April 3

Matt Taibbi is firing on all cylinders again, with a Rolling Stone piece on "How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off America's cities":

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street

One thing you guess, following Taibbi, is that practically every other journalist in the country is reading his pieces with admiration, either whole-hearted or (ideologically) grudging, for his spectacular gift at turns of phrase:

In Illinois, during the Upper Volta-esque era of Rod Blagojevich...

It was like the herpes simplex of loans — debt that does not go away, ever, for as long as you live.

When Maureen Dowd quotes your riffs with admiration, you know you have arrived in the big leagues.

For those such as myself who have long wondered what the Fabulas Panicas comic strips of film-maker Alejandro El Topo Jodorowsky look like, this website answers your curiosity. Hat tip to {feuilleton}.

http://fabulaspanicas.blogspot.com/

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/04/02/fabulas-panicas-by-jodorowsky/

The drawings of Spanish artist Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) are currently being highlighted in the museum in Segovia that bears his name:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37175

http://www.museoestebanvicente.es/ 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esteban_Vicente

Elsewhere in Iberia, the Vodafone Headquarters in Porto, Portugal, is guaranteed to draw your gaze:

http://www.archdaily.com/54336/vodafone-headquarters-barbosa-guimaraes/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto

Jennifer Haley's Neighborhood III: Requisition of Doom, playing in Los Angeles, sounds like a blast of a night out at the theater:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/theater-review-neighborhood-iii-requisition-of-doom-at-sacred-fools-theater.html

Of course, closer to home there is audio theater on the Internet, which the blog Audio Drama Review does a good job of covering. Through it, I discovered the very entertaining British series The Paranormalists:

http://audiodramareview.blogspot.com/2010/03/paranormalists.html

http://www.paranormalists.co.uk/

Speaking of paranormal activity, did you know that George Eliot took a stab at the subject in her little-known short novel The Lifted Veil?

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/a-year-with-short-novels-on-lifting-veils/

John Sutherland, who read not just all of Eliot but pretty much all of Victorian fiction for his wonderful reference book The Stanford (or Longman, depending on the country) Companion to Victorian Fiction, gives an engaging interview to The Literateur in which, among other things, he draws what I think is a very natural and necessary connection between 19th century fiction and long-form television:

http://www.literateur.com/2010/04/interview-with-john-sutherland/

I also like the fact that he calls Bret Easton Ellis's much-maligned American Psycho a "great book," as indeed it is.

The invaluable Open Letters Monthly publishes detailed reviews of huge history tomes, such as Peter Heather's Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Modern Europe, that one is surprised to encounter outside of the Times Literary Supplement:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/pay-attention-cynewulf/

In the history world, the discovery of the first surviving official, original printed copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence, by a Duke University graduate student, Julia Gaffield, who followed a trail to London's National Archives, is an amazing story:

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/5351

I would imagine that her academic career should go rather swimmingly from this point! Not to mention she'll be a national heroine in Haiti.

Among notables born on this date are American fiction writers Washington Irving and Edward Everett Hale, journalist Herb Caen, jazz bassist Scott LaFaro, cartoonist Bud Fisher, designer Russel Wright, composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, zoologist Jane Goodall, poet George Herbert, astronaut Gus Grissom, film director Allan Dwan, singer/songwriter Richard Thompson, and actors Marlon Brando, Doris Day, Leslie Howard, Eddie Murphy, Alec Baldwin, David Hyde Pierce, Dooley Wilson, and Marsha Mason. A re-appreciation of Doris Day -- still happily with us -- as a great singer and an underrated actress is evident in James Harvey's fine book Movie Love in the Fifties and should become part of general discourse, because Day's real contributions are enormous, a little overshadowed by her fluffy Sixties comedies. If she could satisfy the notoriously tough Alfred Hitchcock as an actress, the rest of us should take note. Here is a clip of Day as Twenties star Ruth Etting, singing "Mean to Me" in Charles Vidor's marvelous Love Me or Leave Me: