If you can recognize the dude in the clown makeup from this “very special episode” of Blossom, actually titled “.38 Special”, circa 1993, about both kids with guns and the seamy side of show business, the tears behind the greasepaint, you’re one up on terribly amusing young wise guy Dashiell Driscoll, who wrote and narrates…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Dario Treese—“Round Midnight”
Monk on a pipe organ! And good! Definitely a first! No information as to where this was recorded. Posted by Dario, aka D Tree
Howard Zinn, apologist with nothing to apologize for, meets Ronald Radosh, former commie with no place to go
My head probably should be the other way around,1 because I’m bouncing off a piece by the living Ronald, “Howard Zinn: Fake Historian”, over at Law & Liberty, whatever and wherever that is, taking down poor old Howard, who died back in 2010. Radosh is, in turn, bouncing his piece off a new book by…
Oscar Peterson—“Round Midnight”
The odds are (pretty) good that Thelonious would not have cared for this version. Back in the sixties, I read a Downbeat “Blindfold” column that featured Monk. It was a long-running feature that would have a prominent jazz musician listen to records without knowing who was playing and have him (or her) comment on them….
Dante, Part 2
If you’re looking for “Dante, Part 1”, well, there isn’t any. I’ve never written a piece on the master of disgust, as Professor Artz, and, apparently, no one else, called him in my freshman year at Oberlin. But I alluded to Dante in my recent discussions of such ignoble figures as Dan Drezner, David French,…
How often did the New York Times make an ass of itself in televising its selection process for determining which presidential candidate to endorse in 2020? Let me count the ways.
Well, I would if I had like an infinity calculator, but I don’t so I’ll just have to guess. The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison justly pummels them for at least a dozen good reasons, including their ridiculous, though “typical”, exaggeration of instability in the Middle East, “with a nuclear arms race looking more when than…
Kim, Wootak—“Round Midnight”
Wootak Kim (Koreans like to put the “family” name first), playing a 2001 Greg Smallman. Posted by Partita Studio Need more Monk? Of course you do, Go to Mostly Monk
Trump buys never-Trumper support with Moslem blood, while Iran self-destructs
One hates to see crime rewarded, but that’s what seems to be happening in the Middle East. The outrage over Trump’s outrageous assassination of Qassem Soleimani has been half drowned in the justifiable outrage over Iran’s destruction of a Ukraine International Airlines jet, killing all 176 individuals on board. The Iranian people are mortified by…
David Brooks, also a hypocrite
Okay, that’s old news, definitely, but, well, sometimes one can’t help repeating one’s self. A couple of days ago, I ran a piece nominating Daniel Drezner, David French, Jay Nordlinger, and Ross Douthat as candidates for that wishy-washy band of stand asiders who, in death, stand outside the gates of Hell, rejected by God and…
They’re still alive!
Kidding! Kidding, kidding, kidding. Sure, I knew, or at least assumed that Mary-Kate and Ashley, the Olsen twins, shown here hawking their “Elizabeth and James” fashionware, were still alive, but not that they were, you know, still commercially viable. I mean, wasn’t their shelf-life roughly contemporaneous with the “if there’s grass on the infield, play…