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/ We parked, my two young sons and In a modest lot below the hill, Not half-filled, and climbed the shallow lift The two columns (prayerful hands) rising Into a grey morning sky. “Ridge” conjures a cliff or crag Vimy is a hill, a feature on an alluvial plain You might see the same near… Continue reading What to feel at the Vimy Monument

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)

The 3D printer (after watching the documentary Print the Legend.) It will become increasingly clear over the next few years that three-dimensional printing is a shift in industrial process as important as the move from wind and water power to steam. I make this assertion as a technological innocent, a sixty-year-old who has trouble keeping… Continue reading What Widgets This Way Come? -3D printing

In writing about the film Fury, I praised it for its disinclination to engage in the usual false geopolitical assertion that America Saved The World from Nazism in 1945. Failing to speculate geopolitically is not a virtue in the case of Clint Eastwood’s new biopic American Sniper. Although told with a cool efficiency that has… Continue reading American Sniper–Let God Sort Them Out

Michael Keaton is not an actor who’s easy to love. He famously blew his career out the window, or perhaps up his nose, and then made a gradual recovery through not particularly memorable roles, his one stop in Shakespeare a travesty of misunderstanding of Dogberry, one of the funniest roles in English drama. Emma Stone… Continue reading The Unexpected Virtue of Theatre

Red Bull versus Apollo I’m of that vintage that, as I type, I can still remember the muscular effort it took, the particular mechanical, as it were pianistic feel of typing an essay on a portable Remington. The medium I’m typing on now also served as an information delivery system for the much-distributed video of… Continue reading The Big Red Leap: Baumgartner’s Step Into Space

Interstellar, by Chris Nolan We ARE in Kansas, Dorothy By Kenneth Brown Notwithstanding Matthew (“I’m my own god”) McConaughey’s excellent work in this film, I could barely keep myself interested, or indeed even awake at certain moments, in spite of the earsplitting volume at which Hans Zimmer’s baldly programmatic score was blared at us every… Continue reading Interstellar: We ARE in Kansas!

Inglorious Tank Fury, directed by David Ayer This just in—Shia LaBeouf can act. That’s the first in a string of good things I have to say about the serious Tank Movie that is Fury. This may be my favourite American war movie ever. It’s the war movie that I’ve been hoping some American would make… Continue reading Reasons to see “Fury”

"Samsara" a film by Ron Frick, on Netflix Samsara by Ron Frick The musical direction of this film, as stunning as the visuals, literally entrances us as Ron Frick’s visuals take us traveloguing through some of the most striking landscapes and manscapes of the planet. The beauty of the film, shot in 70 mm in… Continue reading “Samsara” film essay