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I use walking sticks when I walk nowadays, kind of like cross-country skiing in late summer, but I had no idea doing so would connect me with a guy named Joe and open a flow of aching love and the deep desire to matter.

“Can I give you a cane?” he asked.

This was in the alley two blocks from my house. I was pushing myself along — I love to walk in alleys for some reason, maybe because I never know what I’ll come upon — and I passed an older guy (around my age, that is) whose garage door was open. He was working at his bandsaw. As I walked past him, he turned and called out his cane offer to me.

I stopped, shrugged. In my 75 years on Planet Earth, no one had ever offered me a free cane before. We stood looking at each other. “Hi,” I said. We introduced ourselves. He stepped away from his bandsaw and I explained that I already had a cane., but thanked him. “This is what I do,” he said. “I make stuff. I give it away.”

Canada’s unpopular general election of September 20 is increasingly recognized as a mistake by the country’s leading political analysts. However, this mistake could potentially prove to be the very undoing of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in future elections.

An urgent task is awaiting us: considering the progression of events, we must quickly liberate ourselves from the limits and confines placed on the Afghanistan discourse, which have been imposed by US-centered Western propaganda for over 20 years, and counting. A first step is that we must not allow the future political discourse pertaining to this very subject to remain hostage to American priorities - successes, failures and geostrategic interests. 

What is a gaffe but an inadvertent uttering of an awkward truth? For instance:

“This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.”

The “gaffe” part of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 announcement that the War on Terror had begun was, of course, his calling it a crusade. Doing so, as the Wall Street Journal put it at the time, was “indelicate,” because:

“In strict usage, the word describes the Christian military expeditions a millennium ago to capture the Holy Land from Muslims. But in much of the Islamic world, where history and religion suffuse daily life in ways unfathomable to most Americans, it is shorthand for something else: a cultural and economic Western invasion that, Muslims fear, could subjugate them and desecrate Islam.”

The political division in Palestinian society is deep-rooted, and must not be reduced to convenient claims about the ‘Hamas-Fatah split’, elections, the Oslo accords and subsequent disagreements. The division is linked to events that preceded all of these, and not even the death or incapacitation of the octogenarian, Mahmoud Abbas, will advance Palestinian unity by an iota. 

Like Gloria Swanson at the end of 1950’s Sunset Blvd., the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is finally ready for its close up. Years in the making, the Academy Museum’s world premiere is Sept. 30. According to Bill Kramer, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – you know, those fine folks who give the annual Academy Awards – this cinematic sanctuary “is a new home for the art of film in Los Angeles, the world capital of moviemaking.”

At the same Sept. 21 press event Kramer addressed, architect Renzo Piano whimsically likened the edifice’s futuristic spheric design to “a soap bubble. Don’t call it the ‘Death Star.’ Call it a zeppelin or a spaceship.” This 250,000-plus square foot repository of cinema is adjacent to what had been the May Company (now the Saban) Building, famed for its gold-tiled cylindrical section that resembled a lipstick tube, located at the “Miracle Mile” in Mid-City L.A. Inside visitors can experience movie magic and see some of the screen’s most iconic artifacts.

This is the world premiere of Our Man in Santiago – well, almost. According to director Charlie Mount, there were actually two performances of Santiago in March 2020, when the you-know-what shut Theatre West (along with just about everything else) down. Playwright Mark Wilding’s wild take on the 1973 coup in Chile finally debuted Sept. 24 and this critic is delighted to say that Wilding’s satire about the downfall of socialist President Salvador Allende is even timelier now than it would have been about 18 months.

This is because the recent resounding total defeat and humiliation of Washington in Afghanistan is shining a light on the sheer, utter imbecility of US imperialism and lunacy of its foreign policy. The CIA played a devastating covert role in Afghanistan starting in 1979 – only six years after the Agency helped topple Chile’s democratically elected government, as Wilding cleverly exposes (see: American Amnesia: USA’s Afghan Original Sin Began 1979 – Not 9/11 - LA Progressive).

In what’s the most ironic venue twist I’ve stumbled across in my reviewing misadventures, the one-man bioplay about the iconoclastic comic whose routines (in)famously included a bit called “Religion Incorporated” is actually being presented inside of an L.A. church. Ronnie Marmo plays the title role in I’m Not a Comedian… I’m Lenny Bruce, which is actually being staged in the intimate theater located in St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, where the Loft Ensemble theater company is based in the NoHo Arts District.

Marmo also wrote this Theatre 68 guest production at Loft Ensemble, directed by actor Joe Mantegna, whose stage and screen credits include David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (for which Mantegna won the Tony Award), CBS’ Criminal Minds series and The Godfather III.

Yesterday something that has become tiresomely routine happened; I spoke to a college class about the most obvious climate solution, and neither the students nor the professor had ever heard of it. The 325 organizations (and climbing) listed at the bottom of this article are promoting it, and have joined 17,717 individuals (thus far) in signing a petition for it at http://cop26.info

Many of us have been screaming about it at the tops of our lungs for years and years, writing about it, making videos about it, organizing conferences on it. Yet it is ineluctably unknowable.

Here are the words of the petition:

After more than a year offstage due to the you-know-what, LA Opera is back as Giuseppe Verdi’s 1853 Il Trovatore launches the 2021/22 Season for long-suffering Angeleno opera aficionados. But what a “cheerful” choice!

As the lead sentence of Naomi Andre’s article in LA Opera’s Performances Magazine puts it: “There is something kind of odd about Il Trovatore.” “Kind of?” Verdi’s turgid tragedy, with a nightmarish libretto mostly by Salvatore Cammarano, adapted Antonio Garcia Gutierrez’s play featuring witchcraft, burning at the stake, civil war, duels, mistaken or confused identities, thwarted love, “gypsies,” grim reapers straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, imprisonment and other cheery plot points and bagatelles.