Opinion
President Trump addresses the media at the White House on Super Tuesday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)
“…so what if another corporate-neoliberal Democratic presidency in the Clinton/Obama/Biden-Buttigieg/Bloomberg/Council on Foreign Relations mode would birth a 2025 Republican presidency even more fascistic than Trump’s (if Biden could somehow defeat a possibly recession-plagued Trump)? The oligarchs don’t care. They’ll work out a comfortable accommodation with that monster, too.”
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Sacred Fools has long been among my favorite theater companies and its West Coast premiere of Antigone, Presented by the Girls of St. Catherine’s only confirms this critic’s longstanding admiration and affection for this imaginative enclave of theatrical envelop-pushers.
The ancient myth of Antigone - a young woman who suffered for heroically standing up to authority - has been oft-adapted by top talents for literally 2,500 years, starting with tragedies by both Sophocles and Euripides. The 20th century saw Antigone-related stage productions by dramatists Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh, Athol Fugard and Bertolt Brecht, as well as a ballet and opera by the great Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (who composed memorable scores for Costa-Gavras films, including 1969’s Z, as well as 1964’s Zorba the Greek and 1973’s Serpico).
A grisly old PR pro waddles into a conference room where elite technocrats are waiting for his assessment of propaganda issues. He sits down, looks around, and says, “If you’re going to launch a phony epidemic, the ideal place for it is mainland China. The government will lock down that country quicker than a missile fired from a drone. And then nobody will be able to figure out what’s going on.
Which is exactly what you want.
Well, the Democratic Party machine in Franklin County is delivering the primary vote this year as if it was Tammany Hall. Instead of the mantra “Vote early – vote often” it’s “Vote early – and vote our sample ballot.”
I got a call from a Bernie Sanders field rep who witnessed Somalians being disenfranchised at the Franklin County Board of Elections during the first week of early voting. He said the poll workers weren’t letting elderly Somali women vote. Their big sin seemed to be they refused the sample ballot.
Despite their names being in the poll book, the Somali women were told they couldn’t vote unless they pronounced their address correctly in perfect English. The Bernie rep had noticed that all the Somali voters in question had rejected to take the sample ballot a Democratic operative tried to hand to them on their way in. The Bernie rep had asked the poll workers if there were translators present and was told they could help translate at the voting machines but not at the poll book area. The three Somali women were turned away.
In August of 2011, the usually boring world of guitar production was jolted by the arrival of federal agents at three Gibson guitar facilities in Tennessee. The agents executed a search warrant and seized large quantities of Madagascar Ebony and Indian Rosewood thought to have been imported by Gibson in violation of a United States law known as the Lacey Act.
In some respects a law ahead of its time, the Lacey Act was signed into effect by President William McKinley in 1900. The Act prohibited the transfer of illegally captured or prohibited animals across state lines, meaning that you can’t poach animals in one state and sell them in a state where they are legal. The law was intended to stop the over hunting of birds for hat plumes and prevent the introduction of invasive species into native ecosystems.
The night before Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren spoke to several thousand people in a quadrangle at East Los Angeles College. Much of her talk recounted the heroic actions of oppressed Latina workers who led the Justice for Janitors organization. Standing in the crowd, I was impressed with Warren's eloquence as she praised solidarity and labor unions as essential for improving the lives of working people.
Now, days later, with corporate Democrat Joe Biden enjoying sudden momentum and mega-billionaire Mike Bloomberg joining forces with him, an urgent question hovers over Warren. It's a time-honored union inquiry: "Which side are you on?"
How Warren answers that question might determine the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. In the process, she will profoundly etch into history the reality of her political character.
"The urgency of Warren's decision can hardly be overstated."
The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.
Two years ago Laguna Playhouse hit the jackpot by presenting a stage version of a 1967 screen classic about sex, The Graduate, starring a famous actress, Melanie Griffith, as Mrs. Robinson. Now the venerable SoCal theater is panning for gold in the same river by presenting another theatrical rendering of a 1967 movie about love, featuring this time not one, but two, marquee names. Paul Rodriguez and Rita Rudner, both known as comedians and actors, co-star in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which opened on Broadway in 1963 with Robert Redford, who four years later joined Jane Fonda for Hollywood’s take on the beloved romantic comedy.
However, Rodriguez and Rudner, who are both in their sixties, do not play the show’s leads. The newlyweds are portrayed by Lily Gibson as Corie, while Nick Tag - who co-starred opposite (or should we say underneath?) Melanie’s Mrs. Robinson in Laguna’s Graduate - graduates from Ben Braddock to Paul Bratter in Barefoot. Rudner portrays the young wife’s mother, Ethel Banks, while Rodriguez essays the role Charles Boyer played in the movie, Victor Velasco.
Writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu’s slyly stylish The Whistlers is one of those productions film buffs relish largely because of their cinematic references. In one scene characters appear in a theater where John Ford’s 1956 classic The Searchers is being screened. But while the 97-minute-long Whistlers’ Romanian characters may very well be searching for something (and/ or someone), the celluloid genre Porumboiu is most emulating isn’t the Western, but rather Film Noir.
There is also a Hitchcockian panache, paying homage to the Master of Suspense’s most famous scene from Psycho, as well as to mattresses, which hold a special place in the iconography of crime movies. Remember in The Godfather when they “go to the mattresses?”
Julie Whitney Scott – Free Presscolumnist, radio producer, actor and theater festival director – was honored with the Harold Award at the 20th Annual Central Ohio Theatre Roundtable Theater Awards Celebration show on February 16. Scott founded the Columbus Black Theatre Festival and received the award for her Mine 4 God Productions and for and presenting the annual Festival for eight years. The Harold Award is named for the late Harold Eisenstein the long-time theater director for the Gallery Players.
“I am honored, grateful, humbled, privileged and in awe of what God is doing and has done for me. What he is doing for me has blessed others and I will continue to pay it forward,” Scott said after receiving the award, “I was being recognized for something I had and was doing to serve others in my community, of my race, for the unity of all people, to ensure our stories, the here and now stories, the ‘we are no longer slaves’ stories were being told, under the title of Mine 4 GOD Productions. A title that from the beginning had to fight and preserver through the naysayers because I dared to use ‘God’ in my Theatre production company.”