Archives for March 2005

Robert Creeley, who died yesterday at 78, wrote poetry with a spare minimalism that clarified, condensed and dissolved the distance between thought and feeling, between the real world and the imagined, between language and meaning. He was often more explicit than Samuel Beckett and much more approachable, but no less dense or elusive. Listen to him reading two poems: […]

Go to BestCommercialEver.mpg and click on it for something different. Thanks, Martin. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Famed defense attorney Johnnie Cochran is dead. R.I.P: If the heart won’t stirYou must inter. — Leon Freilich EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Today’s column by Paul Krugman — “What’s Going On?” — is too good to go unmentioned. It’s a perfect example of what makes him indispensible. He says in the mainstream media what many think in private, and he says it with coherence, persuasive logic and a level-headed marshalling of facts that most of us cannot […]

I’m being suckered here: Dear Jan Herman, Thanks very much for your attention to my work! And if you have any doubts that “America” is a pro American text, you can check it out: http://www.america-is.com/press. (It is for your reading only.) Best,Paulo José Miranda Miranda is charging five bucks on the America-is site to read […]

While I was fussing with MIRANDA WARNING, I completely missed something much more important. It took my friend Jennie D. to remind me of it: Eyes Wide Open, a traveling exhibition organized by the American Friends Service Committee about the human cost of the Iraq war. Watch the movie. If it moves you, sign the […]

The item ALL RED ALL THE TIME, about a peculiar essay by Portugese writer Paulo José Miranda, drew this response from John Keene: I read your blog regularly and have faith in your critical powers, so I’m a bit dismayed that you didn’t see the sharp and obvious irony in José Miranda’s “America” project. It’s […]

This came unsolicited. Click the link and watch very weird, well-designed, right-wing propaganda about America from a European’s point of view. It’s by Portugese writer Paulo José Miranda, who claims: “America built the Moon. America widens space. America keepings welcoming the world. America doesn’t have a religion, it has God. … Iraq is not occupied, […]

Theater writer Jesse McKinley learned two object lessons this week: Never trust a Broadway producer, especially for a puff piece, and never report that something in the future is “certain” to happen, especially in the theater. “On Thursday,” he wrote, the producer of a new “Sweet Charity” revival told him plans to bring the show […]

Jean Shepherd was always my idea of a media rebel. Phil Donahue never was. But he became one for me this morning on Democracy Now! Donahue, right, smiles easily and calls himself lucky. He says his success spoiled him, which I’m sure is true. But behind the smile and the luck there’s a gritty malcontent […]

The shooting rampage at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota puts American neo-Nazism back on the front page and adds an awful top spin to yesterday’s e-mail debate about David Irving and C-SPAN. As you’ve doubtless read by now, Jeff Weise — a self-described Ojibwe Native American teenager who killed 10 people, wounded seven […]

It’s amusing to look back every once at some of the things posted here over the past 20 months. So says my staff of thousands, which has decided to start a Straight Up tradition. It begins today with possibly the most entertaining yet pointed commentary about the 2004 election: the Sloganator. Go there. I did […]

Taking a cue from ArtsJournal publisher Doug McLellan, who has created a public forum for debating significant arts issues, herewith a baker’s dozen e-mail comments on free speech, the Holocaust and ethical journalism. They were spurred by Friday’s item, C-SPAN ON TRIAL, about the idea of broadcasting a speech by Holocaust denier David Irving to […]

Paul Wolfowitz’s nomination to head the World Bank and John Bolton’s to represent the United States at the U.N., far from being promotions, signal a purge of neocons from policy-making positions in the Bush regime. So says investigative reporter Greg Palast, left, who was interviewed on Democracy Now! about his recent BBC Newsnight report detailing […]

Tim Rutten’s media column (in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday) noted that “National Public Radio’s decision to sever its 21-year connection to [David D’arcy, below] one of its most experienced arts reporters” — purportedly because he was unfair to the Museum of Modern Art — raises doubts “about how its news operation sets and […]

Fox News, which registered “Fair & Balanced” as its trademark, must have done a double-take when C-SPAN tried to poach the phrase earlier this week. In a ludicrous attempt to “balance” its coverage of a lecture by Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, C-SPAN said it would pair it with a speech by Holocaust denier David Irving, […]

Tom Freudenheim, the former deputy director and chief operating officer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, sends this message — a tongue-lashing for the Museum of Modern Art over its negligence in the Egon Schiele case and for NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dworkin over his and NPR’s foul treatment of reporter David D’Arcy: Re the MoMA/NPR/D’Arcy […]