"Come Pick Me Up," Ryan Adams

Royce Hall at UCLA, January 2008

I Vote For Perris In The Springtime

A good line of malarkey and $28.8 million, and you could get a space shuttle.

U.S. Right Is Soft On Terrorists And Traitors

Forty-three conservative bloggers discern that Richard Nixon was worse than Alger Hiss, Ted Kennedy than John Wilkes Booth, and Woodrow Wilson than Timothy McVeigh. Lee Harvey Oswald doesn't even make the list. Worst person ever in U.S., they say: Jimmy Carter.

Just Don't Call Him Barry

What the president's been reading.

"Born To Run," Harris and Knopfler

A Saturday afternoon toe-tapper by the best ad hoc duo in recent history

Peace Of Penguins

Midnight Sunday in Miyagi

Strip Search

Politicians love to collect the original art of editorial cartoons in which they feature, and Richard Nixon's domestic affairs advisor, John D. Ehrlichman, although doomed, was no different. In February 1973, not long before Nixon fired him over Watergate, Ehrlichman wrote to Garry Trudeau asking for a Doonsbury strip parodying Nixon's relative disinterest in domestic affairs. The letter was released last month by the Nixon library. Read a blogger's sardonic take here.

I met with Ehrlichman many years ago at the library, when he was trying to enlist our support for a TV project on the scandal. He died in 1999. He always blamed Nixon for making the decision for which he went to jail: Over Labor Day weekend in 1971, sending burglars to get dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Scholars Stanley Kutler and Rick Perlstein have also tried to pin the Ellsberg caper on the chief. After all, it's the Watergate mother lode. If Nixon had even known about it at the time, it would tend to put a criminal coloration on his Watergate actions and statements beginning in June 1972. But none -- neither scholars nor self-serving aides -- has actually made the case.

Blooming Statesmanship

As President Obama finally comes out in favor of the mosque and cultural center near the World Trade Center, my former colleague Steve Clemons, founding executive director of the Nixon Center, gets prominent play in a New York Times article when he says that Obama's talking points came from city hall:

Once [New York mayor Michael] Bloomberg spoke out, the president’s course seemed clear, said Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution here.

“Bloomberg’s speech was, I think, the pivotal one, and set the standard for leadership on this issue,” Mr. Clemons said.

Salt Shaker

At the end of Phillip Noyce's rollicking thriller, as she staggers through the woods toward the sequel ("Salt II"?), Angelina Jolie (as CIA agent Evelyn Salt) has long since earned our respect for successfully mating MacGyver (she fashions a crude thermonuclear device from cleaning solvent and a plastic tube after masking the security camera with her underwear!) and Jason Bourne, conflicted but super-competent death machine.

But Jolie had already achieved elite action hero status as Laura Croft. In "Salt," she's even better acting her way through three delicate scenes. One pairs her with a little girl (played by Yara Shahidi) whom Salt encounters while escaping from cops and federal agents. They briefly commiserate about math homework, and then Jolie drops off her pet dog for safekeeping while changing into the getaway rig that all CIA agents evidently conceal in their apartments. She also has intense, quietly seductive moments with one U.S. agent she's trying to win over and another she hopes to trick so she can save the world.

I can't tell you if she succeeds in the story, because it would give too much away, and they might come for me. But she definitely succeeds on the screen. "Salt" also succeeds in establishing post-Soviet Russians as endlessly reliable bad guys, in this case Manchurian candidate indoctrinator Vassily Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski), who shows up in Washington one day pretending to be a defector just as Salt's leaving the office for an anniversary dinner with her arachnologist husband. Keep your eye peeled for one of his spiders in particular. It enables a deft plot twist that definitely stung me.

Jolie goes full Bourne after Orlov accuses her of being a Russian sleeper agent who's planning to kill the Russian president during a visit to Manhattan, an event which, we're invited to believe, would lead to a Brezhnevnik renaissance in Moscow. Which leads me to my one Salted beef (besides the characters ruining the transept of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Park Ave.). It's the idea, essential to the movie's totally dopey narrative, that John F. Kennedy was shot by a member of Orlov's corps. If I favored content regulation of filmmakers, my first rule would forbid anyone from asserting or implying that the 35th president was murdered by anyone except a homegrown communist traitor acting alone. The young people are confused enough about Cold War history as it is.

Personal Empowerment By Means Of Penguins

Via a webcam, I took this photo of a guy feeding the penguins a few minutes ago at a zoo in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Why? Because it's my day off, and I can.