Canadian Theatre; Canadian Perspectives
The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art... -T.S. Eliot If there were ever a time to question the distempered part of our body politic, it is now; now, as in no other time in my living memory. In… Continue reading Sharp Compassion: Scalpels Out
If you really want to know where Trumpism came from, you might spend 15 minutes watching Twelve O:Clock High, the 1949 flying epic starring Gregory Peck as “General Savage,” a hard-tack, uncompromising USAAF (United States Army Air Force) officer who takes over a B-17 squadron so that the old USA can show the rest of… Continue reading Tough Guys, or Why Trump Does Dumb
Techne and Psyche: Midway and A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood rolls the end credits with the real Fred Rogers playing and singing one of the many songs he composed during the life of his TV show. It’s a song about sticking to tasks until they are complete, and… Continue reading Techne and Psyche: Midway and A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
Well, Alberta has stepped backwards again. Stepping backwards politically is an act so familiar to us that when we finally stepped forward and elected a progressive government four years ago it was a seismic shock to the national political psyche. Rachel Notley’s government stepped boldly onto the stage, and led the way for a shift… Continue reading Back to the Future, God Damn It
After a decade or so in the wilderness, Mel Gibson may have made the movie that will bring him back to Hollywood respectability, and he couldn’t have timed it better if some clairvoyant had shown him the surprising election results of 2016 when he first conceived this project. America really needed a hyper-violent, xenophobic, feel-good… Continue reading Hacksaw Ridge: Gibson Apotheosis
The first in a series of short tales about the new Tzar at the head of the royal family now running a certain former great Republic. After months of promising to Make Amerikov Great Again, the former billionaire name-brander, education-fraudster, and steak-oil salesman known as Donald Drumfk is now the Leader-Elect of the nation until… Continue reading Annals of Tzar Donaldovitch
Hollywood Gets It Wrong, Again… But Thanks I went to see "Allied" the other night with my French Canadian girlfriend. This movie is set in wartime Casablanca and England. And for those of you who might ask, “which war?” I can only respond, “the big one.” Brad Pitt plays an intelligence officer who must decide… Continue reading “Allied”: Thanks for asking
Eric Lindros has been voted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. I hear the sportsjocks talk about this as the correction of a horrible injustice. What none of them knows, remembers, or wants to talk about is the reason why, when he was drafted first overall by the Quebec Nordiques, Lindros refused to go. The… Continue reading Lindros and the hockey culture
My play Anatolia Speaks was recently dismissed in a weekly arts publication on the basis that because I am male and not of the country I am writing about, the piece was somehow less valid. I was deeply amused to read Miss Culkin’s little piece about my play Anatolia Speaks in the last issue of… Continue reading What right hath these writers?
Universal Studios May 26 When you’re in the presence of America functioning as all-out as at Universal Studios theme park, you are in the belly of the beast. This place is the machine of fantasy at its most unrelieved. The thousands of guests are funnelled from pillar to post as efficiently as one can imagine… Continue reading Universal Studios: Nostalgia Trip
Praise the Lord, Pass The Ammo The Orlando Massacre The loathsomely self-satisfied grin on the face of Omar Mateen will haunt me not because it is the face of a demon: it will haunt me because it is the face of an arrogant frat-boy, at once contemptuous and insecure. A lonely little man taking selfies… Continue reading God and the Gun: The Orlando Massacre
Francofonia by Aleksandr Sukarov Aleksandr Sukarov uses cameras like a very smart kid playing with high-level toys. From the early scenes of the film, one of which features a great drone-shot of Paris, lifting us from street level to high above the city, the filmmaker is at play with our perceptions. The film is about… Continue reading Film Essay: Francofonia
Florida, May 24. The 24th of May Is the Queen’s Birthday If you don’t give us a holiday We’ll all run away I grew up with my grandmother reciting that once a year. It’s the Queen’s Birthday, up in my homeland. Not that anyone for a thousand miles around here would know or care. (Nor… Continue reading The Kennedy Space Center(re)
Orlando, Saturday, May 21. When I called my pal Sean when I got across the border, I told him I couldn’t wait to simply sit and talk to Americans. One of the great pleasures in being here is to get a chance to feel the pulse of these (in the real sense) republicans. Yesterday was… Continue reading What I came South for
Orlando impressions: Good Folks First, everyone drives everywhere. Rather like suburbs anywhere on earth, the only way people can realistically get around and do their daily tasks is to drive. From my billet to the Orlando Fringe is a fifteen-minute haul down the I-4 freeway, which like every freeway in the States that I’ve been… Continue reading From Florida
ECONOMIES (after a day at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria) We made five shillings a month Ordinary seaman, bosun did better And when we seen them natives and their canoes We thought, how’d they get the time to carve all that cedar That takes time you know and naught to eat but dried… Continue reading ECONOMIES: a poem after visiting the Royal BC Museum
The Hunger that Arises from Watching The Games I am somewhat shy to report that I could not resist the last installment of The Hunger Games, a series of films that showed real promise in the second chapter. That film’s premise, like the first, included a really good idea at its core. It is an… Continue reading Hunger in The Games
In the aftermath of the Paris killings, the Facebook world has been, as is only appropriate, afire with opinion, speculation, ire and sympathy. I do not have the kinds of Facebook friends (I’m happy to report) who leap to make bigoted statements about Muslims, or to publicly indulge in revenge fantasy. I am, however, surprised… Continue reading Response to an Act of Religious Warfare
Rebel Without A Cock: Trainwreck, directed by Judd Apatow, written by and starring Amy Schumer Watching the bourgeois heart that is revealed beating at the core of this mediocre film is like watching that tiresome James Dean “classic” for the first time. You have the same bewildered sense of trying to find the rebellious streak… Continue reading Rebel Without A Cock: Trainwreck
Two Kinds of Tomorrow On Mad Max: Fury Road, the critics have spoken: it’s okay to like diesel-powered gas guzzling trucks spewing smoke across the desert while bands of apes (some of them female!) shoot, stab, club, gouge, crush, disembowel, and otherwise murder one another in the name of Saving the Girls (as long as,… Continue reading Tomorrowland and Fury Road… Virtue is SO yesterday
Cuba in February (2) “My grandfather went to that factory every day for five years, and he oiled that machinery.” This is the story of a grandfather who was a tanner by trade, and having arrived in Cuba from Europe, he worked hard, and in spite of fierce competition, and because of his honourable business… Continue reading Cuba in February (2)
Why I am voting for the NDP in the coming Alberta election. I am a lifelong leftist. It’s something that I learned on my parents’ knees, so to speak. They were the son and daughter of Alberta pioneers who suffered terribly when capitalism spectacularly crashed in 1929, and were active enemies of European fascism in… Continue reading Why I’m voting for the NDP in Alberta’s election on Tuesday
Feb 15th. To Cuba. NB: I have made wonderful friends in Cuba. Their real names do not appear in what follows. Perhaps I’m being ridiculously paranoid, but… better they be safe from criticism and me not sorry. I land in Havana from MexCity at 7:30 pm. Customs takes longer than anywhere I’ve been in recent… Continue reading Cuba in February (1)
FEB 5: Mexico City On the fifth, Stewart, Pat, the teens and I ride Dario’s truck down into Taxco and breakfast together, then part affectionately and I enjoy the downhill walk to the bus terminal. I sit playing my little guitar, which impresses the locals just a little (the fact that a gringo sits playing,… Continue reading Mexico City in February
Taxco/Tetipac The bus trip lands me at El Norte, the Northern bus station of Mexico City, and I blow 175 pesos on a cab ride to the Southern Station, which turned out to be a foolish expense, since the traffic crawled through the vast city so slowly that I would have proceeded much faster on… Continue reading Up In The Hills above Taxco
