How palpable is the combat in Nowhere to Hide!
Iraq
Theater Review: Happy Medium Theatre’s “Dying City” — Inventive Intimacy
Happy Medium Theatre’s powerful production is a testament to how the artists in our area are triumphing over the economic adversity.
Theater Review: Company One Exhibits a Ferociously Good “Bengal Tiger”
“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” is hard to categorize. It is both funny and dead serious, not exactly a black comedy but an idiosyncratic composite of many different dramatic antecedents.
The Collective Stupidity: The X-Box War
by Peter Walsh “Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College. I knew George twenty years ago, when […]
Theater Commentary: Who’s Afraid of the Antiwar Play?
by Bill Marx What particularly disappointed Boston Globe theater critic Louise Kennedy about the Huntington Theatre Company’s recent production of David Rabe’s Streamers was that it lacked the emotional impact of the 1976 staging of the script. She found it “painful because that earlier production clearly resonated with its audiences as a powerful antiwar statement, […]
The Art of Being Eternally Hillary
The NY Times is running a series of articles about front-runners for the presidency. I’ve read the two about Hillary Clinton carefully, because I’m stuck about her. She’s someone I’d like to feel enthusiastic about but can’t. She always, to my mind, testifies strongly at first, then cancels herself out. She’s an enigma wrapped inside […]
Liberal Hawks and Paleo-Raptors
Two books by left-wing pundits grapple with why they supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq. “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” by George Packer. (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux) “Power and the Idealists: Or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath” by Paul Berman. (Soft Skull Press) By Harvey Blume The inescapable question for […]
Book Review: Target — The White House
By Harvey Blume Nicholson Baker’s new novel is about a man obsessed with killing President Bush. Checkpoint: A Novel by Nicholson Baker. (Knopf) Nicholson Baker’s short, funny — and frequently tender — new novel consists of a conversation between Ben and Jay, high school buddies who haven’t seen each other in a few years, and […]