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New York, 9:52 PM
Thu Dec 17
50 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/09/09
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I think your initial premise needs more work, Ravi.
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12/04/09
Is Hugo doing some kind of Mark Sanford thing?
12/04/09
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After the first paragraph, I found myself asking, "Mr Franco, why should I care about your 'art'?"
I am still waiting for an answer.
12/04/09
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If Bono is so great, why have the last three U2 albums been utter crap?
12/04/09
Grodin's flawless work in "Midnight Run" and "Catch-22" have done more for this world than your prose will ever come close to (doing) -- which is the reason for YOUR ire. I mean what are you, like Bono? You know, from IRE-land?
12/04/09
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12/04/09
No one ever said these gentlemen need professional credentials in order to be activists. However, Bono is using the bully pulpit of the Times op-ed page to spout opinions that, I'd safely venture, the majority of the readership already sympathizes with. When I I choose to have my own beliefs echoed back to me in written form (or read convincing arguments of the opposing view), I find it best when they're written WELL.
12/04/09
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12/04/09
I don't even dislike Bono. He's quite alright, as far as musicians with more money than G_d go. He wrote some classic lyrics along the way, although in the musical arena, the Edge has always been there to mercifully shut up his bloated spoken-word soliloquies with one of his trademark echo-y, delay-play guitar riffs: That's the beauty of the best of U2's cannon.
But if you unleash The Bono in print or into the political arena--where he's been not-so-secretly DYING to be a major player--he's suddenly an unmasked beast of messianic bullshit. He's a consummate politician--all fancy words, and nothing concrete to hang your hat onto. He surely has the gift of gab-he's an Irishman, after all--but it's all sentimental junk.
To cast him as some kind of enlightened, compassionate spokesman for the ills of the world is ridiculous. He's just another Catholic boy working through his guilt complex. Good for him, but please allow me to laugh at it all.
12/05/09
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12/04/09
This is Toro, crawling across the ring to retrieve his mouthpiece in The Harder They Fall. When you're stunned, you go back to basics, like simple declarative sentences. And, like Toro, a celebrity is convinced he's Champ simply because everybody lays down for him.
12/04/09
12/04/09
I always loved that ever since. It's great humor and done simply, and you have to use adjectives to make it work. I try and remember that.
"Ah, yass, Harry Truman, man from Missouri, as I am; that must be his own boat." - On the Road
12/04/09
Last note, your college creative writing class taken over a decade ago does not make you a linguistical expert. I have even edited columns from j-school professors that needed a fair amount of help. Just be grateful.
12/04/09
It's formatted as a 2,000-word film script that flashes backward and forward, and during which Bono refers to himself in the third person as "THE SINGER" (sic, all caps) with the ironic subtlety of a jackhammer tearing up the pavement.
Cobbled together from deeply metaphoric constructions such as "The black has devoured the blue," and "The bandmates found it darkly funny to imagine the papers back home carrying a photo of them protesting Mikhail Gorbachev’s great drawing back of the Iron Curtain," the message emerges:
Yeah, the fall of the Berlin was kinda cool and symbolic and whatever, but the fact that U2 was there to witness it blow-by-blow is what really propelled it into history books.
This shit was way over the top even for someone with Bono's messianic complex. One has to laugh..
12/04/09
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12/04/09
By "host of possibilities" I'm assuming he means 1) try to fly, get cape stuck, land on third rail, die, hold up trains or 2) get mobbed by teenage girls, flee, land on third rail, die, hold up trains, or 3) just hold up trains.
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