Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 – Free sample 2!

In celebration of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, each Monday in March I’m spotlighting one of the more than 100 pieces by me gathered up in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

I randomly divided this collection up by themes – Profiles, Places, Criticism and the like, and then there was a random selection of more goofy pieces I figured I’d just file under “humour.” This recollection of my very first job in journalism written while I was working at Lake Tahoe is, as best as I can recall, almost entirely true.

Scenes from the route

North Shore Truckee ACTION, September 2, 1998

I have edited newspapers and I have written for newspapers, but my first “real” job in this world was to deliver them.

I was a squirrelly, zit-faced and longhaired 13 going on 14, and I did it for about a year, delivering the Grass Valley Union from door to door in a square mile area several blocks from my home.

The Union is an afternoon paper, and so each day after school I would return home to find a bundle of Unions in our driveway, tightly bound. After an afternoon snack I would kneel busily on our dark garage’s concrete floor, taking my fifty or so papers and wrapping them with rubber bands. If it rained, you had to put them in orange plastic bags first.

The rubber bands sometimes snap if you rush things, and they twang off about the room spastically. Once one smacked me right in the cheek, raising a really embarrassing welt.

Your fingertips become black with ink as the headlines leave a bit of themselves on your skin. The day’s happenings are compressed into a small, dense cylinder of pulp that you lift and hurl repeatedly, trying to achieve a passable imitation of grace with each throw.

It was then, likely, that I began to stumble down the career path I follow tenaciously to this day. I was immersed in the smell of the hot paper, sometimes still steaming with the heat of the press, fascinated with the way the ink can cling to you.

I would ride down my route on my battered yellow bike, the newspaper bag carefully balanced on the handlebars, getting lighter with each block.

It was my first real job, and no one forgets the way that is – the strange freedom I felt riding my bike in the late afternoon on days that always seem cloudy in hindsight, the wind rustling the newspapers in my bag. I delivered news of President Reagan and “Peanuts” cartoons and what was on sale at Lucky’s, and I felt a part of some great system that pulsed beneath my 13- year-old world, a system I was just then beginning to perceive dimly.

I delivered newspapers and took inventory of my customers, the yards with plastic toys and broken bicycles in them, the houses with immaculate hedges and shrubbery whose porches I always aimed for with care.

The most difficult part of being a Union paperboy was collection time. At the end of each month I would go door to door on my route, getting $5.50 per customer per month to ensure they kept receiving their daily dose of news.

Portrait of a young hustler, mid-1980s

It was here you begin to encounter the world beyond lifting and hurling newspapers, and these days I’d dread somewhat. Demanding money from strangers was intimidating – looking briefly inside the anonymous homes I threw papers at, the couches where they read their Union each day.

I rapidly began to learn the language of excuses and rationale used so well in the grownup world.

“I paid you last month, boy, what are you tryin’ to pull?” one beefy guy who always wore too-small t-shirts would say to me every time I came by. And every time I would explain to him that he had to pay every month, he would mutter about what a rip-off it was, and he would finally pull five greasy dollars and fifty cents out of his pocket.

I learned how people wheel and deal, and I learned how people live without luck.

There was a cat woman. Every town has the cat woman, the twisted old lady who lives in a shack with a hundred stray cats. This woman’s house was crumbling and rotten, about to slide down an embankment onto the freeway overpass below. She had no teeth and no hair, and always wore a filthy Oakland A’s baseball cap. She would never have her $5.50 at the end of the month, and would gummily offer me excuses as ten of her bedraggled cats meowed and hissed around her legs. The cat lady had only one eye.

The cat woman would occasionally leave a folded dollar bill for me in her mailbox, toward paying off her slowly rising newspaper debt. I did not know what she did with her Union each day, if she read it or merely used it to line her floors inside what was surely one giant litter box.

And then there was “the towel lady,” as she would be enshrined forever in my pubescent memory. Each and every month when I would come by to get my $5.50, this highly attractive young lady, in her mid-twenties or so I’d imagine, would answer the door wearing a pink towel.

Just a pink towel.

You can imagine the fireworks this would set off in your typical 13- year-old paperboy.

Each month this woman would come to the door wearing just her towel, and she would give me my five-fifty and smile and I would melt into a giddy puddle of goo right on her doorstep.

I never could figure it out. If the towel lady wore just a towel once, I’d understand – she just got out of the shower or something, right? But each month, November or May or August, the towel lady would answer the door in her towel, and I would mature just a little bit faster.

