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Fish on Rushdie, again
And another in an unintended series of remarks on censorship… In 2006, following the Danish cartoon controversy, Stanley Fish critiqued the liberal view of free speech and had scarcely a negative word to say about fanatics who were calling for the blood — literally — not just of cartoonists but also editors, writers and anyone else who offended them. I
The anti-Georgia consensus
Frank Rich, laying out the best line of attack against McCain, concludes with this: “Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?” Saakashvili is not a saint walking the earth, but he does not belong in the same
Herbert on Project Censored
While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship… I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list
The Olympics story that matters
As the world celebrates its athletes I’d like to acknowledge the determination and bravery of all those, Chinese and foreign, who have stood up in protest against the Chinese regime during these Olympic Games. Censoring the Internet is the absolute least of it. The regime set up three designated areas where protests would be allowed and then started detaining people
Give us your poor, continued…
Following up on Matt Davis’s City of Arrivals, on the immigrant experience in Philadelphia, and this story about a Malian couple gunned down in their store in July… this is in today’s Inquirer: Yesterday morning, almost exactly seven years to the day that Fakhur Uddin came to America from Bangladesh, he was slain – bound with duct tape and string,
On S.M.V.
My review of S.M.V. (Stanley Clarke, Marcus Miller, Victor Wooten) at the Keswick Theatre, in today’s Inquirer.
Heading back
[A shorter, modified version of this statement will appear in the Fall 2008 edition of Jazz Notes, the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association.] New York remains an unparalleled cultural mecca, but there’s really something to be said for getting out of town. In April 2007, for reasons pertaining to marriage, I moved to Philadelphia, immersing myself in another