Canditatorial Candor

Hillary Clinton is beginning to seem like Hubert “The Happy Warrior” Humphrey to me. The prospect of Hillary running against John McCain feels to me a bit like choosing between Humphrey and Nixon.
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The root of the problem — part two

Bamboo stalks and leaves are easy enough to whack away and dispose of. It’s the rhizomes that wear you out.
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Strangers in a Familiar Foreign Land

We watched a very engaging movie last night about four North Africans who volunteer to fight for the French. Part and parcel of the story is that these men are fighting for a nation that has colonized their own countries. As soldiers in Europe they find themselves in wonderfully ambiguous places, confronting scenes and situations [...]

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Of Offices and the Veldt

All dreams begin in a sort of psychic confinement, as if context is lost and you’re reborn of circumstances you cannot explain.
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One Bright Shining Moment

We’ve seen a lot of documentaries so far this year; such as
The Yes Men, Outfoxed, Bush’s Brain, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,
American Blackout, and This Film Is Not Yet Rated.
A good documentary gives me something not commonly known, so I didn’t care for
Shirley Chisholm ‘72: Unbought & Unbossed, and I thoroughly enjoyed
One [...]

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Steve McQueen, Achieving What Others Attempt

Bullitt was on TV last night.
Once again I was so drawn in to Steve McQueen’s role that I forgot I was watching an acting performance. The word natural gets overused, but McQueen so becomes the character that you can forget you are watching fiction and get completely involved in the story.
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Cut!

Malcolm Cowley wrote a wonderful introduction to a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories where he describes the cultural changes that struck America in the 1920s. It was a sharp rift. The young kids of the Jazz Age felt the older generation was morally bankrupt on issues such as women’s suffrage, prohibition, and the war.
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II: What Deep Roots the Lies of Words Have

Deception is everywhere. Even the simplest animals employ camouflage to deceive. Vladimir Nabokov writes of a butterfly whose wings portrayed a leaf so completely that it included the appearance of raindrops, with the lines on its wings curved to simulate the refraction of light through water. (That still amazes me.)
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I: What Liars Words Are

My very good friend Gary and I had an understanding that, if we ever agreed on anything, we each needed to automatically re-examine his own position.
There was a Zen element mixed into this, mostly by Gary, who had taught in Japan, although I held my own. And his half of our agreement was premised [...]

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Strawberries, Cool, and Joe

While I was in high school, some forward-thinking teacher showed us the movie The Strawberry Statement, in class. It stuck with me, so much so that I later found a used copy of the book it was based on, by James Kunen. It’s set in ’68 during the student protests and the takeover of the [...]

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