Today's Stories

May 1 - 3, 2009

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

April 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon

Saul Landau
Infiltrating Alpha 66: a Conversation with Gerardo Hernandez, Leader of the Cuba Five

Franklin Lamb
Persia Rising

Ralph Nader
The Greedsters Are Back!

Fred Gardner
Obama's Chimerical Marijuana Policy: a Guide for the Perplexed

Dean Baker
A Win-Win Solution: Tax the Rich!

Rannie Amiri
The Curious Case of Benjamin Netanyahu

George Wuerthner
The War on Predators

Dave Lindorff
No Amnesty for Torturers

David Swanson
Personal Torture Laws

Jim Goodman
The Control of Food

Kathy Sanborn
Economic Fallout Hits Families Hard

Don Monkerud
Economic Recovery for Whom?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The People's Money

David Michael Green
Home of the Barricaded, Land of the 'Fraid

Nelson P Valdés
The OAS Charter, Cuba and the United States

Manuel Gomez
From the Bay of Pigs to Trinadad and Tobago

Dr. Susan Block
On Sex Addiction: the Deadliest Sin?

Ramzy Baroud
Non-Violence in Palestine?

Christopher Brauchli
Banning Barbie

Stephen Martin
Statelessness: the Final Frontier

Ron Jacobs
Tearing the Whole Building Down: the Dead in Greensboro

David Yearsley
Monkey Music

Lorenzo Wolff
A Song for the End of the World

Poets' Basement
Moser, McTeer and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
New England Journal of Medicine Report on Civilian Deaths in Iraq

April 16, 2009

Mike Whitney
A Bulletin From the Captain of the Titantic

Russell Mokhiber
The Top 10 Enemies of Single-Payer

Ronald Teska
From Iraq to Appalachia

Gareth Porter
Predator Blowback

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Thinking Like an Afghan

Benjamin Dangl
Latin America Changes

Kevin Pina
Haiti: Obama's First Foreign Policy Disaster?

Robert Bryce
Another Ethanol Producer Goes Bust

George Wuerthner
See the Forest: the Value of Dead Trees

Paul Garon, David Roediger and Kate Khatib The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont

Website of the Day
Socialism and the Facebook Generation

April 15, 2009

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Solving Palestine While Israel Destroys It

Ray McGovern
W, the Torture Decider

Robert Sandels
Is There a Latin American Policy?

Heather Williams /
Paul Baker
Carbon Cap and Trade: How Wall Street will Game the Regs and Trash the Planet

Jack Willoughby
The Lessons of the S & L Crisis

David Swanson
Habeas at Bagram?

Paul Craig Roberts
94 Years of Serfdom

Sara Mann
Norman Rockwell and the Perils of Nostalgia

Kenneth Couesbouc
John Maynard's Martingale: How Keynes Got Rich

Binoy Kampmark
Tax Haven Hypocrisies

Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Hi'llani Cruz, George Kahumoku Flores, et al.: An Urgent Letter to Obama on the Rights of Native Hawaiians

Website of the Day
Taxa: the Paintings of Isabella Kirkland

April 14, 2009

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Rubik's Cube

Mike Whitney
Why is Goldman Sachs So Scared of Mike Morgan?

Peter Morici
Taxing Grandma to Subsidize Goldman Sachs

Greg Moses
Economic Curveballs: the Laffer Posse

Fidel Castro
Obama's Cuba Policy: Not a Word About the Blockade

Robert Weissman
No Blank Check for the IMF

Rebecca Macaux /
Philip Primeau
Somali Piracy and American Foreign Policy

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
The Dubious Revoution: Biofuels, the Next Generation

Dave Lindorff
Snatch-and-Jail Justice: the Ugly War on Immigrants

Walter Brasch
The Resurrection of Intolerance

Benjamin Day
Why Has the Press Failed Us in Reporting on Health Care Reform?

Website of the Day
The Appraisal Bubble

April 13, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Militia Fear Reprisals After US Exit

Uri Avnery
Our Dissonance

Jeremy Scahill
A Test Case for Habeas Corpus: Will Obama Prosecute the Somali Pirate in a US Court?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide Syndrome: Are VA Protocols Behind Iraq Vet Suicides?

