Obama preserved his civility. Too bad he still hasn’t found a way to deep-six the deep voodo of Republican assholes like John McCain. Or reverse his own unwillingness to nationalize the banks. At least not so far. Ugh! (Crossposted at HuffPo) EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Obama knocked it out of the park tonight at the Abe Lincoln bicentennial dinner in Springfield, Illinois. Stunning. He created an unexpected word picture: Here in Springfield, it is easier, perhaps, to reflect on Lincoln the man rather than the marble giant, before Gettysburg and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Bull Run, before emancipation was proclaimed and […]

I came across this KPFA-FM radio recording by accident. It totally suprised me. I had no memory of it until I tuned in. The archive at radiOM.org notes: In a program that was recorded on Feb. 13, 1970, [in Berkeley, Cal.], Jan Herman reads from the 5th issue of his magazine “San Francisco Earthquake.” The […]

The one-stop shop for all things William Burroughs, RealityStudio, has had a design overhaul. “I was really anxious not only to spruce up the site a bit, but to make the range of content more apparent,” RS godfather Supervert says. “With the old site, a random visitor would have had no idea just how much […]

Wanna see a cool slide show? Click the image of the collage, taken from an eye-popping exhibition of collages by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach that was curated by John McWhinnie in New York, in 2007. I wrote about the exhibition when it opened. Click for the side show. Ginger Killian Eades created the slide […]

There is much to say about China. But I’m not the one to say it. The world there was more or less opaque to me. Not surprising, given the fact that I can’t speak Cantonese or Mandarin, or any of their other languages. I did have a grand time in Hong Kong, a city that […]

Blogging to resume … … when jet lag relents. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

Gone to China. Light blogging ahead. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

An artist friend of mine sent me a brilliant image he saw (and admired) a long time ago. He believes it was posted at Dark Roasted Blend. He can’t remember when it was posted or whose image it is. Can anyone identify and/or date it? The reason I ask: In the issue of The New […]

Harold Pinter, who died two days ago at 78, received the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005. Too sick to travel to Stockholm to accept the award, he gave his Nobel Lecture on video: The lecture begins with a quotation: In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real […]

Elisabeth Bumiller’s Pentagon Memo takes note of the “semantic dance: What is the definition of a combat soldier?” Even though the agreement with the Iraqi government calls for all American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June, military planners are now quietly acknowledging that many will stay behind as […]

Lately I haven’t been paying much attention to “Countdown.” Non-stop, over-the-top bluster can get on anybody’s nerves, and Keith Olbermann has managed to get on mine — even though his rants take guts and even though I agree with them. But whenever he has Jonathan Turley on the show, as he did last night, I […]

The Iraqi TV journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi who threw his shoes at the Bullshitter-in-Chief is not the first to do it. The difference is Zaidi missed. But as Ed Sullivan used to say, he put on “a really big shew.” Too bad Señor Wences isn’t around to comment. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit

You just read the special five-day, 16-blogger AJ conversation A Debate on Arts Education, right? OK, so maybe you didn’t. Well, never mind. Here’s the real thing: arts education in action, musically speaking. It’s a work for trombone choir and tuba by a composer who writes that he dedicated it to the memory of “the […]

At the Council on Foreign Depredations Relations this morning I expected to hear what I thought would be a Southern-fried swan song from Laura Bush. Instead it turned out to be a speech someone wrote for her about women’s rights, because today marks the 60th anniversary of the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She […]

I don’t know what took me so long. It’s old news by now. But I’m still amazed. Here’s a text in English about William Styron, chosen at random from this blog. (Actually, someone else chose it.) Now here it is in Spanish, in French, in German … OK, how about Chinese? Gawd! Put in any text […]

Malcolm Mc Neill’s unpublished memoir about his longtime collaboration with William S. Burroughs, Observed While Falling, is just as spellbinding as the lost art of Ah POOK IS HERE, his current show at Salomon Arts (now extended through Jan. 16 ) in Manhattan. Mc Neill is one of those artists who can really write. The […]