Tag: Steven Clark

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In “They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To,” Angelo Plume’s paean to the film First Knight, he gives us a blow-by-blow account of the film, lamenting that such films don’t get made anymore.  Sad but true for the West. After reading the review, I had my Saturday night pizza, popped open a beer (Sam Adams), and dug into my archives to watch King Arthur, the 2004 film about the once and future king; decidedly different than First Knight, but it has its own flavor and goes very good with popcorn . . . and mead. (more…)

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A new film directed by Thomas Napper, Widow Clicquot, is a period piece that avoids guns, histrionics, spectacle and passion. Well, not exactly avoiding passion, but depicting passion with wine, land, and production. (more…)

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What are my Saturdays like? Quite dull. After my weekly pizza, I settle down to read, perhaps write and revise, pig out on a podcast, and go out sometimes if there is a play, concert, opera, or movie to get my interest. I don’t mind a nice sunset walk (more so now that I have skin cancer).  I never watch TV. (more…)

The Berlin Wall in 1986. Divided Germany may have been the plaything of foreign powers, but it perhaps remained more truly German than the country which goes by that name today. (Image source: Wikipedia)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Schalk describes that when he first came to Germany in the 1950s, he flipped on the radio and got not German commentary or classical music, but AFN (Armed Forces Radio) belting out some jazz. It was part of what he describes as the great American inundation. He shifts back to the influence of those Germans who settled in America in the eighteenth century, and their philosophical hopes for America’s revolution. (more…)

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Adolph Schalk
The Germans
London: J. M. Dent, 1971

The Germans are the most misunderstood people in the world. — Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

In 1974 I was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, doing my watch on the Main. At the PX, I wandered into the Stars and Stripes bookstore and browsed near the rack featuring The Stars and Stripes, Overseas Weekly, and the usual American mags. (more…)

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The Dead Don’t Hurt — the new Western directed, produced, written, and starring Viggo Mortensen, begins not with a showdown but a mounted knight in armor making his way through a forest. Then the camera cuts away — not to a showdown, but to Weston Jeffries (Solly McLeod), who is in the process of completing a mass murder in a saloon, then knocks off a slow-on-the-trigger deputy for good measure. These scenes are very much part of the story, and the film dispenses with linear plot in order to create a visual essay on the West, America, and nobility — both in terms of human independence and making spiritual deals with a strange land. (more…)

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October 7, 2023 was like both September 11, 2001 and January 6, 2021 for American conservatives. Hamas’ attack on Israeli settlements and troops unleashed an immediate fury from the Right, especially when there were reports of “beheaded babies,” babies “baked in ovens,” and hundreds of Israeli women raped. (more…)

From Jamie Allman’s Facebook page.

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On his website A Son of the New American Revolution, Larry C. Johnson, former CIA analyst, lamented what he called the “Missouri Listener”: those Midwesterners in the hinterland who are woefully unaware of current events, content with mainstream news and analysis, and simply accept the mainstream media’s latest interpretations of events in Ukraine, the Middle East, China, or wherever. (more…)

Gene Wilder as Lord Ravisbane.

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I was a modest, 20-year old television baby by 1972, and drifted on and off to the newly-minted network, PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). It had taken over in 1969 from NET (National Educational Television), and I found myself drawn to it, especially its drama. It’s hard to believe nowadays, but PBS in its early years actually aired American dramas that were free of English accents and upper-class angst. (more…)

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I enjoyed my mango milkshake. It was frothy, and sweet, and its chill was a welcome conclusion to the curry and assorted spices. I gave up trying to figure out Fetoosh, wondering if he was good in bed. Around us, tables began to empty. (more…)

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It was morning in America and Christmas Eve in Boston, but Reagan’s good cheer, once again making America the greatest show on Earth, had little effect on me because I was stuck doing a double shift.

I was a security guard, and “doubles,” as we grudgingly called them, were a staple of the trade. In addition to being a guard, I was also a writer, artiste, and bon vivant, but survived on the paltry paycheck coming from door number one. I’d been in Boston for four years and was poor, but happy. (more…)

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Paul Fussell
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
New York: Oxford University Press, 1989

Most readers know Paul Fussell from his satiric Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, which, intended as a humorous study of American mores, has been accepted as a legitimate guideline to what H. L. Mencken called Boobis americanus. (more…)

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A Haunting in Venice is a Halloween movie and also sees the return of the detective Hercule Poirot to the screen, as most recently played by Kenneth Branagh, who directed this film. The story is lifted from Hallowe’en Party, a 1969 Christie novel set in Britain, although here it is moved to 1949 Venice. Little of the original story remains, although bobbing for apples is retained as the staging of an attempted murder. Since this is Venice, floods rage outside, and a past drowning adds to the haunted setting. It all fits. (more…)