Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Like its actors, "Ma vie avec James Dean" (2017), written and directed by Dominique Choisy, is extremely likeable. Johnny Rasse plays the young director Géraud Champreux, who goes to Normandy to present his first feature film "My Life with James Dean." He meets a bunch of oddballs, including Balthazar, played with lovelorn candor by Mickaël Pelissier. Françoise Lebru, who plays Champreux's mom, steals the few short scenes she appears in.   

A Christmas column for Singapore Unbound's e-newsletter. Sign up here . Sunday morning, I found myself in Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. Having left the Christian religion twenty years ago and not having found my way back to it yet, I was attending church at the invitation of friends, a lesbian couple who love Guy and me, and whom we love. Mount Auburn is a special congregation. In defiance of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Mount Auburn has not only championed the cause of ordination rights for GLBT persons but has also performed same-sex covenant unions since 1994. After the confession, the readings, and the beautiful singing of the chancel choir, the pastor Rev. Stacey Midge applied the Bechdel test to the Bible. Named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the test measures the representation of women in fiction. It asks three questions of a work: (1) Does it name more than one woman character? (2) Does it have a woman talking to another w...

Watched "Love after Love" (2017) yesterday and loved it. Directed by Russell Harbaugh, it starred a terrific ensemble cast of Andie MacDowell as mother, and Chris O'Dowd and James Adomian as her two sons, all trying to come to terms with their husband/father's death. Nov 25 - had breakfast with PYR and first interview. She's a great storyteller. I've written 6 of the poems for A History of Singaporeans in America. Got the idea to name the poems a la Chaucer. The Host. The Ceramicist. The Prodigal. The Regular. The Lawyer. The Whore. PYR is The Lady. The book's epigraph is from Henry James: “‘Ah then she’s not French,’ Isabel murmured; and as the opposite supposition had made her romantic it might have seemed that this revelation would have marked a drop. But such was not the fact; rarer even than to be French seemed it to be American on such interesting terms.” — Portrait of a Lady