Global

My biggest concern is not the embarrassment of a U.S. public afraid of the tiny impoverished nation of North Korea. If that embarrassed me, how would I survive what U.S. culture makes of ISIS, or -- for that matter -- the election of Donald Trump? My biggest concern is that U.S. war profiteers may end up using Korea to get us all killed.

The United States bombed the living hell out of North Korea, and -- in hopes that nothing would survive -- dropped diseased insects on the place, hoping to start plagues. One bit of later collateral damage was the release of Lyme disease in Lyme, but Hollywood came out of it with the concepts of brainwashing and Manchurian candidates, so some might call it a fair trade.

Imported from Las Vegas’ Caesars Palace, Absinthe is a heady mélange of a variety of entertainment forms geared for adult (although, not necessarily grown up) audiences. This naughty, bawdy brew blends circus acrobatics, commedia dell'arte, standup comedy, vaudeville, cabaret, the Rat Pack, cross-dressing, striptease, (taped) rock music and live singing. Imagine the Flying Wallendas meet Purple Owsley meet Cirque du Soleil meet burlesque, and you’ll get some idea of this mind-blowing one-act extravaganza executed minus intermission.

It’s all presided over by an over-the-top, sleazy, Trump-like ringmaster called The Gazillionaire, who - along with a kooky female sidekick - intro the acts, interact with the audience and reel off a series of quips and jokes that range from the racial (if not outright racist) to the sexist, often in poor taste. The sheer athleticism of the various performances, many introduced as coming from Russia (with lust), accentuate the human form, and may leave you, like Shakespeare, musing:

Elon Musk's SolarCity is completing the construction of its "Buffalo Billion" Gigafactory for photovoltaic (PV) cells near the Niagara River in Buffalo, New York. It will soon put 500 New Yorkers to work inside the 1.2 million-square-foot facility with another 700 nearby, ramping up to nearly 3,000 over the next few years.

The production of some 10,000 solar panels per day will put thousands of New Yorkers to work doing the installations. The panels will produce electricity cheaper, cleaner, more safely and more reliably than any fossil or nuclear source of power, including fracked gas, thus fueling a bright industrial future for the state.

With a little common sense from the governor, upstate New York could have many more of these massive factories, create many thousands of good, stable, high-paying jobs and solve its energy problems along the way.

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, appears to have achieved an impressive new level of madness. You would think that being Commander-in-Chief and Leader of the Free World is an all-consuming job, starting in the early morning hours and stretching well into the night. Between myriad pressing domestic and global issues such as the economy and fighting terrorism there should be little else that successfully competes for Trump’s attention, right? Guess again. These days, rather than doing his job and promoting the interests of America, he seems more preoccupied with promoting Fox’s television shows and Tweet-shaming everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger and the New York Times to the GOP’s Freedom Caucus.

“The wooden carts that residents use to carry vegetables and other wares in the once busy market area instead ferried out cadavers recovered from the rubble last week.”

The Town Hall Affair is to a large extent a docu-play based on the real (you can’t make this stuff up, folks!) 1971 panel discussion and/or debate at Manhattan’s Town Hall, with various luminaries holding forth on the hot topic (then and now, as the pussy grabbing Trump-istas attempt to de-fund Planned Parenthood, outlaw abortion, etc.) of Women’s Liberation. D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus actually filmed the roiling, rollicking brouhaha, releasing it eight years later as Town Bloody Hall, which is interwoven into the tapestry of Wooster Group’s free form live interpretation of the actual event with the documentary plus clips from the 1970 indie film Maidstone.

Pennebaker - known for his fly on the wall technique, he remains

The first point I'd like to touch on is the idea that the Middle East is a culturally violent place that can be made less violent by bombing it. The first problem with this is that bombing places makes them more violent, not less. Nobody is shocked or awed into nonviolence, not 14 years ago and not for the past century. The second problem is that the Middle East's violence cannot be compared with that of other cultures without figuring out how to factor out the influence of the West. A hundred years ago, Britain and France carved up Western Asia, and not to spread democracy.

Liberals in the United States are relatively educated, yet extremely inarticulate when it comes to Trump, his budget proposal, or the U.S. military.