Virtual Memories

Throughout my adult life, I’ve been burned by artists. I enjoy a book, movie, or record, and find myself immensely disappointed by the follow-up works by the artist. Sometimes, it’s simply an instance where the first work is so singular, so arresting, that any subsequent work has to pale in comparison. Other times, it becomes [...]

P.J. O’Rourke on the need to tax celebrity: “America’s media and entertainment industry has a gross (as it were) revenue of $316.8 billion a year. If we subtract the income derived from worthy journalism and the publishing of serious books, that leaves $316.8 billion.”

Mickey Kaus links to a blogger who thinks he’s figured out how “red states” get red and “blue states” get blue. Personally, I want to find out if Bloods vote Republican and Crips vote Democrat, but I guess no one’s explored that issue.

Keith Thompson writes about his departure from the cultural left wing: I’ll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America’s political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today’s best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican [...]

Once I get this current issue wrapped up (by Friday, I pray), I’ll have more time to write a few longer pieces on which I’ve been dabbling away. Meanwhile, here’s a passage from Proust that I read this morning. He’s gazing at Albertine, asleep in his bed. In this way, her sleep realized to a [...]

The NYTimes has an article about a Proust reading group in NYC. These sissies have taken two years just to reach the fifth book of the series. Your unhumble Virtual Memoirist, on the other hand, started the same book this weekend, a mere 4 months after beginning the project. In your (collective) face, you pansies! [...]

Virginia Postrel has a pretty good post about the Newsweek/Koran fiasco. It puts me in mind of the furor over Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, back in 1988. A lot of Christians were pissed off when this one came out. People who’d never seen the movie called for protests, not realizing the humor factor in [...]

Chris Hitchens writes about George Galloway in the Weekly Standard: We are therefore invited by him to assume that, having earlier acquired a justified reputation for loose bookkeeping in respect of “charities,” he switched sides in Iraq, attached himself to a regime known for giving and receiving bribes, appointed a notorious middleman as his envoy, [...]

I don’t watch a ton of TV. Outside of sporting events (I’m an NBA geek, I admit), days can go by without my turning on the TV. For the most part, I’ve missed out on the reality TV craze, except for a couple of exceptions that stretch the definition. Penn & Teller’s series on Showtime, [...]

Joe Nash, an archivist of black dance history, died last month, a victim of his own archive: Last Thanksgiving, he stumbled over a pile of materials in his packed apartment in a West Harlem housing project. As he fell, he clutched at a stack of books, which tumbled down on him, according to Rashidah Ismaili [...]