I have just returned from a cross-country trip, west to east. I flew to California to collect Carol, who had spent the better part of three months taking photographs in that vast and varied state, and it was time to drive her and her caravan’s worth of equipment home. We crossed through drought country — […]
Heart of the Heartland
Posted April 20th, 2012 at 9:52 am (UTC-4)
The United States is finally getting around to building a memorial to Ike: Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Kansas lad who became one of our greatest heroes and most popular presidents. But there’s a problem. It’s the Kansas part, even though Eisenhower said, in a 1945 speech in his hometown after leading Allied forces to victory […]
Our Everlasting Civil War
Posted March 24th, 2011 at 8:49 am (UTC-4)
The other night I watched actor-director Maximillian Schell’s fascinating 1984 docudrama about Marlene Dietrich, the glamorous (on-screen), reclusive (off it), German-born femme fatale who mesmerized cinema and cabaret audiences but lived her final years cloistered in a Paris apartment. A pragmatic woman utterly devoid of romantic reverie despite her public persona, Dietrich told Schell, over […]
