January 31, 2003
Mandela refuses to mince his words
These are the least diplomatic statements I have ever seen associated with this man who is so extraordinarily popular around the world. Maybe we really are in deep deep trouble. Nelson Mandela, no friend of current White House policy, yesterday...
January 30, 2003
"current American elite is the Third Reich of our times"
John Pilger is writing from and for readers in the U.K., so his title suggests a much more parochial statement than what you will actually find in its text. The first part of the essay is an extraordinary attack on...
"Recession 2003"
But it's about art, not economics, except that the works are priced very economically. In fact nothing costs more than $99. These are serious artists are serious, even when they are being very funny. We know a number of them...
third world passes us by, on a subway train
New York can't do it, and probably no other American city could either. New Delhi, a city with a dense population of some 14 million, has completed the first five miles (ultimately to extend over 62 miles) of a new,...
"People Are Wrong!"
No, it's not a political post this time, but the name of a show. We're finally going to get a chance to see our friend David Driver and a gaggle of other brilliants in "People Are Wrong!" at Joe's Pub...
ice boats
Did I hear that I had no interest in sports? It turns out the stories have been exagerated. Find one that pushes the right buttons and I'm there! I resisted the impulse to type, "ice yachts" in the caption line,...
Recent acquisiton
From Dingercity by Charles Goldman. It's exciting, I can move it around as I please, and it's very beautiful. When I first saw it as part of Charles' wonderful installation last summer, I could not help thinking of the...
January 29, 2003
incalculable harm cannot be undone
First thoughts about the fact that Bush spoke about AIDS in his performance tonight: I just cannot get too excited about the words, first, because right now they are only words, and second, because we are now twenty-three years into...
January 28, 2003
"Bush Says Saddam Shows 'Utter Contempt' for U.N."
So reads the actual lead headline this afternoon on the Reuters site--cross my heart and hope to die if I'm lying! How can these guys live with themselves?...
death walks the streets of New York
Breslin says it's in the faces of the people. But, no, it's not a reflection of memories of the the Trade Center destruction. It's the consciousness of the destruction yet to come.On the streets yesterday, when greeting each other, people...
do not forget the real Giuliani
This blog is directed to the world outside of New York. Its message is hardly necessary for those who have lived in the Gotham City for the last ten years. An opinion piece in Newsday today, from an author who...
January 27, 2003
"I write in a night of shame"
John Berger, the Anglo-French writer and critic, recently wrote this, for a site which asks writers, artists and civic leaders for their words on what Bush has called "the first war of the twenty-first century:SHAME, NOT INDIVIDUAL GUILT I write...
a world alien to reason and logic
Just now I made the mistake of turning on the television for the first time in months. I wanted to see if there were millions, shivering, standing in support of reason outside the United Nations Security Council, and I was...
ACT UP in Berlin
James Wentzy's film documentary, "Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP," has been accepted for screening next month by the 53rd Berlin International Film Festival. Fight Back, Fight AIDS – 15 Years of ACT UP von James...
January 26, 2003
not the colds of yesteryear
So. I guess if we think it was cold in January, the globe really is warming.As of late last week, January 2003 was only the 36th coldest January on record for New York City. Averaging 29 degrees, this January has...
Bush planning to nuke Iraq
I hate to take the narrow view, to personalize the big issues, but as someone who lives in New York, and is absolutely mad about its people and its beauty, I see this news first as the death knell for...
January 25, 2003
"radical nationalists"
Louis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, has come up with the phrase, "radical nationalists," as a description of the party interests which currently control Washington, and thus the nation and already much of the world. Don't call them "conservative." "Conservative"...
Salvation Army Store
The image is very sad at first, especially if you know there were actually two "Bridal Keepsake" boxes in the windows of the Salvation Army store today. I prefer to think of these boxes as images of liberation, and...
January 24, 2003
head for home!
[But first, a warning, home ain't what it used to be.]WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department is sending a cable to embassies around the world telling Americans abroad to be ready to leave their resident country quickly if for any...
hundreds of thousands, almost erased
Everybody out there knows I read the NYTimes, but that doesn't mean I eat it up, and I don't suggest such a narrow or uniform diet for anyone. Today's edition included on page A6 an image of the "Turmoil In...
political imprisonment and murder
The White House tells us that it's up to Iraq to prove that it is innocent.The Bush administration's case against Iraq can be summed up in one sentence: Iraq has not led United Nations inspectors to the weapons Washington insists...
