CURRENT WISDOM
c u R R e n T w I s D o M washington Post In the venerable Post, a reviewer of Jimmy Carter’s book about his ma, A Remarkable Mother, presents the Wonderboy’s eyewitness accounts of the...
...In “Heartbeat,” for instance, over a stuttering beat accented by a cowbell, we find Madonna quasirapping the line “see my booty get down” over and over as Pharrell eggs her on: “A little lower, baby...
...They must have thought that pulsating music, raucous laughter, and loud talking didn’t penetrate our bedroom walls and doors...
...She’s always been very hip on me dating—as long as I’m careful,” Chynna, 20, told US magazine...
...The sketch showing a hardened bunker at the Turkish air base...
...With backgrounds in rock, electronica, c u R R e n T w I s D o M dancehall, and hip-hop, they’ve wandered into a similar sound...
...From Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, by Eric Lichtblau...
...May 5, 2008) The charlie Rose show (PBs) A properly sedated Ted Turner under the searching eye of Charlie Rose gives evidence that vegetarianism is definitely not the wave of the future: “Not doing it [fighting global warming] will be catastrophic...
...And that videotape showing terrorist targets in Las Vegas and Disneyland might have been filmed by a tourist from Tunisia who wanted a cheery reminder of his travels...
...holder of the Ashley Dupré chair of aesthetics at the Washington Post and a scholar destined for a full fellowship at Harvard State University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: Given hip-hop’s long-standing ubiquity, Madonna is arriving late to this parfrom the archives Timeless Tosh from current wisdoms Past (June 1988) new York Post A public testimonial from Chynna Phillips, whose telephone number can be found in the Los Angeles telephone directory: There was no teenage pregnancy problem for Chynna Phillips, whose mother, Michelle, was the scenic quarter of the Mamas and Papas...
...Was she lying, as many of her critics maintain...
...They’re there for everybody, for me, all my friends, for anyone who needs them...
...A freaky new sound...
...The duo perform here on May 2 at the Low End Theory, a party started in Los Angeles and now being imported to the Knitting Factory on a monthly basis...
...That seems improbable...
...Menacing, bassheavy productions with layers of electronic noise are laid under existing hip-hop vocals...
...Awk-ward...
...Though the crowd chose schmoozing over dancing, Megasoid bobbed and laughed through their own set...
...More likely, she just misremembered...
...Pantheon, 349 pages, $26.95) new Yorker Heavy-handed satire at the expense of troubled youth in the magazine of Manhattan sophisticates—or a wretched capitulation to the clods in the audience...
...March 23-29, 2008) new Yorker Young Hendrik Hertzberg’s guileless response to the most recent of Hillary Clinton’s 30 years of lying on the record, off the record, and over the moon: It is a fact, now established by videotape evidence and eyewitness testimony, that there was no sniper fire—no unusual danger of any kind—near that Bosnian tarmac...
...c u R R e n T w I s D o M washington Post In the venerable Post, a reviewer of Jimmy Carter’s book about his ma, A Remarkable Mother, presents the Wonderboy’s eyewitness accounts of the orgies he suffered in Plains, Georgia, despite the best efforts of Prohibition and the local vice squad: They seem to have been a wild bunch...
...Quietly, but clearly with great passion, he walked the listener through a remarkable exploration of race from both sides of the color divide, from both sides of himself...
...april 18, 1988) J u n e 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 7 7 (april 29, 2008...
...I wondered if I could do the campaign...
...A different crop of producers...
...april 18, 2008) anderson cooper 360 Sitting in for the former men’s underwear model, Anderson Cooper, Camp bell Brown provides an amp litude of drivel: It was daring...
...Gore by Hendrik Hertzberg, the celebrated tutu collector: Nevertheless, on balance—the way Gore likes to judge things—a Gore presidency would be a pleasing prospect for liberals...
...Her Bosnian jaunt took her into a still not completely stable area that had lately been a war zone...
...I call the genre “lazer bass...
...Whether lazer bass affects hip-hop or simply exists as a brief, happy splinter, it is as good as dance music gets...
...he would be, I think, a charismatic president...
...ticular party, suggesting that she might be slowing down in her advanced age...
...I saw them play in Montreal in a small loft above a restaurant...
...Gore is attractive as much for what he might become as for what he is...
...It works best when Madonna isn’t trying to act like she’s down with the hip-hop kids, which just sounds weird...
...There are fewer exciting voices, and production has stalled...
...Both of these things are being provided by a loose affiliation of musicians in California, Montreal, and Glasgow...
...My favorite artists in this coalition are a Montreal duo called Megasoid...
...March 17, 1988) new Republic The highest accolade known to New Age Liberalism is extended ’midst the requisite paralogisms to the Hon...
...Couldn’t she have felt under fire, with mundane tricks of memory doing the rest...
...Jimmy’s parents gave parties that he remembers with prim disdain: “I always dreaded my parents being hosts...
...I mean, she keeps a drawer full of everything: condoms, foams, sponges...
...The alchemy of the White House would probably turn Gore into a kind of American Gorbachev...
...We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow...
...april 1, 2008) washington Post More earnest elucidations from esteemed rock critic J. Freedom du Lac (not his real name...
...He has not been a charismatic candidate...
...He fairly radiates possibility...
...March 18, 2008) american Profile Evidence that the physiological disturbances Senator Barack Obama 7 6 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R J u n e 2 0 0 8 has caused NBC journalist Chris Matthews (“I felt this thrill going up my leg”) are a threat to other NBC news criers as well, this time Lee Cowan and in both knees: When NBC first assigned me to the Barack Obama campaign, I must confess my knees quaked a bit...
...The Justice Department was forced to conclude that it might just as easily have been a crude map of the Middle East doodled by a mentally ill man...
...My friends have always envied me having a mom like that...
...Even the faithful will admit it: hiphop may not be dead, but it needs a jump start...
...Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals...
...If it’s not the boldest move of her career, it’s still a successful gambit from one of the great all-time shapeshifters...
...They would push back the dining room table and chairs, use our small breakfast room as a bar, put us in bed early and let their hair down...
...So what comes next...
...William V. Shannon has written “of the serious candidates in both parties, he is the only one who has the potential for greatness...
...But even if she’s not starting any new trends in following the lead of Nelly Fur tado, Gwen Stefani and such, Madge still manages to sound perfectly at home in the hip-hop world, where her sharp pop sensibilities—particularly her ability to craft killer hooks [apparently not a sports term, Ed.]—are given a mostly fresh rhythmic framework...
...I wondered if I was up to the job...
...So what was Clinton thinking when, not once but several times, she said that there was...
...Instead of simply distancing himself today from his former pastor’s offensive remarks, Senator Obama took the opportunity and the risk of doing much more...
...The antiAmerican hate speech found on some of the audiotapes...
...april 21, 2008) The Great Books series In his otherwise humorless monograph on the Bush administration’s pursuit of terrorists, the agelastic New York Times investigative reporter, Eric Lichtblau, gives ritualistic liberals their customary vision of law and order run amok and for the rest of us an amusing panoptic view of the whimsical Islamisist world: …what began in the view of Bush and Ashcroft as a slam dunk case against a terrorist sleeper cell ended with only lingering questions and doubts...
...Possibly just an old children’s song in Arabic about a duck...
Vol. 41 • June 2008 • No. 5
