LEARNING THE GAME or: How John Lennon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love His Inner Geek Perfect Sound Forever LONG BEFORE "POST-MODERN" became pure jargon, Buddy Holly put quotes around his "normalcy" to disarm rock machismo. Holly, the "King of the Sixth Grade," hiccupped his hormones out loud, flipping everybody's high school jitters into metaphor. His futuristic Stratocaster guitar gave his horn-rimmed glasses sudden but certain panache, and in a style crowded with "hipsters," "Marlon Brando with a guitar" as Jackie Gleason dismissed Elvis … [Read more...]

NIXON... OR BUSH? HERE AND NOW story aired today: interview with David Leaf, co-director of THE US VS JOHN LENNON. … [Read more...]

ARCHLY ANTI-STARCH "I appreciated the relative anonymity of the actors (one doesn’t want recognizable faces in trash), but what is Samuel L. Jackson doing in “Snakes on a Plane”?" --David Denby in the New Yorker. … [Read more...]

WHERE THE PAST PEEKS INTO THE FUTURE "Archimedes Palimpsest," a 10th-century parchment document, has been rotting for hundreds of years, besides being erased and painted over numerous times. And lost. And rediscovered. On August 3, Uwe Bergmann, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, spoke about his work at the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory. It was a lecture that became a podcast that led me to this page, where some brighter-than-sun intense X-ray beams are now used to transcribe the Greek mathematician's … [Read more...]

MORE DREAMS OF JOE HILL Mother Jones has posted an Iraq war timeline that's even better in its interactive edition: Lie By Lie IF I WERE AN ASSIGNMENT EDITOR Write me a story about how gas prices have fallen by as much as 20 percent in the past month, and do a comparison of gas price fluctations (relative to other economies) before the last three mid-terms elections. CAN'T THEY PREP MATT BETTER THAN THIS? … [Read more...]

HATE TO AGREE WITH THESE GUYS Tierney in Friday's Times: Compared with past threats — like Communist sociopaths with nuclear arsenals — Al Qaeda’s terrorists are a minor problem. They certainly don’t justify the hyperbolic warnings that America’s “existence” or “way of life” is in jeopardy, or that America must transform the Middle East in order to survive... T-SHIRT SLOGAN TO LIVE BY "I Never Thought I'd Miss Nixon" OFF CAMP "Pop Art is Beatle art," Susan Sontag … [Read more...]

Let us be frank: godless sodomites is a COMPLIMENT in this day and age, ESPECIALLY if you don't get it. But we hasten to add: Annette Bening wuz ROBBED. (And we ADORE Helen Mirren. AND Jeremy Irons.) … [Read more...]