I’m not a fan of Pilgrim’s Progress. I know. It’s a Christian classic. The very late and extremely great J. I. Packer said that Christians should read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress every year. Nope. Sorry, Jim. I’m not doing that. Here’s why: I realise that within my own tribe of conservative evangelicals that what I’m saying here is heresy. It’s almost on a par with denying penal substitutionary atonement. (I fully affirm this doctrine.
The well-deserved tributes have been rolling in for Norman Lear since his death last week at 101. However, the obituaries and think pieces have overlooked his challenging but formative early years. The creative genius who would give us “All in the Family,” “Maude” and “The Jeffersons” was born in my adopted hometown, New Haven, in 1922. It was a long way from Hollywood. What were the odds he would make it there?
On September 21st, 2023, news broke regarding the passing of Sharon Niesp, an actor, artist and singer who was one of director John Waters’ Dreamlanders (a.k.a regulars in his films) as well as the lover and girlfriend of Cookie Mueller, a fellow Dreamlander, author and actress in her own right. A brief bio of Sharon Niesp’s life is documented in Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, an oral history compilation on the life of Cookie by Chloé Griffin.
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button! The great Sir Horace Ové has died following a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, his family announced this morning. Below is an excerpt, focused on Ové, from a much longer piece that I wrote about the history of Black British protest cinema for Sight & Sound magazine in the tumultuous and emotionally draining summer of 2020.
The future, most people would agree, is inherently unpredictable. Yet not all of it is: depending on the time scale of your prediction, some aspects of the future won’t change very much. The sun will still be rising in 100 years, for instance. The eventual fate of the sun, in several million years, is also quite predictable, because stars turn out not to be that complex: they’re mostly just big balls of plasma undergoing constant nuclear fusion.