"Frank Rich and John Simon are the Syphilis and Gonorrhea of the Theater."

That’s a quote by the great David Mamet, back in the days when he was a “brain-dead liberal” (his words), in the late 1980s.

I gotta believe his view of Simon has softened considerably since then. Simon was no red-hot conservative partisan, not remotely. He was merely a critic who expected beauty and culture from screen and stage in an era when beauty required pornography to get produced and culture was nearing the point of exhaustion.

Our culture has since arrived at the exhaustation station and everyone except the abjectly moronic knows it. Mamet knows it.

Observers like Chesterton and critics like Mencken were waving warning flags back in the 1920s. Simon was there--in the 1960s through 1990s--as the train flew off the tracks.

Simon’s prose is delightful, which is no small thing when one’s job in life is to watch and describe, week after week, an unfolding catastrophe, like Don Henley’s bubble-headed bleached-blonde who comes on at five to tell you ‘bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye.

We could use more of Simon’s gleam these days.

He once said an actress’ breasts looked like rotten vegetables. She complained. He said that if she didn’t want him to review them, she shouldn’t bare them. It was neither the first nor last time he’d criticize an actor’s physical qualities when they didn’t match up to artistic expectation.

I can’t imagine what he’d do with the body positivity movement on the screen and stage, not to mention the ludicrousness of “blind casting.”

Simon did his best work for New York magazine. For 36 years, he wrote for the leftist rag, and they tolerated it (with difficulty, I’m led to believe). I doubt a person could even type the word “fat” between those covers today.

The man was also funny, even off-color. Despite his high standards, he was no prude.

When he heard Mamet’s criticism of his work, he responded, “[W]hat would the theater be without a clap or two?