hanging out with Natalie Musteata, cowriter & codirector of the absurdist darkly comic sci-fi short film Two People Exchanging Saliva, which is nominated for the Cesars & The Oscars, for best live action feature short film after last night's Wrap Pro screening of the Oscar Shorts Showcase at the Culver Theater. In her film, violence is not just accepted but normalized, whereas expressions of affection are not just discouraged but punished, and it's leaning into absurdist dark

hanging out with music maker, sound explorer & fellow storyteller Owen Nathanael at The Night Temple event in Los Feliz last night, after he bought a copy of my debut memoir Killing Justice

hanging out with Usman Ally , writer/director of the powerful, deeply moving short film Emigre Americana, after it screened at the NewFilmmakers Los Angeles monthly film festival this past weekend...the film wrestles with the complicated nature of intergenerational immigrant trauma, especially in trying to distinguish "white saviors" from "white allies", in much the same way as my debut memoir Killing Justice wrestles with the complicated nature of intergenerational & adoptiv

hanging out with KPop Demon Hunters poster signed by the film's co-directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans; LOVED this wildly entertaining, deeply moving film, with its central thematic tension between hiding your true self in order to belong versus being yourself mirroring that central theme of my debut memoir Killing Justice, & even featuring a complicated adoptive relationship echoing the one at the heart of Killing Justice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JTVQTk36R8

Congratulations to Eva Victor and Naomi Ackie on their Film Independent Spirit Awards wins for Sorry, Baby...as it's a truly transcendent masterpiece written, directed by & starring Eva Victor, a tragicomic tale of healing from major trauma , as is my debut memoir Killing Justice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc0jgWoZo9w

CONGRATS TO this powerful, darkly comic miniseries, Pee-Wee as Himself, which WON the Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary, as Paul Reubens' craving for control and fear of being himself are also central themes of my debut memoir Killing Justice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVx74C-RGDw&t=1s

hanging out with Shruti Parekh, after a NewFilmMakers Los Angeles screening of her wonderful, award-winning short film Zari, about "finding your people", which is also a central theme of my debut memoir Killing Justice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfEcir7CjD4

Hanging out with my new friend Ava Marinos, after she bought a copy of my debut memoir Killing Justice at AMC The Grove last night

hanging out with David Borenstein, co-director of the powerful, deeply moving documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which is one of the 5 Oscar nominees for Best Documentary, & deservedly so!)/LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this powerful, deeply moving Oscar-nominated documentary, as it documents, in darkly comic, absurdist fashion, how authoritarianism, abuse of power, and propanganda seek to try to poison the minds of the students who had become "found family" for Pavel (Pasha) Talankin,

I am Nick in Zootopia 2, lol

After having read the stunning book on which this series is based, I watched the series premiere last night and was blown away by its ability to introduce us to an immensely complicated and painful story about resistance, betrayal, loss, guilt, fury and regret...Northern Ireland is where the intergenerational trauma at the heart of my debut memoir Killing Justice began, as that is where my Loyal Orangeman maternal Grampa Bob's best friend was killed by the IRA...but Say Nothi

hanging out with Will Tracy, writer of both Succession and the darkly comic masterpiece Bugonia...LOVE THIS FILM, as it isn’t content to mock corporate amorality or internet paranoia. Instead, it’s more interested in what happens when belief becomes the only available structure in a life stripped of trust...it's a visceral, psychological masterclass. Plemons steals the show as a conspiracy theorist in a story that brilliantly blurs reality. It’s violent, deplorable, yet utter

hanging out with Hasan Hadi, writer/director of the truly transcendent film "The President's Cake" (aka: for american audiences, "the president's ballroom", lol), which won the Camera D'or at Cannes & was shortlisted for the Oscars for Best International Feature, & which celebrates the power of love and friendship and dark comedy to survive the even the brutality of abuse, as does my debut memoir Killing Justice... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0bWl9lZX5k

sharing a laugh with Caleb Landry Jones after watching his electrifying performance as   Dracula   in the Collider screening of Luc Besson's adaptation of the classic tale at the Culver Theater tonight...LOVED the film...as the theme of religious trauma, which is so central to my debut memoir Killing Justice, was also a central emotional through-line for this film, which handled it beautifully... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w05UztF-3xY

Enjoyed The Secret Agent, as there’s plenty of suspense, but also a strong strain of gallows humor running through the serpentine storyline as if to pay tribute to the benefits of absurdism as a survival strategy, which is also true of my debut memoir Killing Justice

YAY!...My good friend the American broadcast journalist and executive producer Ryan Glover just interviewed me about my debut memoir Killing Justice for his podcast & here's the link:... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhkmwYkF7SY

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this truly transcendent masterpiece, nominated for both the Oscars & Film Independent for Best International Film...nothing about the pulsating “Sirāt” is appropriate or expected or traditional or fully comprehensible. It just is. And it is utterly transfixing...Sirat is a profound meditation on the fragility of the human condition and the illusions of safety embedded in the Western worldview. Oliver Laxe challenges our assumptions of stability, revealing how

Maria Popova share the following on her wonderful blog, the marginalian: This world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others… abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave. -El

Here's the track from DJ Derek's Heavenly Rave playlist that I'm singing along to in these dark times (even if Derek was only 3 when this song was released back in 1981)... Water of life is going to flow again Changed from the blood of heroes and knaves The word mercy's going to have a new meaning When we are judged by the children of our slaves No adult of sound mind Can be an innocent bystander Trial comes before truth's revealed Out here on the rim of the broken wheel You

At one point during the Oscars-Shortlisted documentary My Undesirable Friends , one of the fearless female journalists says to her colleague, on the eve of the launch of the full-scare war on Ukraine : "It's almost as though Putin has been told that he's only got a month to live, and so he's decided he's going to fuck half the world along with him before he goes." THE SAME COULD BE SAID OF TRUMP .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCyxXOSiRyY