April 30, 2003
"We are at war, we are at war."
Thursday night, tomorrow, our appointed President will tell us that the war on Iraq is virtually over. "And the threat to the United States has been removed, and he will address the nation just as he did at the beginning...
April 29, 2003
why is SARS more important than AIDS?
Have any of us been asking the question? It seems obvious one. As of mid-April, 89 people have died of Severe Acute Respitory Syndrome, or SARS, yet you'd think the sky was falling. But, in the now classic formulation of...
no questions asked
We're told the war is over. Well, we're told that at least this sub-war is over. Regardless of whether this is the case, we should be asking ourselves certain questions we deferred in our unseemly haste to prove our faux...
a healthier New York
New Yorkers, by and large, live longer than the average American, according to figures in the latest study of the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The announcement probably surprised as many of us as it must everyone else....
April 28, 2003
so, just where is our free speech zone?
They told him he had to go to "the free-speech zone." The police had established a protest area a good half mile from the South Carolina airport hanger where Bush was supposed to speak last fall. Brett A. Bursey wanted...
April 26, 2003
there are CARS and there are also cars, aren't there?
My friend Glenn and I went to the New York Auto Show yesterday. I go every year, I suppose just to keep tabs on what the selection will look like should I ever decide to own a car again. Besides,...
update on "Così"
An excerpt from today's NYTimes review of the "Così fan tutte" I wrote about earlier this week: But it's not the updating alone that makes Mr. Miller's production so comically sharp and penetrating. It's that with this staging concept Mr....
BBC big describes U.S. media as "gung-ho"
In an irony which will escape many Americans ignorant of the status and character of the media both in Britain and the U.S., the General Director of the BBC says that the American media is basically an arm of the...
April 25, 2003
May Day can only be red-letter day
Time Out New York wants to sell magazines, so it's virtually impossible to find anything on their website, but the print copy reminded me today of the remarkable history of May 1 as a world holiday (except in the U.S.,...
April 24, 2003
political colors
The more-fabulous-than-ever people who run Cursor paraphrase the argument of a familiar, irreverent columnist in New York Press:In speculating on why the terror alert was lowered, Michelangelo Signorile asks: "If there were 'indications' days before the war began that al-Qaeda...
New York's survival kit
New York City didn't buy into the Cold War "Duck and Cover" mindset of the fifties, and it's no sucker for the War on Terrorism "Code Orange" threats of the aughts. A recent poll reveals that New Yorkers are the...
April 23, 2003
correction
I was wrong, or at least wanting, in my information on the general audience dates for the "Così fan tutte" I described last night. The corrected, more extended list of performance dates now appears in the post below....
"Così fan tutte"
A few days ago we accepted an invitation for this evening's full dress rehearsal of the Brooklyn Philharmonic's "Così fan tutte," in a co-production with BAM, directed by Jonathan Miller. Mozart and Da Ponte got it right over 200 years...
April 22, 2003
Part I: all hail a military Easter
I had heard months ago that the 150-year-old annual tradition of the White House Easter Egg Roll was cancelled this year, because of security concerns for the executive lawn. But in the end we were not to be disappointed, at...
Part II: and a Christian military
As the war on Iraq wound down last week the Pentagon celebrated the Christian Good Friday with a religious service and an invitation to the White House's favorite high priest in his repeating role as regular witness to our most...
"Jews for Hitler"
Bloggy says gays for Bush are like Jews for Hitler. What ignited this righteous ire? It started with just one dumb Republican.Rick Santorum, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, and No. 3 in the GOP leadership.If the Supreme Court says that you...
American still held in secret detention without charges
UPDATE to a story I posted April 4: The American software engineer arrested in mid-March, and being held without any charges, remains in federal prison in Oregon. But, in spite of moans from the softy liberals, it's really ok to...
April 21, 2003
how to avoid the word, "gay," even if it's your subject
After more than twenty years, we still can't talk or write in a straight-forward manner in this country about a disease which has taken the lives of millions around the world. Why? Because we still can't relate to sex or...
April 19, 2003
not the stone age, but pretty nearly
We've thrown Baghdad back at least 100 years. We can't even find the government which we claimed was the objective for the death and destruction we have visited upon Iraq, and I won't mention our failure to track down the...
where's the queer soldier's yellow ribbon?
