Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

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THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.

THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.

THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.

THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.

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Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Posted 5:12 PM by Gene

HERR DOKTOR SONDHEIM'S SEVENTY-FIFTH, another of those artificial stories made to sell things, is not a cause of celebration, but one of contemplation, and scorn, as we see the vast empty hole where a lively musical theater was, and as the DOKTOR, with his obsessions and pretensions, helped to excavate it. We forget that this genius was a pupil of Oscar Hammerstein II, and he carried Hammerstein's earnestness to its logical bitter end, and where Hammerstein spoke to all people for all time with songs like "Ol' Man River," the DOKTOR's musicals, with their cutesy artsy angles ("A musical about POINTILLISM?!?", as David Denby quoted a theatergoer in one of his few lucid moments) and death-fixation, predictably became cult favorites for a trendy and marginal elite. It is no wonder John Simon (who must take a little responsibility himself as a fan of HERR DOKTOR) mourned as he did after watching THE HIGH-SCHOOL REVUE. Is a culture without a musical theater a culture worth defending?

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