Arts Express Radio

** "We don't have a rational political system, they're just two angry parties - a wet match in a dark cave..."

Shedding Light On The Chaos. Pacifica Host Garland Nixon sorts out poor folks taking a haircut, the USAID regime change monster, election deniers, football, arguments among ourselves like roaches scurrying around when the lights come on, pies, inflation - and slaves fighting over which master has the biggest house...

** "I speak with the rage of angels, them that be with Marx - I speak with the clarity and inferno of the necessary..."

Fashion This, From The Irony Of The World. The late, eminent revolutionary preacher prophet of the political apocalypse, Amiri Baraka in performance - about the state of the world where pretty much nothing has changed...

** "I think we can learn from this movie, how not to deal with conflict..."

Renate Reinsve Talks Armand, A Different Man. The actress is on the line from Norway to delve into the Cannes and Berlin award winners in release. And in no way 'The Worst Person In The World' for which she won Best Actress at Cannes, Renate discusses being directed by the grandson of Ingmar Bergman for Armand - and including the creative influence on her of the filmmaker's grandmother as well, Liv Ullmann.

Along with Renate's other current awards season dramatic feature, A Different Man, in which she has a romantic encounter with no less than two versions of a physically deformed character, played by Sebastian Stan. Plus, the implications of the allegorical Armand, centering on a grade school tribunal's psychological descent into unresolvable accusations - and what it intimates about the current turmoil and confusion surrounding the seeming endless war in Europe.

** "I first read No Longer Human, I remember, sitting on my bed - and the vague smell of existential dread..."

UK Desk. Reflections on the writing of the late melancholy Japanese novelist, Osamu Dazai. And his profound alienation, a product as well of his persecution as a communist in both pre and then post-WWII US occupied colonialist Japan. And with the atomic bombing of an already surrendering Japan, by the US intent of both crushing the rising Japanese left, while preempting the Soviet Union poised to enter the country.

And Dazai expressing his communism in his memoir, Almanac Of Pain - beliefs that led Dazai's family to disown him, while forcing him to renounce communism in writing publicly to salvage the family's reputation - by turning himself into the police to sign a confession.