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CAPE FEAR MEMORIAL BRIDGE CLOSURE: UPDATES, RESOURCES, AND CONTEXT

Andrei Codrescu

  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu wonders why there wasn't more outrage by American consumers when gas prices soared to their highest levels this summer. He says "Big Oil" is not a friend of the people, and that the public has been numbed to the oil companies' abuse.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu remembers time spent with writer Hunter S. Thompson, who committed suicide earlier this week. He remarks on the honesty and brilliance of the unique journalist's writings.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu used to be philosophically opposed to golf, but now he is thinking of taking it up. The Kabul Golf Club formally reopens next year, and then there's the thrill of the Prison View golf course, near Louisiana State Penitentiary.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu tells about an opera called Violet Fire, based on the life of pioneering inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla lived from 1856 to 1943. While he has been relegated to obscurity, Tesla helped create the bedrock of modern technology.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu describes discovering a new sound called "Mesh Music" in New York. It's a combination of Balkan and Gypsy melodies, and he thinks it will be the big thing later this year.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu recalls his meeting with George Plimpton, who died last week. As a novice writer in the 1960s, newly arrived on these shores, Codrescu sent a long manuscript to The Paris Review. At first he was told that Plimpton, the editor, loved it but thought it too long. Codrescu convinced Plimpton to come downtown and meet him in a bar. They hit it off, and the whole novella was published uncut.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu laments the hard time non-blockbusters have catching browsers' attention on bookstore shelves. He details the thought-process that a potential reader goes through in making a bold determination if he or she should actual buy a lesser-known work. It is this detail that gives us insight into the difficulties of authors. Codrescu's latest book is It was Today: New Poems, available from Coffee House Press.
  • City Lights, the West Coast bookstore of the Beat Generation and American alternative culture turns 50 on June 8. Commentator Andrei Codrescu offers a poem, paying homage to a San Francisco icon and to City Lights founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu tells the story of a woman offering to show him her breasts in exchange for Mardi Gras trinkets. Codrescu offers a portrait of New Orleans in all of its glorious weirdness.
  • Commentator Andrei Codrescu is in New York City and walks in on a meeting of young radicals toasting Old Communists. He notes the fact that old commies never say "die." They just die. He listens to them, believing some of the conversations may have started in the 19th century.