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The Arts: The Politics Of Filmmaking

In the course of reading a book we have time to change our mind about things, or anyway, the author has time to change our minds. But seeing a film is different. Not only the brevity of the event, but the limited intellectual possibilities of the medium itself make it almost impossible for a filmmaker to challenge (uproot, enlighten, deepen?) the filmgoer’s attitude about the way things are.

February 1978

We are free to do most anything, yet, understanding so little about freedom, we confuse it with license, as we confuse living with style.

Nuclear Power: The Ugly Truth

An Interview With Richard Webb

I’d have to assume that you’re going to get a disastrous accident within the next 20 years, 30 years, right around there . . . I may be wrong . . . We’re liable to have one next week.

Crimes To Fit The Individual: South African Justice

The destruction of the liberal, moderate left, both black and white, has brought apartheid to its logical conclusion, the polarization of the races. Each color is increasingly influenced by the voice of extremism. South Africa is now poised on the brink of guerilla war.

Remembering The Bicentennial

This is all in service of an excuse to reissue a bunch of bicentennial humor that ran on WDBS from the fall of ’75 to July 4, 1976. There were well over a hundred different “bicentennial minutes,” and what follows was excerpted from the worst of them.

Dirty For Dirty: The State Vs. Larry Flynt, Or All In The Bloody Eye Of The Beholder

Hustler isn’t sex, but an advertisement for sex. And, like all advertisement, it must be judged, like it or not, as art.

“The Business Of America . . .

Open Letter To The President (II)

There are those of us, not many formerly counted among your admirers, who to date take heart from reports of your activities which mayhap (dare we so hope?) indicate the formulation of a Coolidgean policy of saying little and doing less.

Care Packages To Fat City

An Objective Opinion

I write of a ridiculous-acting class of people, but one that is not without craft and guile. Public office seems to attract people who are just smart enough to realize that elected positions of “public confidence” are the easiest and safest of possibilities for not especially bright individuals to get rich.

Saving The Hunter From The Rabbits

“Watch out for the poor! They want to marry your daughter.” The Word: Anything that the poor want must come from the middle-class. The rich have somehow at once been bled dry while remaining wealthy.

1977

New Year’s Day. No television, or newspaper, to remind me of the world outside. No news-of-the year in review. I can tell myself better lies than that. Nineteen seventy-seven. Seven years to 1984.