Arts Express Radio: Recent Episodes
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** "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.
"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.
"The names of those running for office, no matter who it was, we can call them Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. And it might get ugly - which it did..."Predicting The Election: And how Garland Nixon Got it Right. The Pacifica Host turned political astrologer - and here's why. With connections to George H.W. Bush in 1990, US war mongering cults, the ruling elite and genocide, alcoholics, and the price of lettuce in the grocery store... "Hitchcock had a very dark mind. And I'm quite glad that he did what he did, but I'm quite glad that I'm not him. I don't think that I'd have wanted to look at the world and see darkness everywhere - and see duplicity and murder everywhere..."Alistair McGowan Talks 'I Am Alfred Hitchcock.' And in this unusual conversation, a perfectly legal act of identity theft, pulled off by the British impressionist, actor, comic, singer and writer. Summoning via this documentary in a seeming cinematic seance from the beyond while slipping in and out of character, the late iconic screen legend. Stay tuned, and all will be revealed... "William's real world drama takes a sobering turn on November 15th, when he begins an eight month prison sentence in Connecticut for tossing Israeli signs in the trash - an action that has sparked intense debate..."UK Desk: A Conversation With William Banks. The creative artist, actor, writer of sharp, biting comedy shows and self- proclaimed inter-dimensional traveler takes us through the arrest and trial. And his case, part of a broader social commentary - the surveillance state we live in, used in attacking political dissent... "No one would call it a work of literature. But you can certainly hear Al Pacino's voice loud and clear - as if he were sitting in a bar with you telling intimate stories about his life and work..."Sonny Boy: A Memoir. A window into the extraordinary journey of Pacino through the years - 'even as he acknowledges his own power and talent as an actor, he also explores how he is an emotional wreck most of his career...' From his South Bronx working class origins as a troubled youth - 'when he started to feel how powerful words were...'
"The question arises, how can we be the shining city on the hill if we're dead..."Words Matter - 'An Interesting Convergence of Time And Consequences.' Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on The Matrix, The Mayflower, election time, Reagan, nuclear war, Dick Chaney, and Neo-Consout of the closet... "Wow, that's a tough one..."Dinesh D'Souza On The Arts Express Hot Seat. The MAGA filmmaker challenged by a trick or treat question under cross-examination as this Halloween season kicks in, and addressingamong inflammatory matters, a tale of two movies - the simultaneousrelease of two politically opposite filmsregardingDonald Trump.Along with D'Souza explaining his unusual promotional bio for that film, Vindicating Trump, characterizing him as 'a right wing political commentator, conspiracy theorist and convicted felon, whose films and commentary have generated considerable controversy due to their promotion of conspiracytheories and falsehoods, and well as for their incendiary nature.' Plus, a surprise guest engaged in some sidebar identity theft... "All the news you need in today's crowded information landscape..."Jack & Rick October Surprise. And what it has to do with cranes, cornfields, cupcakes, madness, a Times Square subway station, a lost cat Shirley - and a woman throughthe revolving door with an umbrella... "We're diving deep into the life and legacy of the soulful legend, Bobby Caldwell - that has given us decades of timeless music across genres and generations."UK Desk: A Conversation With Mary Caldwell. The late performerer's wife on music, memory and the medical crisis...
"We all almost died Saturday..."Doomsday, Armageddon, And Nuclear War - Pacifica Host Garland Nixon and guest Scott Ritter sort out the odds. Referencing Ukraine, Britain, storm shadow missiles, 72 minutes, Spock and the guy in the little red suit. "I grew up in the Bronx, and there were these characters everywhere. And when I started to see movies like Mean Streets and Dog Day Afternoon, they seemed to mirror what I was familiar with already. And I thought, who knows, if I hadn't become an actor I perhaps would have become one of these characters - it just seems it was my destiny, these were the kinds of stories I was destined to the telling of..."If That Mockingbird Don't Sing, Deli Boys, Goodfellas, Bernie Eggs - and Playing Jerry Rubin In Steal This Movie: A Conversation With Kevin Corrigan And Sadie Bones. And what it's like directing her badass dad in her first movie, premiering at the Soho Film Festival - while recollecting growing up on Corrigan's screen procession of 'criminals, drug dealers, addicts, kidnappers, rapists, drunks, bank robbers and hitmen' - and the occasional nice guy portrayal in John Sayles' Walking And Talking... "I awoke one day it was early September...A prisoner in my own land..."Arts Express Playhouse - Political Prisoner Requiem For The Other 9/11 From Behind Bars: A solo reading and interpretation of the state of the world by Mitchel Cohen... "If anything, it's like a wild ride on a philosophical roller coaster - where every twist and turn leads us to ponder why we keep getting stuck in the same loop of capitalist nonsense..."UK Desk: Anti-Oculus - A Philosophy of Escape. A literary analysis of The Acid Horizon Collective 'in a world where our every move is tracked, where the mundane and profound are woven into a tangled mess of algorithms and social expectations, this book challenges us to question not just the systems that govern our lives, but the very fabric of our reality...'
"They arrest you for standing up for human rights - 1984 has arrived and is alive and well."Fascism, Facebook, The FBI, And French Criminalization In The Service Of Snooping On People's Stuff - Roger Waters and political commentator Rick Sanchez weigh in. "Look like a girl, act like a lady, work like a dog, and think like a man..."Radha Mitchell Talks Take My Hand, Finding Neverland, And Kerouac's Lover In Big Sur - the Australian actress discussing as well her grandmother's advice on surviving the film world. And her latest film, 'Take My Hand' - delving into the mental and emotional toll of disability. Along with a look at her upcoming portrayal in A Natural Selection, a class conscious psychological thriller opposite Malcolm McDowell, her character 'struggling to raise her daughter by taking a job at a billionaire's lavish estate - only to realize she's been lured there for sinister purposes...'** "Normalizing violence on the world stage - the gaming industry and further blurring the line between entertainment, and recruitment and military propaganda..."UK Desk: Theater Of War filmmaker Matthew Alford discusses 'the fascinating and controversial world of military recruitment through video games - and the historical evolution, ethical implications and political impact of this digital recruitment strategy...'"...A painting I did several years ago of two historic revolutionary figures done in a single canvas - they continue to be a major pain-in-the-ass to the rulers of the capitalist system. These legendary individuals provided humanity with a critical analysis of this system that has proven applicable to this day -I enjoy painting images of revolutionaries. With my brush I give grandeur to those who would otherwise not receive it under the savage system we live under...'A Conversation With Artist Carlito Rovira. The self-described Puerto Rican 'Young Lord for life' delves into discovering painting in prison, and his political inspiration creatively from 'the revolutionary struggle of the Young Lords as a youth, when 'during the McCarthy era, it was the McCarthy era on steroids in Puerto Rico - and that is what I want to be remembered by, that I was an artist but I was a revolutionary artist...'
"One of the things I'm seeing, the value of propaganda and ignorance..."Kamala Harris: The Phenomenon, Not The Person. Pacifica Host Garland Nixon breaks it down. Referencing Biden, bowling balls, Obama, socialism Joe Rogen, marbles, crew necks, t-shirts, stickers, blind dates, health care, student loans, Israel and Ukraine... "RFK was a fascinating, controversial figure at the time. And you know, I think we're all going through some interesting moments right now, in today's political world..."Sex, Lies And Minnesota: Jack Huston on portraying RFK in The Irishman; how the British actor has been inspired by his iconic grandfather, filmmaker John Huston - and his latest production uncovering a real life Middle American '70s underground suburban married couples sexuality movement.And nothing to do with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz turned Dem VP candidate, with his own shady history - authorizing the use of rubber bullets targeting First Nation protesters against the Minnesota line three pipeline there. And Walz behind the Northern Lights police task force established for that very operation - and trained by the Israeli defence forces and Mossad. "If you feel like us - that our concerns in this election cycle have been stuffed into the washer and hung up to dry, and that the elections are a senseless distraction - take heart..."Arts Express Playhouse: To The Rescue. Featuring AE crew's actress extraordinaire Mary Murphy, and the work of multi-talented political analyst, poet, and self-described digital street philosopher, Catlin Johnstone. Stay tuned, and all will be revealed... "We find ourselves in the midst of a national crisis, making my stomach churn and my blood boil - it's time to call out this madness for what it is..."UK Desk: Making sense of the massive UK race riots over there. Jack Clarke on the ground in the heart of the conflict, and filing this report. Though the pressing issue avoided by the big business media - what all of that rage may have to do with the massive hunger crisis in the UK including millions of children - and the impoverished population forced to buy fewer groceries.And even as the Labor Party just brutally defeated the conservatives for this reason - but the new Labor PM Keir Starmer continuing the same economic policy - denouncing the UK rioting fascists, while impoverishing the UK masses by sending billions to the military neo-nazi fascists in Ukraine.
"It's not even politics anymore, this is the way it works...I've got plenty to say as always, all kinds of stuff is going on - let's start here..."That's America Right Now: Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on gender, race, war crimes, morons, puppets, ideology, and the man in the moon... "A lot of people have never known what kind of a man Beckett was - and this film is an attempt to show the emotional life of this man behind the iconic mask that he wore for most of his life..."Gabriel Byrne Talks Dance First, John Wick Sequel Ballerina. The Irish actor in a conversation about his portrayal of the reluctant and irreverent theatrical and literary legend Samuel Beckett, in the somewhat similarly subversive Beckett biopic, Dance First.Byrne takes us behind the enigmatically covert dramatic curtain that defined the late Irish eminent figure, as to who he was, really - tremendously inspired by his mentor James Joyce, and who fought in the WWII French Resistance. And while Byrne also reflects on how his own Dublin working class roots as the son of a carpenter and hospital worker have influenced his perspective on films.** "Today we're diving into a subject that lies at the intersection of art and activism - where creativity meets climate consciousness..."UK Desk: The Dry Harvest. Jack Clarke in a discussion with Zimbabwe multimedia filmmaker and digital activist, Malon Murape...
"I'm not into politics for good feelings - I got an ideology..."Same Puppets, Different Day. Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on Harris, Haley, Clarence Thomas, race, gender, Bonapartism, Malcolm and punchlines... "I think this film is a timely reminder, just the terrible damage that war can do..."Iain Glen Talks Game Of Thrones, The Iron Lady, and his latest film, The Last Front - a historical drama depicting the World War I invasion of Belgium. And the massacre of its rural masses - a grim reality that is nothing new, rebranded in the present time as collateral damage.The Scottish actor, delving into his defiant portrayal of rural farmer Leonard in standing up to the fierce German battalions, weighs the dramatic responsibility, even when a fictional depiction of history. And in that forgotten war, overshadowed in collective memory by WWII that followed. 'It's very addictive to you as an actor - but you just want to take on that responsibility to do it justice...'" Modern policing has become an Orwellian nightmare - where power corrupts and justice is an illusion..."UK Desk: Jack Clarke in a Crime Scenes Episode this week, deconstructing police brutality and mass resistance - 'welcome to the dystopian reality of contemporary law enforcement...' "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold" wrote Yeats in The Second Coming - 'but he might as well have been covering the French election.'Bro On The Euro Cultural Beat: The French elections, the rise of the left, and the fall of the center right and far right. And 'an abrogation of the main power of any legislative body dating back to the Magna Carta - the power of the purse...'** "The borders have been manipulated in these different ways - not because of this natural thing, it's because we could actually exert more economic power if we are able to push it further West...'The Case For Open Borders: A continuing conversation with investigative journalist, human rights activist and author, John Washington - mulling 'twenty-one arguments for open borders' - "Things don't have to be this way..."
"It's a bloodbath, an absolute bloodbath - if Starmer was a vegetable, he'd be a potato..."Same Politics, Different Day: What's up with that UK election to nowhere. Plus, the latest Joe Biden not going anywhere revelations - shape shifting, time travel, divine right presidential succession claim from God. Biden's black woman persona, his time machine vow to defeat Trump again in 2020 - and a defiant chat with his imaginary friend up in the skies, calling all the shots about his candidacy... "I think it's something that a lot of people wrestle with, something you're passionate about and means the most to us - and always a sense of not quite belonging..."Dandelion: A Conversation With KiKi Layne. The actress delves into her current turn in the film as a creatively and financially challenged aspiring musician in down and out Ohio - and yet another release focusing on youth struggles today in Economic Crisis Cinema at the movies. Along with a red and blue nation divided in Dandelion, and the roles she's embraced in the page to screen black classics - James Baldwin's 'If Beale Street Could Talk' and Richard Wright's 'Native Son.' "I have a wonderful story of theatrical celebration and generational influence to tell you - it's a bit of a personal story...that changed my life forever.."Miracle On 47th Street: Stay tuned and all will be revealed... "If you're in the mood for an intellectual thriller on dystopian facets of our society - kindling your existential flame..."The Darkest Timeline: Living In A World With No Future: Jack Clarke at the UK Desk straight talk with Bram E Gieben - author, curator of the cult website Weaponizer, and the creative force behind the philosophical podcast 'Strange Exiles.' Touching on techno-capitalists, Straw Dogs, the collapse of journalism, economic terrorists, and looney tunes ruling the asylum...
"Hollywood's job was to clean the black folks out of America on the screen. And there was a TV show called Father Knows Best - so that was America..."Pacifica Host Garland Nixon in our Crimes Scenes Edition this week, with a continued breakdown of Rainbow Imperialism in Hollywood. And connections to the infamous nuclear family, virtue signaling, the George Floyd protests - and symbolism over struggle on and off screen... "Sitting and talking with Myrlie Evers, and her telling me the love story of Medgar Evers and how she met him - and how much she still is deeply in love with this man, really inspired me to write about it. And I had not read a civil rights love story, and she told me one - and I said that's the story I wanted to tell..."A Conversation with Joy Reid. And the book the journalist, political commentator and MSNBC host has just written, during this year's June 12th commemoration of the civil rights leader's assassination 61 years ago. Exploring the marriage of Evers and his wife united in a bond of activism and love, in 'Medgar And Myrlie: Medgar Evers And The Love Story That Awakened America." Reid, who has herself fought against attacks for her defense of the Palestinian struggle, reads as well excerpts from her book. "Not The NY Times: That's right, The NY War Crimes - because what's contained there, you will not find in the so-called paper of record."The NY War Crimes: A Reading. Dispatches From Gaza, Writers Against The War On Gaza. From the press to philosophers, poets, and Israel's cultural genocide - and exposing how the media manufactures consent for genocide. "I always felt country music was all about cowboys and conservative values. But I was in for a surprise - diving deep into the heart of America with a genre that is as iconic as it is misunderstood..."Open Country: Jack Clarke at the UK Desk in a conversation with Glenda and Jesse Drew about their music documentary. And country music as a powerful expression of working class struggles and aspirations - and the history of liberating country music from corporate radio.
