ELECT YOUR PEOPLE'S POLICE by Norman Spinrad If something isn't done, and done fast, a civil war in the United States is just a shot or a Molotov Cocktail away. But how and by who? If there is one American who could stand up before the protesters and be listened to it is surely the one and only former President of the United States, Barack Obama. Live before the largest crowd possible and of course well televised. What should he say? He should speak the hard truth to the leaderless protesters that what they are doing is counterproductive to their own confusion of diverse and general causes which if even possible would take decades of legislation to accomplish. What is needed immediately is a strong significant and reachable demand. Demand that the head of all police departments in the United States--cities, towns, st...
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QUARANTINE by Norman Spinrad If it wasn’t the best of times, at least it wasn’t the worst of times, or something like that, which is the opening line of a novel called A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and it seemed like this would be only a tale of one. Back in the day before the Quarantine, Manhattan island was the heart and soul and pocketbook of New York City, to the extent that New York could have been said to have all three, Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Broadway and 42nd Street, and all that jazz. When you saw a movie or a TV show or an ad featuring New York, the Big Apple was Manhattan, not anything in what some visiting Californian must have dubbed the “Outer Boroughs,” the moral equivalent of Anaheim or Eagle Rock as far as a Hollywood wise guy was ...
NORMAN SPINRAD SINGS ONLY CHAOS IS REAL AT CIRQUE ELECTRIQUE IN PARIS
ONLY CHAOS IS REAL PERFORMANCE Not that I'm planning to ever give up my day job, but I've had a long slow minor career with music, something around a dozen songs written or co-written, something less than that creating and recording, occasional live performances too such as this one, my best I think. ONLY CHAOS IS REAL is the title song of a Heldon album, lyrics by my me, music by Richard Pinhas. Something of a success, but I didn't sing it on the record, the melody was not quite what was in my head, so I always wanted to sing it live myself before an audience and this is it. Here are the full lyrics: ONLY CHAOS IS R...
THE POWER OF DIRTY WORDS
The New York Post September 25, 2012 THE POWER OF DIRTY WORDS--Illustrated!!! by Norman Spinrad In memorium: Lenny Bruce Fuck, shit, piss, cunt. Have I gotten your attention? Of course I have! These words have that magic power. As we all know, fuck, shit, piss, and cunt are the rock bottom basic “dirty words.” Neither the New York Times nor any other establishment publication will print them. They may not be uttered on broadcast television...
JIHADHIS--THEY PLAY THE GAME, GIVE THEM THE NAME
JIHADIS--THEY PLAY THE GAME, GIVE THEM THE NAME It's World War III, and we are in it. Al Qaida in Pakistan, Al Qaida in the Mahgreb, Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the Taliban, whoever, wherever, these groups and franchises operate, they're called "militants," in government lingo, in newspaper, news sites, and TV news, they're called "militants." But "militant" denotes a level of passion, dedication, and ruthlessness, not even a tactic as "terrorist" at least does, and that doesn't begin to describe what they real are. They they call themselves "jihadhis" and proud of it and that's what they really are. All these terrorist groups, wherever they are, whatever their tactics, have a coherent and focused ideological goal-...
GAY OR STRAIGHT, MARRIED OR NOT, ALL COUPLES ARE MATES!
GAY OR STRAIGHT, MARRIED OR NOT, ALL COUPLES ARE MATES! by Norman Spinrad A while back, Dona Sadock--my clumsily so-called “significant other”--and I attended a traditional wedding where the “bride and groom,” a man and a woman costumed more or less like the traditional little statues on the traditional wedding cake, became “husband” and “wife.” Dona and I had been “significant others” decades ago, parted for decades and married other people, which is to say officially became “wives and husbands,” were both divorced from our respective spouses, and have now once more been eachother’s “significant others,” for over a decade. Awkwardly written paragraph, now isn’t it? What do you call a man and a woman who are and have long been living together as “husband” ...
THE TRANSFORMATION CRISIS--a book proposal for a major publisher
A LONG RESTROSPECTIVE OF 5 NORMAN SPINRAD NOVELS in The Los Angeles Review of Books
LARB GET OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS REVIEWS ESSAYS INTERVIEWS ABOUT LARB MEMBERSHIP BOOK CLUB PRINT JOURNAL JOBS AT LARB BLOG AUTHORS CONTRIBUTORS GENRES TAGGED AUTHORS Norman Spinrad TAGGED BOOKS The Void Captain's Tale , Bug Jack Barron , The Iron Dream , Deus X , The Men in the Jungle DIRECT LINK to IRON AND CHROMIUM Iron and Chromium: Five Novels by Norman Spinrad by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro March 10th, 2014 RESET - + NORMAN SPINRAD'S WORK has, over the last fifty years, elicited responses that range from “depraved, cynical, utterly repulsive” (Donald Wollheim) to “delightfully bonkers” (Thomas M. Disch) and “extraordinary” (Ursula Le Guin). Perhaps my favorite characterization of Spinrad is by Isaac Asimov, who, in somewhat of an understatement, observed that he “constantly displays the courage to be different.” I’d like to illustrate this career-...
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