Opinion

Nobody, not racist warmakers, not imaginary non-racist warmakers, not founding fathers, not radical protesters should be made into a deity, larger than life, in marble or bronze, on horseback or otherwise. Nobody is that flawless, and nobody’s story so withstands the test of time. We need human-sized statues and memorials of whole movements.

The U.S. Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence, has a whole marble building dedicated to its worship: the National Archives in D.C., plus the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. It’s generally taught in U.S. schools as something in the past, not something to be improved upon — hardly even to be questioned.

DEMOCRACY (SIC) Theater Review

The Democracy Zone: Theater of the People, By the People, For the People 

By Ed Rampell

Don Williams’ com-dram democracy (sic) opens with a movie-like montage, accompanied by a throbbing recorded rock soundtrack and flashing lights designed by the aptly name RAY Jones. (Look closely and you’ll glimpse a red flag with a hammer and sickle in the background.) The rest of this world premiere production presented by the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater Company at the Art of Acting Studio Los Angeles is also quite cinematic, a fast moving, often comic pastiche with seven filmic vignettes commenting on America’s contemporary political scene (and what a scene the players make!). 

Riffing on TV’s famous Twilight Zone anthology supernatural series that debuted on the tube in 1959, hosted and co-written by Rod Serling, Alex Best plays an ersatz Serling who welcomes spectators to a “dimension of imagination” called “the Democracy Zone” - a demented domain that I must say is truly “demo-crazy.”

istorically, bigotry has served as the basis for US policy and law often enough that no one should be surprised that we’re at it again, targeting people who had no meaningful choice when they were brought to this country as children. To mask our bigotry, we call these innocent young people “childhood arrivals.” We pretend they broke the law as minors by accompanying their parents who brought them to our country in violation of our constitutionally squalid immigration statutes. But we also pretend we are big-hearted because we will hold off on “deferred action” against these criminals in our midst. Yes, that’s DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the 2012 executive program that is fundamentally a moral hoax and a legal joke, neither of which is among the reasons President Trump has given for throwing the program into deferred chaos.

“Even if you’re the one charged, you will help create the answer.”

And the court has now come to order.

The speaker is Colleen Sheehan, the presiding judge of the Restorative Justice Community Court, which opened last week in the Chicago neighborhood of North Lawndale, after several years of intense planning.

Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera

V.I. Pudovkin’s short Chess Fever

Sergei Eisenstein’s first film Glumov's Diary

Los Angeles, Sept. 15, 2017 – The Los Angeles Workers Center and Hollywood Progressive co-present a triple feature of films by three of Soviet cinema’s greats. These movies show that the Bolsheviks had a sense of humor.

As the Nazis ride again, British playwright Oliver Cotton’s brilliant play Daytona is about how fascism impacts and haunts survivors throughout their lives (and those are the “lucky” ones!) and what may be the first postwar “Antifa” in America. The two-acter opens mundanely enough, with an old married couple practicing for a dance competition in their rather routine, drab Brooklyn apartment, expertly designed with her usual deftness and eye for detail by Hillary Bauman.

But what is about to befall the seventy-something Elli (Sharron Shayne) and Joe (George Wyner) is anything but typical, as out of the blue, the long lost Billy (the peerless Richard Fancy) shows up to upset the proverbial applecart. Billy’s arrival from out of nowhere reminds first Joe and then, in Act II, Elli about who and what they really are and their deep dark past, as long buried secrets are excavated and revealed.

How blessed we Angelenos are: LA Opera’s Carmen is opera at its grandest, right here on Grand Avenue. I was immediately swept away by the opening strains of the “Prelude,” with Georges Bizet’s ebullient sounds as frothy as wave rolling ashore at Malibu or Makapuu in Oahu. When James Conlon strode up to conduct the 61-piece LA Opera Orchestra to launch his 10th year wielding the baton at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and LA Opera’s glorious new season, the sold out crowd erupted in applause, chanting: “Connie! Connie! Connie!” (Okay, so that’s a total lie about the shouts - but not the clapping, although I imagine many of us did indeed feel like calling out the maestro’s moniker in acclaim.)

The Greek tragedian Euripides’ rumination on war, Iphigenia in Aulis, is the Getty Villa’s annual outdoor classical theater production reviving a Greek classic at the Malibu amphitheater. Iphigenia was first performed posthumously in 405 BC at an Athens amphitheater with 20,000 seats. Iphigenia won ancient Greece’s equivalent of the Tony or Ovation Award at the city state’s Dionysia festival.

Unfortunately, the Iphigenia production at the 500-ish seat outdoor Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater at the Getty Villa remains startlingly relevant. Iphigenia is set against the background of the Trojan War, which according to legend was triggered by Paris running off with the beautiful Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus (Michael Huftile). His brother Agamemnon (Mark Montgomery) is the leader of the Greek forces that have assembled at Aulis to set sail with a formidable fleet to recapture Helen of Troy. However, the Greek god Artemis has conspired to prevent this from happening - unless Agamemnon commits an unspeakable act as a sacrifice to the gods.

When I wrote a book about the Kellogg-Briand Pact my goals were to draw lessons from the movement that created it, and to call attention to its existence as a still-current law

The U.S. proposal for a U.N. resolution allowing “all necessary measures” to forcibly halt and inspect North Korean ships and to cut off oil to North Korea may send our species out the door with a culminating act that echoes and builds on numerous historical precedents.

We know, if we don’t deny the science, that climate change threatens us all, that a single nuclear bomb could push climate change well past the point of no return (if we aren’t there already), that several nuclear bombs could starve us out of existence, and that a significant nuclear war could end our follies quite swiftly.

That alone ought to be enough reason to choose diplomacy over the foreign-policy equivalent of shooting guns at a hurricane.

But why is innocent harmless philanthropic inspecting of ships for the good of the Rule of Law a problem? If those people have nothing to hide, then what — insert clever grin here — do they have to worry about, huh?