Treasury is vacant
Check out the section devoted to Secretary of the Treasury in this White House website. Why would we need a Secretary of the Treasury in these fat times, especially when, in the absence of [an appointee of an appointee], we...
January 23, 2003
monsters and idiots with big guns
Washington to world: "Drop dead!"WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Washington shrugged off growing vocal opposition to a possible war on Iraq as big powers lined up to reject military action. China and Russia, as well as Canada, joined France and Germany Thursday...
January 22, 2003
the wars on drugs, both wars
What a county! So, it appears we're fighting a war on drugs at the same time we're fighting a war on drugs. [Since we're not making any progress in either campaign however, the White House claim that we can fight...
January 21, 2003
the other Venezuela story
This report from Mother Jones is decidedly not what you hear in the North American commercial media, and in any event with its length it's decidedly more information than we have come to expect from the media, regardless of bias....
Sharpton for candidate!
For starters, he's more interesting and more his own man and woman than any of the others--and, not incidently, he's the only one who has actually served time when he was arrested. Oh, and he's the only presidential candidate who...
January 20, 2003
Hlynur Hallsson
The Icelandic artist, Hlynur Hallsson, has, in an extrordinary gracious gesture, included my name along with those of a New York artist/curator and a German curator as part of his email announcement of his current show in Reykjavik ["20 pages...
January 19, 2003
Bengie seems to have made it
Bengie is the name of the leader of the Jokers, a South Brooklyn street gang of the 50's immortalized in the photographs of Bruce Davidson. In "The City" section today the NYTimes has more than a full page of Tom...
don't let them keep us invisible
Across the U.S. and abroad yesterday, and in some areas continuing today, hundreds of thousands of people refused to be robots in Washington's plans for war.Bush spent the weekend at the presidential retreat at Camp David. But White House spokesman...
carrying on regardless
Since the nineteenth century, the Mount Morris bathhouse has survived punctured realty bubbles, white flight, home plumbing, moral crusades, wars, racism, depression, fashion, homelessness and AIDS. A beautiful article in the NYTimes today helps us to understand how.The Mount Morris...
January 18, 2003
reading "OZ" differently
Interesting take on the HBO series, "Oz" from a letter in tomorrow's NYTimes "Arts & Leisure" section: [excerpt] I like "Oz" for many reasons, but I suspect that it touches something in me that the article ["In the Brutal World...
Germans finally remember their own war suffering
They're finally speaking about the trauma of carpet-bombing, ruin and displacement after a silence of almost sixty years. As a historian manque, I've collected some book knowledge on the subject, but also a few very real memories of my own,...
January 17, 2003
Big Brother is already here
Citizen Works has a full-page ad in the NYTimes today describing the Bush administration’s assault on privacy and civil rights. Not news for most anyone who normally sees this weblog, but posssibly a reminder, if not a terrifying reality check,...
Berkeley repents
The University of California has suddenly reversed its decision forbidding its own Emma Goldman Papers Project from printing quotations from Emma Goldman about war and the suppression of free speech. [See my post of three days ago.]"Now I understand, maybe...
January 16, 2003
Washington being oily in Venezuela
I can't take it anymore! The American media has been misrepresenting events in Venezuela, slavishly adopting the account, one of pure invention, furnished by the Right in both Caracas and Washington. Too much time has passed for me to believe...
"The United States of America Has Gone Mad"
Not my quote, but that of that wacky agitator, John le Carré, printed as the headline of his piece in The Times of London.America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can...
Martin Luther King, Jr.
". . . I knew that I could never again raise my voice agains the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government....
January 15, 2003
"the SUV itself is such the ideal ethical lightning rod"
Egads, he's so good he's scary! Mark Morford make's you glad you're not on his wrong side, especially when he writes as he does in his attack on the new Hummer, in fact on all SUVs, and the perverseness of...
whupping it up for self-esteem
In a column whose overall message is the continued decline in Dubya's popularity figures. Maureen Dowd hits a few bullseyes, but none better than her take on what passes for foreign policy in Washington these days.It's equally hard to fathom...
a threat to us all
In a great essay in this week's Village Voice, "Persecuting Pee-wee A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All," Richard Goldstein manages to sort out a lot of scary stuff, and he warns us that Paul Reubens is the canary in...
endless war, mostly faked
Not all of us are blind.DEFINITIONS OF WAR To the Editor: Re "Detention Upheld in Combatant Case" (front page, Jan. 9): If the definition of "wartime president" has changed from being president at a time of war that has been...
