“WASHINGTON SQUARE — While the good John Lindsay praised the peace parade in Central Park, the bad John Lindsay had the peace parade busted in Washington Square Park. While the good Sanford Garelik passed out flyers of ‘principles to guide police officers at demon­strations,’ the bad chief inspect­or gave the order to attack the demonstrators. While the good William Booth looked on, the bad human rights commissioner looked away. While the good Jay Kriegel and the good Barry Got­tehrer privately deplored the police action, the bad mayoral aides publicly condoned it. Saturday was a fair, gray day. At 11 a. m. the Anti-Imperialist Feeder March began to form in Washington Square Park. Its marchers, some 400 strong, had split with the Fifth Avenue Viet­nam Parade Committee because, according to an ad, ‘the Parade Committee leadership arranged for strike-breaker Lindsay, whose police regularly attack the black and Puerto Rican commu­nities and…

On August 13, 1961, the National People’s Army of the German Democratic Republic began constructing the Berlin Wall

“At midnight on this day in 1961, units of the East German army began to close the border between East and West Berlin. Troops and workers tore up streets running alongside the border to make them impassable to most vehicles while installing barbed wire entanglements and fences along the 97 miles around the three western sectors — American, British and French — and the 27 miles that divided West and East Berlin. The date became widely referred to as ‘Barbed Wire Sunday’ in Germany. The chief purpose of the wall was to keep East Germans from fleeing to the West. It was guarded by soldiers under orders to shoot anyone trying to escape. During the 28 years that the wall stood, some 5,000 people attempted to escape, of whom an estimated 600…

“Blame it on the Madison. Or blame it on Arthur, Franz, and Odile’s gleeful race through the Louvre in an attempt to break the world record (held by an American, of course) for the quickest visit ever. Blame it on the minute of silence; the way the director credits himself as ‘Jean-Luc Cinéma Godard’; the way our heroes pass under a stylish neon sign on the place de Clichy that reads ‘Nouvelle Vague.’ But most of all, blame it on the Madison dance sequence, later to be quoted by a parade of hip directors, that 1964’s Band of Outsiders at first seems a film of gestures rather than a singular, coherent drama. Utterly seductive in its digressions, limned with Parisian nostalgia and metafilmic quips, it’s a movie in which the flimsy caper plot risks seeming pure pretext. ‘Un plan?’ asks Odile, turning directly to the camera. ‘Pourquoi?’ Arrogantly sans souci…

“The title poses an immediate challenge: in an emergency, common sense tells us, you call 911 or cry out for help. How can there be time for meditation? And indeed both Joan Mitchell and her great friend Frank O’Hara, for whose poem, reproduced in the memorial volume In Memory of My Feelings, this color lithograph was produced, were devoted to action painting — to gesture, immediacy, process, improvisation — rather than the more careful consideration that we associate 
with meditation. In the dozens of letters O’Hara wrote Mitchell 
between the mid-fifties and his tragic death in 1966 at the age of forty, it is the present that counts, the immediate moment. ‘Here 
I am,’ one of O’Hara’s early letters to Mitchell begins, ‘watching the slowly turning reflection of a record disc on the ceiling.’ And yet such moments trigger intense, if less than orderly, self-
reflection. One of O’Hara’s few prose poems, the…

“Deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. It was originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who defined the term variously throughout his career. In its simplest form it can be regarded as a criticism of Platonism and the idea of true forms, or essences, which take precedence over appearances. Deconstruction instead places the emphasis on appearance, or suggests, at least, that essence is to be found in appearance. Derrida would say that the difference is ‘undecidable’, in that it cannot be discerned in everyday experiences. Deconstruction argues that language, especially in ideal concepts such as truth and justice, is irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible to determine. Many debates in continental philosophy surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language refer to Derrida’s beliefs. Since the 1980s, these beliefs have inspired a range of theoretical enterprises…

“A new band named Mountain delivered their debut album on March 7, 1970, then watched the cheekily named Climbing! quickly move into the Billboard Top 20 on the strength of the smash hit single and future classic rock staple, ‘Mississippi Queen.’ Sounds simple, right? The story of Mountain’s quick ascension to mainstream fame is a little more complicated than that. Mountain was actually named after the solo album released by singer and guitarist Leslie West, formerly of the Vagrants, in July 1969. This had been produced by bassist and talented arranger Felix Pappalardi, who had spent the previous years working in close cahoots with the world’s first rock supergroup, Cream. Less than a month later, the newly rechristened group, rounded out by organist Steve Knight and drummer N.D. Smart, found themselves on stage at Woodstock, which immediately transformed these and other relative unknowns into virtual household names…

“… Hail, hail, the gang’s all here: a galaxy of scoundrels, artists and geniuses commingle in John Strausbaugh’s ambitious 600-plus-page history of Greenwich Village. Strausbaugh — who presided over this newspaper’s ‘Weekend Explorer’ series on New York City and wrote what felt like the entirety of The New York Press in its 1990s heyday — turns a collection of stories and profiles into something less like a textbook than a party spinning happily out of control. … And he has a great ear. Telling the story of Off Off Broadway’s creation, Strausbaugh mentions work like ‘Awful People Are Coming Over So We Must Be Pretending to Be Hard at Work and Hope They Will Go Away.’ He cites the folk musician Dave Van Ronk on what Van Ronk expected to see when he arrived in the Village: ‘bearded, bomb-throwing anarchists, poets, painters and nymphomaniacs whose ideology was slightly to the…

“Perry Mason is an American legal drama series originally broadcast on CBS television from September 21, 1957, to May 22, 1966. The title character, portrayed by Raymond Burr, is a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer who originally appeared in detective fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner. Many episodes are based on stories written by Gardner. Perry Mason was Hollywood’s first weekly one-hour series filmed for television, and remains one of the longest-running and most successful legal-themed television series. … Perry Mason is a distinguished criminal-defense lawyer practicing in Los Angeles, California, most of whose clients have been wrongly charged with murder. Each episode typically follows a formula. The first half of the show introduces a prospective murder victim and several people, including Mason’s client, who have strong motives to commit murder. Once the crime has been committed, Mason, his chain smoking private investigator Paul Drake, and…

Still from ‘Battle of Algiers’ (1966).

“The Algerian revolution against French settler colonialism, which marks its anniversary today, March 19th, stands as one of the most iconic victories for Third World liberation. In the furnace of the brutal, seven-year-long struggle, Franz Fanon forged The Wretched of the Earth. The Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN), victory was remarkable not only because of the brutality of the French settler colonial project but because, although splits within the FLN certainly existed, there was a general consensus that political independence was not the end of the revolutionary process. The next stage was to transform Algerian society and reverse what the FLN understood as the economic and social backwardness caused by colonial exploitation, through a sweeping project of nationalization, centralization, and planning. The experience of Algeria’s revolution then, serves as a powerful example of both the achievements and failures of a revolutionary program put…