Survivor's Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect the President by Vince Palamara is not a book to be read for pleasure. It is not a sterling contribution to literature. Short, but packed with names, dates, citations and, significantly, stripped of narrative, it is probably the… Read full post »

First of four parts: Beyond Dealey Plaza; “Lee Like Moon”; The Burning of the Eureka; Dreaming of Kennedy

I spent the past month poring over a mountain of library books, some having to do with Watergate, some to do with the killing of Bobby Kennedy, but most concerning the strange… Read full post »

When I read in the trades that my sometime friend Steve had gotten the gig to write the screenplay and direct the dramatic film version of The Kennedy Detail, ex-Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine's personal and supposedly factual account of the president's assassination in Dallas published in 2010,… Read full post »

Now that I've caught your attention with my Saturday-Night-Live-sketch Spanish (really, it's “¿Quién es más viril?”) let me reminisce about the coup. It's amazing to think that exactly two years have already gone by since the failed police takeover in Ecuador. And wha… Read full post »

Creatures of Hollywood have no right to ask for money on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is one of those online businesses, the best known of its kind,wherestruggling artists and cultural activists can go to publicize their projects in order to solicit donations. Crowdsourcing I think they call it.… Read full post »

A young friend of mine, exactly one year to the day that she joined the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was in fact on the first day it was organized—September 17, 2011—has finally left it. Not that there is much left of the movement anymore: factionism, greed, opportunism, unclear pur… Read full post »

Scene: A typical house in a typical neighborhood in the capital city, Quito. The present. 

A shiny black 1978 Datsun pulls up. The driver gets out and opens the passenger door. Julian Assange emerges, looking no worse for wear from his long ordeal at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

The driver… Read full post »

We're heading toward a passel of round-number anniversaries: fifty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), forty since the Watergate disclosures (1973), and the big one—fifty years since Kennedy was assassinated (1963). The first two events took some time to play out. The fatal shooting of… Read full post »