Entries by Brian Halpin

The Red Curtain Falls

  When film director David Lynch was creating his first great works back in the 70s and 80s, it seems fairly unlikely that he envisaged an America sliding into full-blown authoritarianism or fascism in what would be his latter years. One could argue that there exists the art of emotion, and the art of ideas.  […]

Greenland, Panama, and Orwell

  Update to readers: I have been keeping new podcast episodes on the backburner since the run-up to the November election. I felt at the time that carrying-on as if everything was “normal” was just somehow frivolous and…wrong. So for the last three months of 2024 I focussed on political posts, blogs, and essays, hoping […]

Hello 2025…Get Ready to Rumble

  I am not given to conspiracy theories. It is my considered opinion – as a thinking 60-year-old who unashamedly claims to be reasonably well-read and well-informed – that the current spread of right wing extremist politics in North and South America, in Europe, and elsewhere, is no organic “grassroots” development. This is being coordinated […]

Feast Your Eyes on the Sound

  Most people under the age of 60 might presume that the age of the music video arrived with the launch of MTV in the summer of 1981. Not true. Between 1940 and 1946, jukeboxes called “Panorams” became a common feature in bars, nightclubs, and restaurants in larger American towns and cities. A “Panoram” jukebox […]

Ahab on a Surfboard

  By the 1790s, the institution of slavery had ended in Massachusetts, and whaling towns like Nantucket had sizable mixed-ethnic populations. Free African-Americans intermingled with sailors from ports around the world. Yankee ships returning from the Pacific around the treacherous Cape Horn brought back crewmen from what Europeans had called the Sandwich Islands – now […]

“Remorse”

  Private Pyle, the troubled character who goes off the deep end in Stanley Kubrick‘s Vietnam War film “Full Metal Jacket“, was based on some now largely forgotten US policy decisions from the turbulent 1960s. Those who have seen the film will recall that Private Pyle was both emotionally disturbed and overweight – conditions which […]

New Amsterdam and the…Melungeons?

  In 1613, the settlers at Jamestown were finally putting the “starving time” of 1609 behind them. A new settlement was being built at Charles City, and the first tobacco crop was going into the ground. Emboldened to confront the Powhatan head-on, they had contrived to kidnap a native girl named Matoaka or “Pocahontas” to […]

New Amsterdam and the Melungeons of Appalachia

  In 1613, the settlers at Jamestown were finally putting the “starving time” of 1609 behind them. A new settlement was being built at Charles City, and the first tobacco crop was going into the ground. Emboldened to confront the Powhatan head-on, they had contrived to kidnap a native girl named Matoaka or “Pocahontas” to […]

Suffragette City?

  We are all truly products of our upbringing – until we choose to break the chain. The young lady in the article shared here was from a long line of slaveholders bearing the surname “Youngblood“, who ultimately trace back to Dutch “Jongbloedt” families of New Amsterdam/New York – people who may have come to […]