Archives for October 2003

Because I don’t want to end the week on a sour note about Shrub and Der Grope, I’d like to point to Timothy Noah’s challenge to Tom Wolfe, yesterday in Slate. Will Wolfe take it? I hope so. I’d wondered why Wolfe’s entertaining polemic in defense of Edward Durell Stone’s white marble Gallery of Modern […]

So Der Gropenfuhrer has tapped a rabbi from the Simon Wiesenthal Center for his Culifornia transition team. Nu? The rabbi said he accepted the appointment, according to the Jewish daily Forward, because of “the assurance that this is not a partisan group.” More than that, the rabbi is already arranging a trip to Israel for Der Gropenfuhrer, notwithstanding his now-regretted […]

The Gotham reviews are in. The score so far for “Golda’s Balcony”: two raves (Clive Barnes and Michael Sommers), one near-rave (Howard Kissel), one positive notice (Linda Winer), and one huge slam (Bruce Weber). If the variations make you wonder whether critics are worth their weight in newsprint, that’s not a surprise. Artists themselves, when […]

You’ve probably seen references to most of the news events that Harper’s Magazine listed the other day in its Weekly Review. These aren’t all of them, just the ones that might have been a figment of Jon Stewart’s funny bone: A shoplifter in Amsterdam was kicked to death by supermarket employees. A lightning bolt killed […]

Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to “30 years in Biloxi,” stripping him of “his Jewish star” and “his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor.” Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a […]

The election of Culifornia’s Gropenfuhrer has spawned many articles about the meet-cute of fame and power, most recently Anthony Lane’s Talk of the Town piece, “Poll Stars,” in this week’s New Yorker, and Todd Purdom’s Week in Review piece, “Government by Celebrity …,” in Sunday’s New York Times. As Der Gropenfuhrer settles into Sacramento, we’re bound to […]

It’s hard to imagine a Jewish schoolteacher from Milwaukee with the power to plunge the world into a nuclear war. But after seeing the William Gibson play “Golda’s Balcony” (opening Wednesday on Broadway, following a successful Off-Broadway run), it’s not only imaginable but credible. Goldie Myerson, better known as Golda Meir, the prime minister of Israel from […]

“The death penalty is probably the one legal issue that everybody has an opinion about,” Scott Turow said. The best-selling novelist is out on the lecture circuit promoting his latest book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “Ultimate Punishment,” which he describes as “a memoir by way of an essay.” I caught his lecture the other […]

Overlooked but not forgotten, artist Peter Max has designed a limited edition of a half-dozen patriotic posters to help raise $1 million for the proposed Pentagon Memorial. Here’s one of the six, titled United We Stand, and here are two others, God Bless America and Peace on Earth. The signed posters, which go on sale […]

It’s already old news that the lemmings have spoken. But now that they’ve elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governator of Culifornia, what’s next? Running Clint Eastwood for president? Re-animating Sylvester Stallone and running him for senator? That’s too obvious. How about doing something really subtle. Let’s join Sen. Orrin Hatch’s campaign to amend the constitution so […]

Ever since Lorin Maazel took over the New York Philharmonic, critics have lined up for and against and in between. Today’s Financial Times review of their performance of Berlioz’s “Roméo et Juliette” puts the case on both sides as well as anything I’ve read: The maestro “is a bit like that girl with a curl. […]

Here’s a story that might as well be satire because, if true, it’s so nefarious even Gore Vidal might not believe all the dots it connects among Arnold Schwarzenegger, Enron’s former CEO, Kenneth Lay, and the California energy rip-off. It’s also based on facts, unlike the tabloid tale in The Weekly World News headlined: “Alien […]

I see that Lloyd Grove, the new gossip columnist at the Daily News in New York, leads this morning with an item about Sammy Davis Jr. that “rips the zipper off the pint-size entertainer’s gigantic sexual appetites.” Oooh. And he got it all from Wil Haygood’s first-class biography “In Black and White,” just out from […]

By Jan Herman Have the chickens begun to roost? There probably wasn’t a pre-adolescent boy growing up in America in the immediate aftermath of World War II who didn’t mimick Adolf Hitler’s salute as a form of mockery during a game of King of the Hill or its equivalent. But “Little Adolf” Schwarzenegger was a […]

Language is alive and wriggling. Herr Doktor Professor Alan M. Edelson sends along this tale: A linguistics professor was explaining to his class how the use of the double negative varies in different languages. In English, the double negative results in a positive statement. This is not necessarily the case in other languages. But, he […]

Probably no one has more admiration for the poetry of W.B. Yeats, “the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy,” as Clive James puts it in the current issue of The Spectator, than Clive James. Reviewing a new book of Yeats scholarship, which he harpoons under the title

Am I the only one who finds the films in the seven-part series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues getting progressively worse? I think the best film was Scorsese’s on the first night of the series. The rest — beginning with Wim Wenders’ — have been missed opportunities. Very dull, though I love the music. Here’s […]