A cynical and angry man, yes I am quite cynical when it comes to the system - and you know, things are just running through my mind..."Bipartisan crime lords, banana hit squads, fascism, the price of chicken wings, and the US overthrowing governments all over the place - Pacifica Host Garland Nixon breaks it all down... "How long do we have, and how much alcohol can we drink..."Jennifer Esposito Talks Fresh Kills. The actress best known for Blue Bloods, Crash and Spike Lee's Summer Of Sam, in a conversation about growing up and making movies in a man's world - the Mafia and Hollywood. And Fresh Kills, her deeply personal latest film which she wrote, directed and stars in, about females surviving the Mafia as both a sense of place and metaphor. "I have fasted for truth in the gardens of Babylon, and found substance in the solace of my own history..."Arts Express Playhouse: Gates Of Toil - A Juneteenth Poem. Performed by Kataalyst Alcindor... "Every day the brothers went out to work. They worked not for themselves, but for the poor - wherever the overworked, the sick were to be found..."The UK Desk: The Two Brothers And The Gold. Jack Clarke reads from the works of Leo Tolstoy.** "What if everything you knew about the way the US economy works, was wrong. I mean everything, even what money is - this film flips the narrative on its head..."'Finding The Money' - stay tuned and all will be revealed in this followup episode...
"Let's look at a couple of things here. The ruling elite more than anything fears internal uprising - more than the enemies and adversaries they create..."The Google Gatekeepers, Censorship and 'Writers Block' Online. Pacifica host Garland Nixon looks at a couple of things going on here. Referencing the French Revolution, Blinken and the Neo-Cons; the imperialist monsters, the warmongers, and the genociders - and Google psyops, vodka, Gaza and nobodies like us... "Addiction is everywhere, especially in the rural areas. I came from a background of alcoholics. My grandfather was a heavy drinker, my father drank - but it's a topic that needs to be addressed, and it's a difficult topic that personally we don't like to talk about, and we hide from it. So to me, the film really I think, lifted the level of importance..."C. Thomas Howell Talks Ride, Playing Controversial Iran/Contra Official Caspar Weinberger in 'Reagan.' And Ride described as' three generations of rodeo bull riders facing addiction in the heartland, medical care financial crisis, and 'the cowboy's place in modern America.'And Howell's venture through his many decades of 130 movies - from a youth in ET, War Of The Worlds, being directed by Francis Ford Coppola in The Outsiders - and portraying anti-fascist iconic musician Toscanini, targeted by Mussolini and censored by US McCarthyism here, in Franco Zeffirelli's 'Young Toscanini' opposite Elizabeth Taylor - and leading him down the road to breaking out as a musician himself, alias American Storyteller... "What if everything you knew about the way the US economy works, was wrong. I mean everything, even what money is - this film flips the narrative on its head..."'Finding The Money' - stay tuned and all will be revealed... "Everything that draws human beings to art in the first place, needs to be sacrificed to retain celebrity status - that wild connection with something mysterious and strangely sexy, all that needs to be flushed down the toilet to become a celebrity guardian of the information interests of the US empire..."Political analyst, poet and self-described digital street philosopher Caitlin Johnstone, in a presentation of her take no prisoners ideological dissection of Hollywood. And, a growing disturbing trend - most recently with actor George Clooney crossing the line into fascism with his Clooney Foundation, hunting down with secret arrest warrants dissenting press voices, on behalf of the US empire.
"So what we have here is a foreign policy that is malicious, brutal, that is genocidal - and that needs a pretty face..."Rainbow Imperialism: Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on Movies, The Defense Department and Hollywood, and The Existential Threat Of The CIA. In other words, 'I look at movies, and I interpret the intentions of the ruling elite...' "It's impossible today in the US, to make a serious political movie - the only way you can do it is to have John Wayne saving the day. You have to have a white hero, that's the only way you can make a political movie in America..."Same Politcal Prisoners, Different Day: Philippe Diaz Talks I Am Gitmo, Angola 1,2, & 3...The French director discusses his US penal colony, dramatic 'Gitmo' update; creating together with Robert Hillary King, the subject of his next movie, 'Angola 1.2. & 3' on the grueling life of the Panther's nearly 30 years in solitary as a political prisoner at that dreaded Louisiana hellhole before his conviction was overturned- and what's up with Macron modeling himself as the New Napoleon, seemingly intent on marching into world war - and perhaps a New Waterloo against Russia...** "It's possible to make a whole series for the cost of the indie film. And the quest for synthetic creation, which might someday eliminate the human element entirely - and the next level up in cost cutting..."Bro On The Global Television Beat: The Business Of TV - Increasing Quantity Meets Declining Quality. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on Sherlock Holmes without Sherlock; here come the machines - AI versus the unions; streamer junk and series mania - and 'the ultimate goal one CEO claimed, was to be able to make a complete film from your bedroom...'
"Sit down for this one, get ready - gonna be tough..."The Politics Of Language And Manipulating The Narrative. Pacifica Host Garland Nixon reads the newspapers - as to how the so-called 'business titans' alias US oligarchs decided to lie to you, to change your minds. "I had a childhood that was rough, I didn't love my childhood years. And acting was a salvation for me - and it felt like my trip out of the circumstances I grew up in..."Nick Stahl Talks What You Wish For, Keep Quiet. The actor known for The Thin Red Line, Man Without A Face and Terminator: Rise Of The Machines delves into his latest offbeat, economic crisis cinema, political horror venture. And his down and out chef on the run, who turns up in a Latin American town somewhere in the Third World, cooking up ruling class dinners with possibly proletarians on the menu.Along with his own, not unrelated thoughts since a child in movies, on how Hollywood can eat you up alive; as a recovered meth addict making his comeback; Hitchcock, his bad cop on a Native Rez in the upcoming Keep Quiet - and how 'acting saved me...' "This is really close to home, about one of the largest ammunition plants in the US, officially known as the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant - and the only one supplying 155 mm artillery shells to Ukraine. Regardless of whose side one is on, there are several ironies about this effort, and only one result..."The One Minute Marxist: Arts Express continues the legacy of Darryl Waistline Mitchell, Detroit auto worker, comrade, and organizer of The League Of Revolutionary Black Workers, who tragically passed away on April 17th. And his 'One Minute Marxist' dynamic episodes on the show, live on in tribute to his unwavering passionate political dedication to the struggle, as our Radio Man Production. The first in that series, The Five Minute Marxist this week, presented by Peter Wise reporting from the Red Star Cafe... "Are you or have you ever been against genocide..."The New Repression On College Campuses As The Return Of The Red Scare: Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on the criminalization of free speech, and the militarization of campuses across America. As universities are called before Congress, where they must betray their own students - and pledge allegiance to a new wave of repression, or be fired. With connections to Google, IBM, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, HUAC, and Rupert Murdoch."On a photo from Vietnam of two American soldiers holding five civilians at gunpoint...all of them standing in a quiet river..."Poetry In Performance: A Solo Presentation Tribute To Connie Nordgren, from the unpublished works the late poet left behind. Contemplating kitchen midnight, and 'the alley with its cooler breath, doesn't hold yesterday...'
"I couldn't think of a more hypocritical song - Tony Blinken trying to play a guitar, singing 'Rockin' In The Free World' - by a Canadian mocking America, not celebrating America..."Nero Blinken Fiddles While Rome Burns: Culture and chaos on the world stage. Pacifica Host Garland Nixon Warrior Update joined by Scott Ritter - as somewhat music critics this time around, seeking to make sense of Blinken impersonating both Neil Young and Harry Potter.Referencing oligarchs, a neo-nazi bar, Ukraine's shopping list - and 'a roach motel - the money goes in, but it doesn't come out...' "I grew up watching Richard Pryor, he was a hero of mine, I loved his character driven storytelling. And I just thought he was the greatest - I still do."Eric Bana Talks Force Of Nature, Hulk, Berlin Nobody. And a decade later, the Australian actor moving on from Hulk to portraying a quieter sort of sleuth - investigating corporate crimes playing out deep in the Australian wilderness in 'Force Of Nature.' And, how Richard Pryor first inspired him creatively when starting out as a standup comic in a Melbourne bar.** "Thomas Mann, the expatriate writer who had fled Hitler - wrote in California that how all through the war, it was incredible to him how Californians were just having barbecues and mowing their lawns...."Bro On The Dispatches Beat, Episode 6: A Conversation With Historian Juan Cole - One More Just War, Or Just One More War. Professor Cole, author of Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East, in an excerpted investigation into language, lies and labeling land grabs; corporate cash registers, weaponry and wars; the 'Blob' in DC; a leveled Gaza; Sartre turning over in his grave - and time to play Global Jeopardy as the Doomsday Clock countdown ticks away...
"So here's the bottom line, Biden doesn't work for you. The US Empire, they got wars, they got things to do - they've got people to kill, that's what they do..."The Mission Of The US Government Is This...Pacifica Host Garland Nixon on making sense of connections between US wars, elections, the working class, 850 US bases around the world, and girlfriends... "In many ways the Soviet Union was winning the culture war, because they were sending out the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera. They were culture - and we were bubble gum and Coca Cola..." Taking Venice: The US government fighting communism with culture. A conversation with filmmaker and celebrated art critic, Amei Wallach. Venturing into the sinister US intrigue that went down back then, while promoting at the time clueless post-modern artist Robert Rauschenberg. Where it all began, and what it has to do with John Cage, Selma, Vietnam, and the atom bomb."The casting couch had been presented - and I declined."Jane Seymour Talks Ruby's Choice, Harry Wild. And that casting couch the point of departure in our conversation with Seymour some years ago - leading to a followup as to how exactly she has eluded the fate of older actresses, continuing to shine in a steady stream of screen portrayals today. Plus, the mystery behind her stage name switch somehow from Frankenstein to an unfortunate spouse of Hentry VIII.And the British actress holding her own as psychic and seductress Solitaire against Roger Moore's James Bond in Live And Let Die early on, to Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman on the small screen, Marie Antoinette, Maria Callas - and currently as an artist stricken with dementia in Ruby's Choice. Along with playing yes, a woman named Harry in the dramatic mystery series, Harry Wild.** " 'The home is a place of privilege, of happiness.' She pronounced each of her words slowly, with almost a breathless whisper. She had turned real estate into pillow talk - and then ruined it..."Bro On The Global Literary Beat. Dennis Broe presents an episode from his latest Harry Palmer detective noir series cornering LA racist real estate vultures, 'The House That Buff Built.'Referencing men in dark suits lurking in the shadows, the Klan, rhythm & blues on the radio, segregation and manicured lawns - and 'a Nixon smear campaign against a political rival, pinko right down to her underpants...'
"Let's start with what's happening in America..."Open University Of The Airwaves: Scott Ritter joins George Galloway for a deep dive into 'the passion of protest.' With connections to Kent State Chicago '68, and 'weekend warriors succumbing to the reality of time...' "Everyone in the room is part of the Biden state media. - they're only invited because they're kind to Biden. But understand - everyone in that room is so scared to say anything bad about Biden because they'll be disinvited from the White House at this point forward..."The White House Correspondents Dinner: Three alternative reporters dissect the gathering that has just transpired - a particular elite contingent of the US press. Joining journalistand radio host Rick Sanchez are no laughing matter editorial cartoonist and take no prisoners columnist and author Ted Rall, and reporter and political columnist Angie Wong. "Nothing like Nat..."Lionel Cole Checks In: Performer and composer Lionel Cole, nephew of music legend Nat King Cole, on being deeply inspired creatively by his uncle, yet forging for himself a different musical path, and on his current tour. And what all this has to do with Stevie Wonder, Prince, Chopin, Mariah Carey - and jamming with Robert Downey Jr.'s band. "The good, the bad - and the interesting..."Bro On The Global Television Beat: Cannes Film Festival and Spring Global TV Preview. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe's Wrap-Up Report. Delving into French social realism and kung fu, the mass farmer protests, Soviet jean, NATO and gangsters, tear gas - and 'the commercial alternative to an oppressive state as the detritus of market capitalism..."
"The US right now is supporting two wars, and our government at home is at war with its own people in the streets - with identity politics as a weapon of the system..."Heroes, Villains And The Endless Now: Pacifica Host Garland Nixon breaks it down, in our May Day week coverage spotlighting 'Gaza in struggle' on the show. "It's a very strange story you'll never believe - I have a very weird thing to say, but I'm a great lover of the film Blazing Saddles..."Nowhere Special: A Conversation With James Norton And Director Uberto Pasolini. And quite a strange story to tell indeed, how this venture into working class cinema then and now came to fruition. With actor James Norton as a Belfast window washer literally on the outside looking in those windows at the privileged classes. And the influence on filmmaker Uberto Pasolini, nephew of directing legend Luchino Visconti, whose proletarian films ushered in the breakout Italian Neo-Realism Movement at that time.Norton discusses as well starring in 'Bob Marley: One Love' as Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records, in a milestone collaboration with Marley back then. And his venture into the production of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - in which he seems to have portrayed both Kurtz and Marlow simultaneously. "Welcome To I Fought The Law - The law being corporate media and its shilling for global arms dealers and fossil fuel companies, as it cheers on planetary destruction."Bro On The Global Television Beat:Dispatches.Today's Dispatch: Live StreamingGenocide With Ads - Or Genocide Plus No Ads. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on 'the sights and sounds of mass protest everywhere creating a new TV series - where not just destruction but also dissent is live streamed to counter media complacency...' "The hotel advertises itself as having from its window 'the worst hotel views in the world' - one sees the towering separation wall that Israel erected, which goes on for hundreds of miles...'Walled Off, The Film. A strange, disturbing stroll through this 'museum of occupation' designed by street artist, Banksy. And produced by Roger Waters, Immortal Techniwue, and Kweku Mandela.
