Pianist John Stetch with Nicholas Walker on Bass and Tom Killian on Drums. Live at the Carriage House in Ithaca, New York. Posted by beatdweller
Author: Alan Vanneman
So Not The New Yorker
Go here for the real thing. “It started out as a metaphor, but I lost control. I know it means something, but I don’t know what. Up to my ass in bills? Up to my tie bar in treatises? New York after the Smash? You tell me.” “It’s called diving for paychecks, dude, and the…
What does the future hold? More of the same
When I was a little boy, I liked to take baths. And when I was taking a bath, I liked to rock back and forth, causing the water to swish back and forth, my ultimate goal being to cause the water to swish back and forth so violently that at one point all of the…
Felix Salmon, swimming upstream
I continue to be impressed by Felix Salmon’s column for Reuter’s “A Slice of Lime in the Soda” (well, everything but the title). I love his omnivorous appetite for economic data, his command of financial minutiae, his, well, a lot of things, but I also continue to be amazed at his intellectual flabbiness when confronted…
Is rape the new toilet paper?
A little background. Back in the early days of the DVD era, I rented a disc with the specials that Rodney Dangerfield did for HBO back in the eighties. After sitting through three or four hours of standup, most of it not by Rodney, I could only imagine that when comedians got together for drinks,…
Ho, ho, ho, Ho, ho, ho. Gingrich got $1.6 million from Freddie Mac
No wonder the dude could stand straight at Tiffany’s.
Super Committee, last seen discarding genitals
When you’re a Super Committee, you can do whatever you damn please, right? Anything! And anything includes nothing, right? The null set! Which is just what the super committee set up by Congress a few months in a fit of “this time we mean business” fury seems ready to do. Over at Politico, which takes…
Why, Oh, Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps? Mark Halperin just wants to be liked
I really shouldn’t read Time magazine, and I especially shouldn’t read Mark Halperin, aka Captain Kiss-Ass, but I did, and I have to pay the price—I have to suffer as Mark rates Newt Gingrich an A- for saying, among other things, that he would use sabotage and assassinations, plus “absolute strategic pressure” (which is kind…
New at Bright Lights: Chaplin at Keystone, Part 1
The new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal has another of my pieces on the films of Charlie Chaplin. Flicker Alley recently released virtually all of Chaplin’s 33 odd films made in one year, 1914, at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios in Los Angeles. I take a look at the first 18 films Chaplin made. The…
Newt and the Neo-Cons, updated
Last week I noted that noted Likudist Jennifer Rubin has been industriously pissing on Newt Gingrich and every other Republican presidential candidate not addressed as “Mitt” and suggested that this was all a plot on Jennie’s part. Well, welcome Charles to the party, as in Krauthammer. Charles is a lot more subtle than Jennie. Instead…