• Personal Reflections - Politics/Culture

    How Malcolm X and James Brown Secured My Hungarian Identity

    August 27, 2017 - By 

    I can’t really remember a time when I was not self-consciously of Hungarian heritage. Sure, I harbor a few single-picture early memories frozen in my mind before I had any sense of what identity even meant, but the sauce in which I was marinated from my earliest remembered days was as a child with two parents who had come to the United States from Hungary by way of Germany after World War II. I grew up speaking and responding to Hungarian right alongside English, and with my parents’ thick accents and European mannerisms and cultural sensibilities, there was no hiding the fact…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Reflections on “The Path of Totality”

    August 22, 2017 - By 

    100 percent is the important and even urgent thing, yes? The Full Effort, Maximum View, Big Immersion, All-Out Hustle to Achieve the Ultimate, Second-to-None, I’m-All-in-Let’s-Head-to-Central-Oregon! Pour yourself the Best-Ever of Everything, then keep your radar on for something Better Still. Never settle, never retreat, and never, ever quit. It’s “The Path of Totality,” and you shall not have it denied, nor deny it to yourself. No piddling 91 percent view from here; we are headed for the Path. *** Truly, the arc of history bends not only toward justice, but toward constant, unrelenting improvement in every human endeavor. No iPlato…

  • Politics/Culture

    Trump and Kim Confront Their Spiritual Doppelgänger

    August 13, 2017 - By 

    So a troubled and uncertain world has snapped to an even more enhanced state of attention this past week as the resident American and North Korean bad boys—Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un—have been hurling threats and insults across the seas. Trump ostensibly ad-libs the phrase “fire and fury” while chatting expansively with reporters at his golf course. In true Trumpian fashion, he takes special care to repeat the phrase, clearly enunciating each syllable, so enamored with his words he is, and so cognizant that they will land on every news website and newspaper in the world by the next morning.…

  • Personal Reflections - Plays

    Lamenting Sam Shepard
    …and the Cruelty of ALS

    August 3, 2017 - By 

    An old friend of mine has been stricken with ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease, in some ways the most devastating medical diagnosis a human being can receive. There is little to no pain in ALS, so at least that takes it out of the realm of suffering common to rheumatoid arthritis, bone cancer and other diabolical conditions specializing in pain delivery to undeserving innocents. But in its eventual (though not always) robbery of nearly all human muscular activity save for blinking the eyes and perhaps an occasional partial smile or frown from a minutely functioning facial muscle or two, ALS has no parallel…