Sidney Lumet, Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams on the set of Fugitive Kind in 1959

“… Marlon Brando, who was 23 years old, had appeared without much critical attention in five Broadway plays. He was a beautiful, brooding specimen: mercurial, rebellious and rampant. Like Stanley, he was a ruthless man-child with reservoirs of tenderness and violence. … None the less, another witness to Brando’s memorable, ferocious psychic explosion, the critic Pauline Kael, thought to herself: ‘That boy’s having a convulsion! Then I realised he was acting.’ Brando wasn’t trying to act, at least not in the hidebound acting tradition hitherto practised on the American stage. … Brando’s acting style was the performing equivalent of jazz. The notes were there, but Brando played them in a way that was uniquely personal to him. In his ability to call out of dialogue a heightened sense of emotional truth, the freedom of his…

The Table On the Porch (1971)

Respect For Things As They Are by John Ashbery: “In his introduction to Fairfield Porter‘s posthumous collection of art criticism, Art in Its Own Terms, Rackstraw Downes quotes a remark Fairfield Porter made during what must have been one of the more Byzantine discussions at the Artists’ Club on Eighth Street, around 1952. The members were arguing about whether or not it was vain to sign your paintings. With the flustered lucidity of Alice in the courtroom, Porter sliced this particular Gordian knot once and for all: ‘If you are vain it is vain to sign your pictures and vain not to sign them. If you are not vain it is not vain to sign them and not vain not to sign them.’  We do not know the reaction of his colleagues; quite possibly this mise au net fell on the…

“Film fans of a certain age, and some of them are certainly represented and name-checked in the film, will immediately recognize the true subject of the new documentary by Kent Jones, Hitchcock/Truffaut . It’s not a dual biography of the French director and the British director (ensconced in Hollywood by that time), but rather the biography of a book. Hitchcock/Truffaut (Simon & Shuster) was published in 1966, a transcription from a series of interviews Truffaut (then 30, and having finished his third film, Jules and Jim, held with Hitchcock (having finished his 40th film, The Birds) in 1962, with Helen Scott as translator, discussing his films title by title, from production histories to aesthetics. As a work of cinematic analysis, nothing like it had been done before. Film culture was still defined by Hollywood studios and fan magazines that ran puff pieces on the latest blockbusters. There hadn’t…

Meditation chambers at the old Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ashram

“‘Well, if you’re so cosmic you’ll know why,’ John Lennon explained to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as the final two Beatles left his Ashram before fulfilling their Transcendental Meditation regimen. … Inner peace is as much a bitch as karma, which bites the asses of rock stars and gurus alike. Maharishi was accused of sexual misconduct during the Beatles’ sojourn to India for enlightenment, a journey which may have culminated in the band teaming with the Beach Boys in spreading the movement. But it darkened Lennon’s vibes so bad he banged out the holy rocking roller ‘Sexy Sadie.’ … ‘Sexy Sadie’ from The Beatles (‘White’) album preceded ‘How Do You Sleep?’ as one of Lennon’s signature tunes of personality bashing, and gave murderess Susan Atkins her signature alias. … Lennon has a reputation of taking his personal frustrations out in rhyme and…

During the 1965 Mime Troupe arrest: from left to right: Bill Graham, Ron Davis, Luis Valdez, Paul Jacobs.

“Bill Graham’s rise to fame coincided with (and is partly owed to) the heyday of late 60s counterculture movement and its music scene in San Francisco. Greg Gaar, a native San Franciscan photojournalist, describes the Haight-Ashbury of 1967 as an environment where musicians were free of pretension and concerns of commercial success. In large contrast to the famous artists of today, artists back then lived with (and lived just like) the people they performed for. In Gaar’s words, ‘The Grateful Dead would be sitting on the front steps of 710 Ashbury, where they lived. On hot days, they would be squirting cars with a water hose as the car went by …. You’d see Janis Joplin shopping on Haight Street.’ The ideology of the hippie counterculture was also largely present in the…

One of the regular readers of the blog alerted me to the fact that there were several comments today (January 5) that contained vulgarity and profanity that are not allowed on this blog.

These disgusting comments were written in response to a post I wrote on June 1 called “I Am Woke, You Should Be Too,” in which I asserted that I care about justice, equality, freedom, and other fundamental ideals of our society. I took issue with those who would censor the views of those who disagree with them. I specifically criticized Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for passing laws to silence those who don’t agree with his censorious views.

I wrote:

One of the hot-button words that has been appropriated by rightwing politicians is “woke.” They are trying to turn it into a shameful word. I looked up the definition of WOKE. It means being aware of injustice…

Bob Dylan and ‘The Band’ performing at the Woody Guthrie memorial concert In New York City’s Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968.

Feb. 1968: “Bob Dylan finally emerged from 18 months of self-imposed seclusion at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert in Carnegie Hall on January 20. His appearance had been announced and the two performances were sold out weeks in advance. … In addition to Dylan, the memorial concert also featured Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie, Tom Paxton, Jack Elliot, Odetta and Richie Havens, all performing songs written by Guthrie. Before and after each song, Robert Ryan, the program’s narrator, and Will Geer did readings from Guthrie’s work, accompanied by slides and still photographs of his art. The performers sat in a row across the stage, most of them resplendently dressed. Odetta wore an orange and gold striped floor-length caftan, Judy Collins…

Early in the pandemic, an economist at Brown University named Emily Oster gained extraordinary media attention for the advice she offered. She wrote multiple articles declaring that it was safe to open schools even without the funds needed to pay for extra safety precautions. She wrote, she was written about, she became the go-to person with “evidence” that schools were safe from COVID.

Oster’s research is funded by leading rightwing and libertarian foundations, organizations, and individuals. As the linked article by epidemiologists Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman explains, Oster’s emphasis on individualism and personal choice ring sweetly in the ears of the rightwing philanthropists.

They write:

Oster’s influence on the discourse around COVID in schools is difficult to overstate. She has been quoted in hundreds of articles about school pandemic precautions and interviewed as a guest on dozens of news shows. Officials from both parties have used her work…

“Everything counts in small amounts. Everything, everything. Everything, everything. All the minutiae matters. El hombre invisible comes into focus only if you shift through enough details. It has always struck me that Ted Berrigan drank Pepsi, not Coke. He is emphatic on this point. It is one of the ten things he did every day along with eat lunch and make noises. You can tell a lot about a man in observing what he drinks. An alternative to Coca-Cola, Pepsi sales first rose during the Great Depression when marketed as a drink for the price conscious. ‘Twice as much for a nickel, too.’ Drinking Pepsi was a sign of class, economically speaking. In the 1940s, it became a sign of race as well when Pepsi began inroads into the ‘Negro market,’ selling specifically to the previously neglected African American consumer. Coca-Cola was viewed as racist as the company, based in…

“The poets and New York natives Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh met at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, while absorbing the Zen-influenced poems of San Francisco-based writer Robert Duncan. This chance encounter begat a romantic and creative partnership that, back across the country in the East Village, lit a spark within the Downtown poetry scene. Lewis remembers: ‘we were going on nerve, all of twenty years old, but trusting in our love, which was less tricky and in the moment defied all uncertainty.’ Angel Hair, the beloved yet short-lived magazine and small press, was, he says, ‘our way of giving birth — as much to the actual magazine and books as to our selves as poets.’  … Anne and Lewis were living at 33 St. Marks’ Place, between Third and Second Avenues in a ‘skinny railroad apartment,’ which, as Lewis notes in one interview, is now a…