I recently stumbled across a free pile of paperbacks from Piers Anthony’s Xanth series. Being the optimist that I am (“Sure, I have space for fourteen books as well as time to read them”), I gathered them in my arms and took them home with me. I’d read most of them before, when I was in middle school, and I had fond, if hokey, memories.
A Game Nobody Wins
Jack McCallum has a moving piece in this week’s Sports Illustrated that parallels the death of his best friend in Vietnam with the loss of another small-town athlete in Iraq. The joy of sports, the complex motivations behind military service, and the senselessness of loss are all effortlessly evoked.
Colbert in the New York Times
Stephen Colbert took over Maureen Dowd’s column in the Sunday New York Times to offer an analysis of the 2008 Presidential race (if only the change were permanent–readers might gain insight into our political system instead of bon mots that Joan Rivers discarded for being too catty).
Scavenged From the Headlines
Some things I learned recently:
Jazz legend Louis Armstrong came late to the political arena, but he didn’t mince words when he arrived.
As David Margolick reports for the New York Times, Armstrong responded to the desegregation standoff in Little Rock, Arkansas by stating, “President Eisenhower…was ‘two faced,’ and had ‘no guts.’ For Governor Faubus, [Armstrong] used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print….He then sang the opening bar of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.”
Punk
Hilly Kristal died a month ago. For those of you who don’t know the name, he was the founder of CBGB-OMFUG, the club in New York City where American punk rock really got started. Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell of Television literally built the stage, and bands like Television, the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, the Heartbreakers, and the Voidoids found a home within. As Smith said in tribute, “CBGBs wasn’t just about Hilly or the people who played there or New York City, it represented freedom for young people. To me the name CBGBs could be a slang term at this point meaning freedom. Hilly offered us unconditional freedom.”