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Feature on Politics and Folk Music
New Left, Old Left, Left-Over Left. Our guest essayist this month is Bob Cohen, a veteran of the 1960s folk group the New World Singers. He discusses the Hollywood movie about folkies—and how things really were. Read “Strumming Along with Dylan and Seeger” by returning to top left, the Pages list.
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Tretyakov
Sex, eugenics, and gender battles in early Soviet Russia! That’s the cheery blurb on the handbill of Swarthmore College’s 2002 production of I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov. Tretyakov (1892-1937) wrote the play in 1926. It’s about Milda, a young Latvian woman of humble origins “who is helping to build a new, communist way of life in…
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Ideological Freight
Let’s unload some of that. A 1950 excerpt from Bertolt Brecht: Thus through Kazakhstan, land of the nomads Went the word and call of the academy. Each work brigade challenged the other To raise millet as never before. And in village and field, in school and workshop There was on this great day in spring…
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Baal-ieve It or Not
Oskar Homolka and David Bowie—not much in common there, right? Guess again. The Viennese actor (I Remember Mama, War and Peace, Funeral in Berlin) played Baal, the frolicsome sociopath in Bertolt Brecht’s play of that name, and so did the British rock star. Homolka, who died in 1978, was Baal during the Weimar Republic, not…
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First Things has reprinted what your editor wrote a while back on Pete Seeger, who died Monday at the age of 94.
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The Liberals, I — Bruce Bliven
Here at Painting the Culture Red, a major part of our mission is to explore what liberals thought of the Soviet Union. Opinion on the Left was not monolithic. (Future posts will make this clear.) But let’s start with liberals who viewed that nation and its leader as democracy’s best hope. The New Republic has…
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The Drama of Galileo — and of Losey, Eisler, and Brecht
“I believe in the gentle force of reason; in the long run, no one can resist it. Nobody can watch me drop a pebble and say it doesn’t fall. Nobody can do that. The seduction of truth is too strong.” So says Galileo Galilei in Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. The staged biography by the…
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This Day in (Protest-Song) History
“Matron Felled by Cane in ‘Old Plantation’ Setting” ran a 1963 headline in the Baltimore Afro-American. The report was about the murder of 51-year-old Hattie Carroll at the hands of 24-year-old William Zantzinger, who struck Mrs. Carroll at a costume ball in downtown Baltimore. Zantzinger, white son of Maryland’s tobacco farming elite, drunkenly lashed out…
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He’s Been Streep-Slapped
For reasons having to do with the eccentricity and/or passive-aggressiveness of actress Meryl Streep, people have grown interested in whether Walt Disney harbored nasty views. Disney is portrayed in a new movie costarring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks. Here is the impression that Walt Disney made on Maurice Rapf. Rapf (1914-2003), who grew up in…
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Painting the Culture Red 