As readers of this blog know, I’ve been troubled by nagging symptoms of surrealism in everyday life. President Bush fills me with the same uneasiness I feel when confronted with the sort of demented-clown figure that populates horror pictures: Chucky, or Leatherface, or the jaunty paleface who appears in \Friday The 13th,\ I think it …
I was in New York last week, mainly talking with groups of NYU arts students about roles for artists in social change. Every once in a while in such milieux, I run into the complacent view that artists are doing good just by being artists. It annoys me when people trot out essentialist ideas of …
I’ve been thinking about elections (not just the current one) because I’ll be speaking on Friday at a panel on “Elections and Democracy” at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. (Check my Web site for information on this, my \Clarity\ reading on 13 October, and other appearances this week in New York City.) The two …
Here it is, handily arranged in a single Quicktime movie a minute or two long.
This morning our local paper ? \The Contra Costa Times\ ? featured a Knight-Ridder story about Kerry’s denunciation of Bush as living “in a fantasy world of spin.” I was glad to see a glimmer of truth in print, but by the time I’d read past the lead, a sinking feeling replaced my pleasure. “For …
I apologize for disappearing for a week, but the Republican convention scared me blogless, which I think was the general idea. I didn’t watch the actual convention on TV, but I saw most of the stellar footage on Comedy Central’s very funny “Daily Show.” I had to scrape my jaw off the floor after three …
I was just listening to Republican Convention coverage on NPR and heard a young delegate from Nebraska describe herself as part of the “post-9/11 generation,” and therefore especially concerned about national security. She put me in mind of \Letter to the Next Generation\, a wonderful film by Jim Klein (you can find it at New …
Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, very near the liberal epicenter at Berkeley, I’ve yet to meet anyone who is now or has ever been a Bush voter. I?ve been thinking hard about this, because it’s in my nature to want to understand those with whom I disagree, and my encounters with their views …
In the Jewish spiritual tradition, there is a Torah reading–a portion of the Hebrew Bible–assigned to each week. This week’s text is \Shoftim\, from Deuteronomy 16:18-21.9, focusing on prohibitions and exhortations to justice. I?m by no means a biblical literalist, but I often find the weekly text resonates with the concerns of the moment, providing …
We had houseguests this past week, dear friends we?ve known for decades. Lingering over breakfast on Friday, we divvied up the \New York Times\. Whoever commented first on the employment report (200,000 new jobs had been forecast for July, but only 32,000 actually materialized) spoke what all of us were feeling: I hate to say …