Today's Stories

January 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Geo. W. Bush, a Concise Biography

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

Karl Grossman
Obama and the Military - Industrial - Scientific Complex

M. Shahid Alam
Gaza's Shattered Mirror

Jules Rabin
Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

Alan Farago
The Nail-Gun Bailout

Ron Jacobs
The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama

Timothy Seidel
Just Violence in Gaza? The Calculus of Proportionality

George Ochenski
Why No Montana Wilderness?

Todd Chretien
Taking a Stand for Justice in Oakland

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Marijuana Prohibition Acid Test

Website of the Day
Uranium Watch

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

Weekend Edition
January 16-18, 2009

Patti Smith's Dream of Life

An Artist to be Reckoned With

By KIM NICOLINI

If you go to see the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life expecting to be given the chronology of Patti’s life or a traditional music/concert documentary, you may be disappointed. If you go to see it with an appreciation of Patti Smith as a visual artist, songwriter, poet, activist, and iconic performance artist who turned her life into art, then you very well may be floored by the film’s stunning beauty. Not a documentary in the traditional sense at all, Dream of Life is a meditation on and a tribute to Patti Smith and the aesthetics and impetus of her art. From its opening image of horses running through red saturated grainy film with Patti’s voice echoing with divine power through the celluloid, I was completely enthralled by this film. I absorbed every fraction of image and sound, and let it wash over me with its aesthetic power.

More than just a movie, Dream of Life is like a visual poem, a piece of art that mimics Patti Smith’s style and aesthetic. It doesn’t document an individual person as much as a whole aesthetic that was born from a specific moment in history (the 1970s) and which manifested itself into this iconic diva Patti Smith who truly is larger than life. Patti Smith and the art movement of early punk are intimately intertwined. Patti Smith is more than a person. She is an entire movement and history embodied in a single voice and presence. As a woman, she moved history in music. As a voice, there is no other like Patti.  Just as Patti is an artist, poet, singer, songwriter, performance artist, activist, the film is many things at once all meshed together into a beautiful piece of abstract, multi-layered art. Patti made her life into art. Everything she lived, breathed, did, performed was an art form, and the movie is just another extension of the art that is Patti Smith. To deliver the massive artistic power of Patti Smith, the film itself operates as a piece of art reflective of the place where Patti’s work originated and the aesthetics that drove it. The movie is constructed with a beautiful collage aesthetic with its blurry and grainy abstract black and white imagery intersecting with archival footage and super-saturated color sequences. Frequently the images on screen and the audio cover are from different sources. While we see the image of Patti on stage belting out her music, we hear an abstract resonating electronic pounding. While Patti recites one of her poems, we see a fractured skyline moving through a car window. The disjunction between image on screen and audio content not only adds to the sense of the film’s abstract art form, but it also works to powerfully deliver the feeling and emotion of Patti’s work. By fracturing the content and using the collage aesthetic of punk to give us this portrait of Patti, we are able to experience it as abstract visceral sensation. We are able to feel the reverberation of Patti’s art and what it signifies rather than getting caught up in the specificity of the archival moment.

Of course the aesthetics of the film and of Patti Smith’s art were not born from punk. While the film functions as a tribute to Patti Smith, it is largely framed by Patti paying tribute to the artists who inspired her and inspired the whole punk movement – William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud. These artists were monumentally important to the punk movement, inspiring a renegade anarchist poetic lifestyle that Patti has dedicated her life to. In fact, Patti Smith, through her art, has elevated herself to an art object. As represented in the film, Patti is always self-consciously living her life as an act of art. Every act is a conscious performance. You can see her editing her presence as she goes. She is constantly in possession of her Polaroid camera which she uses to distill every possible moment into a single abstract image, an artifact. When she visits Rimbaud’s grave, she isn’t just visiting a grave, she is creating a piece of performance art. The act of visiting the grave is staged so carefully, and she then pauses to kneel down and capture its essence in one single snap of the camera.

While many of Patti and punk’s literary influences are acknowledged in the film, the construction and aesthetic of the movie pay tribute to visual artists such as Stan Brakhage and Joseph Cornell who also influenced early punk. The film’s visual style – with its grainy abstract fleeting black and white photography exemplifies the punk aesthetic and the influential experimental filmmakers who inspired it. That Patti’s life is largely constructed via a series of representational objects echoes the collage aesthetic of people like Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner that influenced punk. By the end of the film, we know less of Patti as a person than we do as Patti as an assemblage of objects that carry the intimate meaning of her life -- her favorite dress from when she was a little girl, a Persian urn with Mapplethorpe’s remains, the guitar Sam Shepard gave her, a baby t-shirt with drool stains, a beat-up copy of Baudelaire. You can view some of these objects as a slideshow where the objects take on the aura of freestanding art here at the film’s website. Sure, there are some intimate personal glimpses in the film – Patti when very young, Patti visiting her parents, fleeting interactions with Patti’s children, but it is amazing how much of the “real” Patti as a human being, and not just an art form, remains inaccessible. These glimpses remain fleeting and ghostlike. They tease us in offering threads of Patti’s life, but ultimately stay beyond our reach. The filmmaking technique moves these sequences beyond a mere documentary element. The film’s style maintains a distance between Patti as aesthetic object and historical icon and Patti as a living and breathing person. The camera and Patti herself do not let us in because to make Patti Smith “real” would be to remove her from her iconic state and to deny the film its status as an impressionistic piece of art in its own right.

Despite of (or because of) its aesthetic distancing, I was overwhelmed with the power and beauty of this film. After reading some of the criticisms of the film, I was prepared to be annoyed by Patti’s presence, but that was absolutely not the case. I was hypnotized, enthralled and completely transported into the magnificence of Patti’s art. She deserves every bit of fetishistic treatment she gets in this film because there is no other Patti Smith, and there never will be. We cannot underestimate her iconic power. I was nearly brought to tears many times during the film, by Patti’s sheer force and by how much her voice has resonated in my life. I am always astonished at how much I identify with Patti Smith and how much her voice, words, presence, and art resonate with me. It was liberating for me watching the film because it validated my own voice and the place where I come from in my own creative expression, and that place still has validity here in the 21st century – as an aesthetic, an art form, a way of life, a way of thinking, and as political activism through creative expression. Listening to Patti indict George W. Bush and recite the crimes of the Bush administration and its policies on war, torture, and surveillance carries as much weight and power as listening to her rant about all the outsider “niggers” of society over thirty years ago. Her voice has not lost its power or its meaning. She has carried it with force and urgency into the 21st century.

Yes, Patti Smith continues to be a voice to be reckoned with. She changed the landscape of male-dominated rock-n-roll, and she is a living example of life as art. She deserves the gorgeous treatment she gets in this film. The film took ten years to make, ten years during which filmmaker Steven Sebring shadowed Patti and compiled footage. Imagine the daunting task of editing ten years worth of material and putting together a 109 minute film. I thank him for doing it because it was a 109 minutes that reminded me to unshackle the binds on my own creativity and to listen to the Patti inside myself and let her voice out. It reminded me that artists like Patti Smith, her aesthetic and everything she stands for, never die, and that their voices will always have value. That’s why they’re artists.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life will be released on DVD on Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her partner, daughter, and a menagerie of beasts. She works a day job to support her art and culture habits. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Bad Subjects, Punk Planet, Bullhorn and Berkeley Review. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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