The towel lady probably kept me doing the paper route a few months longer than I would have done – I was entering high school soon, and paper routes seemed too grade-school for my elitist brain then.

But I labored on with the route a few months into my freshman year of high school, always looking hopefully forward to my monthly visit to the towel lady.

The odds of gravity and physics were with me, I knew. That towel had to fall off eventually.

It never did, of course, except in my dreams.

This ink-stained confession and much more can be found in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024

Ten great underrated Gene Hackman movies 

If I had a nickel for every time I saw Gene Hackman called an “everyman” in the past week or so, I’d be rich. But Hackman – easily one of my top half-dozen or so favourite actors – was no everyman, really. He was less instantly dazzling than a golden god like Robert Redford or Warren Beatty perhaps, but he was magnetic nevertheless. He packed a quiet authority into every performance while keeping his characters relatable and real. He could play thieves, cops, cowboys and con men, and the only thing ‘everyman’ to me about his acting was his sheer versatility. 

It’s sad that the dramatic circumstances of his and his wife’s deaths kicked off the kind of tabloid frenzy that you know Hackman would’ve hated. Gene Hackman is gone at 95. It’s the work that remains, and endures. 

Obituaries were quick to mention all the unmistakable masterpieces he was involved with – The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, The Conversation, Unforgiven, The Royal Tenenbaums. But Hackman’s long career is full of gems.

He was the kind of actor who kicked even the most mediocre of movies up a notch through his presence. Since the news of his death broke, rather than wallowing in morbid details of his death, I’ve been celebrating Hackman’s life on screen. Here’s 10 of my favourite somewhat underrated Gene Hackman films well worth seeking out: 

I Never Sang For My Father (1970) – Hackman received an Oscar nomination for this melodrama about a troubled son trying to connect to his difficult father, and it’s one of his finest roles, but nearly forgotten today (I blame the kind of terrible title). This one digs into complicated relationships with aging parents with a kind of brutal honesty that’s still pretty stunning today. Playing a repressed and conflicted ordinary joe, Hackman shows how much he can do with just his eyes and furrowed brow. 

Prime Cut (1972) – This bitterly black and mean piece of farm noir stars Lee Marvin as a grim mob fixer and Hackman as a sleazy Kansas cattle rancher who also dabbles in sex slavery and gruesome murders. Despite his kind of limited screen time, Hackman’s grinningly amoral slimeball is a nasty delight – “Cow flesh, girl flesh … all the same to me.” 

The Poseidon Adventure (1972) – Titanic without all the sappy romance nonsense, this rip-roaring disaster epic was a huge hit back in the day, and a big part of that is thanks to Hackman in a firm leading man action hero role – as an iconoclastic free-thinking priest, of all things. It doesn’t get mentioned in the same league as grittier stuff like The French Connection, but it’s anchored by Hickman’s charisma and prickly guts. Big and bold fun, it’s corny and yet riveting 50-plus years later, and it’s impossible not to cheer for Hackman as he single-handedly tries to save the survivors on a quickly sinking cruise ship. 

Scarecrow (1973) – The only movie that paired acting legends Al Pacino and Hackman, as two wandering vagabonds making their way from California to the East Coast. Hackman’s gruff and sullen character pairs well with Pacino’s fidgety, chatty loser, as what starts off as an odd couple buddy comedy turns into a heartbreaking little gem about failure and optimism. 

The French Connection II (1975) – Somewhat overshadowed by its Oscar-winning predecessor, this sequel takes Hackman’s brute cop Popeye Doyle down into the abyss. It picks right up from the first movie with an obsessed Doyle travelling to France to track down the drug dealer who got away. Cannily undermining sequel expectations, it features a long, riveting sequence where Doyle is captured and addicted to heroin. Like the first, it’s a kind of anti-cop story that lingers in the brain. 

Night Moves (1975) – I love me some “sweaty noir,” and this steamy Florida mystery delivers sex, death and malice in equal measures. Hackman is a hapless private detective who gets wrapped up in a missing persons case that slowly submerges his entire life. A movie that’s soaked with a sense of anxiety and despair all the way through, somewhat forgotten but now getting its due. 

