Given the advertising famine in the radio business and years of patching holes in the submarine, Air America wasn't long for this world and now it's goodbye for good. Let the grave-dancers dance: I no more consider Air America a failure than I would the Ramones, just because they never cracked the top ten. One of its hosts, Rachel Maddow, has done quite well for herself, another is now a senator from Minnesota, and Marc Maron is tearing it up on his podcast, and Janeane Garofalo is performing in a benefit for Haiti tomorrow night, so let no ill word against her be uttered. I enjoyed doing Air America in its early days, taking the haunted elevator up to high floor where its original studios were located (on Park Ave South), and later at its cubicle cluster on lower 6th Ave, where novelty sex shops appeared to cater to a very picky clientele, judging by what was in the windows.

I listen to few voices of opinion on radio now, few voices period (apart from BBC podcasts). My favorite station is Q2, which plays Philip Glass, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Brian Eno, Gavin Bryars, Laurie Anderson, John Adams, and Steve Reich in seamless succession, and the Beatles' "Revolution 9" sonic collage wouldn't find itself out of place.

Deep-felt condolences to TBogg and family, over the loss of Beckham.

Celebrity feuds and talk-show ambushes are nothing new, but the naked, protracted rancor of the Leno/Letterman/Conan pool-cue rumble is unprecedented in showbiz history. I've never seen anything this public become this acidlly personal at his high a level. Johnny Carson may have taken digs at Merv Griffin's "theme shows" and deflated Dick Cavett when Cavett came on as a guest after his ABC talk show was cancelled, but Leno taking Viagra and infidelity shots at Letterman, Letterman conducting nightly tutorials on what a jackass Leno is, Conan and sidekick Andy Richter ripping Jay and chortling over how much money NBC will lose on the Olympics, Jimmy Kimmel talking trash to Leno's face--this is really an escalation in hostilities in which everybody comes off looking petty and juvenile, millionaires fighting over parking privileges. They can all invoke Johnny Carson but Carson would have wind-surfed this with far more classy finesse.

What this John Woo insult fest reminds me of is not an old-time showbiz feud but a new-millennium blog war similar to the recent incomprehensible thrash between Jeff Goldstein (Protein Wisdom) and Patrick Frey (Patterico's Pontifications), spiraling out of control with the invaluable assistance of troll-inflamed hyperbole and ad hominem spite. Every blogger has an inner troll, to paraphrase Jaron Lanier in his You Are Not a Gadget manifesto (highly recommended), and the shock of the late-night fight is that we now have major stars, famous comedians, behaving like trolls in a toxic dump. It doesn't make for a pretty demonstration.

As I type, Fox Movie Channel is showing Beloved Infidel, the ill-fated romantic tale of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham, starring Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr, desperately clutching each other as if each moment might be their last, not having the luxury of time afforded Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, although their romance came later, and has no particular relevance to this motion picture, or this paragraph.

Gregory Peck, wearing a bow-tie and drinking like no drunkard has ever drunk before (downing each glass with his head tipped back like a Pez dispenser), is almost miraculously miscast as the dreamy, lyrical, dissipated Fitzgerald, each line of dialogue turning to lead in his mouth. Eaten up by failure is the last thing Peck projects ("You write beautiful prose, Scott, but we can't photograph adjectives," says a studio boss, firing Scott from a film in pre-production), looking hale and handsome even as Fitzgerald makes a ruined fool of himself on a gin-fueled bender, forcing Deborah Kerr to fret and fuss even more than usual. She does it nobly, because that's what Deborah Kerr does, but why must she suffer so?

That is cinema's eternal question.

I wonder if I will ever be popularly known as a "beloved infidel."

I reckon not. I think I probably missed that bus.

