Living in the USA

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RY COODER has a new album out: MAVIS STAPLES – ”We’ll Never Turn Back,” reinterpretations of classic songs of the Civil Rights movement. “When I listen to this music, it takes me back. It takes me back to the red clay hills of Georgia . . . It takes me back to the moans and groans and pains of an oppressed people yearning for freedom. It takes me back to the time when hundreds and thousands of us decided we were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” as Fannie Lou Hamer said.”—John Lewis.

Also: The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is this Saturday and Sunday at the UCLA Campus – we’ll get a preview from DAVID ULIN, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and also talk about the changes at the Book Review and the paper. At the BookFest Dave will be doing a Q&A with Jane Smiley Sunday at 1230 in Ackerman —
–and I’ll be doing a Q&A with GORE VIDAL Saturday at 100pm in Royce Hall—tickets are officially “sold out” but there will be a standby line.

Plus: JOHN SINCLAIR, a champion of justice, art, and fun. He was manager of the MC5 in their 1960s street revolutionary heyday, pot/political prisoner, and subject of a John Lennon song decrying his incarceration. After he won an early release, he produced the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival, and did a long stint in New Orleans in the ’90s as radio deejay. Now his 1960s classic book Guitar Army is being reissued. John will be headlining an evening of high-energy music & verse at 8:00pm Thurs, Apr 26, at Artshare Theater, 801 E. 4th Place in downtown LA, and Friday at 730 at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd. in Venice.

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How DONALD RUMSFELD pushed America into military and strategic disaster—and why the repercussions of his actions will linger for decades to come: ANDREW COCKBURN will explain. He’s written many books as well as articles for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair. His new book is Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastropic Legacy.
READ Andrew Cockburn’s interview at TruthDig.com.

Plus: Eyewitness Peshawar: Mark LeVine just returned from Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, gateway to the region controlled by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, where Osama bin Laden is probably hiding. Mark teaches history at UC Irvine and is the author of Why They Don’t Hate Us and the forthcoming Heavy Metal Islam. He’s written for Mother Jones and The Nation, and wrote about Peshawar for the Boston Globe.

Also: How the press covered – and failed to cover – the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s: HANK KLIBANOFF of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains – he won the Pulitzer Prize in History on Monday along with Gene Roberts for their book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.
READ my review of The Race Beat in the LA Times, Nov 12, 2006: “You might think there was nothing left to say about the civil rights movement.  But just when you thought you were finished with that story, a new book pulls you back in. . .”

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M*A*S*H made MIKE FARRELL famous, and he’s used that fame to fight against the death penalty and for human rights in Latin America and the Middle East — he’s shown what a committed artist’s life can be. His new book is Just Call Me Mike: A Journey to Actor and Activist. Mike will be speaking and signing Sunday April 15 at 10:15am at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave. in Pasadena.

ALSO: JOHN NICHOLS, Washington correspondent for The Nation, says “The real story of the U.S. Attorneys scandal that has so endangered the tenure of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is not that of the eight fired prosecutors. It is that of the 85 U.S. Attorneys around the country who were not let go.”

PLUS: DANNY SCHECHTER the News Dissector talks about the crisis of credit card debt — and the financial forces profiting from it. Danny is an Emmy-award winning TV news producer and documentary film maker, and executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network. His new film, “In Debt We Trust,” is about the money we owe, and the bill that’s coming due. It’s screening at the Fine Arts theater on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills Friday at 7pm.

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MIKE DAVIS talks about his new book Buda’s Wagon: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CAR BOMB. Reviewer John Leonard praised the book in Harper’s for its “savage sarcasm. . . As usual with Davis, this brilliant little book tells us things we’d rather not hear. One the one hand, the use of the car bomb, with its collateral damage to civilians, invariably corrupts the cause for which it has been enlisted; nothing excuses the death of children. On the other hand, add suicide to fertilizer and it’s a tactic we can’t beat, an equalizer for the deracinated and deranged alike.”

Also: HAROLD MEYERSON with our Washington political update – Harold is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post and acting executive editor of The American Prospect.

Plus: Inside the bubble in Baghdad: American officials in Baghdad inhabit an isolated world: the Green Zone, a walled fortress filled with villas, swimming pools, and shiny new SUVs. It’s ground zero for cultural blindness, neo-con fanaticism, and imperial fantasy – the place where the American effort to remake Iraq was always doomed to failure. Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post tells that story in his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone – he was awarded the Ridenhour Book Prize by The Nation Institute today.

Guest host on the radio today–I’m going home to St. Paul for a visit. My home town will be the site of the 2008 Republican National Convention! Today’s news from the St. Paul Pioneer Press: “Protesters who show up for next year’s Republican National Convention in St. Paul will be welcomed with the ‘same respect and honor afforded to conventioneers,’ a draft City Council resolution promises. The council is aiming to protect First Amendment rights.”

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America’s official reaction to terrorist threats has been more harmful than the terrorist threats themselves: That’s what John Mueller argues in his new book OVERBLOWN: How Politicans and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. The war on terror, he shows, has been a wild overreaction to a rare event; the odds of any American being killed by international terrorism are microscopic. John Muller holds the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University.

