Voices, by Harold Pinter, a musical composition by James Clarke with words by Harold Pinter (composed from several of his recent plays), will be performed live on BBC Radio 3, on October 10 in honor of Pinter's 75th birthday.

The plays from which he has culled his lines share a preoccupation with the power relationship between bully and victim, torturer and tortured, master and slave. Against a backdrop of unspecified totalitarian states, Pinter focuses on interrogators, torturers and guards and their violent mistreatment of innocent prisoners.

The broadcast will be accessible on streaming audio live. Here's an interview with Pinter. Metafilter has this description:

The AP reports:

The Rolling Stones' concert at the University of Virginia was interrupted Thursday night while several police officers and three bomb-sniffing dogs searched the stage. The show resumed after about a half-hour intermission. University, state and city police did not immediately return phone calls about the incident, and no announcement was made to the audience about the reason for the break.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The NY Times reports tonight for Saturday's paper that the Bush Administration's Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal by "making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party" according to federal auditors.

Martin Scorcese's documentary about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, will air tonight and tomorrow night on PBS. As the Washington Post reports , it's one you won't want to miss.

Bon Jovi live in concert in New York is free and on AOL now. I think he has the best face in music, I could watch it for hours. According to the blog for the concert, I'm not alone:

All female, the first 50 or so were all old enough to have been Bon Jovi fans since high school. I don't doubt they were. And since that time, these women have not lost any of the ferocity of a 16-year-old about to see Justin Timberlake, Bret Michaels, Lief Garrett or Elvis Presley. They were primed to get the front-row floor space, throwing blocks that would make the Jets' defensive line blush. The other several hundred due to watch the show must have been still outside getting drinks, but this lot -- they are fans.

Even if Bon Jovi doesn't appeal to you, it's a pretty cool thing that AOL is broadcasting entire live concerts over the internet for free.

Update: Bon Jovi trashes Tom Cruise and praises Angelina Jolie in this new interview in the Independent.

The Toronto Film Festival is considered one of the best anywhere. I'd really like to go next year. One of the many films that caught my attention from media reviws is this one, starring Robin Wright Penn, as described by a reviewer:

One of the local papers said that this movie was one of the worst in the festival, so I wasn’t expecting much from it. After seeing it, I must strongly disagree. This is an incendiary film that I am still thinking about. Abdel Kechiche plays Ashade, an Arabian New York City taxi driver. His brother has been locked up in Guantanamo Bay and Ashade is raising money to pay for a lawyer and help support his sister-in-law.

Late one night, he picks up Phoebe (Robin Wright Penn) outside an ATM. She has him drive her to New Jersey , where they sit outside a suburban home for a while before she keys a new SUV that sits in the driveway. Phoebe, who from early on is clearly unstable, works for an MTV-type network and produces a show that’s similar to Cribs. She is also enraged about 9/11 and lets racist comments fly at will.

If you missed the Emmys tonight, you missed a truly moving segment with a video tribute to Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. At the end, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather came out - to a standing ovation and talked about Peter Jennings and "their unique brotherhood." They were reporters first, but also friends. Brokaw said Peter has a place in the brotherhood forever.

by TChris

A columnist at The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who started a column with the words "I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport," has been fired -- not for expressing her repellent views, but for misleading her sources.

Columnist Jillian Bandes told three campus sources - two Arab students and a professor who teaches a course on Arabic - she was writing an article about Arab-American relations, Daily Tar Heel opinion editor Chris Coletta wrote in an article published Thursday.

Bandes lied to her sources. She was actually writing a column about her desire for racial profiling at airports. Her column gave the false impression that the sources she interviewed endorsed her views.

by TChris

MediaMatters calls attention to an underreported story: CNN's lawsuit to vindicate its right to photograph (against the initial wishes of the Bush administration) victims of Hurricane Katrina.

In response to restrictions placed on the media covering the Hurricane Katrina disaster by New Orleans emergency operations chief Terry J. Ebbert and Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, CNN successfully filed suit against the U.S. government to protect the right of the press to photograph the deceased victims of the hurricane. But aside from CNN, most major media outlets have given scant coverage to, or ignored entirely, CNN's legal victory or the subsequent reported violations of the federal court order by government personnel on the ground.

Via the Guardian:

Although Bob Dylan entered his 65th year a few weeks ago, he has never seemed more current. Great anti-war anthems such as Masters of War and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, composed at the dawn of the 1960s, are more perfectly attuned to the mood and concerns of the present time than anything being created by contemporary songwriters. Conceived in the era of Kennedy and Khrushchev, these songs could be redirected straight to the present inhabitants of the White House and the Kremlin, with only a change of name on the address labels.

The Official Bob Dylan Exhibition runs from September 16 until October 15 at the Sony Eriksson Proud Gallery, Stables Market, The Gin House, Chalk Farm Road, London, NW1 8AH.

In case you've never noticed, the "tag line" on TalkLeft from day one (see bottom left of screen)has been this line from Subterranean Homesick Blues:

The pump don't work 'cause the vandals stole the handles.

Bob Denver died Friday.

Most of the blog eulogies for Bob Denver talk about Gilligan's Island. Thanks to Avedon Carol of Sideshow for pointing out that for some of us, his role as Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis is his defining moment.

Bob Denver was born in my hometown, New Rochelle, NY. I was only in elementary school, but I never missed the Dobie Gillis show, although it was more because of Tuesday Weld. Where has she been lately? Who'll Stop the Rain, Play It As It Lays, Pretty Poison and Looking for Mr. Goodbar are some of my all-time favorite movies.

R.I.P. Mr. Denver.

Cingular and Apple have teamed up - a new motorola cell phone with iTunes is coming. I really want one. I never cared about having a blackberry or a Treo, but a phone with built in iTunes....definitely.

It was detailed in this Motoroloa user manual. [via Gizmodo]