Superman II (1980) – I’m pretty sure the first time I ever saw Gene Hackman on screen was his oily, confident turn as Lex Luthor. He’s great in the first movie, too, but for me, Superman II will always be my favourite, as Luthor sidles on in about halfway through and tries to play both sides in Superman’s battle against Zod. The scene where Luthor swaggers on into the Daily Planet and attempts to charm three insanely powerful alien psychopaths through sheer force of will is peak Hackman to me. “Kill me? Lex Luthor? Extinguish the greatest criminal flame of our age?” It’s easy to dismiss his Luthor as a work-for-hire gig (especially when you look at the woeful Superman IV) but there’s frequently a sparkle in Hackman’s eye that shows how much fun he was having. 

BAT-21 (1988): Hackman, a former Marine himself, played lots of military men. He shines here as a cerebral Air Force navigator shot down in Vietnam and trying to stay alive. This one got kind of lost in the flood of Vietnam movies of the late ’80s like Platoon, but is worth revisiting. His hero is no Rambo – he’s a desk jockey trying to stay alive who’s never actually experienced war up close – and Hackman’s thoughtful, restrained performance gives it more depth than your usual gung-ho war picture. 

The Quick And The Dead (1995): Sam Raimi’s delightfully campy western boasts a murderer’s row of talent – Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Sharon Stone – but Hackman’s smiling psychopath John Herod is a scenery-chewing delight, a brasher and wilder take on his Oscar-winning Unforgiven killer. 

Heist (2001): Hackman was surely made to rattle off David Mamet’s whip-smart dialogue, and in one of his last films before retiring, he’s perfect as an ageing thief looking to make one last score. While its tangled heist plot is an echo of many other movies, it’s just a pleasure to watch Hackman and a motley crew of great actors doing crimes and cracking wise. 

Thanks for the movies, Gene. You were no everyman to me.

Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 – Free sample 1!

Hey, did I tell you I made a book? But did I tell you ten times yet?

In celebration of my new collection of the so-called ‘best’ of 30 years of journalism, Clippings, each Monday throughout March I’ll spotlight one of the more than 100 essays in this hefty tome. I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

It was interesting combing through piles of yellowing clippings and old computer files and trying to figure out what to include in a survey of my so-called career. But this profile from when I worked in Oregon circa 2002-2006 was a definite. As a kid, I always wanted to be a zookeeper, until one day I realised that would involve a lot of blood and animal feces. But getting to shadow an actual wildlife park vet around for a day was pretty darned cool, and one of my favourite job assignments. 

The zebra veterinarian 

The Roseburg, Oregon News-Review, May 2002 

WINSTON, Oregon — The veterinarian is taking a close and careful look at his patient, like any good vet should. 

He checks his patient’s pulse rate and takes a blood sample. 

But this patient isn’t somebody’s pet beagle or kitten. Lying unconscious in the grass, he’s 700 pounds, nearly 6 feet long and covered in black stripes, and he requires eight full-grown adults to move him from place to place. 

Toz is a full-grown Chapman’s zebra, and today, he’s getting a house call from his doctor, veterinarian Modesto McClean. 

McClean, 43, has been the senior veterinarian at Winston’s Wildlife Safari since 1999, taking charge of the health of 600 animals — representing 90 different species — who call the park home. 

“You’re a specialist at being a generalist,” McClean frequently says about his job. 

And with good reason. 

In the course of a typical day, McClean’s duties cover the entire animal kingdom. Besides the zebra examination, on this morning he also has an African hedgehog with ringworm to deal with and a wolf recovering from foxtail weeds in its ear. Another day, he tends to a dove with a broken wing and supervises a tricky dental operation on a suffering cheetah, all before noon. 

“You’re always shifting gears,” McClean says. 

Toz is being moved soon from Winston to a new home, a private reserve near Portland. 

Animals come in and out of Wildlife Safari all the time. Some are swapped to zoos or other parks, while others, like Toz, are used for breeding purposes and exchanged around the country. Toz has fathered at least three zebra offspring at Wildlife Safari, but to avoid the genetic breeding pool becoming muddied, he’ll move on and let other, more genetically diverse zebra take on stud duties. 

“Spring and summer seem to be our busiest time (for moves),” said Deb Ryan, Wildlife Safari’s assistant curator. “Within the next month we’ll probably move 10 animals out, and probably move five to eight in.” 

Toz has to be examined for his health and for a lingering lame leg prior to the move. Bringing the zebra in for an examination isn’t as simple as putting him into a pet carrier. Most wild animals must be sedated before they can be safely examined or treated. 

“The toughest part of zoo medicine is the anesthesia,” McClean said. 

