Playwright and actor Wally Shawn discusses the perverse pleasure of power and the subject of a recent speech he gave at the Academy of Arts and Letters: The Unobtrusives. Shawn touches on everything from his own childhood, traveling to India at the age of 21, putting pressure on Barack Obama, and why the Democratic Party is part of the imperial system.
Finally, the American News Project spends a week with Brian Duss as he takes the Food Stamp Challenge, living off a dollar per meal for seven days. Find out how he fares. And Amiri Baraka and Leonard Cohen in a clip from the “United States of Poetry,” a Washington Square film directed by Mark Pellington and Produced by Joshua Blum and the Bowery Poetry Club’s Bob Holman.
All that and more on GRITtv.





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Love the still showing in the video. Very nice.
We’re pretty darn cool at GRITtv but who can top Leonard Cohen?
Still Digging for the Lake:>)
Best way to do food challenges is to make stews/stir fries/pasta/potato dishes/soups, in general.
Didn’t learn that from doing food challenges. Learned that from living on less than $20/week, because that’s all I had.
“You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia.’ But only slightly less well known is this: ‘Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!’ Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha h-…” *thud*
fdl late nite is up
Great show. The Wallace Shawn line at the end about the Democratic party is of course, vintage Shawn, not to mention right on the money.
Since I can’t move to NYC, I’ll just have to hope you do a show out of DC at some point.
Darned cool show. Leonard or no.
Safe, affordable, funded, indeed, Rebecca.
We did used to fight for child care and health
care and comparable worth and and and. Abortion
still gets its own fight in my mind, its a different
legal structure that can’t be overcome by providing
free childcare. But if everybody is hip to working
for childcare and health care and comparable worth
and accessible higher ed plans again, fantastic.
Let’s go. But don’t be asking for Daschle for DHHS
Secretary and lordy please not the faith based scam
again.
The opposite of a system based on “superiority” (hierarchy) is a system based on equality or utopia. (a classless society) You might ask yourself why you believe utopia is impossible.