Short Takes

Aviva Slesin’s charming documentary about the Algonquin Round Table --- Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, Harpo Marx, Robert Benchley --- will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday, 2/5, at 2 PM.

Why should your hands look like anyone else’s? My friend Lucy, at Chapeaux de Lulu, knits strikingly original gloves. She’s fast. And, at $25 the pair, affordable. Say hi.

My daughter showed this to me. Her teacher showed it to her. This is the 4th grade. What a great school.

Only a fool would miss the irony of the title of this song. If the rest of "Wrecking Ball" (a CD to be released in March) is anything like "We Take Care of Our Own," it's exactly what these times demand --- pounding drums, chiming guitars, glorious backup singers and one great performer pointing a righteous finger and offering a vision of better. My hope is that this CD will cut through the bullshit and drop the heartless to their knees. But even if Bruce only preaches to the choir, it's nice to hear some high-energy sanity. For now, this heats the blood.

No one moved for 120 minutes. And when it was over and the credits were running --- in Farsi --- no one got up. That’s how good “A Separation” is. It’s already won film festivals. Now it’s up for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. How can this be? It’s just…a little movie: The wife wants to leave Iran, her husband feels they must stay. And then… but don’t read another word. Just see it. And then, if you like, we can talk.

If you look for a product on the Web --- like, for instance, Clark's Desert Boots --- the next 3 trillion times you go to a frequently visited site --- like, for instance, Talking Points Memo --- an ad for Clark's Desert Boots will be "served" to you. Marginally dumb, but at least Clark's is making an investment in a possible sale. But what if you go on, as I did, to buy the Desert Boots? The ads keep on coming! Wasted money for Clark's. Annoying to the consumer. And so very 1996 --- I have to believe Amazon, which pioneered collaborative filtering (and where I bought the shoes), could serve up an ad for some other product, as in "If you bought this, you might also like..." Instead, I'll be seeing Clark's ads for...well, certainly long enough to wish I'd bought these shoes on 86th Street, even though they cost $20 more in the real world. Can I be the only one who's got this gripe?  

Unfair! I wanted to do a new movie version of my almost-favorite novel, Guy de Maupassant's "Bel-Ami." And now it's been filmed, with the hunk from "Twilight" in the lead role. It's out in England in March; the American release date has not been set. Here is the link to the novel, in which a handsome but talent-free young man pretty much sleeps his way to the top. And here, grumble grumble, is the preview.

"21 Jump Street," in theaters March 16.

In the short story, "Omelas" is a word made from the reverse of Salem, Oregon. So it's at least ironic to hear from Fred Leonhardt about it: “Your mention of Omelas struck a nerve: Here in laid-back, hip Portland, the elites of the city -- the proverbial pillars of the community -- once covered up for the mayor, Neil Goldschmidt, as he repeatedly raped and sodomized a young girl for years, beginning when she was 13. He went on to serve in Jimmy Carter's cabinet and as governor of Oregon. I was his speechwriter.”

Fred wrote an op-ed for the Portland Register-Guard, using the LeGuin story as the spine. It is..well, just read it.    

.... and then you see this.

Sometimes life serves up an amazing story. And it gets told. Again. And again. Richard Babcock --- the greatest magazine editor who ever threw it over for writing --- has taken that situation, set it in a marriage, and turned it into a short story that Alfred Hitchcock would happily have turned into a half-hour drama. My Wife's Story can be downloaded for 99 cents. Cheap thrills, indeed. 

The singer is Blind Willie Johnson. He's been praised here.

Many of you were as blown away as I was by Gretl Claggett’s interview with Kathryn Harrison. Now, on the Daily Beast, she’s taken on a tougher challenge: telling her own abuse story in an open letter to Joe Paterno’s assistant football coach at Penn State. Brace yourselves. 

On Monday --- a day so lovely it seemed criminal to stay in the zip code of the 1% --- my wife took a field trip downtown to Zuccotti Park and the 9/11 memorial.

She got quite an education.

Zuccotti Park, she said, was the very model of an impromptu community. Harmony ruled. Order prevailed. Maybe the housekeeping could have been improved, but it was, she said, a place where you could breathe deep, where you could feel free.

The 9/11 memorial, in contrast, was a classic Homeland Security operation. My wife didn’t have to remove her shoes, but in every other way, her visit was as pleasant as getting to a plane. By the time she reached the open memorial, she was seething at this textbook way of turning citizens into a herd and the illogic of the “security” effort --- if a terrorist had a bomb in a backpack, the time to detonate it would be in that mass of as-yet-uninspected people in the dark, poorly ventilated corridor, not in the glorious and lovely memorial.

Timing is everything. In the middle of the night, at the orders of a mayor who was, the Times reports, annoyed by editorials calling him “gutless,” police cleared Zuccotti Park. Anything the protestors couldn’t carry out was heaved into dumpsters.  

One park was safe. One apparently wasn’t. You can get a pass to visit the unsafe one today.

I’m a writer, a maker of sentences. I never thought I’d write this one: “The New York police dumped a library of some 5,500 books into garbage bins.” Or this: “How did it come to pass that I’m grateful for a police raid that leaves no one dead?” 

Marion Williams. One of the greatest gospel singers. As you are about to find out. 

Want to use your iPad when you’re standing on a bus? On a paper-strewn desk? When you’re in bed and you fear you might nod off, only to wake when it shatters on the floor? The Padlette is a worry-killer. This simple rubber strap on the back of your iPad allows you to hold the device securely --- using only your thumb. $19.99 at Amazon.   

The nine-year-old informs me that the guy on the side of the Starbucks "holiday" cup is the soldier from "The Nutcracker." But look at his face: dead ringer for the hero of "V for Vendetta." He'd better be careful --- the cops are getting edgy.

 Edward Jay Epstein has started to make e-books out of four decades of investigative reporting. As we're coming into the season when we'll be hearing "a diamond is forever," I thought to re-read one of his books, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? And Other Investigations of the Diamond Trade." It's mostly about De Beers, which has had a monopoly on diamonds for a century: how it created that monopoly, how it marketed "scarcity," how it uses the concept of "blood diamonds" to maintain its dominance. Now that's all changing. On Friday (11/4), the Oppenheimer family announced it would sell its stake in De Beers. One of the coolest things about e-books is that the author can update them in seconds. Well, on Saturday (11/5), Epstein added a new chapter. To download the Kindle book, click here.