Review: Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance

Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance by Susan Simensky Bietila
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

biography start

Bessarabia

1920s

Palmer raids,, ice Bondi raids

Family fled 1921 year of second 1919 1921 pogrom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_H...

"TRUMP FLAMBOYANTLY PROCLAIMS HIS IRRATIONAL WHIMS LIKE A TRUE CZAR.

HE COMMANDS TOADIES TO SCAPEGOAT IMMIGRANTS, MEXICANS & MUSLIMS, IMPRISONING EVEN CHILDREN.

WHEN HE WAS MADE AN HONORARY COSSACK IT WAS CLEAR THAT THEY RECOGNIZED ONE OF THEIR OWN."

"chose Brooklyn College and started there in 1964.

The summer before college, I worked at a racially integrated summer camp in the Catskills run by communist-influenced, antiracist organizers from my neighborhood. I learned about people a year or two older who had joined civil rights marches and voter registration drives in the South, as well as some guys who were moving to Canada to avoid the military draft. At night, after the campers were tucked in, the camp counselors sat around a campfire, where I learned that the US was at war with Vietnam. I felt physically shaken by the realization that the US was not a democracy but instead the number-one imperialist power after World War II's destruction of Europe. One of the other counselors was in the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and gave me the name of the student who was starting a chapter...

The New Left introduced me to unvarnished history and critical thinking. This changed my life."

Chapter worth of text interspersed graphic novel like panels

Brooklyn College Vietnam antiwar student demonstrations

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Review: Understanding Islam, Revised Edition: An Introduction to the Muslim World

Understanding Islam, Revised Edition: An Introduction to the Muslim World by Thomas W. Lippman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Narrated by Nadia May

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Review: Chicken Little: The Inside Story: A Jungian Romance

Chicken Little: The Inside Story: A Jungian Romance by Daryl Sharp
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The "American Journal of Chickle Schtick" isn't a real academic publication but a humorous, fictional reference used in texts about the folklore of Chicken Little, often cited with fake volume/issue numbers (like Vol. 17, No. 3, 1964) to add satirical weight to discussions about paranoia or "sky falling" narratives, highlighting the absurdity in seriousness

It's a joke or trope, not a legitimate scholarly journal, used in books like Chicken Little: The Inside Story to playfully mock serious analysis of simple fables.

You'll find it cited in footnotes for comedic effect


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Review: Eat the Rich: And Other Interesting Ideas

Eat the Rich: And Other Interesting Ideas by Peter Werbe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Still, increasingly conservative though Friedkin sounded, The French Connection was far from a conventional picture. He was comfortable with the documentary idiom and used it, giving the film a loose, handheld feel that anticipated Hill Street Blues by a decade. Often, he wouldn't bother to block a scene, just told the cameraman to follow the actors. Moreover, the moral landscape of the film was dark, complicated, and European. "In those days, Coppola and I and other guys, we'd sit around and talk about which way film was heading," he recalls. "You know, Godard or Fellini, documentary and street reality, or formalism and works of the imagination. They were not, it seemed to me, diametrically opposed. I had seen Z by Costa-Gavras. It made me realize you could take an actual story and make it as exciting as good fiction. I thought, I know how to do that. Fuck, that's like introducing documentary technique. It was a big influence on The French Connection."

Jaws

How Steven Spielberg's Jaws made the world safe for blockbusters, BBS enjoyed its last hurrah, while Bogdanovich's bubble burst, and Paramount and Warners turned over, slamming the door on the New Hollywood.

"Jaws was devastating to making artistic, smaller films. They forgot how to do it. They're no longer interested."

PETER BOGDANOVICH

Nashville
Sylbert's distribution of Altman's 'Nashville' and Kael's screening invitation led to a delayed release, highlighting the film's critical acclaim and its eventual box office underperformance, which was attributed to the lack of blockbuster appeal.

One of the first things Sylbert did was pick up Altman's Nashville for distribution. Kael created something of a scandal by accepting the director's invitation to a screening of the rough cut, reviewing the picture off that screening, thereby jumping the release date - and all the other reviewers - by months. It was a typical Kael move, calculated to prevent Paramount from recutting the movie and to goad the studio into putting some marketing muscle behind it. Her piece was full of the excitement of discovering a great work. She called it "an orgy for movie-lovers," and wrote, “I sat there smiling at the screen, in complete happiness." Nashville was Altman's best film, and the studio had high hopes for it. With its large, ensemble cast of character actors, wandering narrative, and refusal of genre, it was an echt New Hollywood creation. Its failure to perform at the box office, despite the blitz of good press, was not only another indication that the passions that animated the first half of the decade were on the wane, it also underlined the limits of Kael's power. When Altman was asked why it hadn't done better, he said, "Because we didn't have King Kong or a shark."

