Lower Manhattan: Let the Public Decide

Local

In the days after the catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center, many spontaneous moving memorials to victims appeared throughout the city, in places like Union Square, the Brooklyn Promenade and various triage information centers for victims’ families.

Against the Giuliani Legacy

Local

The three previous installments of this series critically explored the “new” New York of the Giuliani administration via redefinition of “quality of life” and the war on crime, “decency” and the free market, and, most recently, welfare-to-work and the war on the city’s poor.

The Battle of Seattle and Beyond

Express

Commager, an historian, launched his criticisms at the outset of the Cold War, a period during which freedoms of speech or association would be anything but sacrosanct. Such repression was justified, said HUAC, Truman and soon McCarthy, on the grounds that there existed a rival national power hell-bent on global domination. Freedom, the redbaiters maintained, was a relative, not an absolute condition.

Interviews With Alison Knowles, July-October 2001, New York City

Art

Knowles: Ellen, it was great you came to the performance last night (At the Drawing Center). Tell me what you thought of it?

E.H. Gombrich Remembered (1909-2001)

Art

For many of us, E.H. Gombrich was known as an author of the widely popular The Story of Art, which sold millions of copies and was translated into more than twenty languages.

A War That We Can Win

This past summer, all of us involved in The Rail agreed that in order to gain a toehold, and eventually a foothold, in the publishing world, we would need to make each of our issues flawless in terms of production.

Writing the Left Coast: Peter Plate, in conversation with Christian Parenti

Books

San Francisco Police Captain Greg Suhr once claimed that his forces had to rewrite local surveillance laws just so they could keep tabs on the squatter, thief and novelist Peter Plate. The story may or may not be true, but the po-po certainly hate this scrappy, street fight’n, rationally paranoid, writer.

Independent’s Dance

Dance

Erico Villanueva’s expanded dance piece Ikuko’s Alter Ego had its late September, attack-delayed opening in the grim scene of downtown recovery that has redefined our times.

A Sunday in Oberheim

Fiction

Not even a Sunday, just a Sunday morning. Three scenes, a thousand words. And the necessary backdrop of the melancholy Central European provinces. The square by the Danube: the river has risen a bit in the last few days, and the long-hulled boats, either on their own or with the aid of tugboats, struggle against the current but they slide quickly and almost soundlessly in the other direction as the brown water foams.