“Zebras are very aggressive,” Ryan added. A variety of drugs are used as tranquilizers, some of which are highly dangerous if not handled carefully. 

“A few drops more and I’m going to kill the animal,” McClean notes as he carefully mixes the solutions together into a dart. It takes a steady hand when dealing with the drugs. They can be administered with a dart pistol, a blowgun or an air gun, depending on the size of the animal and the thickness of their hide. 

A zebra has tough skin — “I say zebras are like horses on steroids,” said McClean — so a rifle is used to administer the knockout punch today. 

Every animal must be handled differently, McClean says. Originally from Southern California, his career has taken him to treat animals he might never have imagined he would. He’s worked with dolphins and chimpanzees, and even anesthetized a towering giraffe — “probably the hardest anesthesia in all of medicine,” he says. 

McClean first came to Wildlife Safari in 1995, where he trained under the previous park veterinarian. He was educated at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and Oklahoma State in veterinary medicine, and also served an internship in primate medicine and surgery at Yale University. 

He has also consulted in private veterinary practice for several years. McClean came back to Wildlife Safari in 1999 when he became the park’s senior veterinarian. 

Because the animals mostly roam free at Wildlife Safari, McClean and park keepers have become experts at what they call “binocular diagnosis,” where they carefully observe the animals to detect any sign of a possible medical problem. 

“I don’t have time to go every day to check every animal, so I rely on the keepers too,” McClean says. 

Toz the zebra has been moved out of the park’s general population into a small, half-acre enclosure to prepare him for his move. It also makes it easier for him to be drugged, because Wildlife Safari staff won’t have to chase him down. 

“Some people think hoof stock aren’t all that smart, but they know what a gun is,” McClean says as he watches Toz nervously gallop away from him. 

The doctor raises the rifle, takes careful aim at the retreating zebra, and fires the dart, which brings him to the ground in under five minutes. 

Once McClean is sure he’s fully unconscious, the staff gets to work, popping in an intravenous tube dispensing solution, as well as injections of atropine to keep his heart rate up. A monitor is hooked up to his tongue to check his vital functions, and an oxygen tube is placed in his nostrils. McClean checks out the zebra’s leg, which has been treated previously for weak tendons, and finds that his hoof is suffering some obstructions which he removes. 

While Toz is out, a pint of blood is also taken from him. The blood will be checked and then frozen, kept in store for possible transfusions. 

“This blood someday will save another small zebra,” McClean said. 

Any small checkups that can be done on the zebra are also taken care of. One park employee uses a tool belt set of pliers to scrape a buildup of tartar off the zebra’s large teeth, each the size of a man’s thumb. 

It takes eight park employees to transport the drugged Toz onto an open trailer for his move across the park. He is lifted onto a rubber mat, as one employee holds his IV and McClean monitors his vital signs. Toz is taken to a holding stall where he will live and be watched closely for a few weeks before his trip to Portland. 

The entire procedure, from the dart being fired to Toz waking up in his new quarters, has taken just under an hour. 

“I’m going to rate it as for a zebra, an excellent anesthesia,” McClean says. 

The rest of this delightful yarn and much more can be found in my new book Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024

Hello, I wrote a book, and it’s only taken me 30 years

Greetings! I wrote a book. Well, I’ve actually been writing it for about 30 years, believe it or not. Introducing Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024, a hefty compendium of my columns, essays, feature profiles and much more over the course of my so-called career!

I’ve written an awful lot of words over the years, but I wanted to put together something that was a little more permanent than a bunch of yellowing newspapers and broken website links. Clippings is, much like many journalism careers, an eclectic mix, from long features to blog posts to deeply personal essays to in-depth pop culture criticism, spanning from Mississippi to California to New York City to New Zealand. 

From interviewing governors and rock stars to climbing active volcanos and adjusting to life on the other side of the world, this book is me saying, “Hey, I was here, and this is some of what I did along the way.” Doesn’t everyone want to say that at some point about their life’s work, whatever it is? Throw it all together, and it’s probably as close to a sort of autobiography as I’ll ever get.

It’s got many of my works from long-ago newspapers and magazines, websites and even some fine pieces from this very website in a handsome curated form sure to be adored by your family for generations.

I hope you’ll consider grabbing a copy, now available on Amazon as a paperback for a mere US$14.99, or as an e-book download for just US$2.99! 

