May the Tour de Force Be With You

I wrote yesterday about Perlman's boast that he, as journalist, could take pride in writing faster than those who wrote better and better than those who wrote faster. Today in Tim Goodman's TV column in the Chronicle. We see, perhaps, a manifestation of that kind of bravado:

In the following paragraphs, this column will run at break-neck speed toward a pommel horse, hit it at full stride, vault into the air, deconstruct a terrible Stephen King movie starring Rob Lowe, rotate counterclockwise, compare the vampires in that movie to rapacious television executives, and stick the dismount while telling the sad story of Jordan Levin, entertainment president of the WB, who just got his head handed to him -- all without twisting an ankle.

Either that, or fall down and blow out a knee trying.

That's the idea. We are making haste and if we are making waste, then let's see you do it! It also could reflect the columnist's sense of being limited by his alloted space -- so much bad television and so little time, though I must mention Goodman's own particular strength or affliction, you take your pick: He loves his own bumptious voice -- he rants, proclaims, ducks in and out of exposition -- and sometimes you do wish he could better distinguish between his own navel and that TV set on the other side of the room. He really does have a subject matter, and you do wish he paid more attention to it.

But then look at Molly Ivins, who back in the day struck so nice a balance between her sense of fun and her sense of outrage. Seems to me that today she feels the urgency of what she has to say so fiercely she rarely has the patience to say it in a diverting, entertaining way. I suppose she thinks it's self indulgent and even cold-hearted to be as sly and inferential as she is capable of being in this, the Dark Night of the Fool King. She's not the columnist she was.

I concede there are so many neocon lies which one wishes to swat like Gandalf going protoMedieval on some troll's ass. But good golly, Miss Molly. "Just the facts" is so Faux Cold War, so Jack Webb. ( Don't forget she's fallen among pundits. Pundits wear cotton underwear and drink mineral water. -- Eds.)

I also concede that maybe I'm just feeling residual resentment about how thoroughly Ms. Ivins blew me off when I tried to interview her when I was undergoing the death of a thousand footnotes during my tenure quest.

All politics is local. All writing is personal.

Here's the Goodman link.

Goodman Flips