A charming local French bistro. Every neighborhood should have one! This one, Paname, is at Second Avenue and 57th Street. It‘s casual, inviting, with Art Nouveau on the walls. There‘s a 10-foot high ceiling, wood tables with tablecloths, brown leather banquettes and classic wood bistro chairs. Picture windows overlook Second Avenue.
When I saw this amazingly timely play by Sarah Burgess, about corporate Democrats attacking a progressive Texas candidate, I thought people might think, that really is a stretch. But no, it was real. It‘s at the Public Theater, but have you checked the news? Do you know that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has just in recent weeks attacked Laura Moser, a terrific progressive female candidate for Congress from Houston, Texas?
March 5, 2018 – Snopes, which pretends to check out fake news, is a fraud. I sent them a detailed email of why one of its Browder stories is a fake, and the response was “Thank you for writing to us!” And “our search engine can probably help you locate the very article you’re looking for. Thank you for your interest in snopes.com.” No interest in evidence that its report was a fraud.
March 2, 2018 – My Fault Lines online radio interview on the Council on Foreign Relations “Containing Russia” report discusses how authors Robert Blackwell and Philip Gordon lie in repeating British* investor/tax evader William Browder‘s claims that his accountant (not his lawyer!) Sergei Magnitsky was a whistle-blower on a $230-million fraud against Russian Treasury and that he was beaten to death in a Russian prison. A good 20-minute summary of the facts.
Don‘t arrive late to this charming, surreal and politically sharp-edged play. When you claim your seats, you may be almost touching distance from a sandy oval filled with a few chairs, discarded plastic bags and cups, a real goat being fed by a peasant guy, and a caged rooster that is grabbed and petted by a peasant lady. A lake is edged in sandbags. The livestock will disappear, but the sense of magical realism created by director Michael Arden will not.
This smart musical revue tells the changing attitudes of and toward women over a century with the lyrics of popular songs of the time. It‘s semi-autobiographical about the author Dorothy Marcic, a former Vanderbilt professor who wrote a 2002 book on how women were portrayed in songs, channeled here by Janet (Jana Robbins), as a middle-aged college professor.
Feb 23, 2018 – This is the letter I sent yesterday to the New York Review of Books.
Amy Knight‘s “Russia’s Magnitsky affair and how it comes closer to Donald Trump” in the New York Review of Books Feb 22, 2018, is so full of egregious errors of fact, that I shall just start at the beginning, and link to evidence proving either bad faith or bad journalism. Essentially, Knight here is not a reporter, she is William Browder‘s stenographer. I link to the article here and here so as to give readers a context and not repeat too much.
“A B movie” would be too generous a description of this dreadful play. It is based on the tome by Ayn Rand, a bible of the far-right, which, if the play is any indication, shows they have no more taste in literature than politics. Or maybe this is just the fault of adapter Koen Tachelet. Director Ivo van Hove adds his own horrors.
This gorgeous fantasy by Claire van Kampen, directed by John Dove, is based on a real story, with the narrative setting art and sensitivity against the plotting of ambitious court politicians of the time. The candles on overhanging chandeliers suggest the whimsy that is a mirror of reality. Philippe V (the brilliant Mark Rylance) is the feeble-minded 18th-century Spanish king who was the grandson of King Louis XIV of France. (It was the time of imperialism by Europe‘s royals.)
I have been doing investigative journalism about financial and corporate corruption for 20 years. Ayad Akhtar‘s play is right on the mark. It is based on the story of the corrupt junk bond trader Michael Milken. He got confederates to manipulate stocks so he could take over companies to loot and destroy them. It was a scandal of the 1980s. Too bad the market corruption he revealed never stopped. But this Akhtar gives you an excellent play-by-play. Better than what you might read in the press. Doug Hughes direction is a bit TV potboiler, but he nails it.
At the start of Martin McDonagh‘s quirky “Hangmen,” a condemned prisoner, Hennessy (Gilles Geary) is shouting his innocence. It hardly matters to hangman Harry (Mark Addy) who has heard it all before in his 25 years on the job. It‘s 1963 in Lancashire, the north of England. Near the end, Peter Mooney (a very good Johnny Flynn), a menacing stranger who exudes fake charm, erupts in a storm when Harry‘s wife Alice (Sally Rogers) refuses to rent him a room because his references don‘t check.
Actor John Lithgo is a charmer and always a pleasure to watch how he creates characters with voice, accent and a scrunch of the face. These two short stories lend themselves to his talents, though I have to admit, they might be better read and opened by the imagination.
