Whenever I finish a novel, I weep like a grandmother, because I am saying goodbye to those wondrous characters with whom I’ve walked for two years. Today, when I finished the film “Tamale Road,” I became that grandmother once again. The movie is about my mother, me, and a lost family: When Mom was a [...]
Fear My Barrio
The truth finally came out when my son David invited Arnold over. They planned to walk six blocks up to the movie theatre in our neighborhood. Arnold’s mother put a stop to that. “I don’t think that’s safe.” Arnold, mind you, walks all over his Sherman Oaks neighborhood. But that wasn’t gonna happen in Van [...]
How to Get Closer to Poor Folk
Get a case of ameobic dysentery. While filming the documentary “Tamale Road” in El Salvador this summer, my son Jose David got amoebas from eating french fries off the street. Fries that are loaded with dirt kicked up from tires and grime from handfuls of dollar bills and the sweat of a woman’s work. It hit [...]
They’re Growing our Grass Right Under Our Hiking Boots
The DEA’s been tromping around the Los Angeles National Forests. They’re storming into marijuana farms and ripping out all the grass. It’s the war on drugs: get ‘em where it hurts. Burn out their crop. Believe me, it doesn’t hurt. The growers are doing dandy. It’s a big national forest. Lots of places to set [...]
Kindle and the Loss of Memory
I know why the Kindle disturbs me. I just finished reading The Art of Memory by Francis Yates. It deals with the skill of remembering through image techniques–creating images to remember a word or a name. Through images a professor can memorize the names of all her new students in three minutes. A man can memorize [...]
A Discussion is Kindling over Kindle
I’m afraid of the Kindle. My psychologist would suggest: explore the “why.” Why are you afraid of this new contraption? I’m a Luddite book-lover. The feel of the book in your hands. The smell of the pages (especially my old books). I’m afraid that technology will somehow strip all this away. That books will become [...]
Just When You Thought the Mourning Was Over…
It’s not. We scattered Dad last week so I reckoned that was it, case closed. That’s pretty stupid. Michelle and I buried enough folks in Guatemala when we lived there, over a dozen of them kids under the age of five. A 91 year old man just can’t compare with those kids. And I certainly [...]
The Fascism of Kindle
I just saw a new commercial by Kindle, which had at its core an arrogant loathing toward the traditional book. While showing us the coolness of the apparatus, the narrator teaches us that not only the real book is a relic of the past–it is also a danger to our environmental world. It’s too heavy [...]
