and some additions, i.e.: "The Seattle Times is read by people who spill coffee all over it." But the basic list was posted on Sept. 17, 2000, as Print Media Explained. That seems to be the earliest posting. It was posted again, four days later, as Ever Wonder Who's Reading What? In October of that year The Nation magazine took note of it as Readership Survey (second item down), and it has popped up ever since on more blogs than I care to count. Tom Magliozzi even read it on the air on "Car Talk" back in March 2002. The next thing you know it will turn up in Bush campaign ads.

This "reader-response criticism" of the daily press just arrived in an e-mail message, and it's too good not to share:

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country - if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who's running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country ... or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

I don't know where this wit and wisdom originated, but let's have more of it.

To extol the virtues of the Internet is to report the obvious: It's old news. But every day brings a fresh reminder of its value. Have a look at Newsweek.com's slide show of an exhibition at the AXA Gallery in New York called "They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo," a survey of more than 60 drawings.

Although Newsweek hasn't mentioned the exhibition in print, it has done a greater service by posting the slide show on its Website, with a narrative by exhibition co-curator Peter N. Carroll. (Scroll down and click the photo gallery called "How Children See War.") The reproductions of 12 of the drawings, in color and in black and white, are magnificent. The exhibition runs through April 3.

"'They Still Draw Pictures' collects and comments on a cross-section of the children's art produced in the colonias infantiles," an AXA Gallery press release notes, "as well as a selection of drawings from later wars, from the Holocaust to Kosovo, that bear a tragic and uncanny resemblance to their Spanish counterparts." (Colonias infantiles were colonies established in Republican-controlled territory during the Spanish Civil War for more than 200,000 traumatized children who were either orphaned or separated from their families.)

The drawings are regarded as "invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness." Omitted from the Newsweek slide show, however -- and this is a reflection of the gallery exhibition itself -- are any children's drawings from the Vietnam War, the genocides in Cambodia or Rwanda, (see The Rwanda Project: "Through the Eyes of Children"), the first Gulf War or the current war in Iraq.

Pari Stave, director of the AXA Gallery, explained in a telephone interview: "The exhibition is not meant to be comprehensive. Most of the drawings, about 85 percent of them, are from the Spanish Civil War. They come from a single collection. The others were added as a curatorial afterthought, and I'm not sure whether that was a good idea or not."

A book from the University of Illinois Press -- entitled "They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo," by Carroll and co-curator Anthony L. Geist, with a foreword by Robert Coles -- accompanies the exhibition.

Correction: Peter Carroll writes, "There actually IS a drawing from the Persian Gulf war: the Israeli kid with the gas mask. We were unable to locate a source for the Vietnam War, though we know there are some drawings out there." The Israeli drawing is not in the slide show, but it is mentioned in the narration. My apology for the error.

It's good to see The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg back in top form. He's not the first to argue that Ralph Nader shouldn't run for president -- it's hard to be first in a weekly magazine -- but he marshals his reasons, while still heaping praise on Nader, with a cogency I haven't read elsewhere. ... Leave it to CNN's Larry King to heap praise on Bob Dole, while choosing exactly the wrong word with typical incoherence. As a political pundit, Dole is "an incredible source," King says. ... Thank God, or Someone, that Paul Krugman is back from vacation. Without him the Op-ed page of The New York Times goes as limp as a banana peel. ... This is especially true when David Brooks claims that the poor are to blame for their poverty: All they have to do to live happily ever after is look in the mirror and reform their "bad behavior."

Speaking of the Times ... it ain't easy reporting the Oscar show, as Sharon Waxman proved with her deadline coverage. She got Peter Jackson's nationality wrong, calling him an Australian -- all those New Zealand jokes notwithstanding. She got the number of Sean Penn's Oscar nominations wrong. It's four, not three. Trivial errors to be sure. But how about this? Despite reporting many times on Hollywood's most notorious mogul, Miramax co-chairman Bob Weinstein, she apparently doesn't know what he looks like. Weinstein was not the guy that Renee Zellweger kissed after winning her Oscar, as Waxman's story claimed. See the correction (scroll down).

A friend of mine just took a drive from New York's Adirondacks to South Carolina and back. He says one thing he noticed is that conversation in America boils down to the three "g"s -- God, Gays and Guns. "Wherever I went that's all people were talking about." He also noticed that Americans are wearing small hats. While their clothing has gotten bigger over the years to accomodate larger bodies, according to a SizeUSA survey, their hats appear to have shrunk. "I can't figure out why," he says, "but I think it's because these days the average American head turns out to be the size of a softball."

What everybody is saying about Sunday night's Oscar show is true. Have you ever seen a duller one? We knew we were in for a long evening when the opening number was a never-ending showcase for Billy Crystal's mediocre song-and-dance talent instead of a stand-up spritz of fabulous zingers.

When the most interesting guy on stage turned out to be Blake Edwards, the 81-year-old recipient of an honorary award for career achievement, you knew it wasn't just the sedate glamour of the gowns that turned back the clock. And when the same guy provided the show's funniest moment by skidding across the stage in a wheelchair and crashing through a wall, you were grateful for the joke.

The most candid remark of the evening came from Errol Morris, who shared the Oscar for best documentary feature with Michael Williams for "The Fog of War," a portrait of Robert S. McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. Morris said he thought the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences would never recognize his films. He also offered the evening's best acceptance speech.

"Forty years ago," he said, "this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again. And if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here."

Had you stayed awake long enough to see Sean Penn accept the Oscar for best actor, you would have heard a passing reference to his trips to Iraq: "If there's one thing that actors know, other than that there weren't any WMDs -- it's that there is no such thing as best in acting." Except for Morris and Penn -- and Tim Robbins, who made a pro bono reference to victims of abuse and violence -- the show's escape into fantasy was pretty much complete, not even counting the Oscars for "The Lord of the Rings."

The New York Times Book Review ought to get an editor -- fast. Somebody's not minding the store.

What's wrong in this sentence? "She is equally ferocious when she expresses her disgust with consolidated radio empires and the ludicrosities of the F.C.C itself."

The noun, as far as I know, is ludicrousness. It's not a word that comes rippingly off the tongue and is better avoided. But ludicrosity? I don't find it in my Webster's. I do find it in the online slang dictionary urbandictionary.com, which defines the word as:

1. A descritpive [sic] term used to describe the state of a person, place, thing or event of a particularly ludicrous nature.

"Nas and Jay-Z in a gay prono [sic] together ... what kind of ludicrosity is this?!?!"

I'll grant ludicrosity its place in that context if I must. But it's not the sort of neologism that sticks -- and in a Times review it's, shall we say, way misplaced. A rap reference in a critique of a book about pirate radio? How hip! 

If being hip was intended, how to explain this from the same critique? "She writes in a straightforward enough magazine style, but veers between entertaining overdisclosure and a seeming fear of divulgation." Divulgation? Hello? That word is so long out of use it smells of mothballs. As for the timid hedging ... oh, never mind.