It seems I’ve been drafted to give the last word on a whole generation, a whole epoch of human life, struggle and whatever realization. The real boundaries of our lives are material as well as in our heads. The question is how do we use one dimension against the other. How do we fly when … Read more

First thanks Edwin Frank for enabling us to reprint Greil Marcus’s introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Gilbert Seldes’ The Stammering Century. “I came gradually to want to prove nothing,” Gilbert Seldes writes in his introduction to The Stammering Century. This simple sentence is a key to this galvanic, awestruck chronicle of the revivals, … Read more

It is customary to view principle and compromise as antagonists and sometimes they are. But there is also the principle of compromise essential to the democratic process. Ideally, it is a bringing together of opposing sides in a peaceful and rational manner. It assumes the legitimacy of opposition within reasonable constraints. Democracy “suffers” from conflicts … Read more

On Inauguration Day and on the day before the State of the Union address, I went to Serious Times dialogues – academic seminars (at New York’s School of Visual Arts) where American radicals ponder “Why doesn’t the United States make social progress?” What follows here takes in the distance between discourse there and spectacles of…social … Read more

A. I am standing outside the rest room near the children’s section on the ground floor of the main Brooklyn Public Library, a sumptuously renovated palace of soaring ceilings and gold inlays. Sumptuously renovated, that is, in every respect but one: the restroom is tiny, jammed, totally unequipped to accommodate the constant flow of visitors. … Read more

For two years or so Newark’s May Whore, Corey Booker, never set foot in the City Council chambers. Why? So he wd not have to be confronted by the peoples’ elected representatives. That is why he is called our “Virtual Mayor,” because on the tube he is ubiquitous, on radio, at press conferences from undisclosed … Read more

Word of Buddy Guy’s Kennedy Center honor reminds me of Scott Spencer’s story about going to see Guy and Jr. Wells at a Chicago blues club in 1965 (which he told in his First review of Gregg Allman’s CD Low Country Blues http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2012/04/low_country_blu.html). Spencer’s tale of this 60s trip to Theresa’s evokes the moment of … Read more