Get it here: Clippings: Collected Journalism 1994-2024 by Nik Dirga 

Concert review: Amyl and the Sniffers, The Powerstation, Auckland, February 16

So on Saturday evening I somehow did an Old Man Thing (TM) and put my back out, or nearly out, to the point where I was kind of afraid to move lest my spine shatter into a million delicate pieces. 

And top of my mind was “Oh crap, I hope I can still go to the Amyl and the Sniffers concert Sunday night!”

Fortunately for your hero, a bucket of painkillers and super-hot bath helped and I hobbled into the sold-out Powerstation for the Aussie punk act’s final sold-out New Zealand show. And after 90 minutes or so of amped-up feminist punk anthems and cautiously staying well away from the heaving mosh pit, lo and behold, I felt healed. (OK, I was still a little sore. But you get the picture.)

The Melbourne band has been kicking around for 7-8 years now but really broken through with their excellent 2024 album Cartoon Darkness, and the very NSFW single “Jerkin” which slams toxic masculinity in a grandly profane fashion. 

Watching frontwoman Amy Carter and the band stomp, bounce and shimmy through their propulsive catalog, I kept thinking, “This band should be a household name.” Maybe they will be soon – they’ve got the talent, and the fuck-the-system ethos that 2025 is desperately calling out for. Amy is a whirlwind of motion on stage, bouncing, sticking her tongue out and gobbing a bit in the time-honoured punk fashion, tossing her blond hair around and climbing up the speakers. She has true star power and it’s easy to imagine she’s just at the start of where she’ll go. “How you f—in’ doing?” she asked several times, and we were doing fine. 

Facebook: Amyl and the Sniffers

Punk still somehow has the bad rap of being angry and violent, but it felt inclusive, particularly important coming the same weekend when a bunch of thug so-called “Christians” violently disrupted Auckland Pride events.

For “Me and the Girls,” Amy welcomed on stage a random chorus of audience members of all shapes and sizes and it felt bloody celebratory. Amyl and the Sniffers’ tense anthem about violence about women, “Knifey,” struck a chord with never-ending misogyny still everywhere you look, while poppy nuggets like “Chewing Gum” and “U Should Not Be Doing That” marry plentiful hooks with a bit of throbbing anarchy.

I wrote more about punk (and Amyl) not too long ago and if anything, the vibe has gotten even more spirit of 1977 in my headspace lately. What a joy, then, to see Amy take the stage with swagger and anger, but also, kindness. Her first words to the audience were if you see someone fall in the mosh pit, pick them up, and don’t touch anyone who doesn’t want to be touched. Don’t be a jerk. It shouldn’t be that hard.

It was a show full of joyful rage against the cartoon darkness we’re all living through. I thought a bit about one of my favourite writers, Tom Robbins, who died just last week at age 92, and his mantra: “My personal motto has always been: Joy in spite of everything.”

There was joy at Amy and the Sniffers Sunday night, in spite of everything. Even my back. 

A couple other great reviews by people who are not me:

Chris Schulz at Boiler Room

The 13th Floor

Emma Gleason at the NZ Herald

Facebook: Amyl and the Sniffers

So, I’ve been reading a lot of Captain America comics lately

When I was a kid I always thought Captain America was a bit dorky. Batman and Spider-Man and Wolverine were hip, man. 

It took me a long while to discover the uncomplicated charms of Cap. He’s a good man in a world full of troubles, which for some peculiar reason I can’t quite put my finger on, seems really appropriate as a role model in this battered year of 2025. 

Captain America has been slinging his shield since 1939 in comics, and was probably punching Nazis before your grandparents were even born. Brought back in the 1960s as a keystone for the Avengers, he’s been the moral centre of the Marvel comics universe for decades. 

Yet I really didn’t read an awful lot of Captain America solo comics until the last few years – I never disliked the character, who soared in a lot of great Avengers comics, but he just seemed rather, well, white bread. 

But as usual, I was wrong, and slowly working my way through lots of great Cap stories from the 1960s to 2020s has shown me that you can still make a patriotic American superhero interesting. Like any character, there’s ups and downs to be had, but creators like Lee and Kirby, Steve Englehart, Ed Brubaker, the late Mark Gruenwald and Roger Stern have all done terrific stories over the years. 

The challenge for writers has been in making Cap a believer in a higher cause without being a mindless follower to it. An element of doubt is key to making Captain America great. 

Evil Captain America has been done far too many times and isn’t that interesting, but Doubtful Captain America is a constant of the character, a man who believes in his country but is fairly often willing to question it, up to engaging in a civil war over his beliefs or even quitting the job several times.

