Though the singing of the American national anthem at sporting events retains vestigial trappings of patriotism, the real point of the exercise is entertainment, the more violent the better. If the anthem is a ritual,…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
In Upstate New York the long winter, even harsher than last, has been washed away by torrential rains. This morning at the Ithaca Falls the muddy floodwaters have risen to the walls of the wide…
Ithaca, New York. — Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque nineteenth-century cemetery just. In the nearby gorge the creek builds momentum ever hour as the thaw gathers force. Just beyond…
A BBC Breakfast interview with 95-year-old Dresden firebombing survivor Victor Gregg aired last month in the UK on the 70th anniversary of the attacks. This ten-minute video should be required viewing for all, but especially…
Last month the novelist, screenwriter, and CounterPunch contributor Clancy Sigal, whose most recent book is the vital Hemingway Lives!, sent me the following vignette, a history lesson in the nearly unbreakable union between music and…
A late-imperial malaise hung in the air over Glendale, Arizona on SuperBowl Sunday. It could not be chased away by all the bright artificial lights that shone down on the lip-syncing roster of mediocre Obama…
The baroque density of Thomas Pynchon’s novels for half-a-century has dissuaded filmmakers from trying to turn any of them into movies. Paul Thomas Anderson’s valiant—or perhaps just plain crazy—cinematic confrontation with Inherent Vice is the…