Grassroots Nuances

By Benj DeMott

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Listening to Shirley Sherrod’s post-apology interviews, I was struck by her knack for recognzing traps. Informed by family history – her father was martyred in the segregated South – and Movement experience – her heroic husband Charles was one of SNNC’s lead organizers – Sherrod displayed a deep understanding of fear, power and lies that bind. On The View, she handled the house conservative (who’d parroted Fox riffs about her supposed violations of the Hatch Act). Continue reading "Grassroots Nuances"

Distance Learning

By Bob Levin

In 1963, before my senior year at Brandeis, I worked as a summer substitute mailman out of a station near 52nd & Market, ten blocks from my West Philadelphia home. I was consumed that summer by the desire to find my way toward a meaningful life. I had a girl in Boston who was the first with whom I had wanted to forge a real relationship. (I knew this because I preferred spending time with her to shooting baskets with my buddies.) I had turned on becoming a lawyer because... Continue reading "Distance Learning"


Revolutionary Letters

By Diane di Prima

can we/sow the wind?/can we /condense fury till it is/flame/can we use this fuel/to move us out of here…a flying leap/to another “plane” or “sphere”/& I don’t know into what, don’t ask, only/I know it won’t be worse. Continue reading "Revolutionary Letters"

Sphere of Influence

By A.B. Spellman

For his entire professional life, Thelonious Sphere Monk was almost universally thought to be weird beyond comprehension, musically (up to the late ‘50s) and personally (all of his life.) He was thought to occupy a dimension of his own, to possess a mind that was impenetrable by anyone who thought sequentially, to float above the world of humankind, to be incapable of rational discourse, to be eccentric, quirky, unreliable, nuts. Continue reading "Sphere of Influence"


Savoring the Roots of New York Mambo

By Robert Farris Thompson, Vincent Livelli & Pablo E. Yglesias

Screen shot 2010-07-31 at 4.22.51 AM.pngCaption: Rene & Estella – Mambo king and queen (and Vincent Livelli’s dance teachers)

Historians of mambo have established the cultural importance of the Park Plaza dancehall. The late and great New York Puerto Rican bandleader, Tito Puente, immortalized its very Harlem address, 110th St. and 5th Avenue, as the title of a bop-flavored mambo with a dramatic riff. The passion and imagination of Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican dancers animated and confirmed the prestige of the address, as they later would propel to world fame a downtown counterpart, the Palladium. Continue reading "Savoring the Roots of New York Mambo"


When I Paint My Masterpiece

By Bob Liss

ELGIN REDUX? When Chicago Bulls forward Luol Deng missed his second of two free throws with two seconds remaining and his team leading 108-106 in the third game of the Chicago-Cleveland first round NBA playoff series, it was clear LeBron James would not have an overtime period of five minutes in which to add to his total of 39 points. Either the Bulls' lead would hold, or Cleveland would steal the game with a desperation three-pointer, hoisted up by Anthony Parker (exactly the kind of shot that Butler's Gordon Hayward... Continue reading "When I Paint My Masterpiece"

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