Sacrificing sanity for the cause of knowledge, I’m in the midst of my own private Steve Bannon documentary film festival. I’ll report on my findings in this space later this month. After I’ve had time…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
One observes the liturgy of the Academy Awards for the gaffs and grandiosity. From the heavens above Hollywood, these miraculous moments fall like tiny healing drops of holy water. Everyone has their list of cherished…
Less than a month before the first presidential election of December 1788, Francis Hopkinson published his Seven Songs for the Harpsichord or Forte Piano, dedicating the set “To His Excellency George Washington, Esquire.” Hopkinson was a Philadelphia…
For several years my grandparents lived in a small house on the same property on Bainbridge Island as my nuclear family—nuclear in more than one sense, since our home was a dozen miles from the…
Who says America doesn’t have a natural aristocracy? From young Bar(r)on von Trump to Lady Gaga, this country has produced legions of men, women, ADD teens, and hypoallergenic designer dogs, who radiantly fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s…
The funniest thing about presidential inaugural ceremonies is that anyone takes them seriously at all. This latest edition reached new heights—and depths—of comic excellence. To his credit, Barack Obama had a hard time keeping it…
Irony is the not-so-new normal. Somewhere back in the swirling dry-ice mists of history, round about the time of the one-and-only Clinton Administration, this venerable figure-of-speech stretched its wings and its brand and became a…