May 2010

In Memory, and with Thanks

May 31, 2010

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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Sunday Matinee – Double Down (Part 2)

May 30, 2010

A Film Noir by A. Jay Adler DOUBLE DOWN Part Two The Story So Far Part I: Jack Miles, rock n’ roll roadie, has returned home looking for a job. He meets old friends and begins new love. Her name is Sonny. She’s a detective. Jack’s estranged identical twin is about to be rich. Now, [...]

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How We Lived on It (19) – Joe Cuba

May 29, 2010

Video Compilation: mambohiphop From the New York Daily News Obituary, February 16, 2009 — Salsa pioneer Joe Cuba, who was born the son of a Harlem candy-store owner and grew up to become the “Father of Latin Boogaloo,” died Sunday. He was 78. Cuba died at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan from complications of [...]

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The Conquest of Native America… Continues

May 28, 2010

One of the favorite argumentative gambits of conservatives and those otherwise unsympathetic to the making of present amends for past national crimes, is just that point – it’s in the past. It’s over. Let it go. And let me tell you something: I didn’t commit any crime. Leaving aside the validity of that argument, which [...]

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Scylla and Charybdis

May 27, 2010

To begin, the politics of policy is so often so dishonest that one marvels that so much so decent has been achieved. So many so foul, who know it and know it not, so many so foolish, who never know it. How to enter into it all and be neither foul nor fool? The dilemma [...]

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Jazz Is: 3 – Jammin’ the Blues

May 26, 2010

I’m repeating this “Jazz Is” entry from “How We Lived on It” (2), but it is so exceptional, no collection of jazz riches should be without it. The better quality of the two full-length versions available at Daily Motion is ad defaced, while the other has very poor video quality, and Mili’s filmmaking is too [...]

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Stupidity

May 25, 2010

It’s everywhere. You look to your right: it’s stupid. You look to your left: it’s stupid. Open a newspaper (really – does anyone “open” a newspaper anymore?): stupid. Turn on the television: stupider. Michael Steele, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin? So stupid. It may not be contagious, but it sure is influential. What’s a non-stupid [...]

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Mystery of Judgment Update

May 24, 2010

In my famous (in my own mind) email to Jeffrey Goldberg offering him a question for Peter Beinart, I closed by stating Ask him why this is not his focus, why this is not the article he published in NYRB. And “I’m a Jew, so I’m concerned with the behavior of Jews” is an evasion. [...]

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The Mystery of Judgment

May 24, 2010

Too often, it can be hard to figure how some people can be so wrong. That’s why we have political parties, so we can put all the wrong people in the other party. That way we don’t have to put bells on them to know when they’re coming. As Graham Greene wrote in The Quiet [...]

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Sunday Matinee – Double Down (Part 1)

May 23, 2010

A Film Noir by A. Jay Adler DOUBLE DOWN Part One (In which a rock & roll roadie comes home. He meets old friends and encounters a detective. She is beautiful. She tells him to spread ‘em.) EXT. A Dry Valley – DAY/Night A panoramic view of Caifornia’s Central Valley. Bright, washed out sunlight. Slowly, [...]

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Eating Poetry (XIV)

May 22, 2010

How Fortunate the Man with None by Bertolt Brecht

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Apologizing to Native America – in a Whisper

May 21, 2010

Reader Yuras Karpau, from Belarus, asks in the comments section what I think of Wednesday’s official apology by the United States government to American Indians. Yuras has an interest in Native American issues and is an ardent advocate of the cause of Leonard Peltier. My first answer to such questions is always that it doesn’t [...]

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The God Particle

May 20, 2010

Once upon a time in an intellectual land far, far away, philosophy concerned itself, among other matters, with questions such as the nature of meaning in life, how to live in the absence or presence of God, and why there is something rather than nothing. A great existential cartoon, which still hung on a bulletin [...]

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Picture This: 1 – Julia Dean

May 19, 2010

This is the first in a new series presenting the work of documentary and fine art photographers, beginning with Julia Dean, of the sad red earth, The Julia Dean Photo Workshops, and this writer’s affections. Julia has been shooting and teaching photography for over thirty years. At her workshops in Los Angeles, at Venice Beach, [...]

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Jews Denied Entry

May 18, 2010

Good. I got your attention. Yesterday we got the double whammy – fodder for the BDS (Bias, Deceit, Sensationalism) movement – of news of Noam Chomsky’s denied entry to the West Bank and Peter Beinart’s lamentable New York Review of Books article buying into the prevailing Left narrative of the American Jewish leadership’s moral decline [...]

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Losing Our Heads over Losing Citizenship

May 17, 2010

I t happens every time. There is a threat, a genuine threat, of whatever degree, and some people overreact to it. Some people underreact to it too. Often the underreaction is a reaction to the overreaction. Often it works the other way around. We don’t need to play chicken or egg. It works both ways. [...]

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No Generalizations about Generalizations, Please

May 14, 2010

The other day over at Yaacov Lozowick’s Ruminations an interesting discussion ensued over several posts consequent to some superciliously obnoxious troll taking Yaacov to task, along with Anthony Julius, author of the new Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, for making generalizations about English culture. As is often the case with [...]

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Nazi Tourette’s

May 14, 2010

The definitive Glenn Beck take down. What it says about the state of the American political scene that the most incisive commentary on it is being offered by satirists is subject for another day. Go to the bathroom. Empty your bladder. Come back and watch. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p [...]

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Life in Motion

May 13, 2010

I drove the motor home down to San Diego for servicing yesterday for its final repairs and detailing in preparation for sale. It has been sitting in storage, and after driving it around the country for over a year, I hadn’t been behind the wheel for two months, since we moved out of it into [...]

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Jazz Is 2

May 12, 2010

It is indication of the secret repositories of soul soaring talent that Dwight Tribble, the vocalist you are about to hear if you wisely stick around, worked for some years in the audio-visual department of my college. He established his career locally, playing clubs throughout Los Angeles with his own ensemble, then adding to that [...]

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Honest Injun

May 11, 2010

Image by United Nations Photo via Flickr It can be difficult to assess progress in the movement to recover from the history and consequences of indigenous culturcide. Great symbolic and conceptual achievements are growing. In the former category is the Australian apology to its aboriginal population. In the latter is the 2007 U.N. Declaration on [...]

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