LOCAL FOOLS MAKE GOOD: Tim & Eric’s Trip

NEW YORK TIMES: ON first viewing, the comedy sketches on “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” can seem like outtakes from a public-access channel that’s broadcast only in hell. They are full of shoddily produced, sloppily edited talk shows about acne and commercials for utterly unnecessary gadgets, and populated by people who should never stand within 50 feet of a camera lens. When these elements appear in a typical television program, they’re usually a result of accidents, budgetary restrictions and bad choices. When they appear on “Awesome Show,” they’re intentional. “We have a very strict set of rules of […]

CINEMA: One More Time With Less Feeling

SUICIDE SQUAD (Directed by James Gunn, 132 minutes, USA, 2021) BY DAN TABOR FILM CRITIC James Gunn helming a Suicide Squad film should have been an easy win. The director previously adapted a property for Marvel few even knew existed when he brought Guardians of the Galaxy to the MCU. That film has became a pop-culture touchstone and represents a watershed moment for the director. Gunn cut his teeth making no-budget indie films for Troma that trafficked in transgressive humor and buckets of gore. After a falling out with Marvel — a fence that has since been mended — Gunn […]

SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: American Carnage Cont.

  BY WILLIAM C. HENRY Hey, hey, NRA–and the political pawns you pay to perpetuate your mass-murdering ways — how many Americans did you terminate today? If that sounds radically morbid, I certainly hope so. Since 2018 some 1,453 Americans have been killed in mass shootings in this country (I would have included the staggering mind-numbing year-by-year gun violence statistics but that still wouldn’t sway these conscienceless Republican killers one scintilla). Have Republican politicians EVER done anything substantive about gun violence? Of course not. Will they? Not a chance. Their feet and their feelings are so calloused that they can’t even […]

SH*T MY UNCLE SAYS: Make America Pastel Again

  BY WILLIAM C. HENRY The following is a just received excerpt from the text of Trump’s original (it was removed from the final text because his aids thought it might bring into question his diehard fans’ image of him as a “really smart guy”) self-congratulatory speech commemorating his “Great Trumpian Wall” and fulfillment of his pledge that fair, unbiased, comprehensive immigration legislation would never get passed during his four-year tenure as neo-Fascist in Chief … well, sorta: My Fellow Pale Riders, I have asked you to gather here today to kick off my executive order proclaming that henceforth the 12th […]

BOOKS: America Agonistes

  NEW YORK TIMES: Once upon a time, there was a nation that saw itself as a beacon to the world. It would lead, as John Quincy Adams put it, by the gentle power of its example. If it all sounds a bit grandiose to us now, it did, too, to Graham Greene, the English author of the 1955 spy novel “The Quiet American.” Greene liked to complain that Yankees were “plump, smug, sentimental, ready for the easy tear and the hearty laugh and the fraternity yell.” He was particularly galled by American pretensions to purity in foreign affairs. “Innocence,” […]

SUPPRESS THE VOTE: The Plot Against America

Illustration by VICTOR JUHASZ via Rolling Stone ROLLING STONE: On November 3rd, 1981, Lynette Monroe, who lived in northwest Trenton, headed out to her polling place. It was Election Day in New Jersey. When Monroe, a Democrat, arrived at the polling site, she was stopped outside by a member of a group called the National Ballot Security Task Force. Monroe was asked if she had her voter-registration card with her. She said she did not but that it didn’t matter — she was a registered voter. But the National Ballot Security Task Force members “turned her away, preventing her from […]

In The Land Of Cotton Old Times Are Forgotten

NEW YORK TIMES: I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern […]

OPEN LETTER: From Admiral Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff, To America

Photo OLAF BLECKER THE ATLANTIC: It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump’s leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent. Whatever Trump’s goal in conducting his visit, he laid bare his disdain for the rights of peaceful protest in this country, gave succor to the leaders of other […]

BEING THERE: This Is America

NEW YORKER: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” This is how Martin Luther King, Jr., explained matters to Mike Wallace, of CBS News, in 1966. […] In September, 1967, with little more than seven months left to live, King delivered a speech in Washington, D.C., in which he addressed a society “poisoned to its soul by racism” and the question of how to confront and overcome that malignancy. This was in the wake of uprisings in Detroit and many other American cities. King considered the question not in the spirit of endorsement but of comprehension. Urban riots, he […]

WORTH REPEATING: Will Americans Lose Their Right To Vote To The Covid–19 Pandemic?

NEW YORK TIMES NEW YORK TIMES: A national election is a giant pop-up event, larger in scale and significance than any other private or public occasion. Two-thirds of Americans expect the Covid-19 outbreak to disrupt voting in November, according to a late-April survey by the Pew Research Center. A successful election will require some Covid-era changes. The main one is enabling tens of millions more people to vote by mail (also called absentee balloting — the terms are synonymous) than have ever done so before. It’s also important to make adjustments to keep polling places open for people who don’t […]

RIP: Eric Taylor, A Folksinger’s Folksinger

BY JONATHAN HOULON FOLK MUSIC EDITOR In the midst of all of “this,” it would be a shame for the recent death of one of America’s best songwriters to come out of Texas or really anywhere to go unnoticed. And other than a wonderful obit in the NYT by Bill Friskics-Warren, it appears to have. I first caught up with Eric Taylor in a Quaker meeting house in Phoenixville, PA. I’d been hearing about him for years: Vietnam vet, ex-junkie, second wife was Nanci Griffith, came out of the same Houston folk scene of the late 60s/early 70s that produced […]