"The disruption of mankind is defined as both good and evil. But in American mythology that doesn't exist, you have heroes and villains. And that transfers over into law enforcement - police don't come into our society, they come out of it..."Good Cop, Bad Cop: detoxifying the police. Pacifica host Garland Nixon on messing with the minds of the masses, and challenging that conversation. With connections from Garland's vault of wisdom to Abu Ghraib, bad apples, wolves - and janitors and corporations. "My family is mixed, and I think when your family looks like the world, you see the world in a different perspective - I made this western gumbo with lots of love and jalapeno!..."Mario Van Peebles Talks 'Outlaw Posse.' The actor and director shakes up the conventional western with that buried post-Civil War history of race and class in this country...and about how and why. And those black 'outlaws' invisible in westerns historically on screen, but who actually were one out of every three cowboys, in this daring flip of the script - robbing not for greed but rather slave reparations. Van Peebles also revisits his portrayal of Malcolm X in the film 'Ali' - and turning up as Stokely Camichael in 'Panther.' "In King Lear as now, tragedy turns into horror..."Arts Express Playhouse: Don't Touch That Dial! Apocalypse Now: Shakspeare Without Tears. An ongoing Arts Express episodic adventure - drama for the ears solo performance and investigation. "It's not simply memory that the series is concerned with, it's representation. That is, social memory refracted - through in this case a hostile media which often exists to correct the sins and failures of bloody imperial overreach..."Bro On The Global Television Beat: The Sympathizer - Not Sympathetic Enough...Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe critiques the Vietnam spy thriller. Referencing Rambo, Apocalypse Now, scene chewing, the spy genre and the belly of the beast...
** "Metaphors, Malcolm X, Africa Rising, and EU Josep 'Jungle' Borrell's fantasy garden. Meanwhile, the US declared 'let's do this proxy war thing' - and then Russia said, let's dance..."
Pacifica Host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon's deep dive into this week's Crimes Scenes Edition...
** "Spielberg gave me confidence and great words, when he said that he sees something I do that they can't teach in class - so keep doing what you're doing..."
From Prison To The Hollywood Picket Lines: A Conversation With Actor Brian Goodman. Genuine working class actors in movies is a rare enough sight, and the formerly incarcerated even less so.
From homeless South Boston youth to five years in prison, including twice violated parole, Goodman's dream from childhoodwas to be an actor. And not just starring as the incarcerated, but coming from that world and making it into movies.
Landing his first role in the Donnie Wahlberg crime drama 'Southie' being filmed in South Boston, Goodman opens up about his subsequent portrayals - with Jeff Bridges in Scenes From The Crime, with Robert Redford in The Lost Castle, in Sons Of Anarchy, Munich, and as a motel clerk in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can.
And venturing into writing and directing Ethan Hawke and Mark Ruffalo in What Doesn't Kill You - along with what he has to say about walking the picket lines against Hollywood East And West...
** "Capitol Hill Is An Assisted Living Facility For Psychopaths..."
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix: Multi-talented journalist, poet, songwriter, political analyst and self-described digital street philosopher Caitlin Johnstone is on the case...
** "Now this is a true story..."
Arts Express Undercover: Brett Gregory at our UK Desk in the Writers Corner, reading his short story. With connections to Kafka, Woody Allen, Art Spiegelman, and 'the local doctor and dentist...'
** "Our careers have been turned into gig work - unemploying the workers..."
Bro On The Global Television Beat: 'Writers and actors on strike challenge the corporate lords of film and television.'
Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe breaks it all down...
"Who am I..."Defining Garland Nixon: The Pacifica host, political analyst and contributor to this show takes a deep dive into self-reflection, the illusion of democracy, and ideology vs. tribalism in the United States. And how the propaganda afflicted population when trying to figure all this out, 'they know the music, but they don't know the words...' "Jimmy Dean - all he wanted to be was Marlon Brando..."A Conversation With Terry Moore. One of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age Of Hollywood, Moore talks about her life in movies, and those from that time she's known through the decades and stayed friends with - all of them until the day they died. Including Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Tyrone Power, ElizabethTaylor, Jane Russell, and on radio as Bunny Smith when she was just 12 years old, with Lucille Ball. Along with memories back then of young actress Marilyn Monroe who 'sometimes I'd take her home to dinner with me, because she was so lonely."Moore also comments on her current film touring festivals, 'Silent Life: The Story Of The Lady In Black' in which she portrays the real life mystery woman who has placed a red rose on silent screen star Rudolph Valentino's grave, every year since he passed away in 1926. And, revisiting her roles as a femme fatale seducing Burt Lancaster in 'Come Back Little Sheba' - plus memories of Ingrid Bergman when portraying her as a child in 'Gaslight.'** "The need for change, to look after the individual as they exist within the masses - cast out as the other..."Identity Politics, Horror, Marxism And Hayes Code Hollywood. Brett Gregory at our UK Desk in a discussion with British Film Professor Darren-Elliott Smith at the University of Stirling. Referencing Night Of The Living Dead, Psycho, Interview With The Vampire, The Hunger, Bride Of Frankenstein, and The Celluloid Closet.
** "I'm going to be suing Twitter - so let me tell you what happened..."
Pacifica host, deep dive political analyst and contributor to the show Garland Nixon is fired up against Twitter, and he invites others to join him - and what may involve US intelligence collusion with Twitter against Garland, that could be revealed in the discovery phase of his planned litigation...
** "Chuck Berry to me, really started Rock'nRoll, and of course he was a poet as well - and he sort of invented the teenage audience..."
A Conversation With Jon Brewer. The British filmmaker and veteran manager of rock artists phones in from London discussing his documentary 'Chuck Berry: The Original King Of Rock'n'Roll.'
No stranger to exploring the music world on screen, Bewer likewise directed films about B.B. King, The Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Creme, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison.
** "Those on the picket lines right now are not simply fighting for fair labor contracts and streaming residuals - they're fighting for the very future of cinema..."
UK Desk Report: Brett Gregory delves into the issues with British Film Professor Domic Lees, probing as well how artificial intelligence is impacting cinema and television.
And, heading over to the union picket lines in progress against Wall Street controlled Hollywood East and West - where Bryan Cranston, alias Walter White goes toe to toe with the movie corporations in his seemingly Breaking Bad persona...
** "Stay strong, call me....If you're having trouble getting through the night, if you want to have a drink with somebody at 3 o'clock in the morning, let's do it - but whatever it takes, we gotta stay together..."
Ron Perlman Rant On The Picket Line. No longer raising hell for the movie corporations at the moment, Hellboy alias Ron Perlman is instead mad as hell on the picket lines against them on strike with the unions. Somewhat cooled down from the last time he raged against a struggle that's way bigger than the strike, 'it's a symptom of the soullessness of corporate America' - he explains why...
** "My father absolutely influenced me creatively. So knowing how much he enjoyed being respectful towards storytelling, was something that definitely guided my desire to jump into the ring..."
Amy Redford Talks The Sopranos, This Revolution. And What Comes Around, the daughter of Robert Redford touching in her work on toxic masculinity and 'figuring that out - instead of gaslighting people...'
** "Reds Under The Bed. How those on the Hollywood Blacklist ended up going back into the film industry - those who contributed to the Hollywood Renaissance..."
UK Desk Report: Look Who's Back - The Hollywood Renaissance And The Blacklist. Brett Gregory in a conversation with Film Studies Curator, Professor Andy Willis, about his tour unraveling revelations about what really went down back then in Hollywood, who knew.
Including the Hollywood Ten as actually the Hollywood Eleven; how the blacklisted returned as the fuel of the Hollywood Renaissance of the '70s; what despicable role The Hollywood Reporter played in destroying the lives of the blacklisted; and that deplorable enabler, Red Channels 'sticking their boot in even more' with blacklisting in radio, television and broadcast journalists as well.
And with connections to the FBI, IRA, Altman, Brecht, Lee Grant, Waldo Salt, Ed Harris, Nick Nolte, Elia Kazan, Serpico, Third World Cinema, Midnight Cowboy, MAS*H, the Waldorf - and how the seeds of the current quarrel with Hollywood on the picket lines are rooted in long ago...
** "The impact that the Cold War and nuclear weapons had on America - from duck and cover drills to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg..."
Screening Room: The Atomic Cafe. Continuing deep dive discussion and scenes from the devastating documentary, as timely today as ever. A darkly humorous collage of US government propaganda alarming misinformation about nuclear war. Filmmaker Jayne Loader revisits the crime scenes.
Including the incriminating film clips in question stashed away in unopened cans at a Civil Defense office backroom closet for 40 years - the official there instructing 'oh, just take em'; Bert the duck and cover turtle; Abbe Hoffman - and how to make a tasty meal in a fallout bomb shelter from dried biscuits and water.
** "I'll say it for everybody who is on Youtube - understand that they own you, they control you...We're not going away."
Scott Ritter's Rebuttal On Banned From Youtube. The renowned deep state investigator's show is disappeared, for daring to present other than US state media controlled insights - the former UN weapons inspector charged by Yoube with hate speech - for apparently being anti-war and anti-nuclear war.
Along with the show he shares with Citizen Jeff, 'Ask The Inspector' banished from Youtube as well. And which likewise landed Ritter a spot on Ukraine's hit list, a site oddly bragging as their headquarters address, as the CIA in Langley, Virginia.
** "We have each other, this is really powerful - and I'm out there on the picket lines..."
Margaret Cho Talks 'Live And Livid.' The comedian, actress and activist took time out from her latest national comedy tour, delving into what those strong sentiments that drive the energy and passion of her comic sensibility are all about - along with how she goes about creating comedy out of the troubling world surrounding us.
Cho also reports straight from the struggle in the streets, against the Wall Street controlled Hollywood East and West by actors and writers picket lines in progress...
** "Move over, Oppenheimer...A head spinning stew of atomic age propaganda."
Screening Room: The Atomic Cafe. Conversation and scenes from the devastating documentary, as timely today as ever. A darkly humorous collage of US government propaganda alarming misinformation, about nuclear war...
** "Spinsters, bluestockings, the widow and the witch - how such representations of womanhood and femininity have simultaneously reflected and informed the norms and values, hopes and dreams, anxieties and expectationsof wider Brutish society and culture..."
Brett Gregory at our Arts Express UK Desk in a deep dive into the controversial subject of biological destiny, as manifested in 'The Ageing Woman In British Film' - or perhaps their absence. With connections to Euripedes, Aristophanes, Freud, Orwell, and Simone de Beauvoir...
**Coverage Marked Safe - No Hollywood Strike Actions
** "I feel I accomplished all these things, despite their attempts to stop me - and I take that as a victory because there were concerted efforts to stop me."
A Conversation With Orlando Jones. The actor talks 'Til Death Do Us Part' his latest film not on strike by the unions - and revisiting the Hollywood gatekeepers eliminating him off American Gods, accusing him of 'sending a wrong message to Black America.
With much more on his mind as well in that regard, related to Africa rising at this moment, in a time travel excursion to what went down where it all began back then. Jones shares a strike update as well.
** "That's gonna be it, multipolar world - and we're going to be sucking the rear end of that world, if we don't stop and get our act together...'90 Second News From Strange Places...'
**A-Bomb Japan Memorial Anniversary Week. Lionelle Hamanaka, contributor to the show, shares thoughts and personal memories during Nagasaki remembrance this August 9th, of nuclear annihilation and the Japanese American internment camps back then.
** "I'm trying to pay respect and honor...that's why I'm here. And I'm just doing my best during this process to just try and learn, and bring my own spin to it - and respecting you know, why I'm here in the first place..."
Stephanie Bartage Presents The Shawshank Redemption. A stage adaptation in connection with our Baton Rouge Sister Station WHYR and Artistic Director Bartage, of the 225 Theater Collective youth performances - tackling dramatically the US prison industrial complex.
And the relevance of the classic prison drama in this country, with five percent of the world population, and 25 percent of the world's incarcerated. Along with the existence of the most oppressive US prison in that state, Louisiana's Angola penitentiary.
** "In a sort of ghost story that plays with time, memory, and recollection...the life of a nurturing mother, hemmed in by social and family strictures, is contrasted with that of her artist friend who lives in artistic freedom, but alone..."
Arts Express Playhouse: To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf's experimental work in a radio adaptation, exclusively for the show, and excerpted here with performances by the Arts Express Theater Players.
** "I waited until after 5PM on the day Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour was going to air - so Mattel couldn't get an injunction against me."
Filmmaker Susan Stern Talks Barbie Nation: An Unauthorized Tour. Before Judy Dolls there was...Barbie Doll! Or rather, a post-WW II German sex doll Lilli, cut from the same cloth so to speak.
The director presents assorted under the radar revelations in her documentary. Stern also shares a look back at her screen memoir 'Bad Attitude' still airing, of her late legendary underground cartoonist spouse, Spain Rodriguez.
** "It is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema - a mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness, its past, its present and its people. It's conservatism, paganism, and its radicalism - its habits, its hopes and its horrors..."
Wickermania - In Search Of 'The Wicker Man.' On the 50th anniversary of the enduring cult classic most recently reimagined in the film Midsommar, Brett Gregory in a conversation with producer Chris Nunn about this exploratory documentary in progress - as to what's in store, why now fifty years later, and much more...
** "I've been out since day one, we hit the ground running..."
Hollywood East And West Strike Update. Taking time off to talk to Arts Express from her Broadway stage performance in 'A Beautiful Noise' - coincidentally exactly what she's been doing offstage as well, AFTRA-SAG union official and actress Linda Powell is making noise on all four of the union's picket lines in NYC, against those Wall Street controlled movie corporations.
** "Climate apocalypse, floods, those Canadian wildfires, and the war in Ukraine. Frederic Jameson's dictum that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, has been taken up wholeheartedly by corporate television, now accounting for its own genre - post-apocalyptic TV broadcasts have concocted a plethora of endings to the world as we know it..."
Bro On The Global Television Beat. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe investigates 'Apocalyptic TV And Global Warming' - What's up with the glut of all the doomsday fare on the big and small screens lately...
** "I loved the way Dali as an artist, his creativity and the way he was almost like a child always discovering the world new - and wandering into his own flashbacks. And Dali aging, and terrified of death, that made him very human and vulnerable..."