He and she are not supposed to even be there, but they are. Moreover, like their comrades, most queers on duty in the Persian Gulf have lovers and partners at home anxious about their welfare, yet neither these soldiers and...
both sides feeling the pinch
We came as conquerors, and the conquered know it. Now they are asking questions, tomorrow they may want to do more. Robert Fisk has been in Iraq, in Baghdad itself, since well before the war began, and what he sees...
a Robert Ashley for the ages
For a taste of what people will be talking about and, yes, singing, twenty years from now, not unlike the way that the music of Donizetti or Verdi was popularly enjoyed in nineteenth-century Italy, head for The Kitchen tomorrow evening...
April 17, 2003
pitching for peace, caught in a war
Tim Robbins' credentials as a baseball fan are impeccable, but it appears that at least part of the baseball establishment is no fan of Tim Robbins. Ok, most of us know the facts already, but now we've "Nuke" Laloosh's own...
"The Madness of George Dubya"
Leave it to the British to make us laugh about the war. If we're all real good, maybe we'll even wind up seeing this delicious lampoon, inspired by our real life little kingy and the fictional Stanley Kubrick movie, "Dr....
April 15, 2003
scaring us to keep us in line
We just returned home from an art opening at the Whitney at Altria, across the street from Grand Central Station on Park Avenue. As we left the reception at 9 pm we were shocked to see several NYC police vans...
April 14, 2003
save the pedestals
A quote, à propos the events of the past week in Iraq, from the Polish Holocaust survivor and satirist Stanislaw Lec, supplied by David Remnick in his "The Talk of the Town" notes this week in The New Yorker:"When smashing...
another war
The bodies aren't warm yet in Iraq, and in fact many on both sides don't even know yet that they are about to be dead, yet White House political necessity is about to create another war, the Bush regime arguing...
April 13, 2003
guerilla billboards
Ron English borrows billboards to advertise his politics. Ron English puts up illegal billboards, so he has only one way of knowing if it has been a good day. "I consider it a success if I don't go to jail,"...
if we've won the battle, we've lost the war
We are going to be paying for our stupidity for generations. [The Americans] pulled up in a tank and are Westerners, the same people who promised all last century that the Arab world would be able to throw off the...
media blackouts
See Bloggy today for a sense of what is really happening in Baghdad, Washington and New York. Sample, straight from the Department of Defense itself:Rumsfeld: Let me say one other thing. The images you are seeing on television you are...
I'm too stressed, er, distracted,
watching the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it. So, for now, I think you should go to Bloggy for culture blogs. We dig up the stuff together, but just now I'm not able to focus enough on the art-which-keeps-me-mostly-sane in order to actually write about...
April 12, 2003
removed from life support, then killed
The Israeli government has killed another young International, as he tried to shield children from a tank-mounted machine gun in Gaza. About a dozen members of the peace movement had been trying to set up a protest tent on a...
are we nuts, or just crass materialists?
In today's anniversary memorial to both the pragmatism and the idealism of the 1930's the NYTimes seems to say it's the latter.On April 6, 1933, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill that would have made the standard work week 30...
"I hate what's going on"
Alnajar's father, Bassam, declares himnself "100 percent against the war," but he says he told his son: "You must do the best you can. You are an American soldier."The story is familiar, almost trite. But the Alnajjar family lives with...
April 10, 2003
the shame of "victory"
Today there's another report from Robert Fisk describing the hell that we have made of a Baghdad hospital.A small child with a drip-feed in its nose lay on a blanket. It had had to wait four days for an operation....
we see what we want to see
Bloggy calls for "A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE PLEASE" as he shows three photographs which belie representations by the American media that "Baghdad" celebrated the fall of a statue of Hussein in Firdos Square yesterday....
April 9, 2003
flag-wavers
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. -- Howard ZinnIt ain't over yet, as this headline reminds us: Bush Pleased but W.House Says U.S. Still at War. "They" intend to keep us in...
where are the WMDs?
We told ourselves and the world that we had to hurl death and destruction on a country the other side of the planet primarily because its alleged posession of weapons of mass destruction was an imminent threat to us. Where...
unpatriotic to suggest we not re-elect Bush?
Paul Krugman observes that the war on Iraq is but a skirmish when compared to the Second World War.Yet self-styled patriots are trying to impose constraints on political speech never contemplated during World War II, accusing anyone who criticizes the...
April 8, 2003
"such words are an obscenity"
In a visit to the city's al-Kindi Hospital, Robert Fisk walks among the civilians of Baghdad, confronting what he calls the real, immoral face of war.It looks very neat on television, the American marines on the banks of the Tigris,...
