Tag Archives: commentary

We Did Okay, Kid: Anthony Hopkins

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“Earlier this year we had the great Al Pacino’s memoirs published, and now we have the new memoir of another great actor available, Anthony Hopkins, who as a child had to hear his schoolmates call him “Elephant Head.”  And while both Pacino and Hopkins grew up in working class circumstances with difficult upbringings, their writing voices, like their acting voices, could not be more different…”

Click on the small triangle or mp3 link above for my commentary on the new Hopkins memoir, We Did Okay, Kid, as broadcast this week on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI-FM and Pacifica stations across the nation.

The Best Folk Singer/Songwriter Of His Generation?

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“Jesse Welles has got a voice like John Prine, plays guitar like Bob Dylan, and can write a song that’s as topical and clever as the songs of Phil Ochs or Tom Paxton or Woody Guthrie. It turns out, despite his handsome shaggy-haired babyface look, he has been making songs for a long time. In an age where so much music is artificially created with plastic lyrics and digitally manipulated instruments, it is refreshing to hear a protest song on a simple acoustic folk guitar that doesn’t just talk about generalities, but actually names names, and has a political point of view…”

Click on the mp3 link or triangle above to hear the rest of my commentary on Welles, as broadcast this week on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.

The Ultimate Hidden Truth Of The World

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A posthumous collection of essays by anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, who coined the phrase “We are the 99%,” has just come out, and we look into one of its most interesting pieces.

Click on the triangle above or mp3 link to hear my commentary on the book, as heard on the Arts Express radio program this week, broadcast on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

King Lear: Apocalypse Now

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This week, it’s 460 years since the birth of Shakespeare, and since we are living in what can only be termed apocalyptic times, it might be fitting to take a look at the most apocalyptic of Shakespeare’s plays, King Lear. Let’s call this episode of my continuing series,“Shakespeare Without Tears,” King Lear: Apocalypse Now.

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear my commentary as broadcast today on WBAI-FM and Pacifica stations across the nation.

Don’t Look Back But It’s Our 9th Anniversary!

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Great Balls of Fire and other exultations of exclamatory joy! Hoo-roo and hoo-rah! We made it by the skin of our teeth through one more year of daily posts. I hope they’ve provided some sort of diversion and interest for you. As is my custom, on anniversary day, I post what I feel were my favorite audio pieces of the year. I’ll try to keep the list short this time, a baker’s dozen, so that you can get a chance to sample the ones you missed or re-visit posts that you enjoyed.

Thy Kingdom Come

Hey Guys, Watch This: Nellie McKay

The Underground Empire

Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse

John Sayles’s New Novel: Jamie MacGillivray

Coriolanus: Class War

“Shakespeare Without Tears”: Hamlet and the All-Seeing Surveillance State

Julian Assange In His Own Words

From Approximately Coast To Coast…

The Quiet Epidemic

The Theater of Three Card Monte

Our End-Of-Year Arts Express Thank You Poem

2nd Chance: Sex, Violence and Bulletproof Vests

Coriolanus: Class War

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Imagine please: A working class uprising. The lower classes are starving. They demand the right to eat. They want access to the great stores of grain that have been won in the recent war, confiscated from the enemy, but withheld from the peasants. And so begins the most class-conscious play that Shakespeare ever wrote, called Coriolanus.

Click on the triangle above or mp3 link to hear our commentary on Coriolanus, as broadcast yesterday on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation

The Theater of Three Card Monte

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This is a radio segment based on an article I wrote a few decades ago about the theatrical elements of hustles like three-card monte.

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the piece as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Shakespeare Without Tears: Twelfth Night’s Fools For Love

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Here in the US, January 6th has taken on a particular political meaning, but for most of the world, it’s the celebration of the twelfth night of Christmas, partridges in pear trees and all that. It’s a traditional time of partying and celebration, and Shakespeare titled what I believe is his best comedy, Twelfth Night. But it might be have been better called, Love Makes Idiots and Fools of Everyone!

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the rest of the story as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program, heard on WBAI-FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

The Mystery of Holly Plus

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Was your correspondent deepfaked by a deepfake? And who owns your voice anyway?

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear “The Mystery of Holly Plus” as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio show, heard on WBAI-FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

“Shakespeare Without Tears”: Hamlet and the All-Seeing Surveillance State

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Welcome to our inaugural Arts Express episode of our “Shakespeare Without Tears” series, making Shakespeare accessible and relevant for the 21st century. We start off with an episode based on an a post I wrote here some time ago.

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the episode as broadcast today on the Arts Express program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

And for our New York City listeners, we’re happy to tell you that we are now on at a new time, Wednesdays at 9PM.

Taken For Granted: Overcoming Underwriting

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“This week, I imagined a radio station in dire financial straits deciding the only way out of its financial difficulties was to take on underwriting sponsorships, like you hear on NPR or PBS. Now I know that’s a completely hypothetical situation, I know that would never happen at a place like this, Pacifica WBAI…”

Our take on the latest schemes to fund Pacifica.

Things Are Not What They Appear To Be

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Wherein your correspondent talks of propaganda, faulty perception, the art of magic, Whit Haydn’s theory of conjuring, suspension of disbelief, deception, Buddhist philosophy, and the need to doubt.