Mary Harron Talks Daliland, American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page. The director controversial for probing the dark side of female relationships with prominent men, peers behind the curtain into the other side of art with her unconventional portrait of Ben Kingsley as Dali. Referencing Bunuel, Alice Cooper, and Surrealism.
** "You wish that families starve, while you're making 27 million dollars a year for creating nothing..."
Wall Street/Hollywood East And West Strike Updates: Report From The Picket Lines. Uncovering 'the emotional, financial, political and cultural consequences of the strikes - but the whole vicious Wall Street ramifications that have nothing to do with art...'
** Crime Scenes: Stay tuned for the Arts Express episode this week, with Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon - and all will be revealed...
** "Like many eager teeenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the gilded age of VHS in the 1980s, it generally felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder - as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving, and the uncanny ominously unfold..."
Kubrick And Control: Authority, Order and Independence in the Films and Working Life of Stanley Kubrick. Brett Gregory at the Arts Express UK Desk delves into Jeremy Carr's interpretation of the late directing legend's enormous body of instant screen classics.
Counting Dr. Strangelove, Spartacus, Full Metal Jacket, Clockwork Orange, The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon, Lolita, and Paths Of Glory - and the reported utter agony and ecstasy of actors working under the tempestuous filmmaker.
Plus...This is not a review of Oppenheimer...
** "I can't believe I'm still doing this - it's like I can't believe people still care what I have to say or talk about..."
Hollywood Babble-On: Kevin Smith Talks Taking The Movie Industry To The Next Level. With the issues of worker exploitation and oppression fueling the current Hollywood writers and actors strikes, the director, screenwriter and actor is flipping the script. Buying and actually living in his local childhood Jersey movie theater, Smith has rebranded the premises as 'Smodcast Cinemas.' And he explains how and why.
Along with Smith's marriage of film intertwined with online podcasting on the inventive independent film premises, and what that connection to 'Hollywood Babble-On' is all about. As the reinvigorated director of the enduring worker classic 'Clerks' has moved on from a suicidal mental crisis, emerging into creative reinvention from that 'weird, dark place.'
** "White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of 500 years of history, politics, economics and culture. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war - a myth which millions still believe in today, a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for..."
British Cinema And A Divided Nation: Brett Gregory delves into John White's exploration, 'far beyond the edges of the screen' - probing the impact of 'late stage capitalism on our labor, our time, our bodies, our dreams.' With connections to Disraeli's novel Sybil, the welfare state, what's in Thatcher's handbag, and the National Mine Workers Strike - where 'the fuse of fast burned capitalism has been lit, and an unceasing bonfire of workers rights and protections began to rage.'
** 'Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...'
A Life In The Key Of The Community: And what it has to do with Thelonius Monk, the fusion of art and activism, experimental music, and 'a remarkable person - not a Marvel movie comic book hero.'
Plus...Picket line poetry...Passionate words inaugurating the historic strike against the greed of Wall Street financed Hollywood East and West, talking not just about actors, but all of us..
** "I think the fantasy genre generally, whether it's in book form or in film, what it does is that it takes the real world - and actually makes it into a safer place..."
Graham McTavish Talks The Witcher, Men In Kilts, Somewhere in Montana. And his theory penetrating the mysteries of the real world, and about in life that 'there's an age we're all kind of trapped inside, in our minds.'
The Uk actor best known for his turn as a warrior dwarf in The Hobbit, and a Machiavellian Scottish tribalism 17th century Highland Scotsman in Outlander, sheds light on a dark subject in a different kind of war as well - with his upcoming portrayal in Somewhere In Montana, as a rural rancher butting heads with an invading Hollywood production - 'and what happens when those two cultural worlds collide.'
** "The Washington Post, NY Times, you get nothing but the musings of an unnamed intelligence official - who probably wrote the story and emailed it to them from Langley, Virginia."
Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon in a continuing conversation on the corrupted corporate media, with young former US Marine turned anti-imperialist commentator for The New Atlas and reporting out of Thailand, Brian Berletic.
** "Let me break it all down..."
Arts Express Playhouse: A dramaticsolo presentation of fuming playwright and screenwriter David Mamet's leaked TV memo, in all capital letters, to the writing staff of a classic series cancelled - despite positive notices. Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...
** "If you're listening - you stole my song..."
Red Iowa: In this latest episode, Peter Wise tracks down rock musician, raconteur and reporter for a local paper, Bob Saar, in a conversation about many things. Including his novel conceived as a memoir while wandering across America, 'In Memory of David's Buick.'
And expounding on the art of creation within the dark interior of Valley Monster, the local downtown Burlington saloon - presided over by friendly Nick the bartender into discussing movies and literature...
** "Across the globe and through history, writers of crime fiction are tracing an increasingly more malevolent turn toward violence - as global conditions break down in the face of worsening poverty and inequality."
Bro On The Global Literary Beat: The Crime Novel And Worldwide Corruption. Referencing India's Age Of Vice, The Case of Babylon Berlin: The Fatherland Files, Twilight In Casablanca, Tokyo Vice - And Blood Of Our Enemies. A Marseille policier featuring two cops of political persuasion, one a communist, one a conservative - during the Algerian War Of Independence, and the death of an African man...
** "I started doing a TV show on Fox. And I left because I started reading from a teleprompter. And I left, that's it - I'm done..."
Political analyst, righteous whistleblower, Pafica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon breaks it all down. With connections to China, Ukraine, Russia, the ACLU, and the French uprising - as 'France is burning, people are freaking out, it looks like a zombie apocalypse - it's colonialism coming to bite France in the behind...'
** "Mostly in the media you don't see stories about the migrants, you just hear their statistics. And I was more interested in the human stories, real people. I also come from a country that was in war - and I've been through that war and poverty..."
As Far As I Can Walk: A Conversation With Serbian Director, Stefan Asimyevich. And the filmmaker's unique perspective with his dramatic feature about refugees - growing up in Serbia in a kind of exile himself with his country Yugoslavia destroyed by NATO, and disappearing all around him.
The director also shares thoughts about his hopes and fears for the conflict going on right now between his native Serbia, with Kosova and NATO. And, all the coverage regarding the Titanic submarine disaster - while there is little media attention to the tens of thousands of migrants who have perished at sea.
** "That was really important, to try to build up that reality of women's lives. Including finding a house - I mean I personally knocked on the doors of fifty houses in Vegas, that fit the character who has very little money..."
Catherine Hardwicke Talks Prisoner's Daughter. The director of Twilight, Lords Of Dogtown, an episode of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities, and who cut her teeth as a production designer for Costa Gavras, delves into her current film starring Brian Cox - and dealing with drugs, domestic violence, incarceration - and the struggles of single working mothers.
** "I think if the public can go away with at least questioning why we put our young men in harm's way, questioning who profits from it, I hope we can question why we actually do that - why we continue to do that..."
A Conversation With Wes Studi. The only First Nation star to ever win an acting Oscar phones in from Tulsa while filming new episodes of Reservation Dogs, to discuss his latest film, Mending The Line. Probing with the approach of the July 4th weekend ironically steeped in patriotic revelry glorifying US endless wars, this dramatic feature steeped in the psychological toll on soldiers sent to fight them. And a Vietnam veteran himself reflecting on the PTSD afflicted friendships spanning wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan in his film.
The Cherokee star of Dances With Wolves, The Doors and Geronimo: An American Legend, delves into his passion as well, recreating on screen more truthful and positive portrayals of Native Americans. With connections during this conversation to Native genocide, imperialism, Hemingway - and fishing instead of July 4th firecrackers as the cure.
** "I'm going somewhere here..."
From rebel cop to righteous whistleblower, deep dive political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon, making sense of the corporate media by, well, reading the news backwards. Because "they're never gonna tell you the truth."
And what this has to do with the case of the Mexican border and nationalizing oil, bananas, chocolate, lithium, BRICS, Iran, and 'sleeping with the fishes.'
** "The US has deployed very sophisticated Israeli surveillance towers on the Mexican border, this has been happening for a long time. It started before Trump was president - and it's actually deepened since he left the presidency..."
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World. A continuing discussion with Antony Lowenstein on his investigative work exposing how Israel uses Occupied Palestine as a testing ground for its military and technological sectors - and the worldwide implications...
** "I did a book called Disaster Capitalism, about people making money from misery. And essentially what I was seeing, was how the Occupation really has been exported - at least 130 of Israeli defense equipment links in the last decade.
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World. Antony Lowenstein on his investigative work exposing how Israel uses Occupied Palestine as a testing ground for its military and technological sectors - and the worldwide implication...
** "These characters I play are such big people, you know. Rosa Luxemburg was an incredible, brave woman. I always - I never feel I measure up to these people."
Daliland: A Conversation With Barbara Sukowa. The German actress whose distinguished portrayals include Margarethe Von Trotta's Marianne And Julianne, touching on the life of Red Army Faction revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof, along with Von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg, delves into her latest role in Daliland as Salvador Dali's simultaneous muse and domestic slave - the both adored and abused Gala.
And Sukowa addressing in this conversation as well, one evocative line she speaks in this Mary Harron directed (American Psycho, I Shot Andy Warhol, The Notorious Bettie Page) drama starring Ben Kingsley as Dali - "All these women who kiss your feet at your parties, but I'm the one who cuts your toenails, brings your coffee..."
** "The guitar based blues was not what came out of straight blues - generated out of the black community, and way back to the old logging camps..."
Red Iowa: Peter Wise sits down with Iowa Blues Hall Of Fame musician Pat Hazell, in a continued looking back on his life and playing some of his music as well - jamming over at the local Burlington watering hole, The Blues Shop. And talking Deep South Delta slow blues and hot summer weather; drugs, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, and the British Invasion...
"My perspective of history, this is what shocks me - that Americans believe stuff..."Corporate Media Watch: Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon is on the case... "We had this scene where I had to run half naked down a dusty street. And John was shaking,'what have we done.' And I said John, and I looked him in the eye, 'We will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece..."Jon Voight Talks Mercy, and Coppola's Megalopolis. While phoning in from a Bulgaria film set to take a memory lane excursion about his new documentary, 'Desperate Souls, Dark City, And The Legend Of Midnight Cowboy - the John Schlesinger directed classic that kicked off the Hollywood Renaissance of the '70s back then.** 'A Marxist analysis of the propaganda of the American Office Of War Information - examining how it is that the American disease of perpetual war gains public support from our film industry...'Screening Room: How Hollywood Sells Us War - Hollywood's Crucial Role In The Military Industrial Complex...
"Now they disbanded the draft, and now the American military is just a mercenary force - it's like an almost strange science fiction thing where you colonize the rest of the universe in jack boots...Red Iowa: Army veteran and political artist Peter Wise in the latest episode, along with his self-described 'armchair revolutionary' wandering Scottish nomad across the country, known as 'Globe Trotsky.' As they interrogate together the world situation - and tackle sorting it all out. "Black people can't look around in America and figure out - hey man, I'm not getting a fair shot, my people have not gotten a fair shot..." Crime Scenes Edition: The New McCarthyism Censorship. With connections to anti-imperialism, Omali Yeshitela, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, Malcolm and Martin Luther King. Political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon breaks it down."As it turned out, I met up with Joel and Ethan Coen. I've worked on a number of their films over the years - and I soon realized there's a way of talking about people in a much more surreal way..."Roger Deakins Talks Byways, Blade Runner and his photography work, as among the most esteemed cinematographers. Known for countless productions including The Shawshank Redemption, Air America, Skyfall, A Beautiful Mind, Sid And Nancy, music documentaries, Eric Clapton and Marvin Gaye music videos, and his many collaborations with the Coen Brothers.** "Three examples of dirty work: inside a prison, at a slaughter house, and a military base with drone operators - and what the three places have in common, are that they are hidden away..."Book Corner: Dirty Work - Essential Jobs And The Hidden Toll of Inequality In America.' With connections to Code Pink, James Baldwin, dead flowers and nightmares...
"You got buttons that somebody can push, or buttons if you're a member of one of these teams - and they ain't even your buttons..."Crime Scenes Edition: Buttons, cults, the FBI and Twitter incest, werewolves and full moons. Political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon, is on the case. "My character has been in the Bay Of Pigs. It's a complicated guy because he's a gangster - and gangsters generally don't, you know, go around doing nice things..."Yul Vazquez Talks The White House Plumbers, Godfather Of Harlem. And on the anniversary of the Bay Of Pigs invasion this past week, the Cuban American actor known for The Sopranos, Che, and Kill The Messenger coincidentally describes as well the two real life characters he portrays in both crime series.And at a time when the new Pentagon Papers scandal has just been revealed - his depictions of a convicted Watergate burglar and a NYC gangster, both Bay Of Pigs terrorists, CIA agents, and Batista secret police operatives. "Meanwhile, as the meaninglessness of the world smacked us around...I slid the Buffalo Springfield record 'For What It's Worth' from its sleeve and cranked up the volume - blast the darkness away with music, absurdity, bales of sarcasm, laughter and protest..."The Rubber Stamp Man: Poems And Snippets. Political activist and poet Mitchel Cohen, in the second episode of a memory lane musical presentation of his latest work. "Sound is slippery and mysterious, and it's hard to talk about. I'm not sure exactly why that is - I think that's part of the strange power of sound..."32 Sounds: A Conversation With Filmmaker Sam Green. An immersive documentary on the power of sound and music 'to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perceptions of the world around us.' Channeling Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, voice mail, and one hundred different pairs of shoes...
"I think to myself, I wish I were an alien dropping off. Because I could get on a ship and get the hell out of here - because these people are nuts, a bunch of warring tribes..."The US Empire Is Falling Apart: Crime Scenes Edition. Political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon, is on the case. "Right now, with the way this country is, we all need to get a bucket - and help bail out the ship."W. Kamal Bell Talks Growing Up Mixed. Taking up the complicated issue of race in this country as no laughing matter, the standup comedian and filmmaker of the Emmy nominated 'We Need To Talk About Cosby' and 'United Shades Of America' explores the question, is race a real thing - and how important that conversation in his latest documentary, is key. "Among other things, bringing you all the news you need in today's crowded information landscape..."Arts Express Playhouse: Don't Touch That Dial! Referencing Agatha Christie themed mystery meat, the world's largest slice of Frenchtoast, and 'be happy, no matter what.'Stay tuned, and all will be revealed... 'No Justice, No Peace Prize...'Art And Politics: Red Iowa Episode. A persistent question when it comes to the complex relationships between politics and art: Can they at times be viewed as compatible entities - if ever. Our Artist In Residence Peter Wise explores these issues on the Arts Express Hot Seat with French-Tunisian local Iowa based artist as well, Cecile Houel.Commissioned to paint a continuous series of Nobel Peace Prize recipient portraits, Houel discusses her recent portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. But what about the no less controversial Nobel Peace Prize awarded war criminals like Kissinger - and Obama, thePresident who most bombedthe world...
