Word: simonal
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What Nelson and Was have done is pick 14 splendid songs by some peerless songwriters -- including Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and Willie himself -- and weave them into a subtly colored spiritual stocktaking, a sort of internal monologue that's like a road movie set to music. It's one measure of their singular achievement that disparate as their sources may be, they all focus finely on Nelson's restless spirit. Across the Borderline is as achingly, bracingly personal as any record he's made since the seminal Red Headed Stranger...
...Could) or street savvy (the nifty Love Has a Mind of Its Own). To ensure, however, that the genius has not gone soft of heart or of social conscience, he finishes up with a dextrous cover of Still Crazy After All These Years. As he skims over Paul Simon's elegant lines of predawn rumination, Charles sounds bluesy and bemused, crazy with a vengeance and a purpose. "Yeah, baby," he growls, "you got me by your little finger," and so he's got us, just the same. Same as ever...
Right on the Money (Simon & Schuster; 255 pages; $20) is the 22nd novel about investment-banker-cum-detective John Putnam Thatcher written under the pseudonym Emma Lathen by Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Henissart, an attorney. All the plots center on financial skulduggery, and almost invariably the villain is the least developed principal character, typically a faceless mid-level manager who shows unrecognized ingenuity in concocting a scam. The team's prose is always easy and mildly amusing. While offering less psychological insight than the average TV sitcom, it convincingly conveys the general corporate mindset and the nubby...
...posters were gathered from the Simon Wiesenthal Center...
...seems to be the season for savvy playwrights to slip. Neil Simon's musical adaptation of his The Goodbye Girl left out the good parts, David Hwang's Face Value closed in preview, and now Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly, Burn This) has opened REDWOOD CURTAIN, a would-be poetic musing on ecology, Vietnam, capitalism and multicultural heritage. If you think something is deeply sick in the national soul, then the play, for all its philosophical incoherence and melodrama (about a Vietnamese immigrant seeking her ex-G.I. father), may speak to you. If you live in the world most...