Archives for February 19, 2019

From 2009:

Of all the countless newspaper and magazine pieces that I’ve written over the years, one of the most immediately consequential was “Too Cool to Cash In, Favorite of the Few,” which appeared in the Sunday New York Times in 1997. It was a posthumous profile of the jazz musician Joe Mooney, who had a brief but potent vogue that I described in the opening paragraphs of the piece….

Read the whole thing here.

“Commentators on the political scene tend in retrospect to regard the figures who emerge into prominence as totally derisory. Understandably so. It is extremely difficult, as I know from personal experience, to spend time with one or other of them without reaching the conclusion that some accomplished clown like Peter Sellers has substituted for him.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time