"You know what the Rules Based Order is called in Latin America - it's called The Monroe Doctrine..."Anti-Imperialism And The US Rules Based Order: What is it, the victims, and who benefits. Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon on 'Why I oppose imperialism.' "I just felt that music has the ability to touch people in different ways - and I think that when videos came out, I think they just took away people's imaginations."Chaos Of Color: A Conversation With Uriah Heep guitarist, Mick Box. Unlocking the mysteries and the power of the music now and then, and why the British rock group has called themselves Uriah Heep. While pondering how 'the world is in turmoil at the moment, isn't it' - with connections to covid, war, and the economic and labor crisis in the UK.** "For the record, NPR absolutely is US state propaganda..."Political analyst and self-described 'digital street philosopher' Caitlin Johnstone on NPR in 'many, many ways they have exhibited wild biases to grease the wheels of the US empire.' And the NPR uproar over being officially labeled on Twitter as 'State-Affiliated Media' - just changed since then to 'Government Funded Media' - a designation they now share with the BBC in their own uproar about that.Arts Express Screening Room: The Statue of David - Controversy Now And Then, And Male Nudity In Art. Connecting the current related Florida censorship surrounding the firing of a school principal. And Michelangelo himself, 'an outsider touched by genius' who ironically wrote in one of his poems, 'I know I am ugly' - tortured by his appearance and alienated from his own body. While 'despite or perhaps because of this, he would spend his life making sure that his David would be the standard by which male beauty would be judged...'
"I get emails all day trying to manipulate me, yeah..."Hot Seat: Eli Honig Talks Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It. The CNN legal analyst and author delves into his experiences on the air and in court, pertaining to how the rich, famous and powerful from Trump to Sam Bankman-Fried scheme to manipulate the legal system. And on the other hand, the media and Honig as well. "How do you figure out what's going on. This is what I try to do - I try to think of myself like an alien that was dropped on this planet..."From rebel cop to righteous whistleblower, deep dive political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon dissects how propaganda works so well - because 'when somebody believes something that's propaganda, they think it's their own idea." "I fought the law - the law being the corporate media, and shilling for global arms dealers and fossil fuel companies as it cheers on global war and planetary destruction..."Bro On The World Cultural Beat. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe with 'Dispatches: The Invaders - Alien beings from a dying empire...' "Mary Rodgers was the daughter of Richard Rodgers - which was both her blessing and her curse..."Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs Of Mary Rodgers. An exploration into this posthumous autobiographical release penned by the daughter of the renowned composer, an eminent musician in her own right who crafted the music for, among others, Once Upon A Mattress. And the conflicted creative and emotional reality for her, being judged as someone driven to fill the larger than life shoes of her father.
"It's about a Highlands Scot who is defeated, and instead of hanging him, the English transport him to the 'New World' - basically to serve as a slave for the rest of his life..."John Sayles Talks Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade's Journey. The filmmaker, actor and author best known for the worker uprising classic, Matewan and Union Dues, delves into his latest historical novel. Referencing settler colonialism, indentured servitude, war, slavery, Native American uprisings - and 'always correcting the historical record taught in schools.' "There are certain people who I knew. And several, including two agents and a casting director who bragged to me how they went about doing it, because they thought I would actually be interested - and they could give me tips so I could do the same thing..."Joel Thurm On Secrets Of The Casting Couch: As revealed in the Hollywood casting director's memoir, 'Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season.' And actually about all women in whatever job, whether lucrative or minimum wage, subjected to sex on demand to keep working.** "The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was in the process of melting down - and the students, in their desperate fight for social justice, and in trying to make sense of the existence of the universe..."Political activist and poet Mitchel Cohen, in the first episode of a memory lane musical presentation of his latest work, The Rubber Stamp Man: Poems And SnippetsPlus...Gil Scott Heron, a tribute with music on the occasion of the late legendary jazz poet, musician, author and spoken word performer's birthday celebration this week...
"I want to have the press to understand that what's happened to Julian, will happen to them - and if they go quiet and don't join in this battle, they will succumb to government theater..."John Shipton Talks Ithaka: His struggle journeying across the world to free his son Julian Assange from captivity, as portrayed in this film. And with connections to the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Odysseus, Camus, Sisyphus - and Julian the person versus the public narrative and Hollywood. "Imagine please, a working class uprising..."Arts Express Playhouse: Don't Touch That Dial! - Shakespeare, Marx, The Anniversary Of The Paris Commune, And The Case Of Corealanus. Shakespeare Without Tears. A solo performance of 'the most class conscious play that Shakespeare ever wrote...'* "To me, art without politics or any kind of social dimension, it's pretty, it looks good above couches - but it really doesn't have any relationship with the societal conditions that it's created in..."Art And Politics. Arts Express Artist In Residence Peter Wise on the necessity of artists to fight the power of the deep state in their work, and oppose the Hollywood Industrial Complex. And, where do we go from here...
"Somebody comes to your house, yeah I think I'm going to hang around your house. But I don't want you in my house. Thanks for asking me to stay, I ain't leaving. I got a gun, and I'll kill you - That my friends, is gangsterism..."Arts Express Crime Scenes Edition:Gangsterism, what is it, and how does it play out by the US around the world. US corporate press reporters, or repeaters? Propaganda and the pipeline, the plot sickens. "When I go to business meetings, I'm still told too often by some receptionist, 'the mailroom is downstairs'..."John Ridley Talks Shirley: The African American filmmaker, author, graphic novelist and Oscar winner for '12 Years A Slave' in a conversation on the show, about how apartheid still exists in Hollywood and in this country. Ridley, who directed as well the documentary Let It Fall, about the 1992 LA uprising, discusses his latest graphic novel work - and his biopic, Shirley. Starring Regina King as Shirley Chisolm, the first black Congresswoman, and the first blackwoman to run president.Says Ridley about the upcoming biopic, "You know, it's a complicated story about representation. It's a story about voice, it's a story about the marginalized individual finding a seat at the table - and the way to that table because they deserve to be there..."
"They had changed the lead character from a boy to a girl, and it had started to come to life. And I just thought, it was a really great change for this time - and also because women are at the front of the climate movement..."Mia Wasikowska Talks Blueback. The Australian actress discusses the embrace of her character as the child of environmental activists, and growing up inspired to continue that struggle against corporations destroying ocean life. Along with the challenges of depicting classic characters in films as Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Alice In Wonderland twice, and the voice of the nightingale in Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale And The Rose - and now in Blueback unconventionally portraying an originally conceived male character. Celebrating International Women's Day This Week: The many voices of women around the world, in a gathering of collective expression highlighting music, satire, history and struggle. Poetry Corner: Connie Norgren reads from her work. "Both Marilyn Monroe and Diana Dors came to prominence in the oversexed, but in actuality horribly repressed 1950s. Where misogynist terms like sexpot and bombshell were applied to any actress - though not actors - who gave off even a whiff of sexual liberty..."Bro On The Global Film Beat: Diana Dors vs. Marilyn Monroe: Class, Crime And The Blonde Bombshell. With connections to physical and emotional violence against women, working class noir, the 'angry young man' - and 'Marilyn's America, hell bent on erasing any traces of class consciousness...'
"I had that from Dirk Bogarde on The Night Porter. Just two or three, a few little things that he'd tell me - the kind of things that last forever, in terms of the magic of how to portray yourself through the screen..."Juniper: A Conversation With Charlotte Rampling. No stranger to controversial roles throughout her career including Visconti's The Damned, Rampling is our guest joining us from Paris to talk about her latest portrayal in Juniper - as a bitter alcoholic grandmother and PTSD afflicted war correspondent based in part on Hemingway's WWII comrade in arms, Martha Gellhorn. "You've got to make some noise when the people up on the podium are running their mouths and lying to us..."Dispatches From The Disruption Movement. US Congressman House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on the Hot Seat - in the next wave left protest political theater. "Higgins was up to something - I didn't know quite what, but I was more than shocked at the way the Klan was working with, and proudly infiltrating banks, state planning offices, and the police..."Bro On The Global Literary Beat. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe reads an excerpt from the third novel in his noir trilogy, 'The Precinct With The Golden Arm." "Since it's March, that can only mean one thing - it's the month to celebrate two of our favorite radio comedians."Arts Express Playhouse: Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...News From Strange Places...Expect Us..
'We all agree to keep our mouths shut because we're all criminals - that's what happened...'Crime Scenes Edition: The silence is deafening. Seymour Hersh and Garland Nixon weigh in on the Nord Stream Pipeline act of terrorism, exactly who blew it up and why... "I'm not Marilyn..."A Conversation With Mamie Van Doren. The 1950's screen star on her latest memoir, China And Me, memories of Clark Gable. George Harrison, and Jean Harlow, and growing up on a South Dakota family farm with no running water. And how a corporate publisher censored Van Doren's traumatic revelations, returning in her memory to the scene of the crime - when raped by the star of Dragnet. As for Marilyn, 'I'm still here, and that's gotta prove itself - to be able to survive Hollywood.'** "By the time I got out of the Army, I had a pretty good idea what was wrong. But then I started reading - and all these things convinced me I wasn't crazy..."Peter Wise Talks His Life Journey From The US Military To Marxism. The political activist who has made his home along the Mississippi River in Iowa, was a medic in the 82nd Airborne Division until seriously injured - and turning to painting, mixed media and photo montage for the past four decades."The Israeli spyware company was promoting itself as a savior to the international media - and that the government was partnering to tackle the pandemic..."Arts Express Playhouse: The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World: A solo presentation reading of Antony Loewenstein's investigative journalism, detailing how the Israeli military industrial complex uses Palestine as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology - that is then exported around the world.
"I have never understood why the word provocateur is in French - and it seems like people expect French people to behave like the Marquis de Sade."Irreversible: A Conversation with Gaspar Noe. The French director joins us on the show, discussing the influence of US movies on violence in his films - and in the case of the re-release of Irreversible as the Straight Cut. And he'll explain how, and why. Along with his response to being labeled 'an artist of scandal and a provocateur.' With references to money, movie posters, and paying the rent. Screening Room: Why Beauty Is Killing Cinema. How art changes the world by empowering people with new perspectives - 'encompassing story, emotion, and the use of visual abundance.'** Annabeth Gish Talks Little Dixie: The star of CSI, The X-Files, and Sons Of Anarchy in a conversation about the characters she tends to play as a woman in settings dominated by men, and holding her own. Along with advice she once received from silent screen star Lillian Gish, no relation, to stay away from Hollywood.
"This film, I'm really proud of it - and it's rare that I can say that about what I do..."William Shatner Talks 'Beam Me Up!' On Tour. And China Balloons. Along with the surprisingly self-effacing big and small screen acting legend's lifelong Captain Kirk identity crisis. As for the Balloon-acy that included the Pentagon spending half a million dollars on fighter jets and missiles to shoot it down, 'I mean, the bizarre things that people are saying...' "Around my office, all of these TV's, and they're all saying - A Chinese balloon! No! I got a better idea - my enemies are on Wall Street..."Pacifica host, deep dive political analyst and contributor to the show Garland Nixon, along with RT's legal analyst, outspoken news decoder, bluegrass guitarist and humorist Lionel on the psychology of balloons - likewise weighing in.** "Before there was Covid, there was a mysterious sickness called Lyme disease."The Quiet Epidemic: A conversation with filmmakers Lindsay Keys and Winslow Crane-Murdoch about a disease that would become 'the center of one of the most controversial, divisive and vicious medical debates in medicine.'"Europe in general is showing signs of deterioration and despondency - as well as an unleashing of right wing sentiments..."Bro On the Global Cultural Beat: Dispatches From War Torn Europe. Arts Express Paris correspondent Professor Dennis Broe takes us on a guided tour of Vienna museums, and art performances and installations, 'in the wake of devastation precipitated by the ongoing war in Europe.' Channeling Brecht, Freud, Einstein, Mozart, Wagner, and 'an exhibit disposing of Hitler out of the cellar and into the museum...'
"There's a lot of people that don't know me, don't know that I exist - and a lot of things that have been said about me that's not true..."'My Father Muhammad Ali.' A Conversation With Muhammad Ali Jr. - The Strange Case Of Muhammad Ali Jr. viewed through the lens of a confounding documentary, delving into the late icon's only biological son - dealing with his struggle to make sense of the world in an imagined post-racial America. "If you understand how the US Empire works and you know a little about history, you're probably gonna bite that hook."Propaganda, the possibility of nuclear war, and the price of eggs... From rebel cop to righteous whistleblower, Pacifica host, DC deep dive political analyst and contributor to this show Garland Nixon breaks it all down. And we're not talking Hollywood picking your pockets at the box office...Screening Room: The Con Artist In Movies. "I Fought The Law: Contesting The Role Of The Corporate Media In Cheering On Global War."Dispatches: The first episode of a new series on the show, presented by Arts Express correspondent, journalist and novelist Professor Dennis Broe. With connections to BlackRock, Churchill, Kubrick and Rosa Luxemburg.
"Don't blame me - blame the truth..."Doing The Right Thing, What Does It Take. Deep dive political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show, rebel cop and righteous whistleblower Garland Nixon talks taking the leap, and the psychology of whistleblowing. And his own example of walking away from Fox News, and why.And what all of this may have to do with broken Cherokee treaties - and the FBI files sealed for fifty years pertaining to the mystery still surrounding the murder of Martin Luther King. "How is this not front page news..."On Sacred Ground: A Conversation With David Arquette. The actor may be best known for the Scream movies, but his current portrayal in this dramatic feature revisiting the 2016 mass uprising against the Dakota pipeline violating Lakota tribal land, is in contrast shrouded in a suspect duplicitous silence. And Arquette as a shady oil company operative in collusion with the deep state and the corporate media.And, what the misleading motives back then of the government proclaiming the fuel extraction as benefiting the US masses when actually a bid to expand and control global energy in competition with OPEC - may have to do with war and Russia in the present time. A hot seat exchange with Arquette touching as well on a Ronald Reagan obsessed serial killer, clowns, and his creative roots as inspiration derived from his own extended Arquette theatrical family tribe.** "For a long time, I've been obsessed about the connections between theater and three card monte..."Arts Express Playhouse: Curtain Up On A Performance Of Three Card Monte. A solo theatrical immersion into a very sophisticated street theater. 'And what I learned is that you can take the three card monte out of the theater - but you can't take the theater out of three card monte.' With connections to the Broadway revival of Topdog/Underdog, and a once published academic study of theater and the hustler game.
