Living in the Shadow of Affirmative Action

Perhaps because I am not Caucasian. some friends and colleagues have been asking for my opinion on the broiling brouhaha over the whitewashed Oscar nominations for 2016.  To one such query, I replied cryptically, “People should stop whining, and just get on with it.”   Not surprisingly, my politically incorrect response was met with uncomfortable…

23 January 2016: Westerns, Easterns, and Northerns

First we had “westerns” from Hollywood, which mutated into “spaghetti westerns” from Italy.  Then came the “easterns” by way of samurai movies from Japan, which in turn mutated into the high-flying martial arts movies from Hong Kong and China.  And now we have the “northerns.” There may be earlier “northerns” than The Savage Innocents, which…

Grant Goodman Exposes Sex Slaves

Nearly two years after his death, Grant K. Goodman’s scholarly research on the subject of “comfort women,” a euphemism for the sex slaves working in the official brothels established throughout Southeast Asia by the Japanese Imperial Army for the pleasure of its soldiers during World War II, continues to provide key evidence that such atrocities…

Bowie, Burroughs and Me

David Bowie died on 10 January 2016.  He was 69 years old, three years younger than I am.  The only album of his that I owned was Ziggy Stardust back in 1972 and, later, I was a big fan of three of his movies—The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), The Hunger (1983), and Merry…

10 January 2016: The Big Short

There were half a dozen people in the theater today for the 12:05 PM showing of THE BIG SHORT.  I don’t know about the other people there, but I thought the film was brilliant, at least the 10 percent of it that I understood.  I need Bernie Sanders to explain the other 90 percent, which…

3 January 2016: Landscapes or Mindscapes?

I subscribe to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times, and it’s something I look forward to like nothing else all week because it affords many hours of informative and absorbing reading that I almost never get from the local paper. The Sunday edition always comes bundled in two sections.  I read all…

If I Had a Gun…

For 24 years, the whole time I was in the Philippines prior to leaving for the United States, I knew that my father owned a gun.  I can’t tell you what kind it is, or what it looks like, because I never actually saw it.  I only heard it. Because, every New Year’s Eve, my…