January 14, 2003
free speech still a dangerous and political concept
Almost a century after she helped create the conscience of a once lively American Left, Emma Goldman's words have been proscribed by a great American University. The University of California at Berkeley was the birthplace almost forty years ago of...
January 13, 2003
buying life, if you can afford it
Zachie Achmat still won't take his pills, even though Nelson Mandela has asked him to. It's part of a very big plan, and it seems to be working, since, as he says, "The country is realizing that people can actually...
sometimes a picture really is enough
While some may say the gesture trivializes and distracts from the gravity of the anti-war message, Unreasonable Women organizer Donna Sheehan said desperate times . . . "It got your attention, didn't it?" joked Sheehan of Marshall, who said she...
but it just means we're stupid
--maybe too stupid to deserve democracy. I've always thought that the reason most Americans do not vote their interests, but instead support those of the super-wealthy, is that they actually expect to be among the super-wealthy themselves some day. So...
January 11, 2003
defending our sidewalk ghetto
We have to be reminded, and remind others, that the streets are for people first, and that everything else is there only with the sufferance of the people. The NYTimes decided to print two letters [ok, it was a saturday,...
January 10, 2003
now we understand
Calvin Trillin in the January 27 edition of The Nation: THE QUESTION OF NORTH KOREA Korea has the bomb, but not to worry. It's not a crisis. No, we needn't hurry To get inspections back. Why try to spot The...
in touch with his inner Hitler
Noah Taylor, the actor who portrays Adolf Hitler in "Max" explains his approach to an intimidating assignment in a tiny item of the NYTimes today, "Seeking the Dictator Within."Speaking of obstacles, there were some lines that must have presented a...
he's right
Willam Cohn's letter may have just pushed us over the edge.JETS IN OVERTIME I have been a football fan since I was 14 years old, but I don't think a sporting event is important enough to rate the entire first,...
smoke out
Some people still just don't get it. A Daily News reader writes to the paper today complaining aout the Mayor's threat to her personal freedoms.OUTLAW FAST FOOD South Orange, N.J.: What state of prohibition has Mayor Bloomberg gotten us into...
January 8, 2003
Charles Goldman is up!
His website, that is. It looks great and of course the work is great. Barry supplied the technology, and Charles and he created the design. I'm outrageously enthusiastic about both of them and their work, and it's totally independent of...
boring, boring, boring, but very dangerous nevertheless
My quarrel is not with their sleeping habits, or even the manner in which they entertain themselves. I'm just glad I don't have to be any part of the current regime in Washington."All the senior staff has no life, or...
SUVs support oil companies, and terrorism too
Yesss! The only way we will wean this country from its monster passenger truck obsession is to shame it. I used to think the SUV would eventually be abandoned when Americans perceived it as uncool, since so much of its...
January 7, 2003
Willem Arondius, "not less courageous"
I like to think of myself as a proud activist queer with an enormous interest in history, but the awesome story of Willem Arondius [alternatively, "Arondeus"] and his friends was completely unknown to me until this week. It played itself...
January 5, 2003
"Is that the peace sign or the finger?"
I really love this picture, but yeah, it needs the story it accompanies, which includes the sassy quote above. Grass-roots anti-war activists in the Northwest are reporting a very visible and audible growing swelling of support for a once-local overpass...
decades of concentration camps
The United States Holocaust Museum in Washington currently includes an exhibit on the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, the first in a series on specific groups other than Jews who were victimized by the regime. The numbers of victims identified with...
January 4, 2003
minister of defense, and healing
The world is fortunate there are models other than our own.SANTIAGO, Chile — It is a measure of how much this country has changed that Michelle Bachelet today works from an office that once belonged to Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the...
January 3, 2003
another pep rally
FORT HOOD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush said on Friday the United States was ready to win a potential war with Iraq and "liberate" its people as he rallied soldiers at the largest U.S. Army base amid an intensifying military...
