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Godard’s judgment
I’d never seen Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” before last night, when I watched it twice, first without David Sterritt’s commentary, then with. It’s funny, the moral authority people still impute to Godard (and his role model Bertolt Brecht) on the subject of politics. The long passages of Maoist cant in “Weekend” are supposed to “get us thinking,” notes Sterritt, and yet
On Marcin Wasilewski
My review of pianist Marcin Wasilewski and his trio, in today’s Inquirer.
Hillarygaffes
Think Hillary’s RFK gaffe is bad? Why isn’t anyone talking about her far worse Zimbabwe gaffe? Via Yglesias yesterday: Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.” “We’re
McWhorter on conscious rap
“Why The Roots make cool art, but lousy politics,” goes the headline of John McWhorter’s three-page discourse on “conscious hip-hop.” McWhorter’s a conservative fellow — I mean that literally, he’s a fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute — with a deep appreciation of rap but a contrarian take on the employment market, the prison-industrial complex and so forth. Lots of
Where to begin?
“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch. This appears early in Jodi Kantor’s piece on Florida Jews and the election. Since Obama’s “attitude towards Israel” is roughly 100 percent supportive, it’s hard to know what Ms. Weitz means. But it becomes clearer further down
The Israel-Syria talks
My good friend Yigal Schleifer of the Christian Science Monitor on the lead-up to the current Israel-Syria negotiations in Turkey.
From Cali to Gambia
The welcome news from California on marriage equality has generated lots of reactions, so I thought I’d note something quite in the other direction: this headline, via Brett at Harry’s Place — “President plans to kill off every single homosexual.” That’d be President Yahya Jammeh of Gambia, the tiny sliver of a country that bisects Senegal. In preparing for my
Murder by inaction
It is to the Chinese government’s credit that it is acting aggressively in response to the Sichuan earthquake, a tragedy beyond comprehension. But this shouldn’t obscure the destructive role China continues to play in the unfolding Burma crisis. Discussing the aftermath of Cyclone Nagris on the NewsHour the other night, Chinese ambassador Zhou Wenzhong told Margaret Warner: I think we