May 31, 2018 – Major media reporting that William Browder was detained in Spain, supposedly on Interpol red notice, but Interpol then said it didn’t put one out. So maybe it was an old one. Browder tweeted, of course, got lots of ink in the western media, and the story was over. Except it shouldn’t be.
“Travesties” is a glorious kaleidoscope of famous people, fiction and events that converge in Zurich during World War I and raise questions about radical politics, the meaning of art, and the validity of memory to link it all. Tom Stoppard pays homage to and questions absurdist and revolutionary art in a play which presents three of the great figures of the time through the clouded memory of a retired British diplomat posted in Zurich during the Great War. It is a brilliant historical fantasy directed by Patrick Marber.
Where to go before or after a play in New York‘s midtown west that is smart but gives you a choice of snacks or full dinner? It‘s called Rummy‘s Tavern, on West 53rd Street, west of Eighth Avenue. And in good weather you can sit at tables in a back garden!
This Saint Joan (Condola Rashad) is a charmer. At the same time, she is no farm wench but a tough young woman of 17. She hears voices. She vows to make the English occupiers leave France.
May 22, 2018 – The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Trump Tower meeting testimonies were released May 16th. So far, a week later, the mainstream media has not analyzed Paul Manafort‘s “cryptic” cell phone notes. Not hard if you look at Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya‘s testimony that presents in more detail what she said at the meeting. Which the media ignore. Perhaps because it would spotlight inconvenient truths about Bill Browder and his major client, Ziff Investments.
May 21, 2018 – The people who put up this poster at New York’s CooperHewitt Museum, which I saw yesterday, must be millennials or younger! It’s a critique of US foreign policy mostly in the 1980s. War in Vietnam, invasion of Grenada, Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, US bombing of Libya, invasion of Panama. But blurb says the poster was created in ca (about) 1980! How can a poster that references those events be created before most of the events occurred? Curators appear to know nothing of the US 1980s war crimes the poster attacks!
May 15, 2018 – Michael McFaul, President Obama’s senior director of Russian affairs at the National Security Council and then ambassador to Russia, gave a neocon tour d‘horizon at the Council on Foreign Relations May 11. [Republicans/Democrats, they are all neocons now.] He was there to promote a new book. I asked him about the Magnitsky hoax. I got expected evasions at the Council, but later found revelations in the book. Here’s the Q & A.
May 13, 2018 – The latest William Browder acolyte in the mainstream press is Tunku Varadarajan, a former Wall Street Journal opinion editor now at the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His May 11th WSJ story is a web of fabrications, so let‘s take them one-by-one, with links to the evidence. I love when Varadarajan refers to Browder as “an Anglo-American businessman.” Really, does that mean that one parent was American and the other British? No, it means he repudiated his US birth citizenship in 1998 so he wouldn‘t have to pay taxes on the money he was making in Russia and which he stashed in an offshore network set up by the infamous Mossack Fonseca.
Marin Ireland is compelling in the Transport Group‘s minimalist production of Tennessee Williams‘ “Summer and Smoke.” Her lovely slow southern accent is all the decoration the stage needs. Director Jack Cummings III does a fine job in evoking time and place with no accoutrements required.
May 6, 2018 – I just saw Mikhail Khodorkovsky‘s Wall Street Journal April 23, 2018 article How to Stop Vladimir Putin‘s Mafia. Among other things, he promotes the Magnitsky Act “to stop Putin‘s Mafia.” But now see how golden boy MBK made a deal with William Browder and colleagues Kenneth Dart (Dart Cups) and Francis Baker (Andersen Group) to sell them the Russian firm titanium Avisma complete with a transfer-pricing investor & tax-cheating scam.
May 1, 2018 – Here is what you never read in the mainstream press about crooked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in the MSM again because he received hacked emails the NY Times uses to declare that Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya colluded with the Russian prosecutor in the Browder/Magnitsky case. It’s how he stole his billions. Here is the interview on Fault Lines. https://www.pscp.tv/stranahan/1rmGPmXLjpZJN
April 29, 2018 – People outraged by Browder’s fake story about Jim Zwerg, the Freedom Rider, being his beaten lawyer, found this: Jim’s video interview as he recovered from the Alabama racists’ assault, almost 50 years before Browder’s fabrication.
Why does anyone believe crooked Browder? Oh, sorry, the mainstream media has its own agenda.
April 27, 2018 – Repeating the William Browder fabrications, New York Times reporters Andrew Kramer and Sharon LaFraniere today wrote the repeatedly disproved claim, “The tax fraud was uncovered by Sergei L. Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was imprisoned and died in custody after disclosing the theft.”
