“On Monday, Oprah Winfrey and Sarah Palin will sit down and they’re going to talk for an entire hour. And I was thinking, too bad John McCain didn’t do that with her before he chose her as his running mate.” -David Letterman
Nine-year-old boys who go fishing would be proud enough to pose with a foot-long catch of one scale or another. Not this boy. The Anchorage Daily News is featuring Paul Patkotak, the youngest boy in memory “credited with a kill”–of a whale. He “delivered the killing blow to a 32-foot bowhead whale in Barrow recently,” the paper writes, “a singular, hands-on hunting lesson from the boy’s Inupiat uncles.” I guess because the hunters were natives we’re supposed to be less offended that another whale was slaughtered, though that sort of argument sounds too similar to justifications of genital mutilation under the banner of “local customs.” The shot of a 9-year-old boy posing before the whale he killed conjures up something more pornographic than prideful, however “traditional.” ]]>
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I just read a magazine blogger who rhetorically asked whether David Letterman can still be funny as a comic and genial as a talk show host, now that he has revealed his history of having had a number of sexual relationships with women on his staff.
I think the blogger answered her own question. Letterman will no longer be entertaining - to her. Her knowledge of “Letterman the lecher” will forever color her perception of Letterman as an entertainer.
And whose fault is that?
I recall similar speculations when actress Anne Heche conducted a highly publicized same-sex affair with comedian Ellen DeGeneres. “Can Heche be convincing as an actress, playing heterosexual characters?” people mused. DeGeneres herself lost some fans after she and her sitcom character came out of the closet. “Why does the ‘TV Ellen’ have to be gay?” I remember some viewers asking.
The wonderful thing about film and video is that it allows us to test these questions. Find some footage of a performance you enjoyed in the past, and see whether you still appreciate it. If David Letterman comes off as “creepy” or “lecherous” in a way you didn’t notice before, it isn’t Letterman who changed. It’s you.
A unspoken social contract exists between a performer and the audience; the performer agrees to do his best to entertain, and the audience agrees to give him a chance. If you can’t get past your negative opinion of a performer as a person, then it’s unfair to judge his art.
Whether David Letterman can be funny in the future depends in part on how funny you think he ever was, and your willingness to check your baggage at the door and let him perform.
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| Can there be any room for a centrist at a health care reform town hall meeting? |
Seriously now. This addiction to chess is getting ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s the recession at large or my impending unemployment. Chess beckons daily like an alternate universe where absolute order prevails, even though I make a mess of it every time. I can’t win for shit, which makes me the definition of insanity, since I keep, like Oliver, going back for more. “Those linked central pawns of his,” Martin Amis once wrote of the time he played the world’s Number 3 (Nigel Short), “oh, what they could do to me. They weren’t pawns in the normal sense; they had grown, fattened; they were more like bishops, or rooks. No, they were like queens, I thought, as they worked their way into the very crux of my defence.” I don’t have to play the world’s Number 3 to feel that way. Just my brother on the other side of the world (you can see our latest game, my latest humiliation, here. The guy is merciless. Just like when we were young tykes angling for sibling supremacy. Never had a chance then, still don’t now. Still, may I have some more?
]]>I’ve been trying to learn chess. Now, I’ve always considered myself a relatively smart man, but there’s just something about chess that, just, oh, I don’t know makes me feel like a total dumbass. I thought computers made me feel dumb, but chess has really got them beat. Chess makes me feel inadequate, yet every night I keep playing. I keep choosing easier and easier opponents and I keep losing and losing. A game shouldn’t be this hard. It’s a board game for crying out loud. Everyday I tell myself I’m not going to play again. I come home and sit down in my chair, trying to ignore my computer’s siren song. “Come play chess,” it sings sweetly, “you can win this time,” and like the sailors of old I heed the song, I amble over to the computer full well knowing I’m going to shipwreck on the rocks. (That was all metaphorical. I don’t really need a ship to get to my computer. I use a rowboat.) So after this next game, I’m done. I’m going to quit. I can do it. I don’t need it. I mean, what’s one more time going to hurt?
Incidentally, if anyone wants to kick my ass I play at chess.com as ptristam.
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A little Muzio Clementi never hurt anybody. The guy may have been reviled by piano students (he was the Paganini of the keyboard) and under-appreciated by DJs (Parisian radio stations rarely played his stuff in the 18th century except for a brief and inexplicable stretch during the Terror). But his music has a spirited quality that pingpongs between Mozart, Haydn and Wilie Coyote. If he was to go on tour these days he’d be sponsored by an arthritis medicine. Or crack, if pharmaceuticals weren’t calling it something else. He had his mellow moments. This adagio from a sonatina in G would play nicely at Walter Cronkite’s wake, especially since Cronkite (?-2009) and Clementi (1752-1832) were almost contemporaries. When CBS releases the long-lost interview tapes, there’s sure to be the one of Cronkite interviewing Clementi in 1781, year of Muzio’s Michael Jackson-like concert tour through Europe. Here’s the sonatina. Enjoy. And Cronkite, rest, if Muzio will let you, in peace.
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- Alterman: The “Pro-Israel” Smear Campaign
- Steve Coll on the Drone War in Pakistan
- The CIA doesn’t know where the hell Pakistan’s nukes are
- Man and man in Maine
- UN Demands access to Israel’s Guantanamo
- Richard Posner’s verdict on the financial crisis
- Israeli settlers to Obama: Fuck off
- Hezbollah to Israel: Bring it on
- Holocaust denial among Israel’s Arabs
- The war on immigrants goes local
- Finally, getting serious about fuel efficiency
- George Galloway: The Interview
- The difference between conservative and reactionary
- An alternative short list for the Supreme Court
- Hitchens on Hemingway’s A Movable Feast
- The joys of circumcision
- Where have all the sluts gone?
- Malcolm Gladwell on how David beats Goliath
- But will Obama beat that goddamn Goliath?
- Norman Podhoretz thinks Obama is the enemy
- So does the far right
- So does AIPAC (but in French)
- Benny Morris on the demise of the Israeli left
- How Britain acts like North Korea
- God’s death, exaggerated
- Karl Marx, blogger
- The Atlantic has 12 new bloggers
- Google library FAQ
Hold Your Nose Time:
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s reemergence on the political stage after his ignominious departure on Inauguration Day, eschewing the traditional handshake with his successor and the new president, is nothing if not ironic. The most secretive individual in American politics is now calling for the selective release of documents that remain classified in one of his own files marked “Detainees.” We have also learned that a principal reason for having tortured senior al Qaeda detainees was not, in fact, to defend the Homeland, but rather to build the case for war with Iraq based on alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Despite literally hundreds of waterboarding sessions, there was no evidence developed that such a link existed. But that did not stop Cheney. He and others in the Bush administration simply asserted a link even though they knew one did not exist.”–Joe Wilson, “Dick Cheney’s Torture Hypocrisy“
