Almost forty years after his violent death, Pier Paolo Pasolini, filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure, remains a subject of passionate argument. Best known for a subversive and difficult body of film work, loaded with Renaissance and Baroque iconography, he championed the disinherited and damned of postwar Italy, mingling an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism.
Recent Posts
California: Big Oil AstroTurf Subverts Clean Air and Fuel Standards
While the public demands protections for air, land, and water, the California oil industry uses front groups and spends millions on lobbying the legislature, gaining disproportionate influence in subverting pollution and fuel standards. Keeping the economy addicted to climate-fouling fossil fuels and reaping billions in profits, Big Oil claims to be a “victim” of excessive regulation. Stop Fooling California!
California Condor: Overcoming Extinction, A Symbol of Renewal
The California Condor Recovery Program has defied the odds to rescue from oblivion the last of the prehistorics and icon of Native Californian cosmology. Threats such as lead ammunition, microtrash, and sprawling land development threaten these impressive gains of an endangered species. The film “The Condor’s Shadow” documents this struggle.
Peter Jefferson Nichols: Sorry Slate, No Keystone, Big Problem for Tar Sands
“Blocking a pipeline, isn’t the same as blocking the flow of oil.” Hell yeah it ain’t! Diversity of targets! Diversity of tactics! If I am going to stop the single most profitable and destructive commodity on the planet from permanently spoiling our finite commons, the market place, I’ve got to do more than merely hold rallies and get arrested. I’ve got to organize. And that’s exactly what I’m doing, along with my siblings in solidarity.
The Gamelan Vibrations of Lou Harrison
Lou Harrison: A World of Music is an intimate portrait of an eclectic composer who traded a fast-paced New York career for a remote cabin in the woods. Harrison, a polymath, iconoclast, writer and activist, embraced artistic playfulness over the business of composing. Experimenting freely with western, eastern and custom made instruments, Harrison forged a new course for 20th century music.
Honduras: Neoliberal Utopias Advance on Indigenous Land
The government of Honduras plans the creation of neoliberal free-market enclaves, unaccountable to national laws and governed by foreign corporate interests. Stipulated for territory inhabited by Garifuna people and campesino farming communities, with propaganda about democracy, economic innovation and humanitarian justice, “President” Pepe Lobo should first refrain from presiding over the coup-backed “illegitimate regime.”
Peter Jefferson Nichols: The NYT Misleads on How to Fix Climate Change
The Keystone XL is a great line in the sand. It requires an executive approval from President Obama because it crosses an international boundary, a rare “Yeah” or “Nay” for a head of state. Should the President reject the project based on its adverse climatic effects, he would become the first world leader to recognize the mutually beneficial relationship between ecology and economy.