My impassioned review of Quentin Tarantino’s magnificent “Inglourious Basterds”.
Category Archives: Culture
Songs Of Freedom: A Found Poem
A found poem made up of song lyrics for this week’s www.redroom.com blog competition. My blog from last week, “The Sneeze”, was noted on their website as an honourable mention. Yeah!
Why I Don’t Celebrate Halloween Like I Used To
When I first moved to Europe going on seven years ago I was bummed that I felt they didn’t really celebrate Halloween, American style. Dressing up, spider webs, pumpkin carving, creepy music, Trick-or-Treating…Halloween was always my most favourite holiday. I love costumes and basically will use any excuse whatsoever to dress up. Movie premieres, themed…
Misogyny Lives
I am stunned beyond belief at all the support being offered Roman Polanski, convicted child raper and jail dodger, after his long overdue arrest in Zurich last week. What kind of world do we live in that just because a person is a celebrity and a holocaust survivor he is somehow seen as being exempt…
My Supernatural Fetish
At the moment I have a totally healthy obsession with the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries by Charlaine Harris, the novels that have become the HBO phenomenon known as “True Blood.” I say my obsession is healthy because it’s my staple obsession, going back to childhood: My absolute and utter fascination and love of the supernatural. Monsters,…
Teacup Vampires
For the first time in my life, I am working with children. I don’t particularly like children, or want to have any of them, but this job is exactly what I need to supplement my writing and so I’m doing it, with interesting results. Day One with the kids was insane. Spending my two hours…
‘Til Kingdom Come
I read my first Stephen King novel when I was 12 years old. The book was Carrie and the year was that of the Gulf War I, 1992. Thus began a love affair with King’s books that has continued to shape my life until today. This year I turned 30 and I’m even more in…
The Local Expat
When I was a single twenty-something living in Spain it upset me to no end how difficult it was to make and integrate with a group of Spanish locals. I couldn’t understand why locals wouldn’t want to make a foreign friend and learn about someone’s life outside of Spain, in the same way that I…
Rachel Tension
Regardless of whether or not a nation or people think they have racial tension within their borders or society, they do. Many nations (and people) will say that they don’t have problems of race, but rather problems of culture, or foreigners or socio-economic status. However this is far from true and racism exists on so…
Food of The Gods: The Ethiopan Experience
My introduction to Ethiopia and its cuisine was in a Rastafarianism, Reggae, and the African Diaspora course I took in university. What struck me the most was learning that Ethiopia had never been colonized, and is one of the few African nations never to have been. Not for lack of trying, mind you. The Italians…
Spike Through The Heart
Spike is totally my favorite character. I love his honesty and his ability to tell things like they are, not humouring anyone’s bullshit. As the show goes on he is turning out to be one of the more complex creatures in Buffy, with such a range in his personality arc. That said, he is a…
Inside the Box
You know how in movie theatres they’ll assign you seats as a default on your ticket, and in most places in the world it means nothing? Well, not in Prague. Here, they assign you seats and you are expected to stick by them. Even if the theatre is totally empty. True story: if you happen…
Nibble Nibble Here, Nibble Nibble There
A strange local phenomenon: Czech people eat in public all the time. Not just normal eat-on-the-go types of foods like gyros, ice cream or pizza. You see them at tram and metro stops nibbling on peices of bread. Not French bread, or croissants, or even decent healthy-looking bread. It’s always the cheap, nasty Czech bread…
Satanic Inspiration: The Devil's Bible
Here’s the link to my first ever published article: http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2007/09/12/satanic-inspiration.php
Lost and Found
As always, somewhat obsessed, I have a new fascination with the TV series Lost. I know, I know. It’s sorta cliche by now, having a thing for Lost. But my thing is this: I read an article about how Lost is really some version of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. You know, the Gunslinger chasing…
A New Woman
Most people after they move into a new flat and area will explore and wander around to get their bearings. What did I do? I went and got tattooed. Twice. It was a bit nervewracking, going to get inked on a public transportation system I have but a fragile grasp of. But I did it…
Adaptation
They say that adaptation is one of nature’s most painful of processes, and for the seasoned traveller, it is no different. After having not only travelled, but lived in many different places, one begins to realise that it is impossible to be the same person everywhere. Behaviours that are acceptable in America are not acceptable…
The Learning Curve
Duckie’s learning curve is not that great. She kept her distance from the doorways after I threw things at her to scare her away, but today she is boldly strutting right back into our house. This got me thinking about learning curves in general and yesterday’s massacre at Virginia Tech. It seems that something horrible…
300 Ways To Tell The Difference Between Coercion and Consent
After having watched 300 twice now in mixed company, I continue to be disturbed, perturbed and supremely irritated by the fact that men still don’t seem to understand the difference between coercion and consent when it comes to sexual intercourse. 300 has a very distressing scene where The Spartan Queen offers herself to a Councilman…
There's A Kind Of Hush
Yesterday I awoke to a crazy calm. The kind of Stephen King quiet that means a monstrous clown awaits its drain birth upon my entrance into the bathroom or the coming alive of my paintings to pull me into some strange world from which I will never re-emerge. A quiet. A crazy calm quiet. The…
Pink, “I’m Not Dead!” 2006
I bought this album on the 6-year “anniversary” of Wendy Soltero’s death because, well, sometimes you just need something fun and light to mark a somber occasion. It was the first CD that I had bought in more than a year and in being fun and light, it was money incredibly well spent. Music is…
300 Thumbs Up
Frank Miller, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love the ferocious warriors of your vivid dream portraits. I love their translations into film, the roaring soldiers of the past or future noir. I love your goddess women who float with violent beauty above the men with swords for hearts, loving…
Chicken Is Not Pork and Why Istanbul Is Like A Bad Boyfriend
I was beginning to think that this dismal city has sucked the life out of my cooking because nothing I spend a lot of time making comes out that good (whoa, sounds eerily like what I said about my short-lived newspaper experience…), or comes out just plain bad. Until I had a drunken epiphany very…
Six Feet Under, an HBO production, 2001-2005
When this show first came out I was in the beginning of dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after the death of my good friend and during that time I could not even hear death related words without falling into PTSD panic attacks and flashbacks to Wendy’s murder. The commercials for this show totally freaked…
Heroes
do you ever get the feeling that you are meant for something more? not just something more, but something great? something amazing, something extraordinary. a feeling that is more than just a feeling or a hunch; something deep down into the dark core of you that tells you that you are special. that you are…
Turkish Lessons
They say you can’t know Turkey or understand anything about its people without having your job threatened by management or by getting fired. Today I just learned the latter Turkish lesson as I was fired today from my job at the Turkish Daily News. At first, it stung. That was pride fucking with my head,…
A Sinister Sunday
Sunday’s are no longer a day of quiet leisure and relaxing with my secret pleasures of ‘The OC’ and ‘One Tree Hill.’ In lieu of catching the only work shuttle to the Hurriyet Media Tower where I wile my days away trapped on the top floor like the princess I used to imagine I was,…
How Cell Phones Have Changed the World and Why This Is A Bad Thing
You are sitting on your lunch break, or someone’s lunch break, having a nice visit and out of nowhere, “Toodle doodle doooooo. Toodle doodle doooo.” Yes, the insistent ring of the cell phone which people seem loath to not answer. We are not far from Pavlov’s Dog these days, no siree. They answer the phone…
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