National Public Radio made a huge mistake ousting its veteran arts reporter David D’Arcy and is still trying to cover it up. The latest attempt came during an investigation by the National Labor Relations Board when the network refused to produce documents that would allegedly clarify why he was fired and Tom Cole, a unionized […]
NOSTALGIA BUG: ‘UNCLE BILL’ BURROUGHS
When I was looking at my old Bob Woodward interview, some of which I posted because it seemed, uh, timely, I saw another old interview I did — this one with Bill Burroughs. I thought you’d find it interesting. Here’s part of it: Your books are filled with gun lore. What spurred your interest in […]
FIRST THE BLOG, THEN THE REBLOG
Staight Up posts are being reblogged — curated, if you like — in Germany. The reblogger is Fareed Armaly, an Arab-American expatriate (born in Iowa City, Iowa, now living in Stuttgart). I don’t know him and never heard of him before. All I know is, his work has been shown at Documenta11, among other prestigious art exhibitions. The […]
MEMORY LANE: WOODWARD SORT OF OUTSIDE THE BELTWAY
Now that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are together again, taking a victory lap after all these years, like the Simon & Garfunkel of journalism, I’m reminded by my staff of thousands that once upon a time, long ago and far away, I interviewed Woodward about his only non-political book — the one out of […]
I FIND IT STRANGE . . .
… that Chuck Colson is offended — “I am really shocked,” he says — that Mark Felt (a k a Deep Throat) went “sneaking around dark alleys and talking to reporters.” It wasn’t “the right way” for a “very upright” FBI agent to uncover Watergate crimes. Uh, wait a minute, Chuck. Weren’t you one of the worst of Nixon’s real dark-alley sneaks? […]
RORSCHACH THESE UNITED STATES
See the pretty picture and find out … … what it means. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING IN IRAQ?
Carl Conetta lays it out in “Vicious Circle,” his research monograph on “The Dynamics of Occupation and Resistance in Iraq, Part One, Patterns of Popular Discontent” for the Project on Defense Alternatives. In clear language, the academic sound of the title notwithstanding, Conetta offers the strongest, most detailed and comprehrensive, fully documented understanding of the […]
DEEP AND DEEPER
The Washington Post confirms that former FBI agent Mark Felt was the source for leaked secrets about Nixon’s Watergate coverup. Waving the Flog Now that Deep Throat’s blown his cover,Eliminating every maybe,The only question still remainingIs what to make of Barbara’s Baby. His devil daddy showed him howTo steal the White House like a thief,So […]
IMPERIAL MOURNING
“Preventive Warriors,” a documentary about the National Security Strategy of the United States issued by the White House in September of 2002, is the perfect antidote to Dear Leader’s Memorial Day ravings (a pious official proclamation for “a day of prayer for permanent peace” and an imperial radio address to the nation that the U.S. […]
THE FREE PRESS IN FULL SQUEAK
Chicago, America’s most underrated metropolis, is the capital of flyover country. So unless you grab one or both of its major dailies while changing planes at O’Hare (or you’re a news junkie Web surfer), you’re missing out on some entertaining columns. Here’s one by Debra Pickett, of the Chicago Sun-Times, headlined “Freedom’s just another word […]
CALL THE OMBUDSMAN
A case of plagiarism! May 20: “One day historians will ask how we stood by and let this happen.”— Straight Up May 26: “When future historians look back on this period, they will wonder, most of all, I think, how we let it go without a fight.”— Altercation Talk about plagiarism, how about this? If […]
FLAKY FRIDAY
We’re so late on this it’s disgusting. A friend from Mississippi writes: Today I was listening to local “Talk Radio” and the topic was about the new Pope, who had just been elected. One woman called in and said, “Oh, I was hoping so much that it would be a Baptist this time!” My staff […]
PHONY BUT FUNNY
We’re so late on this it’s disgusting and ridiculous. A while ago The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here were this year’s winners, which the staff also forgot to post: 1. […]
SWOONING FOR ART DECO ON A GRAND SCALE
The Chrysler Building gets the lyrical treatment for its 75th birthday in today’s New York Times from: David W. Dunlap: “Juke Joint in the Sky”Michael J. Lewis: “Dancing to New Rules, a Rhapsody in Chrome”Charles McGrath: “A Lunch Club for the Higher-Ups”William L. Hamilton: “On Top of the World, Drafting, Dreaming and Drilling”Elaine Louie: “How […]
SCHICKEL & CORLISS: RATING THE BEST FLICKS
It’s good to see William Wyler getting his due from Time magazine film critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss. In the current issue, they’ve chosen Wyler’s “Dodsworth” as the best flick of the ’30s, along with Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” Akira Kurosawa’s […]
TUCKED INTO THE CURL
One of the comments in yesterday’s item struck me as particularly relevant to the death of arts criticism in general: “Mass marketing requires a reductive concept of the human. The aesthetic values of global capitalism by necessity esteem baseness.” Anyone with the slightest cognizance of pop culture knows this by now. But back in 2000, […]
IS ARTS CRITICISM DEAD? PROGRAM DIES AT COLUMBIA
The front page of today’s ArtsJournal points to a story in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times headlined “Critical condition,” about the death of arts criticism. The Times subhead summarizes the gist of the story: “Once almighty arbiters of American taste, critics find their power at ebb tide. Is it a dark time for the arts, or […]