E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Years ago, mostly for a lark, I made a short 'art' film (now listed on the Internet Movie Data Base) called Bad Marion's Last Year , a cheesy takeoff on the Alain Resnais film 'Last Year at Marienbad.' It featured two then-hot actors from the Andy Warhol social circuit: Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and jazz singer Asha Puthli, along with 'Boys in the Band' star Frederick Combs, complete with a guest appearance by then-producer Dominick Dunne. The real star, however, was a rich ingenue from the Manhattan-Hamptons elite: Gillian Fuller, who kindly loaned us her father's vacant Southampton mansion for the occasion (mind you, this was in January). Gillian played herself: a bored rich girl with nothing at all to do other than pick up boys (Combs--never mind that he was gay) and bring them home to take drugs and get bored together. Enter the two Warhol girls as righteous angels, determined to either make Gillian see the error of her ways, or be carried of...

As has been noted and reported repeatedly over the past year, America is not just on a war footing now. We have never not been on a war footing, or actively fighting on at least one front since I was born, since the first Boomer was born, and for most of the 20th Century before then, not to mention much of the 19th Century, and a fair chunk of the one before that, even a hundred years prior to our Independence (all those Indian wars, remember? Or maybe we'd rather not). Meanwhile, the Military Industrial Complex and the right-wing pundits who currently dominate the media landscape in the U.S.A. just now are agitating, slavering, and creaming in their dress uniforms over the incredibly profitable prospects of the biggest war ever yet to come: the war with China. Yes, Hu Jintao is a typical conservative political hack, the perfect Chinese equivalent to John Boehmer except in a bigger House. His and his party's policies on human rights, among other issues, still suck. But the cur...

I never knew Ted Kennedy other than by reputation, but my first awareness of him other than as Jack's and RFK's younger brother came at the time he and I were both new in our jobs and working towards the same goal: justice for American minorities in terms of those most basic of needs: health, education, and welfare. I was working for Kenneth B. Clark at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center in New York City. It was 1969, and I was a young idealist and Conscientious Objector to the war in Vietnam, and as a birthright Quaker, had taken a position with an NGO for my so-called Alternative Service in lieu of military action. This required (and I received) permission from the office of the President, who at the time was Nixon, whose mother had been a Quaker herself. At that time Dr. Clark had hired another white person besides myself for his Harlem-based research and educational development programs: the indominable Jeanette Hopkins, one of two venerable, powerful women pioneers I...