Like just about everyone i know, I think Michael Graham is a butthole -- albeit one for whom I have, in the past, shown a certain fondness. I hate his regular Free Times column and miss it as often as possible. I happened to read it this week and found, much to my surprise, that he did a pretty fair job of hanging John Graham Altman out to dry.

There is one cynical sentiment I think most South Carolinians share with Graham, even if they do hate his troglodyte mentality: a deep-seated realization that the Palmetto State is about as ass-backwards as a state can get, and that it's just too late in history to do a thing about it.

Gore Vidal bitches: "Ten years and we're broke ... We won't be able to service the debt and we can hardly get anyone else to buy treasuries."

Not that anyone needs reminding, but HEY BUSH! YOU SUCK!

Ballad of Artistic Immorality

In Brecht/Weill's The Threepenny Opera, the rogue Macheath said that "Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance/In keeping its humanity repressed." Apparently, that method didn't hurt Brecht either.

The Times' Randy Cohen has a marvelous idea: a literary map of Manhattan: "not of its authors' haunts but those of their characters, a map of the literary stars' homes." He invites readers to send in their own suggestions. Nothing comes to mind, immediately, but I'm sure digging through Dawn Powell (which I actually did, recently) would turn up something.

I wonder if Cohen would allow a citation from Bob Dylan. He's "literary," right? Surely, it must be pointed out that the Chelsea Hotel was the site where Dylan wrote "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" from Blonde on Blonde for then-wife Sara.

This, of course, we know from the song "Sara":

"Staying up for days/In the Chelsea Hotel/Writing `Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' for you..."

Hopefully more will come to mind.

Sir John Mills is dead at 97. I was going to say here that if you haven't, you absolutely must see him at his witty British best in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. Unfortunately, he wasn't in it. That was Michael Redgrave, whose been dead ten years.

Sir John is famous for playing Pip in David Lean's Great Expectations, which is a typically brilliant Lean production of a classic. You absolutely must see it.

But do watch The Lady Vanishes as well.

My review of Misfortune by Wesley Stace, Washington Post, April 24, 2005

Review: Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland, Charlotte Observer