Socialism with hope . . . and good humor, too. Those who recall chuckling their way through John’s Sayles’s 1979 story The Anarchists’ Convention will enjoy reading about the OPSL.
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A scan of New York Times headlines for July 8, 2018, reveals several signs of deteriorating times. So much for mother’s milk  The United States delegation to the World Health Organization opposed the promotion of mother’s milk as healthiest for children, thus “embracing the interests of infant formula manufacturers,” reports the Times. “The Americans were...
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Robin Brunet, Let’s Get Frank: Canada’s Mad Man of Advertising(Madeira Park, B.C.: Douglas & McIntyre, 2018), 232 pages, $29.95. Anyone who watched the award-winning TV series Mad Menwill be equally discomfited with the advertising industry as depicted in Let’s Get Frank, a biography of Vancouver advertising tycoon Frank Palmer. Perhaps tycoon is too strong...
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We recently saw an Oregon Contemporary Theater production of Buried Child, the 1978 play about family dysfunction by the late American playwright and actor Sam Sheppard. In my ways it is a multi-layered statement about what’s wrong with America. In the program notes, Sheppard offers this view of the history of his country: “I...
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Black Panther, the box office wonder of the moment, is garnering praise from many quarters and it deserves the kudos. . .for a super-hero flick, that is. Ignoring my usual tendency to avoid super-hero anything, I bought tickets to a theatre with those comfy reclining seats, slapped on a pair of 3D goggles and...
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Trump’s first State of the Union address (Jan. 30, 2018) was expectedly filled with half-facts, false claims, and theatrical tricks designed to support various right-wing causes. They all stood out for their sheer opportunism, but one puzzled me more than the others: what did the police officer do about the opioid-addicted mother of the...
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Steven Spielberg is the quintessential Hollywood movie director. He’s often too patriotic for my liking – Saving Private Ryan comes to mind – but sometimes he chooses topics that go beyond patriotism to real cinematic studies of historic events. The Post, about the risky publication of the Pentagon Papers, is one of those. It...
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American expansionism is an ever-present threat in many parts of the world. Wherever, the United States has chosen to impose its democracy on a country in conflict, those populations suffer horribly. One of the early examples came in the form of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, revisited in Peter Guardino’s The Dead March (Harvard,...
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I attended a funeral a while ago. No one I knew. A friend of my wife’s family. A disabled woman. Fifty-three years old. In her fifty-fourth year, as we say. Fifty-three orbits round the sun and Lynette was gone. Cremated. A family memory of both loss and some relief. Lynette left several stuffed animals...
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The other day a friend at the gym mentioned that he had been watching the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War. “I was on the wrong side,” he concluded repeating a phrase heard in the film. “We didn’t know what we were fighting for and they had everything to fight for.” Not all...
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