April 2009 Archives

From the relentlessly easy to underrate Bob Herbert: "We're confiscating shampoo from carry-on luggage at airports while at the same time handing out high-powered weaponry to criminals and psychotics at gun shows..."

by Arthur Phillips, where the iPod is a character and the obsessive fan finds a voice. Among the very few novels I can think of where musical descriptions approach poetry.

On this morning's second hour of On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

Now a zesty download from Podomatic.

NETFLIX KETCHUP: Finally watched In Bruges, a very clever if sordid script but one of the best supporting performances from Brendan Gleason (The General). The way his eyes roll back into his head, his (ferociously impractical) death scene against anybody's.

Children can also intuit sexuality long before they've got a clue what it is, and Pinocchio is the dirtiest Disney feature ever. The unavoidable Exhibit A is the Freudian no-brainer of the hero's lengthening proboscis, though I'd forgotten that in the scene when it happens he's a) locked in a cage and b) lying to the Blue Fairy, the only adult female in sight. As if the fact that "blue" was the contemporary slang for "dirty" wasn't enough, she's also drawn in an eroticized Maxfield Parrish style that has no equivalents elsewhere in Disney. When not only leaves but chirping little birdies sprout from his "nose's" tip at the scene's--wait, the word'll come to me--climax, the image is as pornographic as anything in a Tijuana bible. Even Betty Boop would blush...--Tom Carson in GQ on Pinocchio

See also: Knock On Wood, Tim Parks on Collodi's original in NYRB

Anyone else notice how rad Bill Moyers has been during the meltdown? Past two guests have included William Greider and Mike Davis, author of the inimitable City of Quartz, best book about Los Angeles.

William Greider used to be in the mag at left:
Here is a very different way to understand the problem: to restore the broken financial system, Washington has to fix the Federal Reserve. Though this is not widely understood, the central bank has lost its ability to govern the credit system--the nation's overall lending and borrowing. The Fed's control mechanisms have been severely undermined by a generation of deregulation and tricky innovations that have substantially shifted credit functions from traditional banks to lightly regulated financial markets. When the Fed tried to apply its old tools, starting in the 1980s, the credit system perversely produced opposite results--an explosion of debt the policy-makers could not restrain. In its present condition, the Fed may even make things worse.