Lovely photograph in the Times today of our friend and comrade Dominique Browning, who dropped in at Casa Veronica* over the holidays, bestowing the galleys of her upcoming memoir Slow Love and a batch of homemade cookies, most of which disappeared under my supervision. Dominique was the editor of House & Garden before it was atomized out from under her, but she and I go way back to the tempests of Esquire and Texas Monthly, back in those halcyon days when nothing said box-office gold like the combination of Burt Reynolds, fast cars on back roads, and sopping humidity. That latter part of that sentence has nothing to do with the first, but White Lightning was on TCM last night, and it struck me as remarkably pungent, liberatingly open-spaced (nothing forced into the camera frame, lots of loose life-going-on lollygagging in the background and periphery), ribboning in its action sequences (as if a gift bow was being made with all those figure eights), and individually acted and characterized in lieu of the usual Southern stereotypes being glopped out cafeteria-style. It makes you feel that its moonshiners etc turn to crime not so much for the money (though that too) but for the lack of anything better to do, the shortage of options buried under that thick moist carpet of summer heat that turns a Southern prison farm into an annex of Hell.

Watching White Lightning, I thought, I bet Kim Morgan digs this film, and sure enough...

Laura is reading Dominique's memoir, ready to lateral it off to me when she's done, but L. hasn't mentioned anything about Dominique being driven to moonshine running after the demise of House & Garden and having to bust out of the county jail, so it appears that my interest in Slow Love and the early oeuvre of Burt Reynolds will continue to operate along separate tracks, converging at no junction that I can foresee.

*Casa Veronica, the unofficial title of our pre-war "classic six," is named in honor of our youngest ocicat, Veronica, not Veronika Part, for whom I'm building a mansion in the clouds.

You know what Jim Treacher's blog at Tucker Carlson's Pringles can reminds me of?

I shall tell you.

It reminds me of a really bad standup comic tapping the mike head and asking "Is this thing on?" after a joke bombs.

Bombing and tapping, tapping and bombing.

"Is this thing on?"

Almost an existential question, as joke after joke dies and lies unburied in cold silence at the No Exit Inn.

When not killing comedy, Tucker's Pringles can deploys other mind-nulling devices, such as conceding space to a monotonous array of white-haired guys posed in front of American flags presenting boring op-eds their Congressional staffs probably drafted, since the evidence of individual voice is nil.

Here's another boring white-haired/flag guy making himself useless.

The "raison d'etre" of this site--it eludes me.

Philip of Oberon's Grove, whom I had the pleasure to meet last week after the judge issued me a day-pass, allowing me to travel downtown under light supervision, has posted photos of the duet performed by Veronika Part and Matthew Renko from Avi Scher's Touch, where, ironically, the dancers hardly touched! Their hands and limbs mostly grazed the space between them. It was bliss seeing Veronika dance at such eye-level close proximity, without a proscenium stage Keeping Us Apart, and she did more for purple than anyone since Prince. Tonya Plank was there, her voice hoarse from laryngitis, too burdened by winter gear to express herself fully through the art of mime. Her novel, Swallow, which I've just started reading, hooks you from the opening pages with its breathless urgency and captures what it's like to live in NY now, with money worries and ambition and myriad obligations breathing down your neck, and none of it written in cutesy chick-lit'ry. So give it a try. I bought a couple of copies of Swallow, even though I'm quoted on the jacket, because I believe in supporting my fellow authors as we all plunge screaming down the rapids toward the waterfalls.

Last night the court allowed another brief outing, allowing me to catch NYCB's Who Cares? at the David H. Koch Theater. It's my first visit since the renovation of the former State Theater and, apart from that already-dated-looking portrait facade encasing the box office booths, the improvements are welcome and elegant. The additional aisles in the orchestra no longer make you feel like a character in a Warner Bros cartoon negotiating all those sore bunions and bulky knees, and the seats themselves are nicely raised, with firm lower back support ideal for meditating during intermission. Well done! Set to the music of Gershwin (orchestrated by Hershy Kay), Who Cares?, when not careful, can mothball into the ersatz Broadway popcorn machinery of a Fox musical, the female quintet looking a bit sparse up there on the big stage. But despite a few ragged edges at the outset, this thing really cooked, with Rebecca Krohn giving us a stylized, smiling profile early on that had a cute punctuation, and Tiler Peck ending her "Fascinatin' Rhythm" solo with a crazy, whippy arm movement that was the ballet equivalent of an exultant "Ole!"

