Category: Essays

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

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)