This is a very good/bad play. Actually, it‘s a staged TV sitcom. It hits all the political bases, as they do. I enjoyed it, as I might a sitcom if I ever saw them (I don‘t), but great drama it is not. The most is to call it a trenchant satire.
So, we enter the upper-class townhouse, with its a white couch and high sideboard, (there will be a terrace). Peter (Marton Csokas) is spying on the phone of Chloe (the always sharp Uma Thurman). She in blonde ponytail wears jeans and black heels. What does that say? Not comfort. (Jeans comfort, heels not) A certain carefully scripted cool sexiness.
Feb 10, 2018 – The Council on Foreign Relations Russia policy report “Containing Russia” by Robert Blackwill and Philip Gordon is a coldwar2.0 “let‘s fight the Russians” polemic that makes many claims but is slim on evidence. Here‘s one false assertion I know, because I spent over a year researching and writing about William Browder and his Magnitsky hoax. Important because it helped charge Russiagate.
So forget about the cover photo of Putin with a glass of champagne! So he is the rich guy against the low-income American officials who represent the working classes! (joke!)
Jan 19, 2018 – The Nation’s Bob Dreyfuss writes innuendo backed up by egregiously wrong information in a story that claims “there‘s a potentially incriminating link between the Trump Tower meeting involving Kushner and a Russian firm enmeshed in a famous money-laundering scandal.‘
Jan 18, 2018 — How I knew about William Browder’s corrupt past, which made me investigate what turned out to be his fake Magnitsky/Prevezon story. Goes back to the Avisma story. It was never reported by the mainstream media. A half hour.
Jan 15, 2018 – Who is Juleanna Glover? Glenn Simpson of the investigative agency Fusion GPS in his August appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was asked about Paul Manafort‘s notes of the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya. Manafort wrote that “Browder hired Joanna Glover.”
Jan 13, 2018 – Just received from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists @ICIJorg an email of an article by Michael Forsythe @PekingMike, a reporter on the investigations team at The New York Times. It tells how a consortium of almost 400 reporters from all over the world wrote about the people implicated in “the Panama Papers,” exposing the shell companies set up by the offshore incorporator Mossack Fonseca.
Jan 12, 2018 – Lawyers are supposed to carefully vet the facts they assert with documented evidence. The National Law Journal is a preeminent legal publication. So why did it yesterday repeat this unproved myth? That “Hermitage‘s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed the alleged fraud behind the Prevezon case before his death while in Russian custody.” Dear writer Ryan Lovelace @lawdotcom, read this:
Jan 11, 2018 – The most interesting new assertion in Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee August 22, 2017, just released by Sen. Diane Feinstein, is this: that charges promoted by William Browder and adopted by the Justice Department to target the Russian real estate company Prevezon originated with a Russian organized crime figure, Demetri Baranovsky.
Jan 9, 2018 – Another fake news story, this by NYTimes. About Glenn Simpson, former Wall Street Journal reporter, whose FusionGPS was hired in turn by the Clinton and Trump campaigns to find dirt on the other. Read the story for details, but note these lies in the NYT account.
Jan 9, 2018 – How William Browder organized an international campaign to block the Russians from going after his evaded taxes and profits from illicit share buys. Includes how Browder got Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act and the Justice Department to file a suit against a Russian real estate company to muddy the trail. A half hour.
Jan 8, 2018 – I love how Wm Browder is considered by otherwise serious media to be the go-to guy for comments on the corruption of others. Here he is quoted in an Al Jazeera story yesterday about how the former Ukrainian President Viktor “Yanukovich’s clan pumped stolen money into companies in Ukraine with bank accounts in Latvia and gradually passed it through dozens of offshore shell companies in Cyprus, Belize, British Virgin Islands and other money-laundering hotspots including the UK.”
Surreal, slapstick, funny, political, clever, and very feminist, Ariana Mnouchkine‘s staging of “A Room in India,” created by Hélène Cixous and Mnouchkine‘s world-famous Théâtre du Soleil (founded in Paris 1964), is a rich feast for audiences.
It is built around the travails of a French political theater troupe visiting India whose director abandons them because he can‘t produce the Mahabarata, the ancient Indian epic. Never clear why.
Dec 29, 2017 – Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty is the U.S. government propaganda news service, so no surprise if it lies about William Browder and the Magnitsky case, but look here at the latest, “Hermitage Capital’s Browder Sentenced In Absentia By Moscow Court,” where it is easy to counter its claims with real facts.
