Left Behind: The Rapture

by

Michael Berube, The Left at War, New York University Press
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotexte
Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City, Verso

The three works under consideration here – the first, a survey of assorted leftist interventions from the past couple of decades, the second, a political sensation from a couple of years ago, the third, an assemblage of texts from the 50s and 60s – have nothing to do with anything in the news now. But, taken together, they tell us enough about where we are. It isn’t good.

Read more

Grounded: Thinking Through the “Ground Zero” Mosque

by

Prologue: New York Story

I went in for the matzo ball soup and ended up married to a Muslim. I met my wife-to-be while she was working as a hostess at Carnegie Deli. Her New York immigrant story has been in my head as I’ve read political narratives about the “Ground Zero” mosque. I might have given New Republic editor Martin Peretz the benefit of doubt when he wondered whether he should “honor” the people behind the mosque by “pretending they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment when I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse it.” But I knew in my gut he was out to lunch once he’d spelled out his own bias in his now notorious statement: “[F]rankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.” When I read that line, I flashed on my wife leading me around a Senegalese Sufi cemetery on a blindingly hot day in search of her beloved grandmother’s grave.

Read more

Appraising Tony Judt

by

Tony Judt lost his courageous battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Shortly before his death, he appeared on the Charlie Rose program, strapped to a chair, speaking through an enabling device with astonishing force and clarity on a wide range of subjects. I can’t imagine anyone, whether critic or admirer, unmoved by the scene.

Read more

Fish and Chips: The Crisis of the Humanities in the U.K. and U.S.A

by

Politics in the United States and Great Britain are again marked by intense hostility toward the expanded role of modern liberal states. Since most opponents of public investment are simultaneously enthusiastic consumers of many of its results—for example, public education—the feebleness of most defenses of public investment is usually hard to understand. But not always, because it is notoriously difficult to persuade people one cannot be bothered to understand, or toward whom one is visibly contemptuous.

Read more

When I Paint My Masterpiece

by

ELGIN REDUX?

When Chicago Bulls forward Luol Deng missed his second of two free throws with two seconds remaining and his team leading 108-106 in the third game of the Chicago-Cleveland first round NBA playoff series, it was clear LeBron James would not have an overtime period of five minutes in which to add to his total of 39 points.

Read more

The Drop Edge of Yonder

by

Rudolph Wurlitzer’s novels have moved a generation of writers and rockers. He’s carried his themes and dreams along the “celluoid trail,” writing screenplays for memorable movies such as “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” “Little Buddha,” “Walker” and “Candy Mountain.” His latest novel, “The Drop Edge of Yonder,” is a book (as per Patti Smith) “you watch as you read, cast the film as you reread, and create a sequel as you sleep.” Scott Spencer has wondered at “Yonder” too: “I have never read anything like it. Every page transports the reader from the cerebral to the visceral and back again, until you start to feel that in the end there is no difference between the two.” Take the following chapters from Wurlitzer’s soulful trip as an invite to get “Yonder” .

Read more

Free at Last

by

Willie Mitchell: 1928-2010

Willie Mitchell slipped away this January 5 just past. Trumpet player, bandleader, songwriter, he was foremost a producer. Not a celebrity producer, he was better than that.

Read more

Politics and Theater

by

In 2007, in the midst of a glut of anti-Iraq-War plays, experimental theatre venue P.S. 122 presented the most challenging piece of political theatre that I’ve seen performed in New York in my lifetime: Young Jean Lee’s Church.

Read more

Battles of Ajami

by

Fifty years ago, the Israeli film industry was largely churning out pro-Zionist propaganda films (Ephraim Kishon being the rare exception). To represent its face to the world in 2010, Israel brought to the Academy Awards an Arab-language flick co-directed by a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli, focusing largely on inter-Arab issues; Ajami was one of the five nominees in the Best Foreign Film category.

The Palestinian co-director has been called a collaborator. Israel’s nominating committee has been demonized as a pack of lefties. But something is changing on the streets of Jaffa, whose citizens have been given, in Ajami, both a mirror in which to behold their own community and an international voice.

Read more

Nailing Avatar

by

The fallacy that great events have great causes tempts both film critics and civilian interpreters to explain mass ticket sales in pretty grandiose terms. Avatar, touted to displace Titanic as the movie with the biggest box office gross in history, has provoked this impulse with a vengeance.

Read more

Left Lean

by

Obama’s remarks at the memorial service for 29 coal minters on April 26 in Beckley, West Virginia.

Read more