PETE SEEGER 1919-2014
Pete Seeger, a great American, has died. In 2006, Alec Wilkinson wrote a profile of Seeger for The New Yorker. It ended like this: Here is a story told to me lately by a man named John Cronin, who is the director of the Pace Academy for the Environment, at Pace University. Cronin has known …
MORE THAN WILLIN’
My friend Dave Jensen and I went to the Capitol Theater in Port Chester last Friday night to catch the Midnight Ramble Band. The band did nothing to diappoint, and even supplied a surpise: the rpesence of Billy Payne, the keyboardist of Little Feat. Payne’s presence added a different flavor to the show, mostly through …
KING IGNORAMUS
I don’t know who this toad Kevin O’Leary is, but somewhere in the great media world he has a job opining on the global situation. I don’t know what the rest of his body of work indicates, but this excerpt alone shows that he, and what’s more, whoever hired him, should be sent back to …
BEHIND IN HISTORY
The media has been all over itself lately following Jen Selter, a young woman of no particular distinction other than having a nearly perfect butt. As the New York Post reported today, “The ample-curved Long Island native was working at a gym in March 2012 when she started taking photographs of herself working out. Since …
FRANK LUNTZ’S DISCONTENTS
There is a sad, fascinating, hilarious article in The Atlantic about Frank Luntz, a “public-opinion gure” who has been a highly effective servant of the Republican party since the largely content-free, package-rich Contract With America triumph of 1994. In the article, Luntz reveals to Writer Molly Ball that he is having some sort of crisis–in …
77 WAYS TO PLAY `THE WEIGHT’
Having spent the better part of three years thinking and writing about Levon Helm, I have inevitably also devoted a lot of thought to The Weight, the mournful, elegiac, mysterious, inscrutable song written by Robbie Robertson and made famous by The Band. Somehow over the years, it evolved from a simple if elusive pop song …
BEST BOOKS
On December 20th, Janet Maslin of The New York Times listed her Ten Favorite Books of 2013. Among them: “JOHNNY CARSON by Henry Bushkin (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). That rare celebrity tell-all by an author who knows whom and what he’s talking about. Perhaps Mr. Bushkin, a young lawyer in 1970, should have wondered why …
THE ARMY WAR COLLEGE TAKES A STEP
On December 18, Fox News reported that the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania is considering removing prints that depict Robert E. Lee and other Confederate generals after at least one official questioned why the school honors those who fought against America. The college is currently conducting an inventory of its paintings and photographs, and …