Category: Whatever happened to...?

Speaking of People Who Are Out To Get John Burns:

It's old news, but we're still curious: did anyone ever figure out who ratted Burns out to the Iraqi Ministry of Information?

Semi-related, re: hanky-panky at the Al-Hamra:

From The Observer, July 21, 2003, "At the Al-Hamra Pool, I'm a Babe Once More, and I Wanna Iraqi!" by Ann Marlowe. (We'd link but the Observer's weird archiving system doesn't allow for it.):

This June, I spent many evenings in Baghdad sitting around the pool of the Al-Hamra Hotel in a bikini. It was one of the Western oases in Baghdad, and at the white plastic tables foreign reporters drank cheap beer, gossiping and creating the viewpoint that magically becomes the consensus press stance in each war zone -- here, it was that the Americans were failing and that the leader they backed, Ahmed Chalabi, was washed up. But I wasn't terribly interested. I was there because all I had to do was sit in my bikini, copying Arabic verb tables in the dim light, to feel again, thanks to the skewed gender ratio, the sexual power I'd had at 25...

Aside from an obsession with plaid shirts, urban Iraqi men dressed pretty much like Americans. I'd found them appealing from the moment I arrived. Waiting in the long line of cars at the Jordanian border, I'd watched perhaps the most attractive man I'd ever seen walk past our GMC -- an Iraqi, by his looks. I never ran into him again, but I realized that my penchant for dark, Semitic-looking men could be fulfilled here."

We imagine that Marlowe now walks ignominiously along the streets of New York, mentally conjugating Arabic verbs and occasionally getting pelted with copies of Orientalism by passersby.

In the continuing adventures of erstwhile film critic and serious newbie academic Elvis Mitchell, Fishbowl is saddened to learn that the love bestowed on the dreadlocked star by his H'wood exec pals at Sundance a few weeks back has not been returned in kind by the Cambridge WASPs. Enclosed is a sample of how the student body thinks, according to the Crimson. Ouch. We thought the kids would be impressed by a prof quaffing drinks with Bill Murray and assigning no homework. Those Crimson kids. Do as Elvis and mellow out. Apparently, he's able to make a living from it.

Since the seemingly impossible death of boyish founder George Plimpton, his Paris Review - according to Newsweek - is in disarray. Having just fired its executive editor Brigid Hughes and trolling for people like Bill Buford, Anne Fadiman and John Jeremiah Sullivan to fill Plimpton's chair, its future direction is unclear. "Confusion reigns," claims Hughes, while board President Thomas Guinzburg wants "grown-ups" in the driver's seat - one assumes he means people older than the 32-year old Hughes. So if you no longer get carded buying smokes and you don't have a need to modernize the Review by adding such gauche features as non-fiction authors or - the horror - screenwriters to the book, do go ahead and mimeograph your resumé. And watch this space.

Since his departure from the Times last May, no one's quite sure where to find Elvis Mitchell these days, unless you want to travel North, park the car in Harvard Yard (literally), walk up the steps and take one of his film classes there. But since all the chatter has died down in recent months, we figured we'd re-start it:

Elvis, where'd you go? Are you still talking to Sony Pictures about becoming the co-head of their office here in our fair city? Or are the other studios - like Fox - still whispering the same siren songs? To quote Tom Lehrer: "Are you sad? Are you cross? Are you gathering moss?" Are you co-writing more screenplays with Ron Shelton? Tell us, please. Or, if you're a "close friend" of Elvis's, give us a jingle and let us know. Because it's quiet out there. Too quiet.