Also; VERLYN KLINKENBORG of the New York Times talks about the UglyRipe tomato, dying beehives across America, and Minnesota’s “concealed carry” gun laws. His book The Last Fine Time is a gorgeous recollection of Buffalo after WWII. He’s a visiting writer in residence at Pomona college this term. Verlyn Klinkenborg will be speaking in the downtown LA Public Library ALOUD series on Sunday, March 25 at 3pm.

Plus: Attorney General ALBERTO GONZALEZ twisting slowly, slowly in the wind: In Washington, where the discussion about Alberto Gonzales’ removal has moved from “if” to “when” speculation, the talk is already turning to the question of who will take over for the scandal-plagued Attorney General.
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JOHN NICHOLS comments – he’s Washington Correspondent for The Nation, he writes “The Online Beat” blog at TheNation.com, and his most recent book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism (The New Press).

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The last few weeks have seen a vast outpouring of reports on mistreatment of wounded Iraq war outpatients following the Washington Post’s revelations of conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Stories of neglect and substandard care have flooded in from soldiers, their family members, veterans, doctors and nurses working inside the system. The official response has been swift — but the reaction outside official Washington has been much deeper. ANNE HULL of the Washington Post explains – she broke the story of the shocking conditions at Walter Reed. Also: SEE Washington Post photos of the wounded.
Your Minnesota Moment: The suicide of a marine came after he served in Iraq.

Also: OIL ON THE BRAIN: Americans consume 10,000 gallons of gas a second – three gallons per person per day. Where does all this oil come from? And where is it taking us? LISA MARGONELLI explains – her new book is Oil on the Brain. Barbara Ehrenreich says: “from the corner gas station to the oil fields of Nigeria, there couldn’t be a better traveling companion than Margonelli. She’s fast, fearless, funny, and a brilliant observer.”
Lisa Margonelli will be in conversation at the downtown LA Public Library ALOUD series at 700pm tonight/Wed – the event officially is “Full – standby only.”

Plus: THE TROUBLE WITH DIVERSITY: Our celebration of “difference” masks our neglect of America’s vast economic divide—that’s what WALTER BENN MICHAELS argues in his new book. Affirmative action in schools has not made them more open, it’s just guaranteed that the rich kids come in the appropriate colors. Diversity training in the workplace has not raised anybody’s salary (except maybe the diversity trainers’), but it has guaranteed that when your job is outsourced, your culture will be treated with respect.

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RY COODER’s new CD, “My Name is Buddy,” released today, is a parable of the radical imagination—it details the life, rambles, and political education of Buddy Red Cat. Ry is joined on the CD by Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger, Van Dyke Parks, and Flaco Jiminez, among others. The CD comes with a book of vignettes about each song and drawings by Vicent Valdez. Ry Cooder’s last CD was Chavez Ravine; his Buena Vista Social Club changed the world.

Plus: President Bush says Iran is “meddling” in Iraq: ADAM SHATZ says Iran “might have legitimate interests in what is, after all, its own geographic neighborhood.” Adam is literary editor of The Nation; recently he wrote about Iran and Iraq for the LA Times “Current” section.

Also: MICHAEL ERIC DYSON talks about race: how it is conceived; how it is expressed; how it is lived; how it confers power; how it undermines social stability; how it ruins or revives lives; how it is embraced and discarded. “Michael Eric Dyson is the most courageous and visionary public intellectual on the scene today.” — Cornel West. Dyson is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania; his new book is Debating Race. He will be speaking tonight/Wed in the downtown LA Public Library ALOUD Series at 700pm. The event is officially full – standby only.

An eyewitness report from Iraq: filmmaker Laura Poitras talks about her award-winning documentary “My Country My Country” – it tells the story of a Sunni activist-doctor named Riyadh — an opponent of the occupation, a clear-thinking, educated everyman on a quiet crusade in Baghdad to heal whatever damage he can, and to get Sunnis to vote in Iraq’s 2005 elections.

It’s “the definitive non-fiction film about the occupation of Iraq: indispensable, heartbreaking, and ferociously wise. Time and again, Poitras manages to be where platoons of US telejournalists were afraid to go . . . the most valuable piece of film to emerge about the war in all of its three-plus years.” – Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice. The film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary.

We’ll be featuring the DVD of “My Country My Country” as a thank-you gift in the 4pm hour today as the KPFK fund drive continues. You can pledge online at www.kpfk.org.

MIKE DAVIS talks about his new book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb – it’s our featured premium in the KPFK fund drive today. Reviewer John Leonard praised the book in the new Harper’s for its “savage sarcasm. . . As usual with Davis, this brilliant little book tells us things we’d rather not hear. One the one hand, the use of the car bomb, with its collateral damage to civilians, invariably corrupts the cause for which it has been enlisted; nothing excuses the death of children. On the other hand, add suicide to fertilizer and it’s a tactic we can’t beat, an equalizer for the deracinated and deranged alike.”

We’ll also be featuring the brand new “Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back/’65 Tour Deluxe Edition” DVD, featuring an hour of special features, including commentary from filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker and more music from the tour.
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Robert Hilburn in the LA Times wrote, “the greatest rock movie ever . . . just got better.”