Playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize Winner David Mamet has a book of essays coming out June 2nd, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The fact that Amazon recommends it next to Ann Coulter’s upcoming “Demonic” and Breitbart’s “Righteous Indignation” says a lot. In an absolute must-read, Andrew Fuerguson’s outstanding Weekly Standard profile of Mamet goes into greater detail about both the book and the man. 

Weekly Standard:

[David] Mamet had been brought to campus by Hillel, and the subject of his talk was “Art, Politics, Judaism, and the Mind of David Mamet.” There wasn’t much talk of Judaism, however, at least not explicitly. He arrived late and took the stage looking vaguely lost. He withdrew from his jacket a sheaf of papers that quickly became disarranged. He lost his place often. He stumbled over his sentences. But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

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Renowned playwright, screenwriter and celebrated Israel-basher, Tony Kushner, was all set to receive an honorary degree from the City University of New York. But that was before a member of the Board of Trustees, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, read a short portion of Mr. Kushner’s anti-Zionist history into the record, which the Board agreed was sufficient cause to deny Kushner’s degree. Apparently, it’s the first time in the history of the CUNY board that they’ve taken such an action. Maybe not so ironically, inside sources confided to me it would have never passed without the concurrence of the gentiles who sit on the Board.

Kushner and “Munich” director Steven Spielberg

At first, the story of Kushner’s rejection was confined to the Jewish media. But yesterday it went mainstream – via the New York Times and AP – after the prolific Mr. Kushner stoked the flames and released a prolix screed objecting to the decision and defending his Israel-loving bona fides:

Mr. Kushner, who had not been alerted that Mr. Wiesenfeld would speak against him, said that he was “dismayed by the vicious attack and wholesale distortion of my beliefs.” He has criticized policies and actions by Israel in the past, and said that he believed — based on research by Israeli historians — that the forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes as part of the creation of Israel was ethnic cleansing. But he added that he was a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist, that he had never supported a boycott of the country, and that his views were shared by many Jews and supporters of Israel.

“This has been an incredibly ugly experience,” Mr. Kushner said, “that a great public university would make a decision based on slanderous mischaracterizations without giving the person in question a chance to be heard.”

“I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.”

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Since I’ve known my lovely wife this romantic comedy set on Christmas Eve and starring Dick Powell and Debbie Reynolds has been her favorite among what she calls “her cute little movies.” Shot in that beautiful Technicolor process among crisp colorful sets (Powell’s apartment gets my vote for Most Fifties Ever!) that give off a nice holiday feel, it tells the completely contrived tale of a thirty-five year-old Oscar-winning screenwriter (Powell, who was actually 50) forced to deal with a seventeen year-old delinquent (Reynolds) over Christmas Eve. He desperately needs a muse and she’s looking for a daddy of the sugar variety and … well, you can see where this is going.

Sounds awful, don’t it? That’s what I thought and refused to pay it much attention for years. But the lead performances, supporting cast and dynamite dialogue are all superb, and it really is a cute little movie with some crisp cynical shots taken at Hollywood to boot — most of them courtesy of Alvy Moore who most of you will recognize from “Green Acres.” (more…)

Yours truly first laid eyes on my wife, Karen, when we were both nine-years-old, students in Yeshiva of Flatbush elementary school. Thus began a love affair that defined and continues to define my existence.

The time has come to introduce Karen to Akira Kurosawa. The time has come to introduce Karen to the single most important movie in my life, the film that shaped my consciousness, the film that turned me from a directionless yeshiva student into a rabid film fanatic, a screenwriter.

Yes, The Seven Samurai is playing at The Thalia, New York’s’ classic movie theater on Broadway between 94th and 95th Streets. I’ve invited Karen to see it with me. Keep in mind, this is 1976, ancient days. There are no videos, no DVD’s, no personal computers, and hard to imagine, no internet. To see a classic film, you must rush to Manhattan, to one of the revival houses, and hope that the print they screen is half-way decent. And with Japanese films, the biggest problem is the subtitles. Frequently, they are illegible.

As we stand on line to purchase tickets, Karen quizzes me about the film. (more…)