I’ll never forget the opening sequence of the 1960 film The Magnificent Seven, the western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Sumarai. This is not because of the Elmer Bernstein Marlboro Man theme music. Nor is it due to later memorable lines like the nefarious villain Eli Wallach’s one, “Can men in our profession worry about […]
Archives for 2022
A Nation of Immigrants? Erasure, Exclusion and the Power of Rodney Toy’s Art
A recent art exhibit in San Francisco got me thinking about immigrants and immigration, which has long been a hot topic in the US. I can relate on a personal level. Rodney Toy, 53, the artist whose powerful work was exhibited at the Canessa Gallery, is a descendant of a Chinese couple who arrived in […]
Death to The Walking Dead
After twelve years of blood and guts, AMC’s post-apocalyptic zombie epic The Walking Dead (TWD) is finally being laid to rest. With almost all of the original cast long torn to shreds since its 2010 debut, and much of the show’s dramatic events a distant memory, TWD can be likened to a post-apocalyptic General Hospital, […]
A Matter of Life and Death: Winning the Fight for Vaccines
It seems increasingly likely that a real end to the COVID pandemic will require all but universal vaccination.[1] There are three challenges that need to be met: The development of much more effective strategies to work with those individuals who continue to hesitate about getting vaccinated. The development of a mass movement to defeat the […]
A Glimpse of Nablus
I probably won’t live long enough to bring into being a film I’ve thought about making in Nablus, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, from the time the Women’s Press sent a preview copy of Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s memoir, A Mountainous Journey (and that was a long time ago). But I do hope to live […]
Rosanne Boyland is Dead—WTF!
When I listened to the “American Radical” podcast for the first time, I had a hard time keeping track of the people and events so I decided to take detailed notes. Then I realized that the podcast episodes added up to almost three hours. I was pretty sure that only a relatively small number of […]