Wow, am I on a hot streak or what? I saw ANOTHER GREAT MOVIE! NOTES ON A SCANDAL is wonderful, haunting and intelligent. It faces quite a tricky subject without making a single wrong move. And of course the acting is bravura – watching CATE BLANCHETT and JUDI DENCH on the same screen is like watching two virtuosos playing a duet. KUDOS. To my mind the both deserve OSCARS – isn’t JENNIFER HUDSON’s more of a SINGING than ACTING achievement? Everybody knows I love HELEN MIRREN to death, BUT isn’t there a difference between IMPERSONATION and CREATION? And why wasn’t the picture itself nominated? What hold does CLINT have over the Academy?

But that’s not what I came here to rave about. The other night I couldn’t sleep and went semi-late night channel surfing again, which is almost always a completely depressing commentary on the sad state of our culture. Some times I just keep looking for ONE thing that’s not totally fake, stale or manipulative, and say I’m going to go back to bed when I find it, but too often I realize that would mean I’d have to stay up all night! I’m getting the same creepy fascination with FOX news these days that I used to have with the 700 club or the PTL club. It’s the same old crap, but it’s getting increasingly surreal and cut off from reality. Take THE BELTWAY BOYS for instance, a couple of "insiders," who don’t seem to know their ass from a hole in the ground, as if the FAILURE of the BUSH REGIME hasn’t been totally self evident. I mean, really, don’t they know that the era of old white guys patronizingly telling us that they know best went out with RUMMY? They don’t talk about the big subjects like IRAQ anymore, only about NANCY PELOSI’s airplane trips, which were O.K. for the male Republican speaker but outrageous for her. You can see where FOX is going already, slimeing OBAMA and CLINTON in their time honored way while expressing their expert opinion that, yes, GIULIANI, looking at it totally objectively, would probably be the best president since LINCOLN. You got to love FOX for their shamelessness – their idea of a panel discussion is to have four people with the EXACT SAME VIEWS. Here’s a disagreement – FORTUNE: All in all, I think it’s pretty obvious that, simply looking at the facts BUSH has done a pretty fine job. WALL STREET JOURNAL: I’m afraid I’ll have to contradict you there. That’s not at all the case. I’m afraid the facts show he’s done a FANTASTIC job. FOX HACK: Wouldn’t PERFECT really be a better word?, etc.

Then there’s the infomercials, the Sly Stallone movies, the Ultimate Fighting matches, the Adam Sandler "comedies," the religious extortion shows, not to mention MTV’s reality shows featuring THE PRIZEST MORONS IN THE LAND both AMATEUR and CELEBRITY!

But then I found it – a moment of true grace and beauty. I’d flipped through the GRANDE OLE OPRY before – sometime they have authentic older artists who are great, but this time there was some rock band lineup group with a lead singer with hair like that guy in the GOO GOO DOLLS who delivered a slab of synthetic plastic country cliches that had the yokels singing and clapping along. But when I got back to it on the next wave of surfing, there was a sort of stillness, a pretty but not glamourous woman (not a girl) standing there in a dress just swaying to the pedal steel intro to what sounded like a classic country song. She was backed up by a bunch of silver headed professionals who were really squeezing country out of their instruments. And then she opened her mouth – it was beautiful and technically brilliant without being showy and understatedly expressive of a world of heartbreak. The song was great too, with lilting melody and simple poetry. They finished the tune as well as they started and bowed simply to muted applause. That was it – I could go to bed – a moment of true feeling and art — like that scene at the end of John Osborne’s THE ENTERTAINER when OLIVIER sings that old spiritual.

But of course UBU is always thinking. Who the hell was that? If there had been an introduction, I’d missed it. The singer wasn’t THAT old (younger than ancient old UBU anyway) so she really couldn’t be one of the legendary fossils they dig up every so often. Was she a has been who’d had a hit ten years ago with this song? (Which I gathered was called PLEASE DON’T TELL ME HOW THE STORY ENDS).

Back in the day, you’d never know, but in progressive today, thanks to the internet such things are easily tracked down. Imagine my surprise when I learned it was singer/songwriter JOAN OSBORNE making her OPRY debut. She blew away all the contemporary country pretenders, but she isn’t really a full time country singer at all, just a great singer who has made a country album PRETTY LITTLE STRANGER. And the song was by the great KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, who really was a RHODES SCHOLAR, and writes the most poetical, literate and intelligent songs in the genre. I guess I’d heard of Joan and that GOD song she did way back when but I’d never really listened or seen her before. But, baby I’m in love now, and I ordered PRETTY LITTLE STRANGER and RELISH and downloaded PLEASE DON’T TELL ME because I couldn’t wait for the album to get here.

You know my favorite philosopher SCHOPENHAUER was mostly pessimistic, but found the one consolation in life to be the appreciation of beauty, of true art, that eternal moment of selfless rapture that allows us to escape causality, time and the burdens of being. So for one of those moments I lift my loving cup to you, JOAN! MAZEL TOV, baby!