"These characters of mine are such underdogs in their worlds. You know - it's not Top Gun!"A Conversation With Sheila McCarthy. The star of 'I Heard The Mermaids Singing' and 'The Umbrella Academy' joins us on the show to talk about her dramatic choices past and present, and her latest film delving into the notion of politically charged conversations, 'Women Talking.' And how the actress responded to one of my questions, that she said she's never been asked. "This past year featuring apocalyptic television, has been about not trying to avert disaster, but coping with and accommodating to its inevitability - a trend in global war in the continued US drive in its quest to return to a unipolar world in which it dominates..."Bro On The Global Television Beat: The Business of Streaming - This Past Year Where The Whole Thing Nearly Collapsed. Taking a look at past and present disasters, and future trends. And what it has to do with the merging of the entertainment industry and the Internet in the age of Covid - and FTX spreading of fictitious wealth among both the Democrat and Republican parties.** "For some his work might be bleak and disconcerting. But for others like all great works of dark, melancholic honesty it's confronting, it reminds us we are not crazy, and that our sadness and suffering are not unfounded - we are merely put in a crazy, sad, violent reality..."Screening Room: The Darkest Philosopher In History. An excursion into the mind of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose brooding reflections continue to resonate today. And was he influenced by the 19th century thinkers of his time like Marx, though quite the opposite - affected by the new catastrophic implosion of industrialization on a socially and economically traumatized Europe. Channeling Tolstoy, Proust, Beckett, Wagner, Mahler, Nietzsche and Freud.
"People think they know this story..."Arts Express Crime Scenes Edition: Joe Berlinger Talks 'Madoff: The Monster Of Wall Street." And what the award winning 'The System' director's latest production has to do with the FTX Sam Bankman scandal, as well as his many movies about serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy - apparently plenty. "I'm going somewhere with this, so please listen to me..."From rebel cop to righteous whistleblower, deep dive political analyst, Pacifica host and contributor to this show Garland Nixon with a look back at, 'what did I learn in 2022...' The Film Festival Report: With DCTV's Lisa Collins... "You aren't sitting here for punishment, you're sitting here for profit."'Angola Do You Hear Us: Voices From A Plantation Prison.' A conversation with playwright Liza Jessie Peterson and director Cinque Northern about the performance for the incarcerated that never happened.
'The system is losing its mind."The Weaponization of Rage. US mass psychological warfare - and what it has to do with billionaires, baseball bats, Spiderman, Doctor Octopus, Viagra, nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction, and the Pentagon. 'Don't Touch That Dial...' The latest Arts Express episode of Shakespeare Without Tears. "Everyone was raving about how I looked at eighteen - but I was twelve..." A Conversation With Actress Mena Suvari: Portraying Jane Wyman, The Black Dahlia, female driven horror in The Accursed - and an excerpt from her memoir on surviving the real life horror of sexual exploitation and suicidal thoughts in Hollywood, 'The Great Peace.' And her Jane Wyman on screen in the upcoming biopic 'Reagan' - while Wyman cited as 'political differences' regarding their divorce as his first wife back then.
"It was my first time on stage, but I didn't resist - I had the feeling I could touch her soul..."Monica Bellucci Talks 'Maria Callas, Letters And Memories.' Her intimate portrait coming to NYC in January. Along with 'The Girl In The Fountain' - in which the actress inhabits on screen the tragic life as well of Anita Eckberg, and the Swedish star's role in Fellini's La Dolce Vita that led to her being 'devoured by her own icon.'Bellucci also revisits her vast choices of challenging roles, including Dracula's bride early on in Coppola's Dracula; Mary Magdalene in The Passion Of The Christ; The Matrix incarnations, the oldest Bond Girl alongside Daniel Craig in Spectre - and in possibly the most brutal rape scene in cinema, in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible. And, those who have inspired her, including Sophia Loren, Fellini, Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti. 'What To Watch - Or Not, In the New Year. While rising above the corporate glut...'Bro On The Gobal Television Beat: Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe's likewise Wrap-Up Report series of honorabl mentions, and the worst of the year.Plus...An unconventional New Year's poem...A PSA predicting nuclear war...Messages about provocation and peace for the coming year...
"A little hand grenade of a movie - where do I begin..."Not Even Coal In Their Christmas Stockings: British filmmaker Brett Gregory talks 'Nobody Loves You And You Don't Deserve To Exist' - his dramatic feature burrowing into the endless war plagued economic crisis. And amid reports that the fuel poverty destitute in Britain are eating animal feed and heating their meals with candles instead.Gregory speaks to Arts Express from Manchester where he grew up, the historical epicenter of the oppressive Industrial Revolution, and the birth of Marxism in that city as well, its blueprint crafted back then by Marx and Engels in Das Kapital. While his film conveys a personal and political odyssey into the destructive heart of Britain in the present time, from the draconian reign of Thatcher to Boris Johnson. "Don't touch that dial..."Holly Plus And The Deep Fake: 'The human being never sang the song at all. Let's just consider the wild artistic and commercial implications, which are absolutely staggering - or was it the other way around." Stay tuned, and all will be revealed..** "My love for horror started with my late mother, who loved horror. She was a civil rights activist, and in fact had a tear gas canister thrown in her face. And I began to realize that my mother was using horror movies as a way to deal with her trauma. And anger, and fear - and racial trauma in the United States..."The Strange History Of Black People In Horror Movies: An African American historian sorts it all out.Plus...A poem for winter...Brecht, Borges, and 'two bald men fighting over a comb...'
"Why would a man shoot himself in the chest 192 times - in a country that worships guns, explosives and comic book superheroes...."2nd Chance: A Conversation With Director Ramin Bahrani. And what this bizarre documentary has to do with pizza maker Richard Davis and his basement, mythmaking and origin stories, a sex and violence magazine, and fascism. "I called up Ringo, and he said Edgar, I'll do it for you. And that touched my heart...That really kind of exemplifies how the whole album came about, it just took on a life of its own."Edgar Winter Talks 'Brother Johnny.' The rock musician has released an unusual new album, Brother Johnny. A collaborative tribute to his late rocker brother, Johnny Winter, who passed away in 2014. Winter phones in from Texas to talk about the music, nominated for the upcoming Grammy Awards as Best Contemporary Blues Album. And how that collaboration including Ringo Starr came together, and why. Along with Winter reflecting that "at the end of the album, I just had this beautiful sense of serenity, of peace and healing. And you know, it's probably not the album Johnny would have made, but I think the album he would have wanted me to make..."** "A supposedly slice of life which is instead, simply an array of toned Hollywood types masquerading as ordinary..."Bro On The Global Television Beat: Social Realist TV - Escaping The Corporate Streaming Bubble. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe's deep dive into 'flawed characters all, but the flaws of each have everything to do with a middle class under constant pressure to pretend all is well - and a desperate breaking bad into a sense of how fellow feeling enables budding class cooperation to bloom..."Plus...A hip poem...Julian Assange and an arresting development in the media...
"I don't know the draw I have on directors by me being a mean looking, scary guy - I consider myself to be like a hermit..."From Bergman To Bully: Peter Stormare Talks John Wick, Food And Romance, and showing up again as Lucifer in the upcoming Constantine 2. And turning the kitchen tables so to speak, getting in touch with his kinder, gentler persona in his latest movie about cooking and older actresses in love.Stormare also revisits in this conversation, starting out as a youth in Ingmar Bergman's Fanny And Alexander, and his journey in movies to the Coen Brothers, Fargo The Big Lebowski; Seinfeld, Armageddon, and Spielberg's Minority Report - and as Albert Einstein in the WW II film Gift Of Fire. "I could tell you stories..."Suspended For Life! Pacifica host Garland Nixon just sent into forever exile by that new Twitter gatekeeper, Elon Musk The KPFK and WPFW political analyst, righteous whistleblower and self-described 'artistic version of a talking head' probes for answers on the show, following indictment for his satirical Twitter post detailing US Secretary Of State Blinken's Imperialist To-Do List.And what all of this may or may not have to do with the Deep State, the Pentagon, the political establishment's combo expropriation and disappearance - both real and linguistically of the actual left, strange letters mailed to Ukrainian embassies everywhere - and 'Garland Nixon's Ghost'....** "Don't Touch That Dial..."Arts Express Playhouse: Shakespeare Without Tears -Hamlet And The All Seeing Eye of Surveillance. We continue that legacy on the show with the inauguration of this series, talking about the awesomeness and political smarts of Shakespeare, and much more ado about something. A time travel solo performance.
** "My kids ask me, why are these people homeless, why are they living on the sidewalk. And twenty-two veterans commit suicide every day. I'm a person that's in recovery from drugs and alcohol, and we try to find - what do we have in common..."
Tom Arnold Talks MVP. The actor, comedian, and former bouncer discusses pretty much playing himself in this reality based sports drama touching on this country's main spectator sports exploiting essentially gladiators - damaged football players and soldiers alike - channeling PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, and actual homeless on the streets of LA as part of the cast.
And Most Valuable Player, based on the life of the director, screenwriter and star Nate Boyer, probes warts and all, the former army soldier turned player for the Seattle Seahawks - and who defended Colin Kaepernick on the field taking a knee.
Arnold also revisits his early struggles as a working class youth in an Iowa meatpacking plant - to survive economically in an America where nothing much has changed in the present time.
Along with his characters that have included Rip Van Winkle, portraying Forrest Gump twice, and his upcoming 'The Naked Umbrella' - in which he apparently is not the starring conspiracy theorist.
** "Our holiday wish gift list high mobility howitzer artillery rocket systems, with a range just out of this world!"
Arts Express Playhouse: The Home Shopping Weapons Network. Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...
** "The dark web is regarded as an underworld, an illegal place where criminals meet. But the other argument is that it gives people freedom - it can stop governments from overreaching their boundaries, it can keep people and their ideas safe."
Screening Room: What Is The Dark Web, Really....How did it all start, where did that underground Internet come from, and where is it headed.
And what it all has to do with US intelligence, money laundering and bitcoins, hackers, hit lists, rocket launchers, stolen identities and fake passports for sale - while at the same time crucial to whistleblowers, and a hidden wikipedia containing articles immune from censorship.
RESUBMISSION
** "It sounds like we're still in the Second World War...."
Judd Hirsch Talks 'The Fabelmans,' 'Resistance: 1942.' The veteran actor delves into two of his new releases this month - Resistance: 1942 in which radio itself stars as a driving force of the French Resistance in the vanguard of mass movement communication and mobilization, evolving into that power of the Internet today.
And, what his portrayal of the mysterious Uncle Boris in that Steven Spielberg coming of age drama The Fabelmans is all about - "a key figure in Spielberg's life to whom he attributes becoming inspired to be a filmmaker." While Hirsch talks endless wars, Woodstock, and revisiting the road that took him to that sitcom classic Taxi, and what it has meant to him in his life.
** 'A provocative and ambiguous classic, its dialectical view of the world of all things being composed of opposites - and like a thread of voices responding to one another online...'
Arts Express Playhouse: The Daodejing - A solo performance presentation.
** "DOC NYC should be ashamed..."
The Youth Report: Neo-Nazis In The House. Movement For A People's Democracy young Latina activist Kayla Popuchet describes turning up at the largest documentary festival in the country - and gets thrown out. Fearlessly protesting the presence on stage of a guest of honor from the Azov Battalion, Dmytro Kozatsky - who just happens to sport Nazi tattoos, and is fond of creating photographs of swastika carved pizzas.
** "James Hemings literally stood up to Thomas Jefferson, the most powerful man in his universe, and refused to be called a slave. Was he murdered - Chef Ashbell thinks so - and here's why..."
Not Just Sally Hemings - 'James Hemings: Ghost In America's Kitchen'. A Conversation with Ashbell McElvee. The film's narrator and a chef himself, McElvee probes the tragic short life of Jefferson's abused slave among hundreds, and unrecognized kin as his wife's half-brother. While delving into the US President's weaponization of Hemings' cuisine for political gain, cookbook plagiarism, French fries and macaroni and cheese.
In other words, food that you may eat not realizing the origins from that enslaved 'culinary founding father' unrecognized for nearly 240 years - and which is the subject of our Politics Of Thanksgiving' episode this week. Along with Chef Ashbell's recommendations regarding how best to eat well while surviving the cost of food during this Recession.
Arts Express Playhouse: 'X: The Life And Times Of Malcolm X.' A musical theater presentation.
Screening Room: A Climate Scientist Dissects Global Warming Movies. With the world climate crisis dominating the news, where are people getting a great deal of the information from. According to one NASA scientist, it's Hollywood. An analysis of when Hollywood gets it right - and wrong.
** Julian Assange In His Own Words: An Arts Express Feature Presentation
A gathering of activist and radio voices, from the speeches and writings of Assange - and the imprisoned journalist for years in the UK Belmarsh Prison, who can't speak for himself. Medea Benjamin, Reggie Johnson, Paul DeRienzo, Mary Murphy, Miguel Gardel and others in performance. Gleaned from the compiled speeches and writings by Karen Sharpe.
** CNN Host Don Lemon Cancelled - Financial Fallout Or Political Payback?
The Emmy Award winning television anchor, demoted from his prime time Don Lemon Tonight to a new morning show - and recently in what may or may not be a coincidence, cornering UK talking heads on air to raise the issue of the former empire with its massive wealth, owing reparations to the masses they oppressed and exploited under colonial domination for centuries.
Lemon phones in touching on among other notions, CNN's diminishing audience as less a competitive issue with other stations, than with the Internet - challenging the corporate media's narrow establishment focus politically, as opposed to the online 'newsstand' concept of political diversity and debate.