April 7, 2003
police shoot anti-war protestors in Oakland
This is not going well. See Bloggy for a picture of what war fanaticism and paramilitary violence looks like - here at home. There are more images and news stories linked on his post. Reuters' statement doesn't inspire much confidence,...
martial law without the law
We are all effectively under arrest now. Over a hundred people were penned in, attacked, handcuffed and arrested by riot police outside The Carlyle Group offices in Manhattan early this morning. A certain number of protestors had blocked the entrance...
"Can you help get my arms back?"
Yes, it looks like I'm only arguing from the particular to the general, and yes, it is has the elements of an argument from sentiment, but there is is, and it started with Reuters.The United States says it is taking...
where we really believe in affirmative action
Another milestone for the land of the free!An estimated 12 percent of African-American men ages 20 to 34 are in jail or prison, according to a report released yesterday by the Justice Department. The proportion of young black men who...
paying minorities to defend an empire
Even the NYTimes is finally reporting that we just might not have the representative citizen army we like to think we have.Does the United States military have to be representative of American society? The question has hung heavy since war...
April 6, 2003
"the most potent narcotic invented by humankind"
In spite of the more specific focus of its title, "The Press and the Myths of War," this short essay by Chris Hedges in The Nation this week may be the best thing you'll ever read on the larger subject...
we're just going to have to create terrorists ourselves
The war party in Washington had predicted terrorist strikes in the U.S. would accompany a war on Iraq, but now that it's gotten the war it longed for, it admits there is little evidence Al Qaeda or any other groups...
April 5, 2003
Hummer viagra and armchair patriots
My fellow citizens are now so pumped-up about the unique genius, virtue and power that permits, indeed calls, them to destroy and kill masses of people on the other side of the world (while Americans themselves can remain in family...
complaints and complaints
"Rumsfeld and his coterie now dare to complain that Saddam is violating the laws of war and does not fight fare," according to the editorial in the April 21 print edition of The Nation ."We are invading their country," Chief...
they got the government they paid for
They're just lucky they haven't yet had to deal with the bombs and the sabotage which can certainly be expected some time soon. The NYTimes Business day" section on friday included an article in its "Advertising" column about U.S. companies...
April 4, 2003
but it's not about Bin Laden or Hussein
Any more. Are we going to swallow this one too?WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Friday it would consider military action in Iraq a success even if U.S. forces failed to find President Saddam Hussein, whose appearance on...
the end of a nation of law
We've lost the "war against terrorism." An American citizen, a 38-year-old software engineer and author, has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Portland, Oregon, for the last two weeks. He has not been charged with a...
April 3, 2003
decades of education cuts yielding results
I actually thought that I had arrived at an epiphany the other day. In total frustration, and unable to understand how the country had bought into this regime with its message and reign of terror, I told myself only half...
"I should not be allowed"
For a totally painless argument about why the Bush administration must be resisted, go to the site of that excellent bunch of social humorists who call themselves The Onion.I Should Not Be Allowed To Say The Following Things About America...
reading to dead Iraqi children
In an interview with the brilliant and gloriously political playwright Tony Kushner, Cleveland Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown quotes him on the subject of our unelected one:"We're seeing this sort of grotesque, illegitimate recrudescence of the Reagan political agenda...
"Gay is good"
Our good friend Bill Dobbs writes us that there may be something in the old slogan, "Gay is Good," coined by Dr. Frank Kameny in the summer of 1968. A 20-year-old marine corps reservist in California is seeking conscientious objector...
who d'ya hav'ta fuck around here to get discharged?
Michelangelo Signorile reports that, in the midst of the real business of the military, its peak period, actual war, once again the Pentagon has decided that gays are too useful to be thrown out.Rather than speedily drumming out gays based...
it's no wonder we know nothing
It's official. It's impossible for Americans to get real news. Our "news" sources have actually become, almost sui generis, government propaganda. The Peter Arnett story is the latest, and perhaps the most dramatic, evidence of the sad development which has...
"The Island" is also our island
It was assembled in love and anger thirty years ago in a world most of us could hardly have imagined, safe in our enlightened beds, until now. In 1973, at the height of the Apartheid regime, the playwright Athol Fugard...
April 1, 2003
we can dream
Iraqis have just arrested Saddam Hussein, formed a secular democratic government of unity and demanded the U.S. and Britain leave the country immediately and pay reparations for 12 years of damages and loss of lives. April fool....
