San Francisco Chronicle: “Rumors are even floating that President Bush, who has yet to set foot in San Francisco since being elected, might make a surprise visit.”

Michael Rice goes all Masterpiece Theatre and stuff.

Interesting Clifford Odets profile:

When, in 1937, L.J. learned that Odets had separated from Luise Rainer, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress, with whom he had a tempestuous three-year marriage, he sounded off in all his brutishness: “I’m ashamed of you. You are the dummist chunk of humanity I have ever come in contact with. . . . Your all ass backwards and sitting on your brains.” Odets internalized this constant excoriation, berating himself in his journal as a “pig,” a “pissant,” an “idiot,” a “loafer,” and “twice an ass.” He wrote, “It is the father you have incorporated, his characteristics and hated elements—that is the father to be afraid of!” L.J.’s toxic voice also found its way into some of Odets’s most seductive stage villains—the gangsters Eddie Fuseli (“Golden Boy”), Kewpie (“Paradise Lost”), and Moe Axelrod (“Awake and Sing!”), the womanizer Mr. Prince (“Rocket to the Moon”), and the Hollywood mogul Marcus Hoff (“The Big Knife”).

The Economist: “This is not a vote in favour of the sort of literary navel-gazing that Mr Wolfe condemned. But it is a warning that it is almost impossible to outdo reality in a country as richly bizarre as the United States. Perhaps writers should leave those unfinished novels locked up in the drawer—and content themselves instead with the humble craft of journalism.”

Recently, Kevin Smith has sidestepped the quotidian reportage to write very candidly about Jason Mewes’ heroin addiction.