Apparently, evangelicals are still waiting by the phone for their GOP convention invites. “‘People who are not part of the religious right might be alienated if they put too many conservatives as the public face of the party,’ said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.” You think?
Month: August 2004
Law will tear us apart.
There’s talk about that Jude Law will play Ian Curtis of Joy Division in a forthcoming biopic. That’s pretty good casting (better, for example, than Ashton Kutcher as Flash Gordon), although after 24 Hour Party People I’m not sure a Curtis biopic is really necessary (but cast Paul Bettany as Bernard Sumner and we’ll be getting somewhere.) Also in the Jude department, the trailer for Mike Nichols’s Closer is now online, and it looks pretty solid, if you can buy that anyone would actually leave Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts.
Good heavens!
Trouble is brewing again in Grover’s Mill…With the Munich Olympics project and the third Mission Impossible both hitting snags, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise are now looking to remake The War of the Worlds. I’d wish they’d kept it a period piece, but this should still be more fun than MI:3.
Wally World East.
Wally Szczerbiak for Kurt Thomas? I’m not sure that makes much sense…the Knicks are already rife with guards, even assuming Allan Houston is out again for awhile. We need more Bigs.
Sexy Beast?
Word is Ray Winstone, of Sexy Beast and late of King Arthur, will be voicing Mr. Beaver in The Chronicles of Narnia. Yeah, I can dig it.
Cornered.
Alas, the Bush campaign drops ‘turning a corner’. That’s too bad. It was so tone-deaf and Hoover-esque that I’d hoped Dubya would keep saying it right through to November.
Up From Theory.
“The problem of theory was never the philosophy it drew on but the absence of a public forum to criticize it, expand it for intelligent adults, and correct it. The return of the linking intellectuals — adept in philosophical thought but not beholden to the academy — could restore a heritage of speaking to the public about the professors, and, more importantly, could get the professors speaking honestly and intelligibly to us.” Mark Greif, an old college friend of mine, discusses the Death of Theory in The American Prospect. Compared to most other academic disciplines, American historians seem to have side-stepped the worst excesses of echo-chamber theorizing…but it can seem a different world not all that far away.
Positively Clintonian.
“Although parts of the book are dull, the memoir as a whole is a rewarding and revealing portrait of an endlessly fascinating man. Those who write histories of Clinton and his time — as many people, of course, will do — will find this memoir an essential starting point.” Also in the new Prospect (which, I know, is getting a lot of links today), Alan Brinkley takes a gander at Clinton’s My Life.
Ninjas, Black.
“Clinton says in 1999 to General Hugh Shelton, ‘You know, it would scare the s**t out of al-Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of a helicopter into the middle of their camp,’ 189.” N+1 indexes the 9/11 Commission Report, so you can get straight to the good parts.
Pass it On.
“You are the heirs of one of the country’s great traditions — the progressive movement that started late in the l9th century and remade the American experience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third of the 20th century…Its aim was to keep blood pumping through the veins of democracy when others were ready to call in the mortician…While the social dislocations and meanness that galvanized progressives in the 19th century are resurgent, so is the vision of justice, fairness, and equality. That’s a powerful combination if only there are people around to fight for it. The battle to renew democracy has enormous resources to call upon – and great precedents for inspiration.”
By way of a friend of mine, Bill Moyers recounts the Progressive Story of America. The whole thing’s worth a read…and I for one think it’s great to hear the Progressives get their due. (Along the same lines, this month’s Prospect has a special report entitled “A New Progressive Era?”, with contributions from, among others, Sean Wilentz, James MacGregor Burns, and John Podesta.) Progressives take a lot of flak in the Academy, some justified (they were silent on lynching and generally really lousy on race), some not (ridiculous amounts of ink has been spilled lambasting them for being middle-class, bureaucratic, and/or unSocialist.)