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the commentary as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program heard on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Lee Camp, Redacted: Censorship Tonight

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Wherein we talk of media censorship, and broadcast part of political comedian and activist Lee Camp’s explanation of how the platform he was broadcasting on got shut down.

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear my commentary and Lee’s talk as broadcast yesterday on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.

How to Tell A Story In One Sentence

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Have you ever had this experience, as I have had many times? I’m at a friend’s house and inevitably someone asks what’s new, and what have you been working on, and though I may have a project that I’ve been working on, I suddenly become all muckle-mouthed and it just becomes a trail of, “Well, it’s kinda hard to explain…”

To the rescue: a book that I thought I would hate, but turned out to be a really interesting and useful book…

Click on the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the rest of the story as broadcast today on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica stations across the nation.

I Digress

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“This is about digression. This started six years ago as a written piece and somehow I’m circling back to it now. We’re coming up on Halloween, which is a day where we hide ourselves, change our identities, have secret identities; in other words, we refuse to be what others see us as, we try to make things a little bit harder for those who want to capture us in a word, a phrase, a box, a category, an image. Like Harry Houdini, I want to be an escape artist from the expectations of others…”

Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the story, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC, and Pacifica stations across the country.

Acting Up: A Deeper Dive

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There have been many enjoyable memoirs about an actor’s life in theater and film– the autobiographies of Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando come to mind–but one of my favorites is David Hare’s Acting Up. The British-born David Hare is not a professional actor, but rather an acclaimed playwright and director who talked himself into taking the main–and only–role in his play Via Dolorosa. He kept a diary of his rehearsals and performances, and published it. Here’s a radio piece I did recently, expanding on a brief essay I had written previously.

Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the piece, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NYC, and Pacifica stations across the country.

Diaspora Boy

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American artist Eli Valley created his Diaspora Boy comics because of his anger with the corruption of American Jewish institutions and so-called Jewish “leaders” that he was constantly exposed to. His response was a savage comic strip with a visual style that mixed the 50s Mad’s Harvey Kurtzman and the 60s R. Crumb.

I broadcast a radio commentary about the collected strips that Valley published in book form, and I also read one of his 9-panel cartoons on the air.

Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear the commentary, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

Memoirs of a Misfit Ruler

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Wherein we make like Marcel Proust and recall our humorous encounters with the trappings of power and authority in my local elementary school.

Click the triangle or mp3 link above to hear our tale, as broadcast today on Arts Express on WBAI FM NY and Pacifica stations across the nation.

Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays?

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This April is the 457th Anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth and I have to admit that everything I thought I knew about William Shakespeare’s life may well be wrong. My faith was recently shaken by both the film Last Will and Testament and the book North by Shakespeare. Both works posit that heresy of heresies that William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon was not the fellow who wrote the 37 plays usually attributed to him.

For the skinny, click on the triangle or mp3 link above and listen to the story as broadcast today on the Arts Express program on WBAI FM radio and Pacifica stations across the country.

Denial

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(“Enjoy Denial” by Tim Fenn is licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Here’s a re-working of an essay that I originally printed on this blog some time ago, and revised for radio broadcast.

“Well everyone’s all aflutter these days with our newly elected overlords, and far be it from me to burst anyone’s bubble.  I mean, what fun is it in having enemies if you can’t beat up on them and blame them for all the country’s ills? Of course our unelected overlords still continue apace, but today I want to talk about a different level of reality that remains largely unspoken...the one incontrovertible fact about life in these United States regardless of who is ruling is the following…”

Click on the triangle or link above to hear it as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the nation.

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs

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David Graeber died last month and it was a real loss. The radical anthropologist was probably best known as the author of Debt: The First 5000 Years, but my favorite book of his is the quirky Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Here’s my commentary on this important book as broadcast today on the Arts Express program on WBAI FM NYC and Pacifica affiliates across the country.

Click on the triangle or the image above to listen.

High Anxiety: King John, the Audio Version

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mad world

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Here’s the audio version of my commentary on Shakespeare’s King John, which I recorded for Arts Express on WBAI NY radio and Pacifica affiliates across the country..

It’s one of the least known of Shakespeare’s plays, but no less a writer than George Orwell said about it, “When I saw it acted, what with its intrigues and double crossings, non-aggression pacts, quislings, people changing sides in the middle of a battle, and what-not, it seemed to me extraordinarily up to date.”

To listen,  click on the triangle or mp3 link above.

“Being Adventurous Means Going To Places You Don’t Know Exist! “

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CAC-3 Photo credit Alma Har'el

(photo by Alma Har’el)

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What do Kevin Kline, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, Laura Linney, and Patti LuPone have in common? They all were students of Moni Yakim, the legendary acting teacher at the Julliard Drama Division, who is the subject of a recently released film documentary, Creating A Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy.

You can hear my review of the film as broadcast today on WBAI 99.5FM NYC, WBAI.org and Pacifica affiliates around the country, by clicking on the triangle or mp3 link above.

If you are at all interested in acting or teaching, I highly recommend this film.