The mind-blower of "Who Cares?" was the restitution of "Clap Yo' Hands," performed to the original 1926 recording of Gershwin himself at the piano, a time capsule with vinyl crackle where Gershwin's virtuosity and Balanchine's snappy moves had the compact, combined genius of gods at play, no sweat, no strain, like a Walt Disney cartoon with everything clicking. The amazement was that Robert Fairchild could perform "Clap Yo' Hands" without flagging right after the tornado work he has to perform in the solo "Liza." It's a tremendous tax to put on any dancer, even Superman, but he socked it into the fourth ring* and, unlike some performances I remember from the not-that-long-ago past, the ensemble finale "I Got Rhythm" didn't totter on the verge of exhaustion, as if the dancers had been ridden across the burning Gobi and were about to buckle. Here, they brought it home, heads high. I so admire the stamina of dancers, and only wish they would loan me some.

*Haglund's Heel alerts us that Fairchild will be making his debut in Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free this Saturday the 16th at NYCB. Tiler Peck's in it too! So watcha waitin' for?

Let others lick the Schadenfreude from their fingers, but I take no savory delight in the operatic swell and scalp-hunting details of the meltdown of the John Edwards presidential campaign and marital facade as portrayed in Game Change, excerpted in this week's New York magazine, with sirens blaring. It isn't that I'm above such vampire snacking, it's that Cate Edwards was an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair, someone I knew and whose going-away party I attended, and the pain and upset she must have been suffered even before this latest pile-on makes it impossible for me to treat this as the sort of train wreck journalists so enjoy. But even if I were totally disinterested, I wouldn't have been able to tune out the misogyny of the portrayals here, the pathologizing of Elizabeth Edwards in particular. With insight and empathy Tom Watson tackles the bipolarity of the Washington punditry full-on:

Perhaps the most rash-inducing thing about this clip from Fox News (h/t: Atrios/Eschaton) is the oozy, patronizing, pseudo-professorial, lip-pursing way Glenn Beck confides to Sarah Palin that George Washington is his favorite Founder, too. As if she just gave the correct answer and passed the audition--the audition for his heart. Which still put her in the subservient position of having to prove herself worthy of his fatuous approval.

After Palin's maiden appearance as a Fox News contributor on The O'Reilly Factor, David Frum made a series of perceptive points as to why the Roger Ailes ego factory may not be the ideal re-entry vehicle for her:

There’s room for only one star on any Fox program, especially O’Reilly’s. As he talked over her and corrected her ('We discussed that last night,' he said when she compared Harry Reid to Trent Lott), O’Reilly enhanced his own authority at the expense of Palin’s.

Beck's vanity isn't as blustery and patriarchal as O'Reilly's, but it still loomed like a man-sized lump of mashed potatoes as he conducted his smarmy oral exam to determine whether Palin was "the woman who can lead us and not lose her soul." A tall order to fill, with him measuring the foam, not to mention keeping tabs on her soul, making sure it doesn't break curfew.

Palin is demystifying her appeal by becoming a Fox News regular and sharing the same green room where Dick Morris scatters his peanut shells, but her own vanity may blind her to the gilded cage into which she's flown.

His pedicures--I don't begrudge a man his pedicures. Toes needn't be neglected just because they're so far away, at the end of our feet. Being chauffeured around town while the rest of us wait in the Tolstoyan cold for the M4--who can really blame him? I'd recline in the roomy interior of luxury car too if I were pulling down seven figures a year. But where Harold Ford Jr. crosses the line that gets on the bad side of me is when he coolly tells The New York Times:

Asked about his own experience with guns, he said he was an occasional bird hunter. “I shoot at things that can’t shoot back,” he said with a smile, “and will continue to do that.”

Bad enough that Harold Ford is an emotionless Machiavellian cyberbotic Manchurian Candidate whose home planet may not be earth, but a proud slayer of defenseless, harmless birds too?--no, that is unacceptable. Go join a tea party, Harold, or fuck off to your fancy nail salon in your camouflage fatigues, that's what I say.