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I really like the Sunday news shows. I don’t like George Stephanopoulos because he’s Greek but I do like that he served with Bill Clinton. But not my favorite because he’s Greek. Donna Brazile referred to conservative Republicans as “those people.” Something happened to Chuck Schumer’s eye- its sinister. As in Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, George Stephanopoulos asks tough questions of his side- Democrats. This being the post-Bush style of fair and balanced, even Dick Cheney’s had a change of heart. I actually like Fox News Sunday the best when Chris Wallace rips his friends on the right so hard. Chris Wallace moderated Meet the Press in the eighties- the only person ever to host more than one of the end of week shows. He was born in Chicago and his father Mike is on 60 minutes. They talk once a week.

My all time favorite is Meet the Press- I grew up watching. Tim Russert and I passed each other under the heated entrance of a Boston hotel in the mid 2000s. We made eye contact. He was the best, born in Buffalo. I was at a Qdoba in Cambridge when Tim Russert died of a heart attack and the news came on the TV. That was the first and only time I will ever eat at a Qdoba- left a bad taste in my mouth. David Gregory’s wife is a badass in the military. Gwen Ifill often has all women shows. Bob Schieffer reads his own weird poems on the air. I just found out next week Face the Nation expands to a full hour. That will bring my number of hours spent on end of week recaps to five and a half.

They should get the arrest and more. The police who cooperated with trying to cover this up should be fired or jailed, as far as I’m concerned. I should also say- and the last caller was profoundly correct, in terms of his summation of what it is to be a black man walking around- black teenagers, any white teenagers, don’t know how to function, don’t know how to process a lot of this stuff. It’s important that we can’t lay all the blame for this on the police. The blame that’s involved should be scented right on each and every one of us. We have to re-examine our sense of values and priorities and our sense of self in terms of who we think we are as a nation. That’s really where the core of this is. Functionally, sure- all of this is coming too much after the fact. We have to do what that last listener did. We have to re-examine how we see each other and what we want this society to be and that means examining who the cops are, who is the chief of police, who are you voting for, what do you do in your own community to push the good forward? To inch it forward, just a little bit. That’s really crucial. -James McBride

Hey Tom, hey listen- I really enjoyed the show, and the gentleman Mychal- I found a great deal of honesty in what he was saying. It may be something the rest of us need to look at maybe. I think we’re all guilty of racism and bias. I think we’ve all got a certain degree of bias, that we have. When we come to the play and we want to discuss these things with each other I think we all need to admit that we have a sense of commission and omission and that- hey, we’ve all said the N word. At some time or other, other people have done that too. I would just like to see folks deal with their own bias and racism and political problems, and step up and discuss this thing, after we look at ourselves. -Gene in Greenbrier, Tennesee

I appreciate the last caller because it’s very easy to go about your life and say you’re not a racist. But to live in America is to be effected and to internalize racism. So we all have to come to the table and say- Not that I’m not a racist, but in fact, I am a racist. Being a racist is not the worst thing that you can be. The worst thing that can happen because of your racism is that a boy like Trayvon can die. So you have to address your own biases and racism that we’ve all internalized. I hear those screams from the 911 call and I know that it haunts me. But there’s a 13 year old witness who says he hears those screams and he knows he fits the stereotype of the type of people that get killed. So what type of effect does that have on him? We are all internalizing this every single day. And we all have to work on that. –Mychal Denzel Smith

-On Point with Tom Ashbrook, March 20, The Killing of Trayvon Martin

There’s nothing like sitting in a completely quiet room, and then the strings start up. It’s like when you go to the cinema —- the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much do anything for those first few minutes. It doesn’t matter how many films you see —- it’s still kind of a moment.

-Johnny Greenwood, Alex Pappademas’ profile Kid A+

Davies is no stranger to flourish, though the sort that begins The Long Day Closes and invokes such triumphant Hollywood brassiness is not what one would expect from a film whose final spoken words are voiceover echoes of Bud’s drab science teacher detailing the different kinds of erosion. Angrily squeaking out his lessons in chalk, the mustachioed instructor informs the students, definitively, that there are five kinds of erosion: river, rain, glacial, wind, and marine. Naturally, the disintegration of memory and consciousness doesn’t enter into the equation, even though this is the most tangible form of erosion to most of us.

-Reverse Shot, Michael Koresky on The Long Day Closes

On Sunday I rode my bike 45 miles- first West to Garfield Park, then South for a torta and pineapple water in Little Village, then further South to Marquette Park at 71st St, through the East Side and to the lake, Jackson Park, down a golf course and over a fence, onto the Lakefront Trail, listened to “The Noise Made By People,” 16 miles North to uptown, bought a catnip mouse and underwear, found a bench in Welles Park where I read my book Sex Drugs and Sea Slime and spoke with my sister, to the Music Box for a showing of Terence Davies’ 1992 memoir of childhood, The Long Day Closes, and back down Ashland Ave.

My friend Zoe came to visit and brought her friend Sara. They stayed for three days. We went to the Bridgeport Art Center building- Zoe climbed inside Sarah Palin’s mouth. The industrial elevator took us to higher floor and I asked those inside the way to the art. No one had an answer. On the roof we found some.

I rode the elevator at Navy Pier- the ferris wheel. There was no glacier yet. The temperature has been in the seventies. The hottest night we went to the beach and had fried shrimp on Goose Island. Sara had fried mushrooms. I ate tacos at Big Star on the picnic tables and got to tell my story about the Midwestern woman who choked down the dessert she did not like. So it was a good night.