On Saturday night, Ginny and I and our friends Cathy, Tim, Greg, Susan, Jo and Dave took a limo (!) up to Woodstock to see the legendary Levon Helm perform at his studio/home. In this warm, intimate atmosphere (the audience couldn’t have numbered more than 200), Helm and his wonderful band (among the players: Larry …
Rocky, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, Million Dollar Baby: I’m not so crazy about boxing, but I love boxing movies, David O. Russell‘s The Fighter is one of the best, because, like the other great ones, it’s less about the pugilism than it is about the people. The fighter of the title is the promising but …
I don’t know who these dear folks are, except to say, these are my fellow Americans. Found on Jeff Wells‘ hollywood-elsewhere.com site.
A sign left by a distraught reader on the windows of the just-closed Lincoln Center branch of Barnes & Noble in Manhattan.
The new issue of The Atlantic features an exceptionally good article by the impressive Chrystia Freeland called “The Rise of the New Global Elite.” The excellent article describes a new aristocracy whose power reaches across boundaries, whose ability to act in its own self-interest is probably impervious to national governments, and, perhaps most alarmingly, whose …
In the Times today, David Brooks takes on those in the media who would lay the acts of an apparently quite mad Jared Loughner at the door of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, et al. “These accusations — that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl — are extremely grave,” …
Ginny and I had the pleasure yesterday of going to the Jacob Burns Center and not only seeing The Way Back, the new film by Peter Weir, but also hearing the great Weir talk about the movie in an interview with Janet Maslin. The Way Back is a fictionalized version of The Long Walk, Slavomir …
In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in Boston, the History News Network of George Mason University announced the sixth annual Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging on Friday. The award for Best Series of Posts went to Jamie Malanowski, David Blight, William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, and others, for Disunion, on the New York Times Opinionator …
One of the hardest things to do is to explain to a young person what it was like when something that has become established and famous was brand new. This clip of Mel Brooks appearing on The Dick Cavett Show offers a small bit of what it was like when he was first rolling out …