• Film/TV

    Two Popes Make for One Great Movie

    December 28, 2019 - By 

    Early in the current Netflix release, “The Two Popes,” I recalled the outlandish, unexpected success of “My Dinner With Andre,” Louis Malle’s 1981 film featuring two guys talking—and talking, and talking, for 111 minutes—across a café table in Manhattan. That was pretty much it as far as plot and characters go, but oh, what glorious talk it was. Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s “The Two Popes” features quite a bit more dramatic backdrop and tension than did Malle’s film, but in its essence, it’s a kind of intellectually, theologically combative buddy movie that features two marvelously gifted (and hard-working!) actors reveling…

  • Photography - Visual Arts

    Seventh Annual Holiday Photo Gallery

    December 22, 2019 - By 

    I’ve noticed something of late: In both my work and my blogging life, I pore over so many thousands of photographs through the course of a day and a year that I have sometimes begun to feel jaded and not all that impressed. “Another 9,000-shades-of-orange sunset, yawn…” That of course, is when I need to give myself a not-so-slight whack on the head with my vintage edition of “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” and remind myself—yet again, and again—how truly magnificent the world is, and how much we owe to photographers who help us see and think about it more attentively,…

  • Politics/Culture

    Impeachment’s Next Step: Ignore Oaths and Rule of Law

    December 19, 2019 - By 

    I will admit that I do not understand a key piece of the current impeachment battle that reached another milestone last night with the House of Representatives’ passage of two articles of impeachment against President Trump. I do understand the House’s action, which is to be followed by a trial in the Senate, as the Constitution requires. And that there is disagreement and high tension to be found in those matters, including squabbles between competing factions and viewpoints. Messy business all around. Inevitably so. But here’s what I do not understand: How can the putative jury foreman in that trial,…

  • Poetry - Poetry by Andrew Hidas

    Mt. Royal Drive, 1959

    December 12, 2019 - By 

    MT. ROYAL DRIVE, 1959 The garage door— atop which my father placed a basketball hoop, its backboard sawed, drilled, painted and hoisted by his own hands, Against which dodgeball epics played out among siblings and neighbors, Past which we dashed in races that began north of the driveway and careened to the back fence, Inside which I smoked my first cigarette, nervous as the homing pigeons who pecked warily in their coop above (another father-built project born of scrap wood and love). The basement— place of hiding & seeking, caroms & checkers on idle summer days, where the parents retreated…

  • Psychology - Religion

    In Praise of the Darkness

    December 4, 2019 - By 

    A rather well-known book once began with this rather foreboding line: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.” A few lines down in that same story, we read: “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years…” Much later on in the Book of Matthew, Jesus talks about sinners being flung into the darkness, where there is “wailing and gnashing of teeth.”  That would be down there with the…