Karl Grossman
A Radioactive Extension for Aging Nuclear Plants

Nadia Hijab
Still Waiting: Obama and American Muslims

Sam Smith
America's Cultural Bear Market

James McEnteer
Peru's Shining Example

Sean McMahon
Globalizing Politicide: Israel's Strikes on Sudan

Namihei Odaira
Makota's "Campaign Against Poverty"

John V. Walsh
Bossnapping

Website of the Day
Declining IRS Audits for Big Financial Houses

April 10 / 12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Resurrection and Revenge

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

Mike Whitney
"Liquidate the Banks; Fire the Executives!" Warren's Devastating Report to Congress

Saul Landau
How the Media Bought the Surge

M. Reza Pirbhai
Obama's Afghanistan Plan and India-Pakistan Relations

Franklin Spinney
The Art of the Scam: Wall Street and the Pentagon

Rannie Amiri
Iran's Elections: Why Arab Leaders Want Ahmadinejad to Win

William Blum
The Ideology of Barack Obama

Matt Vidal
Why Card Check Would Help the Economy

Jeff Howison
Death of the Square Deal

Jeff Leys
Resisting the Af-Pak War: the Creech Air Base Arrests

Dave Lindorff
America's Imperial Wars: Why We Need to See the Horrors

Ramzy Baroud
Israel Investigated: But Will It Repent?

Missy Beattie
The Grateful Dead, Wounded and Displaced

Fred Gardner
Fakes Left, Goes Right: Obama's Crossover Dribble on Marijuana Policy

Harvey Wasserman Another $50 Billion for Rust Bucket Nukes?

Suzan Mazur
A Revolution in Biology: an Interview with Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse

Bernard Umbrecht
German Capitalists Take Fire

David Macaray
A Word Clooney, Hanks and Baldwin Should Learn: Solidarity

Janet Kauffman
How to Starve (or Feed) a River

Ron Jacobs
Daring to Struggle, Failing to Win

Norman Solomon
Getting a Death Grip on Memory

Michael Winship
Let the Railsplitter Awake!

Richard Rhames
Empire, Ennui and Extra Cheese

Wanda Fucha
Brother, Can You Spare a Million Bucks?

David Yearsley
My Journey to the Heart of Rahman

Lorenzo Wolff
Getting Beyond the Black-and-White: Jason Isbell's Challenging New Album

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini's Louis XIV: "Neither the Sun Nor Death Can be Gazed Upon Fixedly"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Poets' Basement
Corseri and Corzett

Website of the Weekend
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help!

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

May Day Weekend Edition
May 1 - 3, 2009

The Musical Patriot

Nuts Over Beethoven

By DAVID YEARSLEY

Given that “Based on a True Story” is Hollywood’s poetic license to kill, it is just too good to be true that the homeless virtuoso in Joe Wright’s new film, The Soloist, is an ardent, if unhinged, devotee of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. The opening theme of that epoch-making work runs like a leitmotiv through the movie.  The filmmakers have resurrected in Dolby surround sound the most venerable critical response to this music as dark and deviant.      
      
We first meet Jamie Foxx’s black street person and Juilliard dropout Nathaniel Ayers through L. A. Times reporter Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr. ) whose columns and eventual  book, The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music, spawned the movie. That subtitle’s cloying recitation of redemption strikes fear into the hearts of those, like me, who give the widest possible berth to the deadly icebergs of Hollywood’s frozen tears. I’m still in recovery from the time some fifteen years ago that a jetlagged Yearsley (me) was made to cry above the North Atlantic in full view of my fellow passengers during the final scene of Forrest Gump. What humiliation it was to have the emotion extracted from me by the soaring strings of the soundtrack lofting the feather of true-love-thwarted-by-cancer up to heaven. Shackled to my seat, I watched in pure terror as the tears were tortured out of me, raining down on my midnight/morning coffee. Never Again!
      
At the outset of The Soloist Lopez has left his cubicle in the LA Times building and is out for stroll in the surrounding urban desert in search of a story, when he hears Ayers playing a deceptively simple melody on a battered violin with only two of its four strings. It is a disarming tune, naïve even: a major triad venturing harmlessly outward from its central pitch. But after this matter-fact opening, the theme gets harder to sing— as Foxx does throughout the course of the movie—for it then lurches dangerously towards unknown territory.

