Lobenthal.com

Since summer now extends into what was once fall, how appropriate that the Metropolitan Playhouse down on East Fourth Street revives S.N. Behrman’s 1936 End of Summer beginning October 7. Behrman’s one of our greatest playwrights, but his work isn’t as often seen as it should be. Just happened to re-read this particular play, however, not too long ago, so I feel synchronized. Like last year’s The Awful Truth, End of Summer originally starred Ina Claire. In his autobiography, Behrman mentions owning a recording of a performance she gave of his 1931 Biography. . . where is it now?

In End of Summer, the Claire character almost falls for a strong man, a shrink with definite fascistic tendencies. Relevant in 1936–relevant this election season.

It’s been a long, long time since I first went to Staten Island for one of the riotous parties she threw in her parents’ historic old home.

It’s even been a long time since I last saw her, at a memorial tribute to Fred Koury, past principal of City-as-School when we were both there in the 1970s.

But last month we had a great catch-up conversation.

Now she works at the NYC Department for the Homeless, and she’s restoring the family home. Her parents are gone, but she’s established in her mother’s honor the Lathrope Voorspuy Memorial Scholarship Fund. Its mission is “to encourage grass-roots activism by underwriting the cost for students in programs which train for community organizing, or political candidacies.”

Jim Naureckas at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting finds it interesting and lamentable that “mainstream” “news” media journalists can’t seem to muster up any interest in the fact that Amy Goodman was arrested–by the state of North Dakota!– for trespassing when she practiced the public interest-protecting act of real journalism at the construction site of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

But Amy Goodman is indeed an actual journalist, not a corporate employed-and-muffled “journalist.” And she routinely puts to shame those I will generously call her colleagues.

Senator Warren shoots a shot across HRC’s bow:

Warren’s letters to the DOJ and FBI remind Hillary that she is not getting a free ride: support from Warren is conditional. Hillary’s love affair with Wall Street has to cool. You know, we’ll give each other some to think. . .

Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade have some things to say. . .

“It’s long past the time for the U.S. Senate to stop conducting isolated, piecemeal investigations and undertake the type of in-depth hearings that the Senate held from 1929 to 1932 that led to the public’s understanding of the serial criminal activities on Wall Street that had produced the Great Depression and which led to the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act — legislation which protected this nation for 66 years until its repeal in 1999 during the Bill Clinton administration.”

And of course, without Warren’s support, HRC may get about 100 Sanders supporters to vote for her.

Will HRC finally wake up?

It’s my birthday present from the hood, perhaps:

I actually heard a political comment made by someone in the West Village!
Not talking about his lovers, his career, his commodities.

Two guys sitting on a townhouse stoop. I walk by and catch:

“. . . Obama has been so harsh to whistleblowers. . . ”

Music to my ears.

It is a war, and it needs to be recognized and described as such, and it goes hand in hand with the wars on literacy, on public education, on enfranchisement.

Virtually no government funding, shamefully little “mainstream” commercial media attention, and perhaps worst of all, the end of arts programs in public schools.

You go to the coffee shop and peripherally take in the endless chatter by customers about whom and what they are consuming, and then you read “When Will New York City Sink?” by Andrew Rice in New York Magazine, and marvel at the folly of people’s refusal to see beyond the bridge of their own nose.

And you also look at the supposedly savvy political skills of Hillary Clinton, and wonder why she is not clobbering Trump about his deranged dismissal of the reality of catastrophic climate change, even as it is already happening all around us.

Now Streisand’s doing it. Isn’t it time you did?

The memoir thing.

Over last winter, a falling tree crashed into the garden fence, behaving with intolerable rudeness to a yellow day lilly. And so, over the course of day lilly blooming season, no yellow day lillies from this traumatized plant. But the tree was cleaned up, strips of barks it shed left to enrich the soil. And the day lilly slowly recharged itself. And now–lo and behold! A few tenacious yellow day lilly blossoms to enliven this torrid September week.

Yes, Krugman is right, Hillary is being mau-maued by the press–but no more so than was Sanders. And that’s what the “mainstream” “news” media does to Democrats: we have a media owned by right-wing moguls and corporations that espouses right-wing causes, agendas, frames—and I mean shamelessly. And endlessly. That is nothing more than a given, but it’s good Dr. K keeps reminding us. I’m not being sarcastic–he has a huge audience and a bully pulpit.

But the establishment liberal commentariat really has some explainin’ to do when it comes to Hillary’s conduct as a nominee. For one thing, her manic pivot to the right since realizing she had clinched the nomination. Are they addressing that? Ha!

At Commondreams, Sonali Kolhatar headlines: “This Election Is Hillary Clinton’s to Lose, and She’s Screwing It Up”

And man, does she enumerate the ways. Among them:

“Her refusal to even attempt to embrace bold progressive values and her inability to read the simmering nationwide anger over economic and racial injustice are the larger obstacles to her popularity.”