Month: April 2007

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RY COODER has a new album out: MAVIS STAPLES – ”We’ll Never Turn Back,” reinterpretations of classic songs of the Civil Rights movement. “When I listen to this music, it takes me back. It takes me back to the red clay hills of Georgia . . . It takes me back to the moans and groans and pains of an oppressed people yearning for freedom. It takes me back to the time when hundreds and thousands of us decided we were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” as Fannie Lou Hamer said.”—John Lewis.

Also: The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is this Saturday and Sunday at the UCLA Campus – we’ll get a preview from DAVID ULIN, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and also talk about the changes at the Book Review and the paper. At the BookFest Dave will be doing a Q&A with Jane Smiley Sunday at 1230 in Ackerman —
–and I’ll be doing a Q&A with GORE VIDAL Saturday at 100pm in Royce Hall—tickets are officially “sold out” but there will be a standby line.

Plus: JOHN SINCLAIR, a champion of justice, art, and fun. He was manager of the MC5 in their 1960s street revolutionary heyday, pot/political prisoner, and subject of a John Lennon song decrying his incarceration. After he won an early release, he produced the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, and did a long stint in New Orleans in the ’90s as radio deejay. Now his 1960s classic book Guitar Army is being reissued. John will be headlining an evening of high-energy music & verse at 8:00pm Thurs, Apr 26, at Artshare Theater, 801 E. 4th Place in downtown LA, and Friday at 730 at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd. in Venice.

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How DONALD RUMSFELD pushed America into military and strategic disaster—and why the repercussions of his actions will linger for decades to come: ANDREW COCKBURN will explain. He’s written many books as well as articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. His new book is Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastropic Legacy.
READ Andrew Cockburn’s interview at TruthDig.com.

Plus: Eyewitness Peshawar: Mark LeVine just returned from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, gateway to the region controlled by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, where Osama bin Laden is probably hiding. Mark teaches history at UC Irvine and is the author of Why They Don’t Hate Us and the forthcoming Heavy Metal Islam. He’s written for Mother Jones and The Nation, and wrote about Peshawar for the Boston Globe.

Also: How the press covered – and failed to cover – the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: HANK KLIBANOFF of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains – he won the Pulitzer Prize in History on Monday along with Gene Roberts for their book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.
READ my review of The Race Beat in the LA Times, Nov 12, 2006: “You might think there was nothing left to say about the civil rights movement.  But just when you thought you were finished with that story, a new book pulls you back in. . .”

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M*A*S*H made MIKE FARRELL famous, and he’s used that fame to fight against the death penalty and for human rights in Latin America and the Middle East — he’s shown what a committed artist’s life can be. His new book is Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist. Mike will be speaking and signing Sunday April 15 at 10:15am at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave. in Pasadena.

ALSO: JOHN NICHOLS, Washington correspondent for The Nation, says “The real story of the U.S. Attorneys scandal that has so endangered the tenure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is not that of the eight fired prosecutors. It is that of the 85 U.S. Attorneys around the country who were not let go.”

PLUS: DANNY SCHECHTER the News Dissector talks about the crisis of credit card debt — and the financial forces profiting from it. Danny is an Emmy-award winning TV news producer and documentary film maker, and executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network. His new film, “In Debt We Trust,” is about the money we owe, and the bill that’s coming due. It’s screening at the Fine Arts theater on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills Friday at 7pm.

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MIKE DAVIS talks about his new book Buda’s Wagon: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CAR BOMB. Reviewer John Leonard praised the book in Harper’s for its “savage sarcasm. . . As usual with Davis, this brilliant little book tells us things we’d rather not hear. One the one hand, the use of the car bomb, with its collateral damage to civilians, invariably corrupts the cause for which it has been enlisted; nothing excuses the death of children. On the other hand, add suicide to fertilizer and it’s a tactic we can’t beat, an equalizer for the deracinated and deranged alike.”

Also: HAROLD MEYERSON with our Washington political update – Harold is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post and acting executive editor of The American Prospect.

Plus: Inside the bubble in Baghdad: American officials in Baghdad inhabit an isolated world: the Green Zone, a walled fortress filled with villas, swimming pools, and shiny new SUVs. It’s ground zero for cultural blindness, neo-con fanaticism, and imperial fantasy – the place where the American effort to remake Iraq was always doomed to failure. Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post tells that story in his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone – he was awarded the Ridenhour Book Prize by The Nation Institute today.