For some people, Cinqo de Mayo means a nacho party platter, a cooler full of Corona, plastic sombreros and a pinata filled with stale butterscotch discs. For a few of us, though, Cinqo de Mayo means one thing and one thing only: Aztec mummies. The sad part of it is that it might actually make much more sense than the nachos.

On the inside, ladies and gentlemen. Pree-senting my anti-canonical list of the “greatest” movies (laughs backwards) ever made on this or any other planet… presented for your edicational edification in no particular order… with conflicting standards applied… I bring you miscellaneous genres and the occasional rare species… with no abiding respect paid to “seriousness,” renown and what have you… See ‘made-for-television’ tomfoolery. Witness the wonder of accidental Surrealism; the expanses of expanded cinema, shorts, features. With industrial films… animation… agitprop… home movies… Hollywood cheapies… medical adventures. Step right up and behold!


MATHEMATICS OF GOD, Val Del Omar

PAROLE GIRL, Cline

80 BLOCKS FROM TIFFANY’S, Weis

CYBERNETIC GRANDMOTHER, Trnka

WALKING FROM MUNICH TO BERLIN, Fischinger

SENSATION HUNTERS, Vidor

ANOTHER WORLDY, Thornton

WOMAN UNAFRAID, Cowen

THE POOR RICH, Sedgwick

BECAUSE WE CARE, Oscar Mayer

MIDNIGHT COURT, McDonald

POLLY TIX IN WASHINGTON, Lamont

REACHING FOR THE SUN, Wellman

THE COMET, Zeman

IMPATIENCE, Dekeukeleire

GETTING HIS GOAT, ?

TOPOLOGY, Eames

THE ROAD TO RENO, Wallace

TWO ALONE, Nugent

MOR VRAN, Epstein

WICKED WOMAN, Rouse

LIQUID CRYSTALS, Painleve

GLOBE, Jacobs

THE RED SPECTER, Chomon

DARK HAZARD, Green

DOWN TO THEIR LAST YACHT, Sloane

A FIRE, Golestan

TOWN BLOODY HALL, Hegedus, Pennebaker

CHAZ CHASE: The Unique Comedian

In 1948, while living in New York and struggling to support his sister and invalid mother through sales of his homemade jewelry, then-23 year-old Wally Cox ventured onto the stage of the Village Vanguard for the first time to try his hand at stand-up.

Maxwell Bodenheim is no longer the cat’s pajamas.  If he was once something of a cult figure in Chicago and, later, New York City’s Greenwich Village, he is no longer of much interest to any reader – except perhaps to some stray dissertation student or to some crime reporter dredging up the gruesome details surrounding his violent death.  So much for the vicissitudes of poetic fame.

Back in 1931, however, when Bodenheim was coming into his own as a literary maverick, New York publisher Horace Liveright issued his novel – Naked on Roller Skates. The title is a grabber, but the book itself would be anathema to feminists since it features a heroine who wishes to be beaten and degraded:

“Did you ever hear a dream talking?”  (line from an old song)

What was lost and what gained, crossing the great techno-divide between movie pantomime sometimes as stylized as ballet, and an initially stagey yackety yak? Film had been visual, fluid and rhythmic, with live music helping to transport audiences into The Bigger Than Life Beyond. The big deadweight soundproof box, containing both camera and asphyxiating operator, then fell on this dancing medium… flooring it. What would survive?

A natural-born mimic, ham, tease, hard worker, stoic follower and out-of-reach babe, Ginger Rogers has proven one of the most difficult to define of all the 1930s Hollywood stars. At her best she was a synonym for fun and high spirits while also conveying a dignified and skeptical kind of resistance to other people, and these contradictory impulses made her one of the most special and ambiguous performers of her time. Rogers excelled in her first seven musicals with Fred Astaire and in several of her comedy vehicles and even in some of the programmers she churned out in the early 1930s. She was beloved, and rightly so.

The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity — grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.

At the heart of this endeavor stands Ramzy Baroud. His career is the antithesis of clandestine. For decades he has written, taught, and spoken in public, producing books translated into multiple languages, contributing columns to international publications, addressing audiences in universities and public forums across continents. He is not a shadowy figure; he is a man whose work has been consistent, transparent, and intellectually rigorous. His life is not untouched by the tragedy he describes: many members of his family were killed under Israeli bombardments. Yet while mainstream media rushed to amplify unproven allegations against him, they remained deaf to his personal grief. His tragedy was ignored, his integrity overlooked, his voice distorted — because his engagement is unbearable to those who would prefer silence.

A Crime of Conscience, Not of Law

He is an engaged journalist in the noblest sense: independent, lucid, unflinching. His so-called crime is not collusion with violence but fidelity to memory. That is why he is demonized — not for what he has done in law, but for what he represents in conscience. America, unable to silence Palestinian voices through censorship alone, now instrumentalizes its justice system to achieve by indictment what it failed to achieve by argument. Having harassed universities, intimidated students, and punished professors for their solidarity with Gaza, it turns the courtroom into a new battlefield. And Congress, captive to the whims of its Zionist masters, joins the manhunt, targeting a journalist for the sole offense of telling the truth of his people. As for the mainstream press, it chooses cowardice: ignoring his family’s suffering, ignoring the emptiness of the charges, while echoing the accusations of power as if they were evidence.

