Stewart at the Wang center last Friday night, first show, mostly brilliant, including two savvy pop jokes. 1) After the Y2K crash, the whole world devolves back to... (gasp!) 1982! "No! I can't run like the wolf again!" 2) Why don't Jews and blacks get along? Both oppressed minorities, blacks came … [Read more...]

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, … [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 … [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 … [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 … [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...]

Here's my story on Pollini's Nocturnes, aired last Wednesday. If you just wanna grab the RA file, go for it. He gave me a very chatty twenty minutes, even though everybody I asked beforehand reported him to be "monosyllabic." He was in Lucerne, Switzerland, doing press from his hotel room, and I … [Read more...]

When George Will can say something as racist as this on TV without a firestorm: "When you see Lamont standing there on victory night with Jesse Jackson looming over one shoulder, and Rev. Al Sharpton looming over the other, where does the Democratic death wish come from...? " [paraphrase] … [Read more...]

On last Friday's Front Porch with Eric Lott talking about the Dartmouth Dylan conference. … [Read more...]

"Does this Leonard Cohen trib pic have too many Canadians? Yes. Does he come from Montreal? Of course. Do they give Rufus two songs when Teddy T. has the better voice? Absolutely. Should they have interviewed some critics to provide a larger context? You bet. And where's Bruce Cockburn? Rebecca … [Read more...]

Joke of the week. (Audio) … [Read more...]

You don't see Wills genuflect all that often, except perhaps to St. Augustine or Abe. But I spent the vacation pouring through At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch, and it's to drool for. There's an intriguing unanswered question left dangling at the end: LBJ suddenly announces his withdrawal from … [Read more...]

Weird watching Munich a couple weeks back; it's soundtracked the Hezbollah crisis for me. Easily swamps Schindler's List in how Spielberg handles prickly moral themes; Geoffrey Rush is quiet and astounding; the Tarantino homage where PLO confront the Israelis at their "safe house" is a hoot. That … [Read more...]