The encounter between the two men takes place in front of the statue of Beethoven standing in Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles. The monument’s bronze impassivity masks what Beethoven’s likely response to Ayers monomania would have been: appreciation not only of the ongoing tribute to his oeuvre, but also of the dedication to a single theme. An inveterate sketcher of musical ideas, Beethoven patrolled Vienna and its surrounding countryside always with a tune and its infinite possibilities on his mind, a weight to be unburdened often in the form of large-scale works, monuments to his own obsession.
      
Longer and more ambitious than the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven’s teacher Haydn, the Eroica was from its premier in 1804 lauded and criticized for its daring, experimental qualities, its sprawling zeal, indulgent to the point of pathology.
      
A review written by the editor of the leading German language music periodical, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, inthe months after the work was first heard in Beethoven’s adopted city of Vienna warned that:  “This long composition, one extremely difficult to perform, is in reality a tremendously expanded, daring and wild fantasia.  It lacks nothing in the way of startling and beautiful passages, in which the energetic and talented composer must be recognized; but often it loses itself in lawlessness.  The symphony begins with an Allegro in E-flat that is vigorously scored; a Funeral March in C minor follows which is later developed fugally.  After this comes an Allegro scherzo and a Finale, both in E-flat.  The reviewer belongs to Herr van Beethoven's sincerest admirers, but in this composition he must confess that he finds too much that is glaring and bizarre, which hinders greatly one's grasp of the whole, and a sense of unity is almost completely lost."
      
This could well be taken as a fitting description of Ayers’ troubled trajectory: he has energy and talent, but he has gone badly astray, an exile from the formal dictates of society. Likewise, Rochlitz’s response to the Eroica adumbrates the outward signs of the movie character’s schizophrenia. Ayers is beset by a pathological fascination with the moment: the snatch of melody, the minutiae of opus numbers and dates, the individual letters that make up names.  He veers between fragments — the aesthetic diagnosis of musical fantasy descended into chaos.

Respectful of the volatile power of music over the human psyche, Rochlitz himself was interested in the musical forms of mental illness portended by uncontrolled fantasy, a tendency embodied most grandiosely in the Eroica.  In the same summer that the Eroica received its premiere, and a few months before Rochlitz reviewed the work, he made a trip to an insane asylum in his native Leipzig to hear a musical genius incarcerated there. Rochlitz begins his essay, “Visit to a Madhouse,” with a chilling admission: “Most living people held for me exactly the interest that the dead have for an anatomist, and it often pained me that one could not once take a truly significant mind with a pair of forceps and put it under a microscope.”

Rochlitz has come to the institution to hear the musical outpourings of a crazed fantasist, whom he simply refers to as “Karl.” A disturbing mixture of timidity and haughtiness, Karl refuses to play for Rochlitz, so our musical journalist tricks him into thinking he is leaving the madhouse.  But after saying goodbye, Rochlitz lurks outside the half-opened door and eavesdrops on the bizarre course of what Karl thinks is his private fantasizing at the piano. Rochlitz would later print in his journal the fragments he transcribes. The performance that these transcriptions relate holds up a distorted mirror to the accepted rules of musical logic and mental coherence. Karl stalks around his piano, then rushes to the keyboard to play bold flourishes prone to twisted repetitions and breathless digressions. These abruptly give way to invocations in recitative style and devastatingly lyrical utterances of pure sentiment. He hammers out angry, but harmonically logical, chords, before jumping up as if in sudden recognition that his music is not only a symptom of his illness but its cause.

Rochlitz’s account of Karl evokes contemporary reports of Beethoven’s reluctant, even scornful, improvising at parties or for uninvited visitors, often forcing them to adopt similarly covert listening tactics in order to follow the genius of his musical fantasy away from the light of reason into the dark interior of his mind. Rochlitz’s  essay could also serve as outline of the screen version of Nathaniel Ayers: rather than a hostage to his own demonic improvisations as Karl is, Ayers is enslaved to Beethoven’s fantasy.