Law Twisted into Weapon

The complaint filed against Ramzy Baroud and the organization (People Media Project) that runs the Palestine Chronicle rests on the Alien Tort Statute, grotesquely overstretched to criminalize editorial decisions rather than acts of war. It alleges that by publishing articles from Abdallah Aljamal — described by Israel as a Hamas operative killed during a hostage rescue — the Chronicle “aided and abetted” terrorism. But here lies the first fissure: this characterization of Aljamal comes exclusively from Israeli military sources, themselves a belligerent party. It has never been independently verified. The claim that he was both a journalist and a Hamas operative remains an allegation, not an established fact. To treat it as judicial evidence is to replace proof with propaganda.

Even if—hypothetically—Aljamal had, at the demand of a militant group, harbored hostages, such a circumstance would not in itself render him culpable: what ordinary civilian in a war zone can refuse the command of militants under threat of force? And even if it occurred, how could Ramzy Baroud have known of it? Even taken at face value, the allegation collapses upon scrutiny. No evidence demonstrates that the Chronicle or its editor had actual knowledge of Aljamal’s supposed operational role, nor that modest freelance payments — if any at all — bore any causal nexus to hostage-taking. The federal judge, in February 2025, dismissed the original complaint precisely for lack of proof of knowledge or intent. The plaintiffs returned with an amended filing, repackaged in rhetoric and pathos, but still devoid of the material elements required under international law: actus reus (a substantial contribution to the crime) and mens rea (intent or knowledge).

Let’s open with a few passages of deathless prose from the classics.

EMORY’S SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE (18 in.; to 35 lb.) is the only Southwest member of an edible group with long necks and short tempers. Handle with care.

BELTED KINGFISHER Where there are fish there are Kingfishers, beating the air in irregular flight, diving into water with a splash and emerging with fish in their beaks.

THE EASTERN MOLEor common mole makes the mounds that dot your lawn. You are unlikely to see any moles, for they stay underground unless molested.

You saw them in the basement of your third-grade best friend, or in your school library. If you were lucky, you had one or two at home—your older sister read them first, years ago; maybe they’d even belonged to one of your parents. Paperback books just a bit smaller than pulp fiction novels, though equally thick, their illustrated pages of a glossier, higher quality. The typeface was Futura, that design marvel of yore, also seen in the old Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History. Insects, Seashores, Mammals, Reptiles and Amphibians—which did you have? The Golden Guides gave us our natural world in all its glory, and managed to do it in a singular style, dry yet affectionate, concisely informative and never, ever dumbed-down. They were written for children, but each, too, is a cracking read for any adult eager to learn. Or to remember.

On November 20 1942, a Brooklyn jury returned guilty verdicts on a pair of Williamsburg teens, 16-year-old Neil Simonelli and 18-year-old Joseph Annunziata, for the murder of Irwin Goodman, their math teacher at William J. Gaynor High School. The two of them had never much liked Goodman, a 36-year-old father of two. When he reported them to the principal for smoking in the boys’ room, they walked eight blocks to Simonelli’s home, where they picked up a pistol, then back to the school. They confronted Goodman and got into a scuffle with him. The gun, which Annunziata was holding, went off, perhaps accidentally, fatally shooting Goodman through the back. Because the jury entertained a doubt that the shooting was premeditated, they convicted the boys of murder in the second degree. The pair went off to Sing Sing together to begin sentences of 20 years to life. Had the verdict been first-degree murder, they could have been the youngest New Yorkers ever executed. 

Muselmann is a term from the Holocaust. It was used by prisoners of the camps to describe their fellow inmates, those who were utterly emaciated and resigned to impending death. The word is Yiddish for Muslim, deriving from the old Turkish word, müslüman. In the camps, its use was varied and there are many opinions on its origin and application, most notably from Victor Frankel, Eugen Kogon, and Primo Levi (all of whom were Holocaust survivors). Here is Levi’s powerful description: “Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmanner, the drowned form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand ...” 

Count Dracula (1977) is a British television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s canonical vampire tale. For Tim Lucas, who recommended I check out this awkward video/film hybrid, it does greater justice to the original Dracula than any other filmic version. “Judi Bowker,” claims Lucas, “is the only real Mina ever represented in film, and it makes her corruption all the more tragic.” Dracula isn’t the central focus. This gives Bowker’s Mina Harker — who might accurately be described as a doll-like, even pat incarnation of honey-haired innocence  — the chance to evince a modern paradigm, becoming, by immeasurably small degrees, a model of high-minded vampirism. Mina communes, unprotected, with madness AKA the fly-eating menace called Renfield. Surviving the encounter with her true opposite number (normally Dracula himself), she does so by moving him with frankness: “I was very interested in what you were saying about Eternal Life… I feel we understand each other”. It’s a finely turned performance echoed satisfyingly by the soundtrack’s Ondes Martenot, more human and throaty than any other electronic instrument, here centralizing a woman’s existential experience — drawn from, but not solely dependent on, Stoker’s original late-Victorian metaphysics. Even Count Dracula’s hybrid format, then-standard for English television, seems appropriate to Mina’s curiously doubled existence as she glides along an ethical Mobius strip like an enlightened somnambulist.

by Daniel Riccuito