Ornette Coleman stands before Jackson Pollock’s Number 13 (1949), one of the more poetic splatter paintings, ferociously dense yet airily light. He ponders it for several minutes, tracing his index finger over its subtler patterns. “These don’t look like strokes,” he finally says in his hushed, gentle tone. “They look like signals or messages, like Read More
Slate’s Fred Kaplan has a pointed response to Greg Sargent’s recent plea for New York Democrats to vote against Mike, an article Kaplan sees as essentially a symptom of the Democrats’ problems.
“The lament misses the point. The VIPs’ real concern is that they don’t want the party to be associated Read More
Gore Vidal: A Biography , by Fred Kaplan. Doubleday, 850 pages, $35.
Ah, to have been Gore Vidal! The blond princeling in 1930′s Washington, the postwar prodigy, boozing and cruising with Tennessee and Truman, Christopher Isherwood and Paul Bowles; the double-edged sexual swordsman, slaying youths and maidens with seigniorial hauteur; the heavyweight author, trading blows Read More
