Lobenthal.com

David Swanson at warisacrime.org defines television “news” stations and the way they “fill fluff that no one listens to into the spaces between advertisements for crap no one buys.”

“Anytime you see my name on the schedule, just go sit down in the corner and I’ll forget you’re even there,” Antony Tudor said to me in 1983 when I asked if I could watch his rehearsals.

He knew me by sight, from being around Tchernichova.  And I think he really was being gracious.  And yet, I must say, that eventually I neurotically reflected–Does he mean that I’m that forgettable?

No, I don’t think he did.  But making you question yourself, stripping your defenses was something he knew how to do.  Where the dancers were concerned, that meant that he enabled them to get past their superficial ego, to stop letting their eyes get peeled on their own glass ceiling.   It’s probably a little uncomfortable to function that way, but with that vulnerability on the part of the performer, extraordinary things will happen, and they did in his ballets.

Dancers are always keyed-up before a performance, but it did seem to me that there was an extra quota of seriousness and intensity before one of his ballets was performed.

Of course sometimes his behavior was gratuitous: there are some awful stories about the way he treated people.  I didn’t see cruelty; I saw intimations of a temper and will that were perhaps all the more daunting for not being completely deployed.  (He was of course old and had had a heart attack.)  But he did, invariably, get his point across.

Laura Nyro’s Save the Country has never been more pertinent.

I recently listened to it on the Spread Your Wings and Fly CD, a record of a concert she gave at the Fillmore East in 1971.  I just bought it; I hadn’t listened to her in a while.

But as a teen in the late-70s, I really grooved to the way that Nyro understood so many emotional weirdnesses—adolescence is of course a time when you’re saturated with them.

I wasn’t at the time so interested in her political bent, for all that I’ve been political at least since I was ten, when I marched in the Vietnam Moratorium in November 1969.

Nyro may insist, “In my mind I can’t study war no more!”

But war has become part of the core, required U.S. curriculum.

For the used-Bentley salesman running things across the pond:

Why, indeed, were —

“British firms granted permission to export deadly chemicals to Syria”

??????????

It’s all over the British press.

Wesley Messamore at PolicyMic tells us about Washington’s own use of chemical weapons:

“10 Chemical Weapons Attacks Washington Doesn’t Want You to Talk About.”

In U.S. politics today there’s hardly a more preposterous sight than John Kerry wagging his finger at us.  That digit belongs to someone who may shortly become as disgraced as his predecessors Powell and Rice, and for exactly the same reason.  (On balance, it’s a good thing for Hillary that she’s already cleared out of Foggy Bottom.)

The “mainstream” “news” media  (it’s reached the point where both have to be quote-encompassed) have, as usual, got the narrative ass-backwards.

Obama is not going to be weakened by the possible defeat of his virtual war (thank you, John McCain) declaration.  He is going to be weakened by his war.  His presidency will, for all intents and purposes, basically be over.

And the first thing, as the billions go up in smoke, that the right-wing will likely demand (and a weakened Obama would very probably accede t0) are cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

He did well leading the Third Campaign of Stars and Stripes at New York City Ballet last May.

And he has engaged some wonderful NYCB dancers for his Dance Collective, bringing it to the Joyce last month, and garnering highly favorable reviews from Oberon’s Grove and Alastair Macauley in the Times.

And, closer to home, Judy Gelman Myers in City Arts.

No, I didn’t go; I don’t think I went to any performances last month.

But I will try to next time.

of GW Bush’s catastrophic deception–that’s what Obama’s mad rush to war is starting to look like to Robert Parry.

If you want to know how ill the “mainstream” media is, consider the fact that Robert Parry doesn’t write for it, but rather for his own Consortiumnews.com website.

This is the quintessence of falling empire: billions and billions on war while the nation rots.

Robert Reich writes on his blog:

“We are not debating what’s happening to our nation. We are not creating jobs for the long-term unemployed. We are not raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC, or providing enough food stamps to keep working Americans out of poverty. We are not improving the nation’s poorest schools or providing enough low-income housing to keep destitute families off the nation’s streets.

“We are not reforming our tax code or fixing our schools or reforming our brutal immigration system. We are not addressing the widening gap between a few at the top who are doing better than ever and a larger number below who are sinking. We are not getting big money out of politics.

“We are paralyzed at home — as we turn our attention to a potential quagmire abroad. This is the great tragedy of our time.”

and ditched that copy of The Faerie Queene that’s sat on her night table?

We haven’t heard much from her since her mediated endorsement earlier this week.

Does she realize what this war is going to do to Democratic prospects?