Not to mention the liberal establishment public expropriation of the term 'left' while erasing the existence of authentic left and progressive identity. And in effect designating any dissenting voices together as a dangerous right wing threat.
** 'Most media have simply collapsed, echoing mainstream views. And those sites that continue the battle in these bleak times, have not surrendered their values for whatever funding or scraps from the imperial table might be available.'
Bro On The Global Television Beat: Something's Rotten In Nato. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe takes the temperature of the European and international media - repression and resistance. And a deep dive episode exploring the New Iron Curtain Media - what is it and how it functions in the current nuke threatened world today.
** "I believe that the diagnosis of these bizarre people - like in the real world there would be war, in this family there's war going on just beneath the surface..."
Jon Voight Talks Dangerous Game; The Coming Home actor, whose politics were apparently not always what they are today, once again plays a damaged Viet Nam veteran in the horror drama. And while covid has led to an unending procession of pandemic driven dystopian, doomsday and disaster terror in subsequent movies, Dangerous Game may have something a little different yet the same subconsciously in mind.
In other words, can evil itself be contagious, with Voight's possibly PTSD damaged family patriarch having descended into homicidal tendencies after killing a Vietnamese soldier in the war - and then mentally infecting his own descendants. While intimating that violence and even war can be as contagious psychologically as a pandemic - even if not the conscious intent of a filmmaker influenced by the world around him no matter what the movie.
Discussed as well with director Sean McNamera joining him, were wheelchairs and wars - in the actor's creative journey through the years from Coming Home to his disabled protagonist in this film.
** "It's always a good thing for a horrible government to be out of power. But I'm not so sure the Nazis were completely defeated - a great many of them were hired right into the US military, and you could see their handiwork right through to the war in Viet Nam..."
Leaving World War II Behind: A Conversation with David Swanson. Challenging the notion of how World War II as the 'good war' is used to justify the many wars since then. A deep dive with the author of War Is A Lie and many other books, and the executive director of World Beyond War.
** "The subjective, non-representational nature of abstract expressionism made it very amenable to interpretation - so if the CIA wanted to attach anti-communism to abstract expressionism, the art allowed for it..."
Screening Room: Pollock And The CIA - A War Of Ideas. How the CIA used artist Jackson Pollock and abstract art to fight the Cold War. With connections to Operation Long Leash, McCarthyism, Da Vinci, the Twist, and 'Jack The Dripper' Pollock - notorious for ignoring the bounds of art itself while flinging cheap house paints across the canvas...
** "Films haven't given this type of character a voice - and so that was instantly intriguing to me..."
Jena Malone Talks Adopting Audrey - Millennial Misery Meets Economic Crisis Cinema. A last resort odyssey, in which her character Audrey is about to be fired from her 7th low wage job in two years, and facing eviction as well, embarks in search of adult adoption for her economic survival.
** "I am somewhat bleary eyed from my home film fest - and you'll experience what it's like to be breathing foul air beneath the ground, with nothing but a candle lamp stuck on your mining hat lighting your way..."
** Deep Dive: The Working Class On Screen. A look at the few and far between movies about worker struggles old and new. Because the notion of 'workers' in Hollywood has usually meant those who work for the CIA, the military, mercenaries, SWAT operatives, or for organized crime.
And ironically, promoting those dangerous personas in the service of a determined indoctrination of the masses, to accept the system as is - while disappearing from movies those potentially truly dangerous, the working as posing a real threat - to the corrupt and exploitative system that exists in the real world. Along with working class oppression when it is portrayed on screen - originating as an emotional or psychological condition of those characters.
** Look, I want to give you a present long distance. This is Gandalf's Glamdring Sword - and if I can come to Kiev and present it to you with my love, it would be a great joy. It's not a real sword!"
The Banned Online, Broadcast On Arts Express Episode This Week: Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...
Plus: The One Minute Marxist, featuring Michael Caine...Zelensky, Mayor Klitschko and Stepan Bandera...The politics of racism in the workplace...
** "There's definitely a Debbie Downer that lives inside of me. But I often censor myself, what I want to say - so that I'm not Debbie Downer."
A Conversation With Rachel Dratch. Delving into her current portrayal of Patton Oswalt's unconventionally enticing girlfriend 'the voice' on the phone in 'I Love My Dad.' And starring as 'The Principal' in the upcoming Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse.
Along with the pros and cons of Debbie Downer in her life, thoughts on cancel culture cops in comedy, Covid, King Of Queens - and radiologists.
** "Fix this thing. Have a beer with Putin - have a couple of beers..."
Banned Online, Broadcast On Arts Express. Among a number of impersonation episodes on the show this week, Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus are at it again. Phoning up eminent Twin Peaks and Dune director David Lynch, disguised as Ukraine President Zelensky - in our Cancel Culture Uncancelled feature this week.
** 'The answer might just surprise you. Or will it? We'll bring you the shocking reveal, in just a moment..."
Arts Express Playhouse: A kind of 'Granted' offered up for your listener approval. Stay tuned, and all will be revealed...
** "The series is awash in the sights and smells of the marketplace - but then indulges in a colonial ravaging of the streets."
Bro On The Global Television Beat: Ms. Marvel - Politicizing the Multiverse And Rendering It Asunder. And Disney's Muslim girl superhero 'caught up in the studio's commodified seriality.' Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe, channeling Asian hate crimes, Hilary Clinton, James Bond, and Homeland Security.
** "Actors have definitely been doing outlandish things for money since the dawn of time, that's just part of the job - David Mamet said, 'actors were historically this kind of cursed people..."
The Immaculate Room: A Conversation With Emile Hirsch. Well, maybe not so immaculate - as the actor plays, along with his girlfriend portrayed by Kate Bosworth, contestants signing up to win five million dollars from an eccentric tycoon, if they survive 50 days under extreme, regimented conditions in this sensory deprived lockdown.
The young actor also explored issues in the film reflected in the real world, in what may be considered the latest addition to Economic Crisis Cinema targeting his millennial generation in particular - along with observations about actors as well lured into doing outlandish things for money. And the South African filmmaker Mukunda Michael Dewil's unique outsider looking in perspective possibly reflecting his own background born into that regimented, repressive apartheid country.
Hirsch also discusses his unconventional choices of characters to play in movies. Including Houdini, Thoreau, opposite scary nun Jodie Foster in The Dangerous Lives Of Altar Boys, and as Jay Sebring in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood - the real life celebrity hairdresser murdered by the Manson Family. Along with a memory lane excursion remembering late co-star Heath Ledger, in Lords Of Dogtown.
** "CBS committed the crime of journalism. And the people who are in charge of the war are also the people who fund CBS News - and so a phone call was made, and this is what the result is..." ~ Jimmy Dore
Screening Room; In the Arts Express Cancel Culture Uncancelled Episode this week, 'Arming Ukraine' - The Director's Cut. Stay tuned and all will be revealed...
Plus...Going Rogue...James Dean, River Phoenix, Marlon Brando...David Mamet, thespian graves, vampires...
** "I don't really have any thoughts about cancel culture - there's always been times when people dig their feet in..."
Patton Oswalt Talks Hot Weather And Other Hot Topics: Cancel culture in comedy, bad dads, and his latest movie about identity theft online, with Rachel Dratch co-conspiring as "the voice" - I Love My Dad.
** "This is Facebook's Metaverse and Marvel's Multiverse - in an attempt to curate, not create a community..."
Bro On The Global Film Beat: Mr. Caruso Goes To Town - Corporate developer remade as the common man. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe channels Frank Capra's Depression era 'Mr. Deeds Goes To Town' - in a reinvention of rapacious California land grabbing.
** "And all of a sudden, she was...Those pockets came as a revelation. Of course she had known they were there, had counted them, made fun of them, mended them. Even envied them. But she never dreamed of how it felt to have pockets!"
Arts Express Playhouse: An original solo performance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's I Wish I Were A Man, reprised from her original work penned in 1914. Not so much a case of body possession, as possessed by liberating impulses connected to exclusively male attire back then.
Plus...Boris Karloff, Chris Rock, Donald Trump, Dave Chapelle...Same presidents, different day...
** "An artist's attempt to come to grips with national gun worship - and a Baltimore sculptor wondering what he could take what he was feeling and turn it into art - to do a work that would spur a discussion about guns."
Deep Dive: Art And Violence. White Noise, Gun Show, Loaded - the stuff of a child's imagination, and Flash Gordon movie props comes to life.
** "It was incredible - I was a kid among giants."
Christopher Cerrone Talks Goodbye Goodfellas. The actor was just 12 years old when he starred in the 1990 Martin Scorsese directed crime drama as the young Ray Liotta, portraying real life mobster turned FBI informant Henry Hill. Cerrone shares memories of Liotta, along with Paul Sorvino, both just passed away within two months of each other.
And recollections as well of being directed by Scorsese - and the controversial, charismatic Henry Hill on the set, described by Cerrone in the conversation as 'someone you could put in a room with John Wayne and Mick Jagger. And Henry Hill by the end of the night will be the only celebrity in the room.'
** "The differences in Chinese villains and wolf warriors on screen are instructive in understanding their response to the concerted, bellicose intentions of Joe Biden..."
Bro On The Global Film Beat: Chinese Cinema, Pelosi, Wolf Warriors, And Joe Biden's Neo-Cons - The Takeaway. 'And the Chinese asserting themselves nowhere more prominently perhaps, than in cinema.'
** "The media is to blame for telling us about categories of people, places that seem frightening and bizarre - to think we're not at all interested in people in Iran or Venezuela. But in order to help the real business of living, we need this hugely compelling and powerful art form."
Screening Room: Cinema And The Mind, Society, Time, Class And Alienation.
Plus...Hollywood poem...Broken microscopes...Hallucinating pumpkins...
** "I guess I just went with my gut - and let the character, in this case the voice, seep into me. And how much a voice can permeate someone's energy, and someone's spirit."
A Tale Of Two Movies: Including one that never got made. And starring that first intended director in the second film on the very same subject - the multi-talented Cabaret and Golden Eye actor, Alan Cumming. Who is our guest this week on the show, along with the director of My Old School, breaking it all down.
** "You know, oftentimes we walk into a room, and people assume they know who we are. And then with time, we peel away those layers back and show them the dynamism of our humanity - and I think that was what I was getting at with Meeko Gattuso."
Nana Mensah Talks Queen Of Glory: And the filmmaker and star of her satirical feature, no stranger herself to being stereotyped as the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, finding the humanity of that central character Meeko, a Bronx Puerto Rican Latin Kings gang member turned actor. And, a rare exception of working class and inner city actors of color getting to play themselves, instead of middle class impersonations.
Mensah, who starred with Sandra Oh in The Chair and on Orange Is The New Black, phones in from London where she's currently filming the upcoming dramatic series The Diplomat, to discuss Queen Of Glory - and checking her own class bias in developing that difficult but evolving enriched relationship with Gattuso.
She also provides an update on what's going down over there in the UK with disgraced Boris Johnson's resignation. Or has he? "I don't have the 411 from Downing. But I will say that people have been pretty happy - here they are literally dancing in the streets!"
** Banned on Youtube, broadcast on Arts Express - Stay tuned and all will be revealed....
** Plus...Multiple masters of disguise this week...The Fist Bump Heard Round The World......Poetry Break...
** "There's this mask-like veneer, where the champagne corks are popping, and a sort of frenetic attempt at enjoyment. But we have the Blackshirts, and that gets very dark - pertaining to the rise of fascism..."
Hotel Portofino: A Conversation With Natascha McElhone. The British actress returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, from her first screen role in Surviving Picasso opposite Anthony Hopkins as the temperamental artist, and while also navigating pre-WWI Spanish fascism - and now as the proprietor of a deceptively serene, sumptuous hotel, dodging Italian fascists in this dramatic series.
Phoning in from the Croatian film set during the filming of Hotel Portofino Season 2, McElhone also delves into the characters she tends to play - that draw from her survival as a woman in her own life, a suddenly widowed mother of two during her third pregnancy.
Counting as well her upcoming reality based portrayal of a Malta village woman in Carmen, thrust into the role of the deceased local priest - and who just happens to come up with more relevant advice for women who visit her confession booth. McElhone also weighs in on the current Boris Johnson resignation scandal back home in the UK.
** "In the beginning, jazz was born. Playing louder than fire. Jazz was fire, and blues fueled jazz..."
Poetry Corner: 'This Is My Jazz Poem.'
** 'Does it seem like everyone's angrier, more depressed and more medicated than they have ever been before..."
Screening Room: You're Not My Enemy, The Media Is. An excerpted deep dive analysis of the 'media outrage machine.' With connections to Terminator, Planet Of The Apes, Network, The Apocalypse, Mad Max - and the Radio Act of 1927.
** "America is a capitalistic society, the one thing that America understands is money - and if you can make them pay, they will stop killing black people..."
Ben Crump Talks 'Civil': A new documentary about the acclaimed civil rights attorney's activism, his denuncation by Fox News as 'the most dangerous man in America,' and victories against racist, class and workplace discrimination across the country. And about him as well - what has led Crump personally down that path and mission of persistent struggle, and why.
Along with what all this has to do with Crump's own working class roots as the child of a single factory worker mother - and what he refers to as the collective weapon of 'the black imagination' as a key component of struggle - even as "there will be times when our hearts will be broken..."
** Bro On The Global Television Beat: The Lincoln Lawyer And Snowpiercer, While The Planet Burns.
Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on ecology at the movies and gas guzzlers. With connections to the world gas crisis, product placement, class, gas, race and cultural props - Tequila versus Scotch, and stopping by a taco stand.
- "We live today in a society awash in debt - egged on by propaganda and advertising."
Deep Dive: The Destiny Of Civilization - Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism Or Socialism. Michael Hudson, an economist, professor, former Wall Street analyst and contributor to the podcast Left Out, exposes the parasitic, co-conspiratorial entities that are destroying the economy here and around the world - namely landlords and banks.
Hudson's theory is a warning to China about the dangerous designs of predatory capitalism on their country. But Mao seems to have gotten that right, well, some time ago...
** "It was like being visited by a spirit..."
Carl Lumbly Talks Birth Of The Cool: And the eminent veteran actor of color's portrayal of Miles Davis - along with a procession of his characters that essentially define cultural, political and historical landmarks dramatically.
