U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell got down the other night in Washington D.C. — or thought he did — when he paid tribute to Warren Beatty at the Kennedy Center Honors with a rap that went like this: I’m Colin Luther Powell.Public service is my thing.Don’t do it for the fame.Don’t do it for […]
THE KERIK CONNECTION
Why can’t Rudy Giuliani’s former chauffeur and body guard become U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security? Well, he can. Everyone says Bernie Kerik will be confirmed. But should he be? Ellis Henican has doubts. And so does Fred Kaplan. Both also made their case this morning on Democracy Now!
HIGH COLONIC
Give this man the Katie Couric prize.
GOOSING THE GANDER, PART 3
The editorials are starting to dribble in. They don’t address the irony of Georgie Boy’s call for “a full and open” accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq — which would be a bagatelle, I suppose. But they do take up the issue as an attempt to mug the U.N. Philip Gourevitch calls […]
SHAKE IT UP, BABY
A recent article about a conference on the current state of classical music criticism by John Fleming, the performing arts critic of the St. Petersburg Times, has really pissed off my composer friend William Osborne. What bugged him was a recurring theme of the conference, namely that so many critics seemed willing to accomodate pop […]
GOOSING THE GANDER, PART 2
Where are the editorials noting the irony of Georgie Boy’s call for “a full and open” accounting of the U.N. $64-billion oil-for-food program in Iraq? He’s never given a similar accounting of his own tainted $200-billion war for democracy in Iraq or any of the other questionable programs on his agenda. Besides, if you watched […]
BYE BYE BROKAW
Although she waited until today to say it, Alessandra Stanley is right: However sad it was to see Mr. Brokaw leave on Wednesday night, it was sadder to watch NBC milk the transition for every drop of bathos and promotional padding. On “Today” and a special “Dateline” this week, the changing of the NBC news […]
JUST ENOUGH THOMSON
David Thomson, reviewing “Just Enough Liebling” in the Dec. 13 issue of The Nation, makes a candid confession of the sort you rarely ever hear from a reviewer. “I am bound to admit,” he writes, “that before this assignment I honored the name without knowing the books.” But Thomson (biographer, film scholar, movie critic, essayist, […]
NOAM CHOMSKY PLUS ONE
A reader writes: Chomsky has a point. [Scroll to the end of SWITCHING NEWS CHANNELS.] But the overarching reason the Bush brigade will steer clear of a draft is that it would incite college students to go to the streets, burn their draft cards, and take up the Johnson-Nixon era chant, “Hell, no, we won’t […]
SWITCHING NEWS CHANNELS
Now that Tom Brokaw is gone as NBC News anchor, his handsome successor Brian Edwards has already begun filling his shoes. “I feel the weight of history,” Edwards said in an interview this morning on the network’s “Today” show. It’s that kind of baloney that’s objectionable in him, not his handsomeness. But the truth is […]
GOOSING THE GANDER
George says the U.N. must come clean on the Iraq oil scandal. Hey, George, we’re still waiting for you to come clean on a few scandals yourself. Let’s see … Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Halliburton, WMD, etc. How about the whole damned Iraq war scandal, George? Here’s a deal: If Kofi tells all, you tell all. […]
ANCHOR AWAY, CELEBRITY-STYLE
Maybe I was over-turkified. Still can’t get a grip. Must be the tryptophan, or possibly the halo effect of Tom Brokaw’s protracted departure. His celebrity-style leave-taking as NBC News anchor, so long-winded and self-important, has been milked to a fare-thee-well. The fact that he has gone along with it or worse, encouraged it, would make […]
READING THE TIMES
With his latest column, “Good News About Poverty,” David “Bobo” Brooks continues his wayward adventures in idiocy.Making the case for globalization, he points to the “spectacular decline in poverty in East and South Asia” as evidence that the world’s poorer nations are leading a global economic surge. How so? Well, of roughly 472 million people […]
NEKKID PUNDITRY
A note on copy editing. A friend who teaches at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication tells me her journalism students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels know so little basic grammar that they can’t tell the difference between a noun and a verb. It’s not that bad at the new, improved New York Times […]
BUY THIS BLOGGER’S BOOK
Here’s why, according to him: • You’ve been looking for that perfect gift for your toddler who’s learning to read.• Chances are you can’t bring your PC into the bathroom.• You want to own a copy before Miramax gets a hold of it and changes the ending and makes the story about a French woman […]
REMEMBERING ‘UNCLE WALTER’ CRONKITE
With Thanksgiving approaching I thought I was through blogging this week, but Dan Rather’s sudden resignation as CBS news anchor brought out the worst in me: A sentimental memory of my news story about the resignation of his predecessor, Walter Cronkite, nearly a quarter century ago. It appeared on the front page of the Chicago […]
SONG OF THE WEEK
When “Cybeline” had its world premiere last March in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Hall concert complex, I offered a rundown about its authors, a couple of friends of mine — composer-musicologist-technical-wizard Bill Osborne and singer-actress-artist-lyricist-musician Abbie Conant. The premiere, a multimedia music-theater performance, was part of the cutting-edge REDCAT Musical Exploration Series. According […]