Monthly Archives: December 2018

Thanks for continuing to check in here. I’m not going to go off on a thousand tangents as I have in previous years. Let’s all hope for a terrific start to 2019 and I’ll see you here shortly afterward.

I’m just gonna leave this here. I sometimes say Dar has never spoken. I say it here. I say it to family. I say it to strangers. But it’s not exactly true. Dar speaks all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. But we can’t understand him, because all he says is gibberish. Loud gibberish. Gibberish at 5:30 every morning that could wake the dead. Gibberish during afternoons and evenings that makes it almost impossible for us to watch TV at anything […]

We can’t move. I love my job when my students teach me things. Last week, they taught me: we can’t move. We’re stuck in our house in Berkeley until Dar moves out, maybe in 12 years? Maybe never. I mean, I knew that. But I hadn’t seen it in celluloid. And my job is about applying celluloid to life. I’d slept on it. I teach “America on Film,” or as I call it, “the diversity class.” One week, it’s Latinos […]

I like the tributes to George H.W. Bush, the man. But I think there’s a lot missing in the tributes to his presidency. When I think of those four years, I see a rather astonishing, revelatory time in American life…that Bush probably should receive a little more credit for. I see Bush getting credit for “managing the end of the Cold War.” But that’s both too much and not enough. Weeks after the Berlin Wall fell, when Time magazine anointed […]