He died earlier this week in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Carrefour de l’Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot and waste your […]

Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as “beehive music.” I had to laugh. She wasn’t wrong. (One composer, Jeppe Just Christensen, played two pairs of […]

Nails it again with his latest piece of essential writing about the so-called “core American values” and “moral authority” claimed for and by the United States since its founding: “Unexceptional Americans.” The shorter version with the longer title — “Why We Can’t See the Trees or the Forest: The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia” — […]

As usual, he’s right on target … his latest bull’s-eye. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

By releasing the torture memos and then rebuffing calls for an independent truth commission, the president is doing much worse than cementing a reputation for compromise: He’s siding with the rightwingnuts and with all the Congressional pols — Republicans and some Democrats — who want to bury the past. Does Barack Obama truly believe that […]

In London The Guardian posted its obit Sunday at 9 p.m., which means it went live in New York at 4 p.m. But this morning’s print edition of The New York Times makes no mention of Ballard’s death. OK, print is slow — but not that slow. And how come there’s no obit on the […]

This is my twitter to the world That never twittered me — The inane things of daily life Deserve obscurity. Incessant streams of messages — They come in starts and fits — What one’s eating, whom one’s dating — A universe of twits! — Leon Freilich (He’s our Calvin Trillin.) Postscript: June 15 — Looks […]

All the Hemingways I saw were going for stratospheric prices. Well, not exactly going. More like asking. If I remember correctly, a signed presentation copy of the rare Paris edition of in our time had a price tag of $465,000. Signed firsts of Ulysses by James Joyce and Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot didn’t come […]

Does the Council on Foreign Relations Depredations merit another name change, i.e. the Council on Foreign Federal Depredations? To judge by Patricia Cohen’s report on its recent conference about the Great Depression, I think so. She writes that New Deal critics like the author and syndicated columnist Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow at the council […]

…from Hassan Sabbah: Listen to my last words, anywhere! Listen all you boards, governments, syndicates, nations of the world, And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory, To take what is not yours … Read along if you like. I bear no sick words junk words love words forgive words from Jesus […]

Nelson Algren, most quotable of writers, was born 100 years ago today. I’ve posted many items about him over the past few years, including what his friends had to say: Roger Groening, for instance, and Kurt Vonnegut and Studs Terkel. Some of my own comments and memories, too. A few years ago, I mentioned that […]

“As boring to watch as a space walk,” a friend said about Barack Obama’s latest round of media appearances, including the best one Sunday night, on “60 Minutes.” Paul Krugman, whose wisdom I also trust, is worse than bored this morning. He’s filled “with a sense of despair.” Krugman has been feeling that way for […]

So now it’s the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Folded. Not completely. There will be a much-reduced online version. But the old P-I is gone from print. Only the name remains. What I said when the Rocky Mountain News folded goes double for the P-I, which helped me survive as a freelance many years ago by buying stories […]

“Watchmen,” the movie, caused a stir at the box office when its opening weekend nabbed $55 million, the highest opening gross of the year and third-highest March opening ever. It’s a shame that none of the money will trickle down to the artist Malcolm Mc Neill, whose image of the Mayan Death God (right) in […]

Henry Kisor has posted on his news blog an item called The ‘Inept Blob’ vs. the ‘Inhuman Turd,’ about the nasty friction between the novelist Nelson Algren (a literary great, in my opinion) and the editor William Targ (a not-so-great, in Algren’s opinion). Which reminds me: Dan Simon’s Seven Stories Press has just published “Algren […]

A moment of silence, please, for the Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition. I have a sentimental attachment to the paper because many years ago it helped me survive as a freelance. Its feature editors bought the arts stories I pitched them. They didn’t have a large freelance budget, so they didn’t buy […]

The classical music editor of The New York Times takes up his longtime role once again as chief media apologist for the Vienna Philharmonic. In a promotional article about the orchestra, James Oestreich plants a big wet kiss on Clemens Hellsberg, its chairman and archivist, lauding him as “a force for change.” He dismisses the […]