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Upon returning from Tahiti and Pitcairn Island I was glad I hadn’t missed The Actors’ Gang’s 40th Anniversary production of Ubu the King, which has been extended. Especially as this veteran reviewer has never seen anything quite like this inspired insanity performed on a live stage before. The playbill includes credits for, and I quote, “fartists” (cast members Adam Dugas and Guebri Van Over hold that honor), and before the proverbial curtain lifts a bilingual woman announces house rules, such as where emergency exits (presumably for faint of heart ticket buyers) are located and warns audience members against committing acts of “terrorism,” like talking during the show.

The latter admonitions may reference the outraged disruptions that punk-tuated the world premiere of Ubu Roi (for readers who don’t parlez vous, “roi” is French for “king”). The ensuing 90-minutes of merry madcap mayhem on the boards of The Actors’ Gang’s Culver City theater clearly reveal what triggered Parisian spectators to riot during the apparently not-so-“Gay Nineties,” and the subsequent banning, of symbolist Alfred Jarry’s surreal satire.

At a recent Istanbul conference that brought many Palestinian scholars and activists together to discuss the search for a common narrative on Palestine, a Palestinian member of the audience declared at the end of a brief, but fiery intervention, ‘we are not red Indians’.

Can a poem transcend fury — fury combined with helplessness? Can individual property owners join NATO?

Having no other options than simply to continue seething, let me tear myself psychologically open for a moment here and see what happens. Yeah, this is personal. And yeah, I live in Chicago — part of what would, I presume, be called the “inner city,” which is where trouble happens, right? A lot of people avoid the inner city. Watch out, it’s dangerous.

But it’s been my home for the last 45 years and I love it for many reasons — but, essentially, for its complex, evolving diversity. Back when I was a reporter with a neighborhood beat in this city, I had an astounding realization: The whole world passes through Chicago! Thus, though my beat was a few square miles of teeming neighborhood, I was, in effect, covering the whole world — not from the top down but from the bottom up. It was a world of struggle and squabble, crime and empathy. It was the melting pot of peace.

Or whatever.

Our GREEGREE zoom #117 welcomes RAY MCCLENDON of the Georgia NAACP, JOHN BRAKEY of Arizona’s election protection “scanned ballot image” movement, and democracy journalist STEVE ROSENFELD.

Together they outline the hard realities of the struggle—in many ways successful—to protect our democracy as seen in the outcome of the 2021 “Georgia Miracle” and the 2022 mid-terms.  

As a pillar of grassroots/relational campaigning, McClendon has played a key role in promoting the Get Out the Vote movements that made the difference in twin Senate victories in 2021, and that may hold the key to the “Manchin Runoff” in 2022.

Working with Andrea Miller of the Center for Common Ground, McClendon has been at the core of shifting progressive campaign donations away from mainstream Democratic Party media buys and into the machinery of on-the-ground organizing.

Based in Arizona, Brakey has pioneered the use of digital scanning in tandem with mailed-out hand-marked paper ballots.  Making a mockery of the 2020 Cyber-Ninja recount fiasco, Brakey has made Arizona into a living laboratory for reliable vote casting and counting.

Palestinians and their supporters are justified in celebrating the election victory of the leftist presidential candidate, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, in Brazil’s runoff elections on October 30. But Lula's victory is incomplete and could ultimately prove ineffectual if not followed by a concrete and centralized Palestinian strategy.

Lula has proven, throughout the years, to be a genuine friend of Palestine and Arab countries.

Owing to my voyage aboard the cargo/cruiser Aranui from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island, I missed most presentations of Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ Omar, but am very glad I was able to catch its last performance. Because – like LA Opera’s season opener, an updated version of Gaetano Donizetti’s 835 opera Lucia di Lammermoor – Omar is a highly innovative work that expands the operatic medium, in terms of theme, idiom and mode of expression.

This almost three-hour work, which world premiered earlier this year at the Spoleto Festival, located – appropriately enough – in Charleston, South Carolina, is based on the true story of Omar ibn Said, who was born 1770 in the imamate (theocratic state) of Futa Toro in what is now the West African nation of Senegal. Like Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, Said also wrote a narrative account of his life, and his 1831 autobiography, which I believe he originally wrote in Arabic, forms the basis for the story that librettist and co-composer Rhiannon Giddens adapt and relate in Omar.

Remarks from this webinar.

Sometimes just for fun I try to figure out what I’m supposed to believe. I’m definitely supposed to believe that I can choose what to believe based on what pleases me. But I’m also supposed to believe that I have a duty to believe the right things. I think I’m supposed to believe the following: The greatest danger in the world is the wrong political party in the nation I live in. The second greatest threat to the world is Vladimir Putin. The third greatest threat to the world is global warming, but it’s being dealt with by educators and recycling trucks and humanitarian entrepreneurs and dedicated scientists and voters. One thing that’s not a serious threat at all is nuclear war, because that danger was switched off some 30 years ago. Putin might be the second greatest threat on Earth but it’s not a nuclear threat, it’s a threat to censor your social media accounts and restrict LGBTQ rights and limit your shopping options.