tuesday, july 27, 2010


TOM SHALES Self-helper,


help thyself! NBC’s prime-time “Breakthrough With Tony Robbins” breaks no new ground, and it’s the kind of trash TV that makes night feel like day. C6


Style ABCDE C S BOOK WORLD


A satire that runs stale Carl Hiaasen’s “Star Island” is a Hollywood comedy outside his tropical comfort zone. C2


THE RELIABLE SOURCE


The guests’ guessing game Details are scarce on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. C2


3LIVE TODAY @ washingtonpost.com/discussions Howard Kurtz on the media Noon • Tom Shales on TV Noon • Paul Farhi on pop culture 1 p.m. KIDSPOST


No way to treat a ladybug The insects are cute, helpful and declining! Here’s how you can give them a hand. C10


FLEX APPEAL


David von Storch is so pumped to take fitness centers to a new level, he’s convinced it’s the stuff of reality TV


by Dan Zak N


avy suits and crisp oxfords occupy every seat except his. With the jacket fringed in fur, the red high-top Nikes with electric blue laces, the polo shirt whose slim-fit sleeves permit the right amount of biceps bulge, David von


Storch is a very Logan Circle presence in this very Georgetown meeting room. ¶ His master plan rests on a table. It’s a $15million blueprint to combine his absurdly successful businesses (fitness, restaurant, spa, salon) into one four-story temple of self-fulfillment at 1612 U St. NW. He wants to slap an addition onto the building, tear up the roof, put in a pool and upscale eatery, retrofit the inside for his fitness center and then open five days after the lease of his tenant-rival, Results, the Gym, expires next March. ¶ Groundbreaking is August.


von storch continued on C5 PHOTOS BY XIAOMEI CHEN/THE WASHINGTON POST


GRAND PLANS: David von Storch in one of his Vida Fitness centers, top, and with general manager Jaime Andrews. His numerous area enterprises employ 1,400 people.


The Pentagon Papers, Part 2? Parallels, and differences, exist.


Wikileaks documents lack key data, context and high-level analysis


by Paul Farhi and Ellen Nakashima


A voluminous cache of secret docu- ments is leaked, shedding new light on official statements and drawing into question some of the rationale for America’s involvement in a murky, dis- tant and long-running war. That would accurately describe the


publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Pa- pers, the Defense Department’s secret history of the Vietnam War that re- vealed a “credibility gap” between the Johnson administration’s public state-


ments and its private actions. It might also describe the leak Sun-


day of thousands of official military documents characterizing the U.S. mili- tary’s prosecution of the war in Afghan- istan. In the wake of the release of the Af- ghan documents, the link between the two leaks 39 years apart was made by Julian Assange, the Australian who is the key proprietor of Wikileaks, the whistleblower Web site that posted the documents and orchestrated their si- multaneous publication by the New York Times, the Guardian newspaper of Great Britain and Der Spiegel maga- zine of Germany. It also was made by Daniel Ellsberg, the renegade Rand Corp. researcher who leaked the Penta- gon Papers, first to the New York Times


wikileaks continued on C10 Quick


Spins: Tom Jones comes back for more


on ‘Praise’ C3


RECORDINGS


Best Coast’s ‘Crazy for You’: The girl’s a punk, and life’s a beach


by Chris Richards


If you remember a time when rock- and-roll was so idiotic it was genius, you remember 1977. That’s when four New York numskulls called the Ra- mones asserted themselves as the most vital and insipid force in American mu- sic. In 2010, Bethany Cosentino seems only 25 percent as moronic as the Ra- mones and, by default, only 25 percent as brilliant. But maybe that’s because she’s the only member of her band. As Best Coast, the California new- comer has written some of the most brainlessly charming rock songs since Joey, Johnny, Tommy and Dee Dee roamed the Earth. The 23-year-old crams them tightly into “Crazy for You,”


an enchanting debut album on which the melodies glow, the guitars grind and the lyric sheet delivers the blunt- farce poetry of a drunken phone call. Over the course of the album, Cosen- tino posits herself as a slacker-stoner- loser-loner with the eeny-weeniest of attention spans. So if you’re like her, you’ll want to skip ahead to “Goodbye,” a song that parcels out all of Best Coast’s sonic hallmarks in equal meas- ure: serrated power chords, thumpity- thumping drums and Cosentino’s dead- pan singing — all dunked in reverb co- pious enough to make Phil Spector smile. Then come the words. “I lost my job, I miss my mom, I wish my cat could talk,” Cosentino sings, as if


recordings continued on C3


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