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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives by Tag 'Music'
Following the trajectory of a cinematic biopic, the new documentary Marley is organized as a straightforward biography, starting with Bob’s birth and ending with his death. But the movie is so much more than a linear story of one man’s life and music. Its 144...
Berlin
Just as wallpaper sometimes tells you almost everything you need to know about the people who live in the house it decorates, so too can even the most banal soundtrack to a political ad reveal far more about the candidate than word and image. So it ...
Urban dictionary calls it “granny spam”. The kind of email Thomas Kincaid would send you if you were his luminous pal- and if he wasn’t busy in the afterlife urinating on Winnie the Pooh. Those emails bring to mind being tied up on an Ikea couch, forced to watch ...
In New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans ($27.95, Oxford Universi...
In these days of a dying, raving and hallucinating empire, its best known poet, and a master at being anti-war, is accepting a Presidential Freedom Award from a cynical if affable, still, to many people, master of war. What is Dylan thinking? He and Obama are no strangers...
It was in the spring 47 years ago that my brother brought home an album by blues singer John Hammond called ...
I know something about SXSW keynote addresses. Little Richard and Smokey Robinson both did theirs as, in part, dialogues with me—sitting live in front of several hundred people, Richard being Richard, Smokey being serious, sincere, smart, and as handsome as seventy will...
When I was in junior high back in 1967-68, many of my Saturday afternoons were spent at the outdoor basketball courts across the highway from my house. These courts were where I learned about many things besides basketball, which I was never very good at. Sex, beer an...
Nostalgia clouds our memory of the Vietnam War era. Peace. Love. Music. Rock & roll, dope, and fucking in the streets. Wasn’t it a mighty time? Sometimes, yes. More fundamentally, the Vietnam War era meant three million Indochinese killed, along with the callous rui...
Berlin
There was never a more confident musician than Handel. This brash self-assurance spawned some of the great musical moments of Handel’s or any other century, not to mention biographical anecdotes redolent of an overweening ego. The assurance with w...
She’s dealt with a lot of obstacles–dismissal of her music, sexist condescension, even attempts from Clear Channel to shut down her concerts. But over the past two decades, Ani DiFranco has remained thankfully relentless, and become a force to be reckoned...
From his locked room, he could hear the trains rattling up the tracks, one every half hour. They reminded of him of home, back on Dockery Plantation, when he played on the porches of old shacks with Charley Patton, blowing his harmonica to the rhythm of those big wheels r...
Berlin
There’s lots of opera to make sure to miss right off the bat in the month of January. In two weeks the Deutsche Oper premieres its new production of Rossini’s first monster hit, Tancredi. Why miss a chance to revel in this rarely-produc...
The Doors are one of those groups that achieved fame via their own unique path. Their musical style borrows from the blues but includes hints of John Cage, the seeming chaos of free jazz and the beautiful not quite anarchy of Messiaen. Lyrically, they could be as comple...
Click here to read Part One.
I’m the last one hired
And I’m the first one fired
I’m the only man
That has never been satisfied
I...
Sacred texts exist to be reprinted, repackaged, translated again and again. Each generation, devout or doubting, comments and questions, elucidates and mystifies, interprets and reinterprets. The continuous interest in, and demand for, new versions of central texts, can t...
It was sometime in 1975, and my friend Richard and I were leaving our job which happened to be in a record store when Richard said, “Let’s go see Howlin’ Wolf.” I was somewhat reluctant at first because various people had told me Wolf’s show was a comedy act w...
“Blues are the roots, the rest are the fruits.”
– Willie Dixon
His momma was weeping by now and Willie knew it. That’s why he couldn’t tell her, couldn’t look Miss Daisy in the eye and let her know he was leav...
Amy Goodman and many others have referred to the corporate media as an “echo chamber,” which is a very accurate metaphor. Mostly privileged, overpaid white men who fall within a narrowly-constrained political spectrum pretend to have debates, while failing t...
Usually Monk walked. He ambled across the city on feet as light as a tap-dancer. He weaved his way down block after block, whistling, humming, snapping his fingers. Monk liked to take different routes, but most of them led eventually to the Hudson River, where the large m...
When she screened a film (or “movie,” as she unfailingly called them), Pauline Kael usually sat in the back row, directly under the projector. Dramatically breaching cinema decorum, she talked during the showings, especially during porn flicks, loudly narrating the ...
For all its supposed majesty over the European instrumentarium, the organ is rarely depicted in masterworks of visual art. One catches distant glimpses of large organs in 17th-century interiors of Dutch churches in paintings by Pieter Saenredam and Emanuel de...
The results of one of the most important recent discoveries in Bach research are currently hanging on the walls of the renovated Bach Archive and Museum in Leipzig, Germany, the city where J. S. Bach lived with his family from 1723-1750. Unearthed musical manuscripts of p...
I was born into the crack era. Although not old enough to take part in the crack game, it did not leave me immune to the detrimental effects the drug had on my community. Growing up in the Bronx, I was surrounded by crack users, drug sellers and poverty. I f...
In 2003, Metallica performed in the prison yard at San Quentin. Frontman James Hetfield was uncharacteristically introspective at the mic: “If I didn’t have music in my life it’s quite possible I’d be in here or, not even here, be dead. I’d much rather be alive....