Fire in Istanbul, Rain in Vienna: An Inside look at Unrest in Turkey
This protest, in its rapid expansion, has grown to defy any specific cause. A list of several might do the job: A park under peril from construction, dead protesters – or rumors of dead protesters – and police brutality in general, especially after the extreme violence of the May Day gatherings. Then there’s Prime Minister Erdogan’s [...]
The Cuban Doctor and His American Taxi
I’ve been to Cuba three times. On each trip I planned to visit the island from one end to the other, but the attraction of Havana always ended up putting pay to such plans. Even so, I still made it to Matanzas, Cienfuegos, Viñales Valley, Cayo Largo and Varadero. Arriving in Havana can mark visitors [...]
An Anarchist Outsider Amongst Türkiye Komünists
Istanbul exists separate from Europe and Asia. From Tophane, where the Bosphorous meets the Mediterranean, or the Eurocentric streets of Taksim, it’s easy to find oneself staring at the horizon from a roof terrace, ringed by fresh skyscrapers and the lofty spires of mosques as the evening prayer surrounds you. The calls are dissimilar and [...]
Chanté, You Stay: Pride in the LBC
Sunday’s Pride parade demonstrated the fact that Long Beach is truly one of the most diverse cities in the world. All colors of the rainbow were beaming as they took to the streets. The Dikes on Bikes roared by, fists raised in the air. Gay veterans marched in step honoring the country they served, as [...]
Help Us Tell The Stories of Syrian Refugees
Everyday nearly 2,000 Syrians enter Jordan to escape the brutal civil war. With your help I plan to travel to the Syria/Jordan border this summer to document their stories. (for more information about my project click here). My colleague Jordan Hattar and I will be blogging daily at Bold Type, and our work will be featured in any publications interested in [...]
The Witch Is Dead
The hag has been put in hagiography. U.S. coverage of the death of Margaret Thatcher has been uniformly fawning, revisionist drool. I awoke to the news this morning, accompanied by Joe Scarborough’s fatuous and specious claims that anti-Thatcher sentiment was, and is something that could be confined to his classist idea of ‘the North’ of [...]
Oscar Pistorius and Journalism by Archetype
Now that Oscar Pistorius has been charged with the murder of his ‘model girlfriend’ Reeva Steenkamp, the appellation given him, Blade Runner, is too ironic for good taste. The crass mythic characterization of Pistorius as ‘the Bionic Man’ and Nike’s ‘Bullet in the Chamber’ and now, according to some very unpleasant Internet mythography, as ‘the [...]
Big Data And Why Spielberg Don’t Know Dick
A problem with philosophically charged reviews of sci-fi films is that they often treat technology as either an extension of an ancient question or secondary to the quandary at hand. Upon a recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian thriller Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story, my online hunt for a review venturing beyond [...]
McNeill and Burroughs: Ah Pook Is Here
OBSERVED WHILE FALLING: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me’ & THE LOST ART OF AH POOK IS HERE: Images From The Graphic Novel’ by Malcolm McNeill; Fantagraphics, November 2012. William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine, inaugural novel of what would become his “Nova Trilogy” (also including The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express) arrived on [...]
Zero Dark Thirty Waterboards the Facts
Since the dawn of American cinema historical events have been followed with jingoistic white propaganda films. Just to name a few: WWI had Charlie Chaplin’s The Bond. WWII had Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Casablanca, and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 rightfully belongs on the list. Zero Dark Thirty is the latest such venture. Director Kathryn Bigalow [...]
ANGELA CARTER’S THE PASSION OF NEW EVE
Angela Carter’s anti-mythic The Passion of New Eve (1977) is a novel that, for me, resides in easy company with Jean-Luc Godard’s new wave Weekend (1967) and Derek Jarman’s post-punk Jubilee (1978). Visually, with its hysterical sexually dimorphic revolutionaries, graffiti, machine guns, dystopian landscapes, surgical Sadomasochism and improvised guerrilla skirmishes The Passion of New Eve [...]
Lords of Business, Gods of Rape
Everyday you’re bound to hear someone make an asinine comment or say something vilely stupid, but no one does so with the hubris and particular grace of today’s GOP candidates – especially when talking about rape. They excel at the absurd, exclaiming such inanities as exemplary of exceptional leadership, valor, and public policy; these are [...]
Treme’s New Character Based on A. C.Thompson and his Invistigative Story: Katrina’s Hidden Race War
Tonight’s season premiere of Treme, written by David Simon and Anthony Bourdain, featured a new character based on Pro Publica journalist A.C. Thompson. In 2009 Thompson published an investigative story in The Nation on police officers who where ordered to shoot looters. In the wake of Katrina officers not only opened fire killing unarmed civilians in [...]
The Other Video Depicting Islam That Should Have Your Attention
There seems little challenge to the claims that what provoked the attacks on the US Embassies in Cairo and Benghazi, killing US ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three of his staff members, was an angry mob incensed by a trailer for an obscurely made film, Innocence of Muslims. The 14-minute long video depicting the [...]
Edward Hopper and the Dissolution of Pulp
Edward Hopper painted American melancholia, scoping the silent exhaustion and unuttered shame of men and women so isolated and suicidal that one can only wonder at the desperation shadowing them. These mute Hitchcockian scenes (his 1925 painting House by the Railroad is worthy of Norman Bates – incidentally Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, got his [...]
When Vaccination Backfires
An acquaintance of mine, lets call her Ruth, has been saturating my Facebook ‘news feed’ with pictures of her child. It started slowly. Photos of backpacking trips with her future husband and nights out at the bar, turned into pictures of a bridal party and a recently purchased home. Overnight a henna painted belly and [...]
No Sex Please, We’re Nerds: The Gernsback Continuum and the Neutering of Science Fiction
The sexual repression of science fiction began in what is now Tribeca, New York. More precisely: the wormhole, the vortex of this Bermuda Triangle of missing sex was located at 53 Park Place, New York, NY, the editorial address of Hugo Gernsback and Dr. Thomas O’Conor Sloane. It was from this address that Gernsback launched [...]
