Author Archive

Trust Us, We’re Experts! Is About The P.R. Tools Corporations Use to Influence Opinion

Written by John Strausbaugh on February 6, 2001. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber walked into MUGGER’s office looking a little like Christians entering the Colosseum. These guys are classic liberal do-gooders, and MUGGER’s office couldn’t look more like a node of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy if he installed a stone altar where Baptists in Antonin Scalia masks sacrificed the children of registered Democrats
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Kipling on Baja California’s Jersey Shore

Written by John Strausbaugh on January 23, 2001. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

I missed the big blizzard. I was on a beach in Cabo San Lucas sipping a margarita and dozing over Kipling’s The City of Dreadful Night. I still can’t decide if bringing the balladeer of the meeting between the white folks and the brown was an inspired choice for a Mexico trip, or just a
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The Egyptian Bible

Written by John Strausbaugh on January 2, 2001. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

But it’s his avocation that brings him to our attention. Some guys race birds, some guys build model trains, some guys coach championship Little League baseball teams. Greenberg is an avocational biblical scholar. And a controversial one. In his 1997 The Moses Mystery: The African Origins of the Jewish People (reprinted in paperback as The
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Victor Bockris’ Beat Punks Documents Downtown in the 1970s

Written by John Strausbaugh on December 26, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Beat Punks (Da Capo, 304 pages, $16) revisits the same turf yet again. Most of it’s interviews and Interview-style transcribed conversations with a very small universe of 70s downtown figures to whom Bockris apparently had the most and longest access–Burroughs (several times), Ginsberg, Warhol, Debbie and Chris (several times), Robert and Patti, Legs, Richard Hell.
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When the Music’s Over: Jac Holzman Tells the Elektra Records Story

Written by John Strausbaugh on December 12, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Read as a classic tale of either rock ’n’ roll profligacy or rock ’n’ roll idiocy, that’s the sort of insider’s anecdote that makes Holzman’s autobiography (written with Gavan Daws) fitfully interesting, if you like rock history. First published in ’98 to very little notice–I missed it as well–Follow the Music has been reissued as
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The Hawk Comes to Hooverville

Written by John Strausbaugh on December 12, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Indeed. It could be a long, cold winter in New York City. Although it took The New York Times until this past weekend to notice, and although the financial media (with the exception of the always-excitable James Cramer) is still hesitant to come out and use the R-word except to refute it, it should be
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The Naked Playwrights

Written by John Strausbaugh on December 5, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

A much-expanded version of The Erotica Project is now being published in paperback (200 pages, $14.95) by Cleis Press in San Francisco, best known as a publisher of books about sex and sexuality by authors ranging from Annie Sprinkle to Gore Vidal. It’s a collection of 75 short, sometimes very short, monologues, evenly split between
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Clever Cats and Opaque Snakes

Written by John Strausbaugh on November 24, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Granted, he has one of the most idiosyncratic voices in modern American fiction; it’s an acquired, and sometimes gamy, taste. Purdy’s writing is often tagged "Southern Gothic" and compared to that of Williams and Flannery O’Connor. There’s a lot that’s rural and wild in his stories, and even when he’s writing about Manhattan or Chicago
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Gary L. Francione, the Animal Rights Movement’s Contrarian

Written by John Strausbaugh on November 21, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

I like animals a lot better than I like animal rights activists. If they’re not soft-headed romantics taking the laziest route to heaven, they’re self-righteous misanthropes with some serious rage-control problems. And anyway, until every last human on the planet is taken care of, it strikes me that their priorities are despicably misplaced. That said,
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Andy Wang and Ironminds Weather the Dot-Com Shakedown

Written by John Strausbaugh on October 31, 2000. Posted in Breaking News, Posts

Last spring, Wang moved to New York City to help create a new online venture. Novix Media was founded last January by Michael Berman, cofounder of George, and venture capitalist Douglas Eger, who was the CEO. Novix’s plan, a version of which Wang showed me back then, was to create a multi-"channel" portal for twentysomethings,
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