Month: February 2007

An eyewitness report from Iraq: filmmaker Laura Poitras talks about her award-winning documentary “My Country My Country” – it tells the story of a Sunni activist-doctor named Riyadh — an opponent of the occupation, a clear-thinking, educated everyman on a quiet crusade in Baghdad to heal whatever damage he can, and to get Sunnis to vote in Iraq’s 2005 elections.

It’s “the definitive non-fiction film about the occupation of Iraq: indispensable, heartbreaking, and ferociously wise. Time and again, Poitras manages to be where platoons of US telejournalists were afraid to go . . . the most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war in all of its three-plus years.” – Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice. The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary.

We’ll be featuring the DVD of “My Country My Country” as a thank-you gift in the 4pm hour today as the KPFK fund drive continues. You can pledge online at www.kpfk.org.

MIKE DAVIS talks about his new book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb – it’s our featured premium in the KPFK fund drive today. Reviewer John Leonard praised the book in the new 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.”

We’ll also be featuring the brand new “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back/’65 Tour Deluxe Edition” DVD, featuring an hour of special features, including commentary from filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and more music from the tour.
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Robert Hilburn in the LA Times wrote, “the greatest rock movie ever . . . just got better.”

It’s the KPFK fund drive, today cohosting with Suzi Weissman, and featuring the new DVD, “The US vs. John Lennon,” during the hour.
“The U.S. vs. John Lennon” tells the story of Lennon’s transformation from loveable moptop to anti-war activist, and recounts the facts about Nixon’s campaign to deport him in 1972. With Walter Cronkite, Gore Vidal, Mario Cuomo, George McGovern, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, G. Gordon Liddy, Yoko Ono, and Jon Wiener–and archival footage of Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and John Lennon.

We’ll also be featuring the soundtrack CD from the documentary, and the book on which the documentary was based: Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files – and also the 2-CD audio documentary from the Pacifica Archives, “John Lennon: The Political and the Personal,” featuring interviews with, among others, Pete Seeger and Abbie Hoffman.

LISTEN TO THIS SHOW ONLINE – SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST
“Black Like Me”: GARY YOUNGE explains “the magnitude of the Obama-thon currently taking place.” “What the nation has liked most,” Younge says, “is not what Obama has said or done but what he is. In short, Obama is a black man who does not scare white people. This is mostly not Obama’s fault. He is who he is.” Gary writes for The Guardian and The Nation.

Also: Girl Groups of the Sixties: a 4-CD Rhino box set, nominated for a Grammy, features the lesser known but more revealing singles and B-sides: One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost & Found. Jon Pareles of the New York Times wrote, “to hear all these long-suffering voices is to realize that feminism didn’t arrive an instant too soon.” GARY STEWART and SHERYL FARBER will explain. (Originally broadcast 11-30-2005)

Plus: CHALMERS JOHNSON talks about his new book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic — on the unintended consequences of our dependence on a permanent war economy. It’s a staggering tale of American hubris from “our most prescient critic of American empire and its pretensions.” (Andrew Bacevitch) In Greek mythology, Nemesis is the goddess of retribution, who punishes human transgressions of the right order of things and the arrogance that causes them.