Carousel is gorgeous. Book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, music by Richard Rodgers, produced in 1945. Well, I‘ll take the lyrics, not the book. The story is from “Liliom,”a 1909 play by the Hungarian Ferenc Molnar. The balletic and acrobatic dancing is stunning, not surprising from Justin Peck who is resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet. The vocals are thrilling, led by opera diva Renée Fleming who presents her solos as if they were arias. But, the story is a little silly, hokey, a young cotton mill worker becoming infatuated with a carnival barker, but you must look at it as you would an opera or ballet. If only it was done in another language!
April 18, 2018 – I thought this photo of yesterday’s Tax Day 2018 anti-Trump tax law protest in Foley Square, Manhattan, carried a plaintive truth. Elliot Crown had a Trump mask and a scale to weigh Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax scam against what the country needs. But by chance in the background was a woman collecting plastic bottles, which of course how she was hoping the deposit returns she would get for them would help her survive.
Edward Albee‘s 1991 play “Three Tall Women” is the attempt of a gay male to get into the psyches of three women, or rather of one women at three stages of her life, played by three actresses on stage at the same time. It is reportedly inspired by his adoptive mother, whom he despised. So, you get a clueless young girl marrying a rich man for money, morphing into a cynical lady in her 50s, and a nasty old woman past 90. Mostly about their interactions with men, nothing about their own hopes or dreams.
In Kenneth Lonergan‘s smart, serious, funny morality tale of the big city, a cop angling for a promotion visits a hooker in a high rise while his newbie female partner waits below, a clueless young security guard in the lobby has a propensity to blather, and his supervisor has a crisis when his brother is implicated in a killing, The “hero” is the one who can‘t help telling the truth.
April 8, 2018 –
At the April 4th Council on Foreign Relations meeting in New York, a panel of ex-State Department and other operatives discussed how to overthrow the government of Venezuela. They were almost gleeful in taking about the terrible conditions, lack of food, of medicine, and the success of US sanctions that had contributed to Venezuelans’ misery.
Federico GarcÃa Lorca was a poet and playwright in Spain in the 1920s and 30s. In 1934 he wrote “Yerma,” about a peasant woman who is obsessed with the desire to have a child. Her husband is a farmer, but she has nothing in life but to be a mother. Lorca was gay. Don‘t know how that affected his attitude toward women who defined themselves only by what they could do with a uterus. Or if he used the story as a critique of women he viewed as crazed baby-making machines. The lady gets no sympathy.
April 8, 2018 – The New York Review of Books refuses to run a letter it invited pointing out fake facts in its February Browder Magnitsky story. It had ready my initial letter, invited a cut, which I did, but will not post it. Shame on what used to be a place of serious commentary and now runs neocon Russophobic screeds.
March 27, 2018 – US journalists Michael Isikoff and David Corn have just published Russian Roulette, an evidence-challenged Russophobic book of the sort that is clogging the media these days. It is a fast cut-and-paste job, including fabrications by William Browder which they apparently never bothered to check out. Since if they cared about their own reputations, they would not have written all that fake stuff. Here is the letter I wrote them, which they did not answer.
Clever, funny, challenging, not totally persuasive, “Admissions” tells of the family crisis when Charlie (the terrific Ben Edelman), son of parents with top jobs at Hillcrest, an expensive second-tier prep boarding school in rural New Hampshire, doesn‘t get into Yale. The father runs the school, the mother is admissions officer, and they are committed to diversity. But Charlie thinks his friend Perry – child of middle class black father and white mother– got in because he checked the “black” box.
March 25, 2018 – “Had enough” was the meme. From the cynical dig at politicians‘ pledge to solve thousands of gun deaths with “thoughts and prayers” to a promise to vote them out, New Yorkers like thousands around the country March 24, took to the streets, to Sixth Avenue, to demand gun control.
March 17, 2018 – Bill Browder must be shedding tears that Mossack Fonseca, the infamous firm that set up offshore shell companies to help tax-evaders, criminals, looting dictators and other money-launderers, is shutting down.
It says it did so because it got a bad rep from the Panama Papers exposé.
The Argentine pampas, their “West,” was settled by English, German, Italian, and Spanish immigrants who became the gauchos, the “cowboys,” who ran the ranches, ran the cattle that made the country world famous for beef. And the Chimichurri Grill, this elegant New York Upper East Side Argentine steakhouse with a glittery Italian crystal chandelier and working Italian marble fireplace, goes back to those roots.
