As a pretentious, factitious fantasist, we know by now that Peggy Noonan takes second place to no one.
And Jon Stewart rightly excoriates her show of manufactured outrage—replete with bizarre facial tics– about the IRS “scandal,” in a segment on her “Nooney Tunes.”
David Kurtz at Talkingpointsmemo.com flags this one.
Jim Meyer at Grist Magazine lists us as one of the U.S. cities that will be most hard hit by climate change.
Read this, fellow citizens, and get your heads out of the sand!
Last night at the Metropolitan Opera, ballet seemed, as it doesn’t enough of the time these days, like an art form that it still important and respect-worthy. American Ballet Theatre’s triple bill was made up of Mark Morris’s Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes, Ashton’s A Month in the County, and Balanchine’s Symphony in C.
In the third movement of the Balanchine, Xiomara Reyes and Herman Cornejo danced with spirit and buoyancy, mediated by taste–an approach to virtuosity that is also quite rare these days.
This program gets two more performances today, and a fourth and final season repeat tomorrow night. Highly recommended!
Sandra Steingraber’s pre-teen child told her that recently, as she relates poignantly in Orion Magazine. (I got to this via Alternet.org) And Steinbrager has decided to do something about it. She’s going to get INVOLVED!
And it’s darn well about time. The educated middle class, which should have been the driver for action on climate change, instead has used virtually the same amount of energy vigorously practicing denial.
Steinbrager reports the way her adult friends repeatedly exclaim “This is crazy!” after each accumulated incident of freakier and more destructive weather. I’ve heard the same thing myself, but accompanied by a very little first-hand evidence of middle class parents seeking to understand the larger pattern and its implications—let alone demand that our so-called leaders do something about it.
Granted, part of the reason for the denial is paralyzing fear, but really, I’ve run out of tolerance for the refusal of the middle class to start responding to an issue that so radically threatens their children’s future. It’s on a par with their denial of the economic restructuring that leaves them saddled with the tax burden that the rich should rightfully assume, leaves them paying outlandish amounts for school tuition, that has resulted in a vastly less mobile and just society than the one in which they were raised.
The response to that? What I see first hand is ever-more obsessive anxiety about money without any concomitant resolve to address the economic assault.
And Jonathan Karl is, apparently, one of the worst. I say apparently because there are so many whose lies, obfucscations, omissions challenge my self-control to the point where I only watch them at other people’s apartments or computers, because that way I won’t let myself throw something at the screen.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting describes the way that, however fradulent so many of them are, Karl may be a new low.
That’s Washington’s plan—I say “Washington” because there now seems to be a consensual Democratic-Republican game plan.
Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian lays out all the chilling details.
On the third floor of the Library for the Performing Arts, home to the research collections, there’s a great little exhibit on Andre Charlot’s Revue of 1924, and the way the show and its Broadway-debuting stars—Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice Lillie, and Jack Buchanan—came, saw and conquered these shores. And did they ever deserve to do so, as did Jessie Mathews and Constance Carpenter, also making their Broadway debuts
I didn’t know, but the exhibit photographically reminds us, that the Revue featured a parody of Les Sylphides!
The Library’s Barbara Stratyner put it together.
Reuters reports on the Congressional Budget Office’s confirmation of what we already knew.
If Obama possessed genuine political and policy comprehension, he’d ramp down the whole hot-air front IMMEDIATELY.
But with Gene Sperling stumping at Pete Peterson’s carnival. . . .
A surprising number of the former-theatrical hotels in the West Forties have survived splendidly.
When I started haunting the theater district’s byways during the 1970s, these old hotels, apart from the Algonquin, were in a state of slumber and neglect. They’ve now been spruced up and repurposed as havens for tourists or visiting business people.
One that did not endure, however, is the Seymour on West 45th Street, right next to the brownstones that then housed the venerable Coffee House Club. Both landmarks are gone now, but the Seymour is given detailed commemoration by Tom Miller on his Daytonian in Manhattan blog.
Want to know how that “dark money” group of Zuckerberg’s somehow pivoted from promoting immigration reform to promoting ecosystem destruction?
Let Common Dreams’s Jacob Chamblerlain tell you all about it. And cheer the progressive groups that are pulling their ads off Facebook!
