The Great Butter Slide of American Culture

Article in the Times about a drop in Arts Attendance in America.

Theater takes the brunt and "straight plays" (also known as "plays") are worst of all, attendance having dropped 33% in the last 10 years.

"At the end of the day, I’m not troubled by it."

No no, of course not, executive director of the American Theater Wing. Everything's fine; nothing to see here; move along...

photo c 1928, Man Ray

RAGE

For Whom the Neocon Bell Tolls

Turns out that yesterday's Times saw William Kristol's last column.

Now, lest we get involved in any grave-dancing for the end of at least one phase of this Project for a New American Century disastermonger's career (that site is really worth spending some time examining, by the way, if you don't mind letting your blood boil for a while, especially as you see how the right wing exploited 9/11 utterly without shame or scruple to advance its economic and military goals. At least take a look at the Statement of Principles, written in 1997, and some of the people who signed off on it. To be fair, I should mention that Kristol's name is not among them.), let me say that I don't think that every single syllable uttered or written by Kristol is complete and unalloyed crap. Nope. I sure don't. Once in a while, he even makes some sense. Once in a while.

But what I'm really wondering is: what's the story here? What precipitated his leaving what had to be his most visible platform? (other than maybe those occasional appearances on TV)

Update: Here's what the Times itself has to say on the subject.

Slight Return...

...to one of the themes in my Something Bad entry of a few days ago. (Bonus Smartypants Points, by the way, if you know to what I was referring in the title and first line of that post)

A source familiar with the Times' editorial decisions informs us that the article about the Supreme Court decision regarding the Exclusionary Rule written by Adam Liptak is considered by the Times to be an update of the story written by David Stout - i.e. a later version of the same story - so it replaced the earlier one rather than appearing in addition to it. Since to the best of my knowledge the Stout story never appeared in the print edition of the Times, it is now lost in the folds of the internets.

One might say 'good riddance to bad garbage;' one might surmise as to the thinking behind that unusually sweeping editorial choice, or the immediate feedback that led to it; one might marvel at something being removed from the record in our so-called 'Newspaper of Record.' But there it is: just one of the innumerable quirky publishing details that happen every day, perhaps remarkable only in that it was noticed by a handful of alert citizens.

Let it Snow!

Woke up after a blissful sleep in (those are pretty rare these days) to find a snowy Sunday out my window. It's been an up-and-down weekend: Friday was dinner with a Pete, of whom I've seen precious little for too long, followed by drinks with him and Rashmi, followed by the Jazz and Jewels gig benefitting Planned Parenthood with bunches of people - way to go Sherin, Jacqueline, Beth and Michelle!! - followed by more drinks at one of my new favorite bars in the Village. It was one of those evenings that devolved from French Wine to Irish Whiskey to Belgian Beer to a long walk home, thankfully impervious to the cold. So, yeah, yesterday I was moving predictably slowly, but did manage to motivate for dinner with some theater friends I also hadn't seen for a long while, and then pulled off that unlikeliest of feats: the last minute movie date with friends. On a Saturday? In New York?? Unheard of! But there it was - Susan and Daniel live around the corner from where I was, and they didn't have firm plans, so we went to see Michael Clayton. Really good film, guys - catch it before it leaves the theaters if you can. Then went home and watched the second half of Dig! which is the movie about the parallel stories of the bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. If you have any interest in them, or in recent indie rock at all, you'll want to check that out too. Those crazy rock-n-rollers! Got to bed late-ish, but not unreasonably so, and woke up to the Winter Wonderland.

So this morning I went downtown in the season's first proper snowfall to get bagels and other foodstuffs, and have been just hanging around my place with the Sunday New York Times, having coffee and noshing, listening to excellent holiday music and chatting with people on the phone. No laundry will be getting done by me this weekend (unless I blow off that dinner in the East Village, but who wants to be rude?) but it's been nice just having some semi-snowbound solitude. Plus it was a reminder that I should get the actual, physical Sunday Times more often; been too slack on that for too long. Otherwise, I would have missed the article about the Hello Kitty Vibrator. I'm sorry, I mean "shoulder massager." Yeah, it's there in the online version, but no way would I have seen it. And that would have just been a shame. Oh, my!