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.
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.
