Theater & the Arts
Dreariness is the design motif of Gordon Edelstein’s persuasive staging of Tennessee Williams’ 1944 memory play about a family trapped in unhappiness and illusion. Dreary dark wallpaper hovers over the single bed with a rose spread in the New Orleans hotel room that the writer, Tom (Patch Darragh), Williams’ alter ego, inhabits. The same claustrophobic space becomes the St. Louis tenement rooms he shared with his mother Amanda (Judith Ivey) and sister Laura (Keira Keeley) .
Theater & the Arts
A table is set with bread and cakes, back-dropped by a forest created from a jumble of cross-hatched planks painted and splotched to suggest leaves. A servant is angry at the housekeeper who enters the space without warning. Do we barge in on you? Class stratification and conflicts ripple through this richly comic production of Alexander Ostrovsky’s satire of a Russian aristocracy high on self-importance and low on cash.
Banks, Corporate Abuses, Featured, Offshore, Scoops
The American Interest, July-Aug 2010 (online May 18, 2010) –
As I write this, the U.S. Senate is debating a major financial reform bill in which the credit default swap, a kind of derivative, plays a significant part. An amendment to that bill, proposed by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), would ban banks from proprietary trading. There are a lot of high-rolling bankers who do not want that amendment to pass, because it will mess up their plans to repatriate foreign profits into the United States, untaxed, by trading in derivatives on their own accounts. The clearinghouse ICE Trust U.S. forms a central part of these plans.
What is ICE Trust U.S., and who owns it? ICE US Holding Co., which was established in 2008 as the parent of ICE Trust U.S., is located in the Cayman Islands. Yet none of the owners of ICE US Holding Co. are based in the Caymans. Among the owners of the Cayman‘s company are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which are headquartered in New York. Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Theater & the Arts
Martin McDonagh takes weird to new levels in this ultimate shaggy dog story. It’s bizarre and funny and if you suspend disbelief and don’t take it too seriously, you will have a good time. It seems that a 17-year-old kid was playing catch in Spokane, Washington, when six hillbillies dragged him to the railroad tracks, forced his hand on the rail and watched while a train sped by and sliced it off. Then they used it to wave him good-bye. He, Carmichael (Christopher Walken), decided if he didn‘t die he would retrieve his hand and pay them back. He has spent the ensuing 47 years doing just that.
Blog
May 5, 2010 –
I have won the Sigma Delta Chi journalism award for Non-Deadline Reporting (Daily Circulation 100,001+) for “Allen Stanford’s Miami Connection.” This is the exposé I brought to the Miami Herald that told how the Florida Banking Department allowed Stanford to set up an unregulated office to move money offshore. I worked with two Herald reporters, who shared the award. It is one of the country’s major journalism prizes.
According to the Society of Professional Journalists, which presents the award, Judges chose the winners from over 1,300 entries in categories covering print, radio, television and online. The awards recognize outstanding work published or broadcast in 2009. They will be presented Oct. 2 during the 2010 SPJ Convention and National Journalism Conference in Las Vegas.