After Lopez befriends Ayers, and then begins writing about him in the L. A. Times, the columnist procures for him a fine cello, the instrument that got Ayers into Juilliard, and had promised a way out of inner city Cleveland before mental illness eventually derailed his dreams.  Like “Karl,”, Ayers is a Soloist, and rather than enjoying a good-paying job which his talent and perseverance might well have won him in a symphony orchestra, he holds forth under echoing overpasses to the accompaniment of the city’s relentless traffic.

With trust building between the two men, Lopez convinces Ayers to join him for a rehearsal of the Eroica by the LA Philharmonic; Lopez had tickets to the concert itself, but Ayers refuses to go out of pure fear, agreeing only to attend a rehearsal because they’ll be in the hall without the threatening presence of thousands of others all around. With some further prodding and a concession on Lopez’s part that Ayers cannot leave his all his worldly belongings unattended, the pair pushes Ayer’s shopping cart at maximum speed alongside and over the moats of freeways and up through the titanium contours of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall just in time to hear Beethoven’s fantasy masquerading as symphony unleash its dark power.  Here British director Joe Wright, a self-styled Hollywood outsider, transports us into Ayers’ mind with a series abstract, amorphous images that fill the screen to Beethoven’s music—a detour into fantasy unexampled in big budget buddy films and biopics.  Ayer’s ecstasy at Beethoven’s music is in this way rendered as bliss in bright colors. That this homage not only to the abstract animations of Disney’s original Fantasia of 1940 but also the more recent Beethoven’s Fifth of their Fantasia 2000 takes place in Disney Hall is a quite a funny joke, though one might object that it uses a street person as a prop for this groovy directorial excess—a Gesamtkunstwerk of product placement and Disney branding.

To the movie’s credit, Beethoven’s Fifth, the composer’s most famous work and one whose victorious final movement is often taken to represent the composer’s personal triumph over impending deafness, is never heard.  Nor are the pastoral strains of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, a piece which animates those Technicolor fauns and nymphs of  the original Disney Fantasia. The only suggestion of picturesque Beethovenian nature we get in The Soloist is itself a parody: the disaster of Lopez’s lawn devastated by raccoons in spite of his defensive measures involving bursting bags of coyote urine. We never even see what green remains of this patch of the pastoral since we only visit the place at night.

In spite of Joe Wright’s protestations that he refused to let Ayers be portrayed as a savant, the film falters from clinical precision worthy of Rochlitz.  In his columns Lopez admitted that Ayers didn’t allways hit the right notes, but in the movie he does.  He moves from the two-string violin to the cello without a hitch. The instrument is always in tune, and so is his playing. However necessary this may have been for purposes of dramatic compression it is hardly truthful. Ayers’ schizophrenia may be ugly but the music never is, even after a night on the street and years away from one’s instrument.  In this subtle but crucial way the film falls prey to a dangerous transcendentalism: not only does Ayers come off as a profoundly troubled genius for whom Beethoven offers, if not a cure, then cinematic redemption.  The movie ends with Lopez and his ex-wife, Ayers and sisters sitting amongst a formally dressed audience at Disney Hall listening again to Beethoven. Other carefully placed people of color—more than than what one would expect at such events—come into view as Wright’s camera pulls back. Even if not fully integrated into a society, Ayers can now fantasize amid a larger public, and this integration is now more important than the spectral wanderings of his mind that precipitated the earlier abstract color fest. Ayers’ androgynous get-up is enough to show his continued outsider status.  Thus the movie finds its way inevitably to Hollywood’s homeport of redemption.

Following, if unwittingly, in Rochlitz’s footsteps, Steve Lopez wrote in his column of 2005 introducing his “Karl”— Nathaniel Ayers — to L. A. Times’ readers: “Nathaniel was shy in our first encounter a few months ago, if not a little wary.  He took a step back when I approached to say I like the way his violin music turned the clatter around downtown L. A.’s Pershing Square into an urban symphony.”  When Lopez finds the Soloist again it is near that tunnel. Spirits buoyed by his unshakeable love for music, Ayers declares that: “It is beautiful here.”  That Beethoven’s statue and its most dedicated follower, Nathanial Ayers, are condemned to this urban wasteland provides the most powerful message of the film: with nature gone fantasy offers the last refuge.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu  

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