THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Last week, I finished the daunting task of watching The Vietnam War , the 10-episode, 18-hour documentary first shown PBS in May 2017, and now streaming on Netflix. It was a stunning achievement, epic in scope and depressing in affect, educational without being didactic and dry. If only the lessons it taught were examined and understood by those who needed the instruction the most. Like most kids raised in the '70s, I grew up with "Vietnam" as an abstract, a concept that offered up a quick delineation between adults -- who seemed to understand the multiple meanings implicitly, with a nod or a sigh or a conversation in hushed tones -- and mere children. It was stitched into the fabric of the United States like a single black strand of coarse thread in an otherwise pristine American flag. But as a kid, I gave not a whit of attention to it, as Star Wars and Marvel Comics and Lego and Top 40 FM radio consumed most of my waking hours. Oddly enough, it was Top 40 FM radio ...

It was a warm August afternoon, and my wife Courtney and I had been in our house -- our first house as a married couple -- for just over a year. I was sitting on the couch, awash in summer dog farts swirled around by the ceiling fan, when Courtney came to the top of the stairs to tell me that Robin Williams had died. After a few seconds, a wash of numbness came over me, followed by the fits and starts of understanding the new reality. Disorganization, then reorganization. One might wonder why I would feel this way about someone I had never met, feeling the earth shifting over an actor who once set his fake tits on fire for a laugh. But like many people my age and background, there was a period of time when I wanted to be Robin Williams, before I properly understood what an impossible wish that was. If you have ever made strangers laugh, if you have ever felt your mind ricochet from one comedic concept to the next with rapidity and import -- especially as a kid -- there's really o...

My first awareness of Peter Murphy as an artistic entity -- a thing, a creature, a presence -- was during his tenure as the lead singer of Bauhaus, a late '70s / early '80s British band. As I would look through the CD import section at record stores, this sleeve always stood out to me: It had a clean design, all monochromatic appeal, and the song titles on the back spoke to worlds outside my Top 40 parameters, as I would discover when I did the deep dive into the Bauhaus catalog years later. But the first time I saw Peter Murphy, I didn't know it was him. While "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus is playing in the opening sequence of the 1983 soft-core vampire film The Hunger , we only see Peter Murphy performing it, and he transfixes the viewer in seconds. (Of course, I also saw him in an ad campaign for Maxell cassette tapes, which you can see here .) It was also the end of Bauhaus for a while, as the rest of the band jettisoned Murphy to pursue other mus...

Reporter: A Memoir is not the book that Seymour M. Hersh -- a.k.a. "Sy" -- wanted to release at this point in time in his storied career. That tome, still in the realm of the hypothetical, will be an examination into the lives of Dick Cheney. However, as many of Hersh's sources for that book are still alive, and still in a position to be damaged by one of the most influential politicians of the 21st Century, Cheney's machinations will have to wait for some time in the future, if at all. But in that vacuum, at least we have Reporter: A Memoir with which to pass the time. In Reporter: A Memoir , Hersh details a near-greatest hits of some of the biggest U.S. news stories of the past half-century, from the appalling massacre at My Lai that symbolized American depravity in Vietnam to the hierarchy of torture in Abu Ghraib that symbolized American depravity in Iraq. In between, there are other stories, and stories upon stories, that keep Hersh zigging and zagging through...