In 1967, Diana Sands was playing Shaw’s Cleopatra in Atlanta opposite British actor Ronald Bush. At one point in the action, she kissed him on the forehead. The Ku Klux Klan swooped down to picket. Things were getting rough.
“I am not going anywhere,” Sands said. “I will not be run out of town.”
You’e got to see the Greenpeace video of pianist Ludovico Eunaidi playing amid our rapidly vanishing Arctic ice pack.
Why isn’t Hillary attacking Demented Donald’s denial of climate change?
Why isn’t the DNC platform getting out in front on this issue?
And you know there’s only one thing that could possibly make me feel that way!
It’s those stands of orange daylillies by the road–the ones I told you last year I was so pleased to see once more.
That’s what the rural suburbs leading out into the countryside were like, before the building boom of the 1980s. That’s when the deer freaked out and started eating everything in sight, developing a real taste for ornamental flowers.
Homeowners must now be taking to the roadside, deer-repellent in hand–with militant avidity.
Because I don’t think–pathetic fallacy be damned–that the creatures have really developed a strain of compassion toward flower-conscious humanity.
No, not after what we’ve done to their habitats.
For self-defeating, tone-deaf ineptitude few political organizations rival today’s Democratic National Committee. Just as could have been predicated, they’re bulldozing most positions espoused by Sanders out of the party platform. Their refusal to adopt even positions Clinton says she’s for could not be more damaging to Clinton’s candidacy. Nobody knows how to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory better than this group.
There isn’t a single time I walk through Grand Central Station’s magnificent ex-waiting room that I don’t deplore the decision to basically kick the public out. It is now a space people bustle through on their way in and out between 42nd Street and the terminal. Nobody sits down here anymore. The only reason to linger is to buy something. If you can believe it, it has–at least temporarily–been re-named some kind of food court and is filled with stalls selling stuff.
Before the last GCS renovation, the waiting room was apparently attracting the homeless, the ranks of which have of course risen dramatically over the past thirty years, and rose dramatically again under Emperor Bloomberg. I mean, let’s not do something to change the socio-economic conditions that breed homelessness–let’s just hide them from public view.
If there is a more potent symbol of the destruction of the public sector in post-Reagan USA than this travesty of a once-great civic amenity, I haven’t seen it. If you want to sit and wait for your train, you now are shunted to the cramped, low-ceilinged station master’s office. Because who are you, anyway? Just a lowly passenger, not the inhabitant of a metropolis that honors, includes, enfolds in grandeur its citizens and visitors.
It was the Voting Rights Act that prevented the GOP from stealing the 2012 presidential election and so naturally, it had to go, and our profoundly anti-democracy right-wing Supreme Court majority gutted it soon after.
Now, discriminatory voting restrictions will face much smoother sailing, and the Supreme Court’s corrupt partisanship could give us a Trump presidency. Ari Berman at the Nation tells us how.
Why isn’t the Democratic alleged-leadership speaking up? Why isn’t Hillary speaking up?
is doing exciting things at the Two River theater in Red Bank, New Jersey.
Their production of I Remember Mama closes at the end of this week, was highly recommended to me by someone who made the trip.
Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Frank Langella tap dances in a star turn The Father.
Caught the Saturday night show of The Father — an international success built on the strength of one really good trope (that’s all it takes!), that being telling the story of descent into Alzheimers through the perspective of the sufferer, rather than from “our” perspective. Thus, furniture really does move; family members really do say inconsistent things; people really do come and go. Powerful storytelling using the simplest of conceits, isn’t that what theater is about? Langella fantastic, though perhaps just a bit too much of a star turn. What a great year when Gabriel Byrne’s masterful, controlled, magnetic turn as James Tyrone Sr. is the runner up!
will be the subject of a MOMA tribute this summer! They’re screening all of her major films.
There’s a part of me that believes that the Gates are, in their own way and by their own lights well-meaning, but also extremely blinkered and prey as well to charlatans. After all, the more successful the individual, the more susceptible to flattery and blandishment–that seems to be a constant through history.
On the other hand, the Gates exemplify the way that the right wing’s destruction of the public sector in this country has opened the floodgates to inappropriate intervention into public policy by private individuals who operate without any accountability whatsoever. It’s government by mogulship. It’s a flipping disaster.
What in the world possessed Bill to start paternalistically lecturing Bolivia about chicken production? Bolivia, of course, has told Gates basically to go S.T.E.M. himself, which is what I say to Gates and other moguls who want to turn public education into technocratic obedience training (with calamitous consequences to so many things, including the arts.)
Diane Ravitch on her smashing blog asks: “Wouldn’t it be great if public schools and superintendents could respond like that to Bill Gates? Something like this: ‘We are professional educators and we know what we are doing. Please don’t offer money to try out your experiments on our children. Please take your advice and your money elsewhere.'”
