Tag Archives: roberts

Thirty-Five

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Today is my birthday. I’m 35 years old.

It feels like just yesterday that I turned 30. Now my thirties are half over. It doesn’t feel quite as bad to write that as I thought it would. I’m 35 today, but I’ve had 35 years to prepare for it.

The only downside is that nobody cares anymore what TV shows I watch, what websites I look at, what products I buy. From now on I’m invisible to advertisers.

Er, maybe that’s a good thing.

Anyway, I share a birthday with Louis Pasteur, Marlene Dietrich, Tovah Feldshuh, Gérard Depardieu, Cokie Roberts, and Sarah Vowell, and I was born on the exact same day as Wilson Cruz.

So happy birthday to all of us!

Rent 12 Years Later

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Campbell Robertson of the New York Times has a great piece about the ways in which the passage of time has made Rent anachronistic since it first appeared more than a decade ago. My favorite part:

There is a fascinatingly antagonistic attitude among the characters toward virtual reality and what they call cyberland. The creation of a cyber studio on a lot on East 11th Street is the great evil of the musical, seemingly more ominous than AIDS or drugs, and yet if “Rent” took place today, half the characters in the show would be blogging.

She also has some insight into the authenticity, or lack thereof, in musical theater.

Kristol Begins

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Bill Kristol’s first column for the New York Times — which runs in tomorrow’s paper — shows that he at least has a sense of humor.

We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

Oh. You mean he was being serious?

[Mike Huckabee] began by calmly mentioning his and Obama’s contrasting views on issues from guns to life to same-sex marriage. This served to remind Republicans that these contrasts have been central to G.O.P. success over the last quarter-century, and to suggest that Huckabee could credibly and comfortably make the socially conservative case in an electorally advantageous way.

So Kristol advocates running on the wedge issues. Not only is he ideologically blinkered — he also supports cynical politics. Does he have any redeeming qualities as a thinker?