Including Nat Turner in A Troublesome Property; abolitionist and author of Twelve Years A Slave, Solomon Northup, in Slavery And The Making Of America; Bobby Seale in Conspiracy: The Trial Of The Chcicago 8; Frederick Douglass and Marcus Garvey on American Experience - and starring roles in Charles Burnett's Nightjohn and To Sleep With Anger.
While on stage, Lumbly revisits portraying Gil Scott-Heron in Grandeur. And discusses his latest role in I'm Charlie Walker, the true life story of a California rebel black trucker in the '70s, who went after corporate oil and construction interests back then. And says Lumbly in this interview about the inspirations surrounding his body of work, 'If I could have, I would have loved to play Harriet Tubman...'
** Screening Room: Google's Hidden CIA Connection - The Full Story
** The Youth Report: Deep Dive. A reality check on the corporate media's propaganda U-turn on Ukraine, and the NY Times...
** "It was an incredible time. The sound that we had created when we made our three voices into one, was something that none of us had heard before. And I realized at that moment that my life had changed completely - and I would follow that sound..."
Graham Nash Talks Music, Memories, War - and a multitude of magical moments through the years. The iconic Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performer, songwriter, two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, Songwriters Hall of Famer and Grammy Award winner revisits that classic musical movement - and its impact that continues to resonate today.
Screening Room: 'The Story Behind The Song...'
"When the birds begin to sing at sunrise this time of year, it's an experience of the gradual crescendo of delight - and the most powerful theater you can imagine."
Concert In The Barn: A Conversation With Paul Winter. The musician, composer, 'earth music' pioneer and seven time Grammy Award winner checks in to the show about his latest album - and how it came to be created, livestreamed from his New England barn in the age of covid.
Plus...Juneteenth week poem gleaned from a gathering of protest voices...Hello America!...
** "I can't do something that I don't believe in. But it's always been a struggle, I suspect it always will be - surviving artistically and persistently outside the mainstream..."
Benediction: A Conversation With Terence Davies. The esteemed veteran director phones in from London to discuss his latest dramatic feature about the turbulent life and times no less relevant today, of acclaimed World War I British anti-war poet, Siegfried Sassoon.
A complex writer and human being who refused to continue fighting in the war, which led to his detention in a mental hospital, Sassoon emerged as a leading anti-war voice of his time - broken by the horrors of war and consumed in his life journey on a quest for salvation, for benediction.
Terence Davies, a novelist as well, is the director of the biographical features Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House Of Mirth, Of Time And The City, Sunset Song - and most recently A Quiet Passion, about the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson.
** "A long time ago, everyone in Britain got in a big old boat. And we set sail and we robbed - and this will sound far fetched - everyone in the world!"
Book Corner: Shimrit Lee Talks 'Decolonize Museums.' With connections to Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Black Panther; ivory tusks, masks, the price of a dozen eggs, and the skulls of enslaved Africans in Cuba; the Philadelphia racialized state violence of the MOVE bombing; German genocide and artifacts on display at the NYC Museum Of Natural History - and a museum in Senegal with entire empty rooms awaiting the return of their acquisitions still held in European institutions.
** "If the now disbanded Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force were actually tracking arms to their source, they might have arrested the 16,693 US arms makers, who the Department Of Justice acknowledged manufactured 71 million arms in 2020."
Bro On The Global Television Beat: Killer Cops In New Baltimore and Paris Series. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe on Baltimore cops terrorizing the black community there over the last decade - and the case of an Algerian student beaten to death by Paris police in 1986...
** "It's always interesting, what people use to justify things under the banner of heaven, using religious texts - and how it's been bent to please the American government."
Rory Culkin Talks 'Under The Banner Of Heaven: A Story Of Violent Faith.' The star of Waco and Lords Of Chaos discusses his latest portrayal in this page to screen dramatic mini-series delving into the murky depths of religious fanaticism in this country - in this case pertaining to the crimes and coverups of the Mormon Church.
Culkin likewise shares memories of co-starring when he was just 13 years old, with late screen legend Robin Williams in the radio station noir, The Night Listener. Along with starting out playing many versions of his older actor brothers in movies, including Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
** "Things are not what they appear to be..."
Deep Dive: The magic of art and the art of magic. Our resident practitioner of both the arts and magic probes connections to novels, music and politics; deception, deceit, propaganda, and the CIA/NSA Twitter pages. Along with butterfly wings, someone's dining room table - and 'confrontation with the impossible...'
Cancel Culture Un-Cancelled: George Bush gets grilled by Zelensky - Or does he...Eavesdropping on Pentagon biolabs, orange revolutions, Churchill, Angelina Jolie, missiles, Monica Lewinsky, and Colin Powell's test tubes.
Plus...Your One Minute Marxist, a real deal retired auto worker presentation...Poetry about a hummingbird, a kitchen table, a housefly, nectar and yogurt...
** "Language is the house of being - and we are its caretakers..."
Adieu Lacan: A Conversation with David Patrick Kelly. The veteran actor with an enormous range spanning Walter Hill's 48 Hours and The Warriors that led him to be dubbed 'a fierce actor like a grenade with the pin pulled' - to both singing Sgt. Pepper with John Lennon and portraying Lennon on stage back then - Kelly is into new, provocative dramatic challenges these days, discussed during this interview. And, while quoting Heidegger.
Namely, portraying the late controversial and eccentric, acclaimed post-Freudian French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in this dramatic feature -the first of a two-part interview on the show - and soon to be seen in 'Night Music' as pioneering folklorist John Lomax. Adieu Lacan also stars Ismenia Mendes (Orange Is The New Black's Tali Grapes) as Lacan's autobiographically based psychotherapy patient.
And regarding his inspiration to tackle Lacan's complicated personality, "I came to Lacan, he had a big relation with James Joyce as a young student himself. He attended one of the first readings of Ulysses at Shakespeare And Company- and so that was a door for me..."
** The CIA Wants You - For the Dark Net, apparently.
Cancel Culture Un-Cancelled. Double agent recruitment, or simply psyops? Breaking it all down...
** "The subject on many writers' minds was surprisingly, not Ukraine - but the erasure of economies, landscapes and memories by that greedier form of capitalism..."
Bro On The Global Literary Beat: Lost People, Places And Spaces: The 2022 Crime Novel. Touching on Icelandic starving and displaced farmers; noir in the metropolis; the devastating impact of opioids on Appalachia systematically dumped on the region by Perdue Pharma; and 'cracking skulls and breaking red bones' of the workers in post-war Japan.
** "Through her own example, a part of the de-segregation experiment herself as a student born in 1960s Harlem, and the history of others, Theresa Canada provides insight into the slow process of de-segregation - and re-segregation..."
Book Corner: Desegregation of the New York City Schools: A Story of the Silk Stocking Sisters. Author Theresa Canada in a problematic excursion back down historical memory lane.
Plus...Poetry about Hollywood, tomatoes and Home Depot...
** "Zelensky, hero or puppet? Perhaps a more accurate caricature of Zelensky, is what he is in actuality - an actor. Who has been called upon to play at least four roles..."
Bro On The Euro-Cultural Beat: Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington. Arts Express Paris Correspondent Professor Dennis Broe's 'Media Gaslighting The US Into War' episode this week.
Referencing Netflix, House Of Cards, Kiev oligarchs, coal miners, Russian fatalist humor, George Bush, Woody Allen, Churchill, Peter Sellers - and 'a long arduous transformation into Mephisto.'
** "I think that the law as an institution has tremendous impact on American society, and to the extent from a historical perspective - much more nationalized than when I was a boy."
Scott Turow Talks The Last Trial. The lawyer turned bestseller novelist and screenwriter discusses his latest courtroom suspense thriller - a sequel to his page to screen drama, Presumed Innocent starring Harrison Ford, and a continuation of the character portrayed by the late actor, Raul Julia.
And involving cancer drug mail fraud, insider trading, and murder. Turow reflects as well on his body of work, with connections to 12 Angry Men and Perry Mason.
** "Putin tried to fear all the world, that there are a lot of Banderistas and Neo-Nazis - I hope that UK citizens are not afraid of them." UK Home Secretary Priti Patel: "Clearly they are not! Their support is very significant here, it really is..."
Cancel Culture Un-Cancelled: Once again, Arts Express divulges a conversation disappeared by Big Tech. The second in a two-part episode series this month of those Russian pranksters Vladimir and Alexei- alias Vovan and Lexus, undercover and at it again.
Phoning up in a followup to UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace before, Lexus impersonates once again Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in a call to Patel. And yet again, with the spilling all sorts of state secrets.
Including Patel's response to Lexus/Shmyhal declaring, "We should not allow people like Assange make what they are doing, I know that he tried to drink the blood of your country - we are pleased with the decision of your fair trial."
Patel: 'Uh huh...Speaking truth to power, as in the Assange case.'
** "There are no war heroes. There are only war victims - Please know that at least one pair of eyes sees your beauty..."
Deep Dive: Daily Writings About The End Of Illusions, by Caitlin Johnstone...
Plus... A poem about purple...Puppets...
** 'We're working for the President' - 'Of what corporation?...'
The Contractor: A Conversation With Director Tarik Saleh. Delving into his political thriller starring Chris Pine, Kiefer Sutherland and Ben Foster - and the disturbing truths surrounding the escalating reliance on mercenaries operating beyond the law for both governments and weapons corporation peddlers.
Saleh, phoning in from Copenhagen, also lends insight into what's going down there in Europe, in the midst of a new war. While contemplating, 'I was very fascinated, and also scared - what contractors would do to the world order once you start to use mercenaries to conduct war."
** 'Your supply of NATO weapons is vital for Ukraine. It's very important, thank you very much.' - 'Look, um...It's my pleasure!'
Cancel Culture Un-Cancelled: Those Russian pranksters Vladimir and Alexei, alias Vovan and Lexus are at it again. Phoning up UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace while Lexus impersonates, well, Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.
And during which Wallace spills all sorts of State secrets - including a proposed launch of a nuclear program for Ukraine. Arts Express divulges that conversation blocked by big tech, and including an interview with Lexus - likewise censored and disappeared.
Poetry Corner: 'I Am Flint.'
News From Strange Places...Biden, Neo-Nazis and The Grayzone...Mercenary's Song...Filming Gitmo...Eva Bartlett in Donetsk...General Patton and 'those Walter Mittys'...
** "That's what The Cleaning Lady is about, the undocumented and trying to depict a reality, the detention centers - to shine a light on what is happening."
Oliver Hudson Talks The Cleaning Lady. A dramatic series that places that immigrant struggle front and center. As a Cambodian doctor and undocumented single mother mopping floors for a living here, gets caught up and exploited by organized crime.
The actor, who portrays an unconventional FBI agent and whose parents are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell in real life, also reflects on how they have inspired his own creative choices.
The story, adapted from an original dramatic series in Argentina, stars Cambodian French actress Elodie Yung. And has been crafted by an immigrant herself - Chinese Canadian screenwriter and actress, Miranda Kwok.
** "Censorship is now the opiate of the people."
Deep Dive: Redacted Tonight former host Lee Camp, along with other anti-corporate and anti-capitalist voices, has just been thrown off Spotify while the right wing racist rants of Joe Rogan and his show remain. And, Camp and others disappeared from blocked RT as victims of censorship everywhere.
We'll hear from Lee Camp, and a deep dive analysis of what's been going down with Camp's disappearance by the corporate censorship powers that be - and why.
** Information Terrorism Watch: What's going on with global giants like Facebook and Youtube blocking alternative voices, and not even asking or receiving permission by those governments like India and especially in the Third World, well, if it's okay with them. In the one side to every story corporate media watch episode this week, investigative analysts weigh in.
** "I feel like 'I've Heard The Mermaids Singing' struck a chord in its day, and perhaps still does. In that it respects the artist in all of us - and reveals the poetry within them."
I've Heard The Mermaids Singing: A Conversation With Director Patricia Rozema. With the emergence of mid-20th century women's movement filmmakers, one movie in particular stood out in the vanguard - essentially giving an uninhibited voice to women in movies.
Rozema delves into that historic moment in time, and why 'I've Heard The Mermaids Singing,' currently in its national retrospective re-release, continues to fascinate and inspire these many decades later.
** "The country is on its arse, and Boris Johnson has taken acid and swallowed the dictionary! Boris is absurd, and we've got a fuel crisis, but whenever he's asked a tricky question he deflects it by saying a normal word in a funny way. We don't need funny people in a crisis. Nobody has ever been in a burning building and gone, quick - somebody get me a comedian!"
British Comic Russell Howard Talks No Laughing Matter Boris Johnson - with a little unintended help from the UK corporate media.
Howard phones in from London to talk about his upcoming global comedy tour, and what's up with the Prime Minister's multiple scandals as his allies flee his controversial administraion in droves lately. With connections to Lenny Bruce, the Boris Johnson Partygate, and somebody known as the UK Lollipop Man.
** "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service. And during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer - a gangster for capitalism."
Radio Drama Corner: War Is A Racket...
** "Blixen's pact with the devil, I think that was a fascinating way of understanding her way of thinking as an artist - and when the spotlight was off her, she was a lonely person, she was alone with her demons and with her stories."
The Pact: A Conversation With Bille August. The director phones in from Denmark about his latest release, a dramatic feature about the strange real life relationship between the late famed Danish author of Out Of Africa, Karen Blixen - pen name Isak Dinesen, and her alternately supportive and sadistic mentor relationship with an aspiring young writer.
And while the veteran director of Pelle The Conqueror, Night Train To Lisbon and Les Miserables proposes that Dinesen may have had her reasons, we invite August to take the Arts Express Hot Seat to field questions about unreliable narrators, women and power, class contradictions, and colonialism. And a case of triple mansplaining in connection to August directing this portrait, along with his male screenwriter crafting the film from Thorkild Bonvik's memoir - the apprentice writer in question.
As for his own mentor in real life, Ingmar Bergman, whose biopic The Best Intentions August directed in collaboration with Bergman and his penned screenplay, he recalls, "Every Saturday, I think it was two o'clock, Bergman and I were on the phone. Not five to two or five past two, it was always two o'clock. And we talked about....life!"
Screening Room: The Blank Page - Adapted for the screen and excerpted from one of Blixen's many dark, brooding stories in her collection, Last Tales.
Plus...Black History Month Moments In Time...Lunch with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe...