tagged w/ Writers
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I had a really terrific article for tonight. Honest- I did. It was AMAZING! Trust me on this. Unfortunately, I didn’t jot down a note to myself after I framed the whole thing out in my mind. It went poof, like the old joke about Pierre’s mustache. Yes, it’s a risqué joke.I had a really terrific article for tonight. Honest- I did. It was AMAZING! Trust me... more
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2012 video interview with documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, director of Comic-Con: Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, Super Size Me, conducted by Mr. Media, Bob Andelman. http://www.mrmedia.com/?p=44572012 video interview with documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, director of... more
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The New York Times...
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March 9, 2012 - Friday
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Peter Bergman, Satirist With Firesign, Dies at 72
By PAUL VITELLO
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Peter Bergman, a founding member of the surrealist comedy troupe Firesign Theater, whose albums became cult favorites among college students in the late 1960s and ’70s for a brand of sly, multilayered satire so dense it seemed riddled with non sequiturs until the second, third or 30th listening, died on Friday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 72.
The cause was complications of leukemia, said Jeff Abraham, a spokesman for the group.
Mr. Bergman hosted an all-night radio call-in show on KPFK in Los Angeles beginning in 1966, “Radio Free Oz,” which served as the testing ground for the high-spirited Firesign sensibility. Phil Austin and David Ossman, two other founders of the four-man group, were the producer and director of the show; the fourth founder, Phil Proctor, was a frequent guest.
“We started out as four friends, up all night, taking calls from people on bad acid trips and having the time of our lives,” Mr. Austin said in a phone interview Friday. “And that’s what we always were: four friends talking.”
Mr. Bergman and his friends recorded their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him,” in 1968, followed the next year by “How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All?”
By 1970, their mordant humor and their mastery of stereophonic recording techniques had made them to their generation of 20-somethings what Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are to today’s (if Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart had a weakness for literary wordplay, psychedelic references and jokes about the Counter-Reformation).
Their records employed sound effects in ways considered pioneering in audio comedy at the time. More generally, they were considered important forerunners of comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live.”
Ed Ward, writing in The New York Times in 1972, described the third Firesign album, “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers,” as “a mind-boggling sound drama” and a “work of almost Joycean complexity.”
“It’s almost impossible to summarize any Firesign album,” Mr. Ward wrote, because most of their albums were so filled with “intricate wordplay, stunning engineering and use of sound effects, breakneck pacing and, of course, a terribly complex story line.”
When the Library of Congress placed “Don’t Crush That Dwarf” in its National Recording Registry in 2005, The Los Angeles Times described Firesign Theater as “the Beatles of comedy.”
Mr. Bergman told people the ensemble’s albums, unlike most comedy records, were never made to be listened to just once or twice. “He said our records were made to be heard about 80 times,” Mr. Austin said.
While the ensemble continued making albums for three decades, Mr. Bergman also wrote and produced several one-man shows, including “Help Me Out of This Head,” a 1986 monologue-memoir that drew on his childhood in Cleveland. He also wrote interactive games, including a CD-ROM parody of the popular adventure video game MIST.
Mr. Bergman was born on Nov. 29, 1939, in Cleveland, one of two children of Oscar and Rita Bergman. His parents hosted a radio show in Cleveland when he was growing up, “Breakfast With the Bergmans.” His father also worked as a reporter for The Plain Dealer.
Mr. Bergman graduated from Yale and taught economics there as a Carnegie Fellow. He later attended the Yale School of Drama as a Eugene O’Neill playwriting fellow. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1960s to pursue a writing career.
He is survived by a daughter, Lily Oscar Bergman, and his sister, Wendy Kleckner.
Mr. Bergman got a taste of radio work when he was in high school, according to a biography on Firesign Theater’s official Web site. But he lost his job as an announcer on the school radio system, it said, “after his unauthorized announcement that the Chinese Communists had taken over the school and that a ‘mandatory voluntary assembly was to take place immediately.’ Russell Rupp, the school principal, promptly relieved Peter of his announcing gig. Rupp was the inspiration for the Principal Poop character on ‘Don’t Crush That Dwarf.’ ”
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PHOTO:
Firesign Theatre/Columbia Records
Clockwise from far right, Peter Bergman, Phil Austin, Phil Proctor and Dave Ossman of the Firesign Theater in 1970.
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.The New York Times...
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March 9, 2012 - Friday
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Peter Bergman, Satirist... more
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Lively discussion with author and web TV personality Mitzi Szereto on books, politics, social media, internet TV and Jane Austen, featuring a perspective on the world from both Britain and America. Listen to the 3-part replay from the UK via the link!
http://mitziszereto.com/blog/mitzi-szereto-interview-on-the-hammer-show/Lively discussion with author and web TV personality Mitzi Szereto on books, politics,... more
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CNN...
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New York Times reporter dies in Syria
By the CNN Wire Staff
updated 11:55 PM EST, Thu February 16, 2012
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Anthony Shadid poses at the Turkish Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, on March 21, 2011, after being held by pro-government militias.
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STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Anthony Shadid had reported from the Middle East for nearly two decades
He appears to have died of an asthma attack, the newspaper says
He was the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes
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(CNN) -- Anthony Shadid, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting from Iraq, died Thursday while reporting in eastern Syria, apparently of an asthma attack, The New York Times said.
He was 43.
The newspaper said it was not immediately known how or where he died. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Shadid, carried his body over the border to Turkey.
Hicks said Shadid, who was carrying medication for his asthma, displayed symptoms Thursday morning, when they joined guides on horseback for the trip out of the country. The animals may have triggered the asthma, Hicks said.
He had suffered an asthma attack the week before, when they entered the country and met with guides on horseback, Hicks told The Times.
The Syrian government, which limits international journalists' access to the country, had not been told by The Times that Shadid was there, the newspaper said. He had been inside Syria for a week collecting information for a story on the Syrian resistance, it added.
Shadid, who was fluent in Arabic, had covered the Middle East for nearly 20 years as a reporter for The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Associated Press.
Shadid had been working on a book about his family's ancestral home in Lebanon. He traveled there after years of covering conflict to rebuild his grandmother's home, according to his website. "He found a story of hope, healing, but perhaps most powerfully, loss, in a Middle East whose future rests in understanding its past," it said. The book, "House of Stone," is to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
He wrote two other books, "Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam" and "Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War."
In an interview last December on NPR's "Fresh Air," Shadid recalled entering without a visa the Syria ruled by President Bashar al-Assad.
"I've done things that maybe I wouldn't have done in hindsight, and this maybe would have been one of them," he said. "It was scarier than I thought it would be. I had had a bad experience in Libya earlier in the year, [but] I did feel that Syria was so important, and that story wouldn't be told otherwise, that it was worth taking risks for. But the repercussions of getting caught were pretty dire."
After several days in Hama, he crossed safely back across the border.
"I don't think I'd ever seen something like what I saw in Syria," he said. "You're dealing with a government that's shown very little restraint in killing its own people to put down an uprising. ... And I got to spend a lot of time with [the activists] because I spent a lot of time in safe houses. And it reminded me of an old story in Islamic history, when the Muslim armies are crossing to Gibraltar. And the general who was leading them burned the ships after they crossed into Spain. And the idea was there was no turning back. And that story, I felt, resonated [with] almost every conversation I had."
He did not always emerge unhurt from his reporting. In 2002, while working for The Boston Globe, he was shot in the shoulder in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Last year, Shadid and Hicks and two other Times journalists, Stephen Farrell and Lynsey Addario, were arrested by pro-government militias in Libya and held for more than a week, during which all were physically abused. Their driver, Mohammad Shaglouf, died.
In its 2004 citation, the Pulitzer Board praised "his extraordinary ability to capture, at personal peril, the voices and emotions of Iraqis as their country was invaded, their leader toppled and their way of life upended." In 2010, the board praised "his rich, beautifully written series on Iraq as the United States departs and its people and leaders struggle to deal with the legacy of war and to shape the nation's future."
His last story for The Times, on Libya, ran on February 9. At 1,600 words, it was long, which was typical for him, the newspaper said. "It was splashed on the front page of the newspaper and the home page of the Web site, nytimes.com, which was also typical," it said.
"Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces," wrote Jill Abramson, executive editor of the Times, in an e-mail to the newspaper's staff.
Shadid leaves his wife and two children.
.CNN...
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New York Times reporter dies in Syria
By the CNN Wire Staff... more
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The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from esophageal cancer at the age of 62, ended one of the greater intellectual careers of the last 40 years. Born in Portsmouth, England, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford, Hitchens started his career as a Trotskyite at “The New Statesman,” working along with noted authors, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, who would become his lifelong friends. In the early 1980s, he moved to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2007, and began working for liberal magazine “The Nation,” writing some of his earliest attacks on the conservative government and American foreign policy.
A prolific author, Hitchens left behind a massive body of critical writing, with more than a dozen books and hundreds of essays targeting everyone from the British Monarchy to Bill Clinton to George Orwell to God, usually with wit and more often than not, vicious and cutting remarks. Even those who hated his politics could not help but admire his skill as a writer and ability to craft a sharp turn of phrase, and many called him a friend.
Perhaps his most famous book was “The Missionary Position,” a scathing attack on Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity church, an organization that he called a cult. Hitchens described Mother Teresa as a “fraud” and accused her of glorifying poverty to enrich herself and the Catholic church, rather than truly helping the poor. The book infuriated Roman Catholics around the world, as well as politicians and celebrities who he claimed had used the charity and her reputation to mask their own evil deeds.
A later work, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” accused the former Secretary of State of “war crimes,” and argued that Kissinger should be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” for his involvement in atrocities in Southeast Asia and Central America. As a critic of the Bush administration’s use of torture, Hitchens filmed himself being waterboarded to demonstrate the cruelty of the practice. Hitchens claimed that, “The official lie about this treatment … is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning.”
Hitchens had an enviable career arc that began with his own brand of fiery journalism at Britain’s “New Statesman” and then made its way to America, where he wrote for everyone from “The Atlantic” and “Harper’s” to “Slate and “The New York Times Book Review.” He was a legend on the speakers’ circuit, could debate just about anyone on anything and won innumerable awards.
Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer, a troublemaker and was a gift, if it dare be said, from God.
This piece includes color photographs, a photo-gallery and two documentary short films.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/remembering-christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/The death of Christopher Hitchens on Thursday night, of complications from... more
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Washington Post...
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Christopher Hitchens dies; Vanity Fair writer was a religious skeptic, master of the contrarian essay
PHOTO:
(MARVIN JOSEPH/WASHINGTON POST)
- Christopher Hitchens in May 2010.
By Matt Schudel, Updated: Thursday, December 15, 9:15 PM
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Christopher Hitchens, a sharp-witted provocateur who used his formidable learning, biting wit and muscular prose style to skewer what he considered high-placed hypocrites, craven lackeys of the right and left, “Islamic fascists” and religious faith of any kind, died. He was 62. He had cancer of the esophagus.
Vanity Fair, the magazine for which Mr. Hitchens worked, confirmed his death.
Mr. Hitchens, an English-born writer who had lived in Washington since 1982, was a tireless master of the persuasive essay, which he wrote with an indefatigable energy and venomous glee. He often wrote about the masters of English literature, but he was better known for his lifelong engagement with politics, with subtly nuanced views that did not fit comfortably with the conventional right or left.
In his tartly worded essays, books and television appearances, Mr. Hitchens was a self-styled contrarian who often challenged political and moral orthodoxy. He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, savaged Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, ridiculed both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, then became an outspoken opponent of terrorism against the West from the Muslim world.
In 2007, Mr. Hitchens aimed his vitriol even higher, writing a best-selling book that disputed the existence of God, then enthusiastically took on anyone — including his own brother — who wanted to argue the matter.
His supporters praised Mr. Hitchens as a truth-telling literary master who, in the words of the Village Voice, was “America’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.” Writer Christopher Buckley has called him “the greatest living essayist in the English language.”
Enemies vilified Mr. Hitchens as a godless malcontent. His onetime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, called him “lying, self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic [and] cynical.”
Mr. Hitchens was a raffish character who constantly smoked and drank, yet managed to meet every obligation of a frenetic professional and social schedule. A writer for the Observer newspaper in Britain described him as “at once resolute and dissolute.”
Friends and enemies alike marveled at how the hedonistic Mr. Hitchens, after a full evening of drinking and talking, could then sit down and casually produce sparkling essays for Vanity Fair, the Nation, the Atlantic, Slate.com and many other publications without missing a deadline.
“Writing is recreational for me,” he said in 2002. “I’m unhappy when I’m not doing it.”
He seldom produced an uninteresting sentence while writing with authority on a dizzying array of subjects, including books on Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and the Elgin Marbles. Besides his political essays — usually about international affairs, seldom about domestic U.S. policy — Mr. Hitchens also wrote about strictly literary subjects, including authors Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, P.G. Wodehouse and Philip Roth.
The writer he was most identified with, though, was George Orwell, the British essayist and author of “1984.” His bracing moral courage and brisk prose were among Mr. Hitchens’s ideal models.
.Washington Post...
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Christopher Hitchens dies; Vanity Fair writer was a... more
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Salman Rushdie fought, once again, to reclaim his name. This time on Facebook. The venerable author on Monday night complained on Twitter that his account has been "deactivated" by FacebookSalman Rushdie fought, once again, to reclaim his name. This time on Facebook. The... more
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User Generated Challenge Winners:
1st Place: $1,000 • 2nd Place: $500 • 3rd Place: $250User Generated Challenge Winners:
1st Place: $1,000 • 2nd Place: $500 •... more
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Author Mitzi Szereto chats with Talk Radio Europe about the publishing business as well as her recent releases, including the controversial "Pride and Prejudice: Hidden Lusts" and the Gothic-themed anthology "Red Velvet and Absinthe: Paranormal Erotic Romance."
http://mitziszereto.com/blog/talk-radio-europe-interview-with-mitzi-szereto/Author Mitzi Szereto chats with Talk Radio Europe about the publishing business as... more
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Brin's 2 bits starts - - -
[ One aspect of our re-ignited American Civil War is getting a lot of air-play. It is so-called “class war.”
That's the tag-line ordered up by Roger Ailes. The notion: that any talk of returning to 1990s tax rates - way back when the U.S. was healthy. wealthy, vibrantly entrepreneurial and world-competitive, generating millionaires at the fastest pace in human history - is somehow akin to Robespierre chopping heads in the French Revolution's reign of terror.
That parallel is actually rather thought-provoking! Indeed, can you hang with me for a few minutes? After setting the stage with some American history, I want to get back to the way things got out of hand during that earlier 1793 class war in France. There are some really interesting aspects I'll bet you never knew.
But in fact, "class war" has always been with us. If you ever actually sit down to read what people wrote in times past - for example Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, or even the Bible - then you know struggle and resentment between social castes was the normal state of human affairs for 6000 years, or much longer. Seriously, randomly choose (or "roll-up") a decade and locale from across the last few millenia! Tell me who oppressed freedom and competitive markets in that time and place. I'll wait.
In fact, today's American perspective that there is no-such-thing as class - so blithely exploited by Fox - seems rather quirky and charmingly innocent. ]
David Brin is a brilliant bad-ass,...and any 2 bits of his is worth 1000 words ; you get the picture.
If you don't know who David Brin is,.....well,.....you really need to read more science fiction !
this IS continued, at the
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http://open.salon.com/blog/david_brin/2011/09/23/class_war_and_the_lessons_of_historyBrin's 2 bits starts - - -
[ One aspect of our re-ignited American Civil... more
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It’s a pretty rough time for journalism, as the phone hacking scandal rumbles on, so why not look for some escapism in this list?
We’re looking for escapism (so no documentaries) and films where the reporter is the hero (so nothing like Shattered Glass, about a reporter who made up his sources, or The Sweet Smell of Success, in which Burt Lancaster plays a crooked columnist.)It’s a pretty rough time for journalism, as the phone hacking scandal rumbles... more
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The Jane Austen/Pride and Prejudice controversy continues. Authors have forever adapted and borrowed from literary classics, so why all the vitriol with this latest (and very raunchy) adaptation/re-imagining?
http://mitziszereto.com/blog/pitchforks-jane-austen-and-me/The Jane Austen/Pride and Prejudice controversy continues. Authors have forever... more
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http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/the_history_and_meaning_of_copyright_20110831/
Posted on Aug 31, 2011
C.G.P. Grey
Copyright originated in early 1700s England as a contract between authors and society, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times [28 years] to Authors … the exclusive right to their respective Writings.” After that point, the public was free to mix, remake and build upon an author’s creative idea. In short, to evolve culture.
For a time, that scheme functioned well for members of the art-making and -appreciating public on both sides of the Atlantic, including Walt Disney, who built his animation empire with stories that had entered the public domain. But then, corporations seeking greater profits lobbied for the extension of copyright life far beyond the original length of three decades, and cultural evolution was stymied for their financial benefit.
As C.G.P. Grey, author of the video below argues: “This near-infinite control subverts the whole purpose of copyright which is to promote the creation of more books and movies, not to give companies the power to stop people making new creative works based on the efforts of their long-dead founders. New directors and authors need the freedom to take what came before to remake and remix. And they should be able to use creative material from their own lifetimes to do so, not just be limited to the work of previous generations. —ARKhttp://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/the_history_and_meaning_of_copyright_20110831/... more
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