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Review: Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde

Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: Why are We at War?

Why are We at War? by Norman Mailer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

page 43

As John le Carré had put it to The Times of Lon-don: "America has entered one of its periods of historic madness, but this is the worst I can remember."

Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:

... The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.

Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's declaration "We are not the doctors. We are the disease."

B bush experts

Bush, on a given morning, decides that Expert A’s voice sounds the best. Three days later, Expert D comes in better. The result is that he’s always tweaking his policies just a little. If that is his one intellectual strength, he still has the persona of a fraternity president, sententious, full of cant, pleased with his assertions and always indifferent to their lack of verisimilitude and/or specificity. Mottos and platitudes are steak tartare to him. He knows exactly what he’s doing. So, that one good half of America, composed of religious people who are not particularly political, is with him all the way. Give us more of your mottos and platitudes, they ask. Spice them, please, with your incomparably holy touch of mendacity.

Tv
https://www.theamericanconservative.c...
“I Am Not For World Empire”
A conversation with Norman Mailer about Iraq, Israel, the perils of technology and why he is a Left-Conservative.

AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE: Go back to the integrity of races. I know it is a politically incorrect thought, but it doesn’t have to be expressed with rancor. It might be interesting.
NORMAN MAILER: Let me put it this way: I don’t see immigration as a pressing problem other than that it gets some white people so furious that they can’t think about more important things. They feel America is being lost. All right, America is being lost, but in ways that have nothing to do with races or excessive immigration. America, for one example, is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year-old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don’t do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV. Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption.

Israel

It is in the interest of the Arab nations to have Israel as the great villain. Although I’m Jewish, bone and blood, I’m not a patriotic Jew in the sense of Israel right or wrong, my Israel. I don’t have those feelings. But I do think that the end of the Holocaust gave us one grand example of how inhuman the sheiks and leaders at the top of many an Arab nation were then. They could’ve said, “Let these Jews have that land. It’s not going to hurt us. We might even be able to use each other to good purpose.” They didn’t. They chose to see these Holocaust survivors as the enemy. They used Israel to divert hatred away from their own regimes.

...

...it could prove a dangerous support. For a good many powerful Americans, the future question in Empire might become: How much is our support of Israel still to our advantage and how much to our disadvantage? The realpolitikers in the American establishment have to have mixed feelings even now about Israel. The neocons may feel this is their best shot, this is the moment when they have to take a chance because if they don’t now, Israel is likely to be doomed ten, twenty, thirty years down the road.

Corporate
Totalitarian

...We do not really know what works in a modern society, but the odds against flourishing in a society of the center (given its potentiality to narrow the exits and promote a single, central, secure point of view) may prove to be the least good answer of all. Until the Left and that part of the Right that is still loyal to its old values can come to recognize that no matter their essential differences, they also share one profound value they might look to protect in common—the vulnerable dignity of the human creation. At present, we are all obliged to travel willy-nilly into the vain land of corporate hegemony, with its self-serving notion that democracy is a nutrient to be injected into any country anywhere, a totally oppressive misconception of the delicate promise of democracy, which relies on the organic need to grow out of itself and learn from its own human errors.

By now, our nation has become a democracy that is bereft of a few of the essential elements. Nobody ever said, so far as I know, that a democracy should be a place where the richest people in the country earn a thousand times more than the poorest. Should the richest man in a town amass ten times more, even fifty times more, it is not hard to conceive of a reasonably decent society. When you get to the point where you’re speaking of thousands to one, something outrageous is taking place. The people who feel this lack of balance probably make up two thirds of the country, but they don’t want to think about it. They can’t, after all, do a damn thing about it. We don’t control our country. Corporate power is running this country now. The notion that we have an active democracy that controls our fate is not true. Was I ever able to vote on how high buildings could or should be? No. Was I ever able to say I don’t want food frozen? No. Was I ever able to say I want tax money to pay for political campaigns, not interest groups? Nobody’s ever been able to vote on many an item that truly matters in terms of how our lives are led. And, of course, we see the political process become more and more money-mechanized. We’re on a power trip in which only one small fraction of America manages to participate.

They speak of pre-cancerous conditions in bodies, and I think we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now. I hope we’ll muddle through, provided there are no more large disasters. There are pro-democratic forces in America that assert themselves when you don’t expect them to.

But the situation is serious. If we have a depression or fall into desperate economic times, I don’t know what’s going to hold the country together. There’s just too much anger here, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism. ...

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