A Lurid New Year
Scrapbook A Lurid New Year THE SCRAPBOOK enjoyed a pleasant New Year’s at home, thank you. No Times Square revelry, no First Night celebration, no sparklers or twirling noisemakers, not even...
...Fraser] was no less meticulous in his reconstructions of the past...
...They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it...
...There is also a humorous, mocking tone to Fraser’s work, a bit reminiscent of Thackeray, which contrasts with the somewhat dour mood of the Aubrey/Maturin books...
...Of course, Sir Harry Flashman—hero, coward, gallant, rogue—was entirely Fraser’s inspiration, and the most entertaining company imaginable in the high tide of the British Empire...
...Between occasional excruciating pronouncements from Mr...
...While channel surfing in search of that lighted ball, however, THE SCRAPBOOK made a horrifying discovery...
...But now we all know: Steiner’s second novel is due out in the spring...
...It was loud, lively, lurid entertainment, but not quite what THE SCRAPBOOK craved in the comfort of its darkened parlor...
...hotchkiss.org/arts...
...Ezra Klein, blogging for The American Prospect, Jan...
...And as usual, once the lighted ball descended and “2008” was illuminated, THE SCRAPBOOK glanced briefly at “late-night talk show host Spike Feresten,” that motorcycle jump in Vegas, and Kid Rock, and switched off the television set with relief...
...ESPN treated its sporting East Coast audience to daredevil Robbie “Maddo” Maddison, who at midnight attempted a world-record motorcycle jump in Las Vegas, and three hours later West Coast viewers caught Rhys Millen attempting “an unprecedented truck flip from the same Vegas location...
...Clark—who, since his 2004 stroke, looks and sounds like the animatronic Dick Clark at an amusement park—Ryan and Fergie performed from Hollywood with the likes of Akon, Miley Cyrus, Plain White T’s, and will.i.am...
...On the Fox network you could catch the voluptuous Cat Deeley presenting “music group Lifehouse” and “late-night talk show host Spike Feresten,” and on NBC there was New Year’s Eve with Carson Daly featuring the sounds of Alicia Keys and Lenny Kravitz...
...Civil War to the First Afghan War...
...But for those of us in Television Land who like to welcome the new year to the sound of, say, tenor saxophones, and not a punk band or the latest hip hop sensation, there wasn’t much variety to be found around the dial...
...Among them may be found our friend and contributing editor Max Boot, who wrote last week in the Contentions blog on the Commentary website that Fraser’s books gallop along at the pace of a runaway mustang, with incident piled atop incident to keep the reader’s attention, many of them violent or salacious...
...We kept flipping the dial, and no matter where we turned, it seemed the same bass guitarists were madly thumping their Peveys while thong-clad dancers bounced up and down...
...Portrait of the Artist Perhaps you’ve been wondering what our good friend and longtime cartoonist for this page, Peter Steiner, has been up to...
...As usual, New Year’s Eve programming was exclusively directed at a very young, very circumscribed, audience—few of whom, THE SCRAPBOOK suspects, were actually at home, sitting in their armchairs, nursing a whiskey-and-soda, awaiting midnight...
...They elevate...
...The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence...
...That is how I like to work because the two enterprises use entirely different parts of my brain and require a major shift in my entire mentality...
...In the meantime, be sure to check out “Portraits & Self-Portraits” (www...
...They do not inform...
...It’s an old tradition in the SCRAPBOOK household, which has happy memories of sitting in front of the Zenith and tuning in to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians playing “Boo Hoo” (“You’ve got me crying for you / Boo Hoo . . . ”) and “Auld Lang Syne” at the stroke of midnight, from the Hotel Roosevelt ballroom...
...Flashman was a Victorian Zelig or Forrest Gump who showed up conveniently enough at every important event between 1840 and 1900...
...Is THE SCRAPBOOK showing its age, or what...
...If there is a modern writer with a better ear for Victorian slang, I have yet to read his or her work...
...No Times Square revelry, no First Night celebration, no sparklers or twirling noisemakers, not even champagne, just a quiet evening, and modest observance, chez SCRAPBOOK...
...Needless to say, MTV’s Tila Tequila’s New Year’s Eve Masquerade 2008 was an unrelenting siege of Mary J. Blige, Kid Rock, Fabolous, Paramore, Good Charlotte, Wyclef, Boys Like Girls, and Flor Rida...
...To be sure, Guy Lombardo died in 1977, and we shall never see his like again...
...3) Flashman, RIP We note with sorrow the death, at age 82, of George MacDonald Fraser, Scottish journalist-turned-novelist, brave veteran of the Burma campaign in World War II, unreconstructed conservative, and author of the dozen “Flashman” novels, published between 1969 and two years ago...
...For those not yet initiated into the fraternity of Fraser readers, the first in the Flashman series was entitled Flashman: From the Flashman Papers, 18391842, the lost journal of a mid-Victorian soldier of fortune which Fraser claimed to have discovered at a household sale...
...Obama’s finest speeches do not excite...
...Many experts say it will go up, then down, and then maybe up again...
...Saint Barack (cont...
...CNN had the bright idea of inviting anchorman Anderson Cooper and comedienne Kathy Griffin into our living rooms to salute the passing year, and Comcast Cable offered Foreigner (that’s a rock band) and “a live special from Florida hosted by E’s Todd Newton...
...They do, however, have this one thing in common: When I start writing or painting, I do not have the slightest idea of where I will end up...
...It occurred to us that the subtle minds in network television must have concluded that when Guy Lombardo died his audience died with him, and that no one in America has grown older in the intervening decades...
...He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair...
...Thank Goodness for the Experts From the New York Times, January 4, 2007: “Now that the price of crude oil has crossed the $100-a-barrel threshold, and then retreated slightly, what direction will it take now...
...He has been quite busy, as it turns out, working on a series of paintings (acrylic on canvas), which are now on exhibit at the Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery in Lake ville, Connecticut, until February 2. “I think of this as an exhibition of three large works,” writes Steiner...
...Some time before midnight we remembered that it might be a good idea to switch on the television set and watch the lighted ball creep down the pole in New York City...
...Like the devotees of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, Flashman partisans are a notably diverse lot, with a common appreciation for low comedy and high adventure...
...On ABC, of course, there was Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 2008 with his cohosts Fergie and Ryan Seacrest of American Idol fame...
...A reader interested in Victorian history could do a lot worse than to pick up the Flashman series, which contained . . . descriptions of conflicts ranging from the U.S...
...I do a series of paintings, then I write a novel, then I paint another series, then I write a novel...
...They don’t even really inspire...
...I am also a writer of novels...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 17
