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“This is how they fight”
Last night during a panel discussion at Barnard College, I heard choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women talk about what she called the “pitfalls” of the radical left politics she embraced in the ’70s. Mentioning the Black Panthers and other cultural nationalist groups, she spoke of her discomfort with “reducing people to generalities.” To paraphrase, Zollar felt
Holy lands
Following up my post of Oct. 21, here is an arresting comment about militant Islam and the notion of holy land. Noah Feldman’s NY Times Mag piece on nuclear arms and the Muslim world includes reflections on bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam — specifically his treatise “Defense of Muslim Lands”: In it, Azzam argued that not a single hand span
Shostakovich at 100
Yesterday I had the thrill of attending a Shostakovich matinee at Avery Fisher Hall. Valery Gergiev conducted the Kirov Orchestra, straight outta St. Petersburg, in a performance of the 8th and 13th symphonies. This was the final concert in Gergiev’s 2006 series: all 15 symphonies in the 100th birth year of the great, unknowable Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-1975). Gergiev conducted without
Dylan on Broadway?
Jody Rosen of Slate has the word on Twyla Tharp’s stage musical inspired by the music of Bob Dylan. It ain’t pretty. It’s hilarious, in fact: Sure, Dylan composed “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But to turn that modest folk-rock reverie into a three-dimensional dream-vision, with a singer seated on a neon-lighted sickle moon suspended 20 feet above a stage where dancers
Sounds to cherish 5
Another in an occasional series… Paul Pieper, Stories of Before (Bright Orange)A strong guitar player from Maryland. He placed second in the 1995 Monk competition. I first heard him on the Relax CD, by 79-year-old tenor saxist Buck Hill (who is apparently a mail carrier by day). After hearing Pieper’s adept, snaky lines I felt I had to investigate. My
“We answer to the name of liberals”
Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have written a new manifesto for those unashamed of the word “liberal.” It appears in the November print edition of the American Prospect, and it’s online as well. It reflects my current thinking more closely than the Euston Manifesto, the UK version of which I signed earlier this year. Below is the Ackerman-Gitlin text in
They hate us because…
PBS ran an excellent documentary this week on the war photographers’ collective known as “Seven.” This is a smart, experienced group of people with diverse views. One of them, now focused on photographing the American social and political scene, offered his thoughts on Bush’s oft-repeated slogan that terrorists “hate us for our freedom.” I can’t pin down this person’s name
Raimondo shills for Putin
Right-wing paleocon antiwar activist Justin Raimondo, last referenced here, has now penned a hallucinatory defense of Russian president Vladimir Putin — get this — “a capable, no-nonsense, and staunchly nationalist leader.” Raimondo gripes about “elegies praising [brutally murdered journalist Anna] Politkovskaya as a veritable saint.” He works up to this: Those who criticize Putin for supposedly reintroducing authoritarian rule can