As an example of bad Captain America, Mark Millar’s post-9/11 edgelord Captain America in The Ultimates hasn’t aged well at all, channeling Bush-era belligerence and arrogance into a character who’s the opposite of what Cap should be. And being good isn’t being weak.

There’s a fine line between making Cap frequently question his patriotism and making him a whining bore, of course. Yet I admire the writers who’ve made us realise that uncertainty and kindness isn’t a bad thing, all while telling us stories of a man dressed up in red, white and blue.

There’s nothing worse than a fanatic who thinks he can do no wrong. For some reason I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

The marvellous performance by Chris Evans as Steve Rogers in the MCU helped seal my Cap fondness, making square-jawed decency seem kinda hot. And of course, there can be more than one Captain America – Anthony Mackie is stepping up as the main man’s successor in a new movie being released this week. Whether or not the movie itself is great, Mackie has done a fine job in his MCU appearances tapping into that fundamental charm and battered optimism Cap needs. 

I imagine if Cap was real these days he’d be aghast at a lot of what’s going on under the colours of his flag, but then again he’d probably find it pretty familiar. He punched Hitler, after all. 

Again, maybe it’s the tenor of the times. There ain’t a lot of heroes in the real world at the moment. I’ll just keep reading my Captain America comics and hoping for better days ahead. 

Bob Dylan is a complete unknown, and that’s the point

One of the secrets of Bob Dylan’s success is his enduring mystery. Dylan has forged a 60-year career out of being opaque, inscrutable…. a “complete unknown,” if you will.

I’ll admit, I’m kind of a sucker for rock star musical biopics, even when they’re terrible. I watched Elvis and Walk The Line and Bohemian Rhapsody and I embrace the cheesy “rags to riches to overdose” narrative of such films, even when my head admits they’re not always great movies.

A Complete Unknown is a deep dive into Bob Dylan’s early years that does its share of romanticising and mythologising… but then again, hasn’t Dylan himself been doing that since he was a kid? For me, it hit the spot by embracing the many mysteries of Bob, revelling in music biopic cliches while being just prickly enough to feel real.

Timothée Chalamet is really far too pretty to be young Bob, who had a reedy, squinty babyface, but he nicely summons up the keen intelligence, peculiar charisma and somewhat mercenary ethics of young Bobby. Dylan rode into New York from rural Minnesota pretending to be everything from a hobo to a carnival worker. He threw aside his birth name of Zimmerman and became a kind of perpetual musical sponge, absorbing everything and synthesising it into something kind of new. 

A Complete Unknown is about the birth of an artist who’s also a magpie, a wry cynic and also kind of a genius who’s not really a very nice guy. Dylan is called an “asshole” a couple of times in the film, which thankfully doesn’t try to show him as some kind of saintly hero. We avoid some big teary monologue where Bob Dylan reveals all the dark secrets that motivate him.

This exchange is as close as A Complete Unknown gets to peeking behind the mask: “Everyone asks where these songs come from, Sylvie. But then you watch their faces, and they’re not asking where the songs come from. They’re asking why the songs didn’t come to them.“

Chalamet’s natural teen idol charm is cleverly subverted just enough to make his Dylan feel like an echo of the thin wild mercury sound of the man himself. (And while he doesn’t sound exactly like Dylan singing, he sounds close enough to make it work, and lipsynching Dylan would’ve been even weirder.)

A Complete Unknown takes the great Bob Dylan creation myth and hits all the beats – his turn from folk music to electric, his wry confidence, his thorny romance with Joan Baez, his worship of Woody Guthrie. The movie follows Dylan from his arrival in New York as an eager kid up through his explosion into stardom in the mid ‘60s, and its big emotional turn is in Dylan’s moving from stark and preachy folk into raw and raucous rock, culminating in his famously defiant “electric” performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

A Complete Unknown wrings Dylan’s transformation for a lot of drama that might seem a bit hokey from 2025 eyes – so he’s playing an electric guitar now, so what? – but it’s worth remembering that Dylan’s “betrayal” of folk was a big deal back in the day. (Ed Norton‘s marvellous supporting turn as folkie Pete Seeger really captures the man’s uniquely kind heart and endearing dorkiness.)

As anyone who’s dipped their toes into the vast waters of Dylanology knows, there’s an infinite number of Bobs in the Dylanverse. (At least 80, as I painstakingly rambled on about a few years ago!) There’s no way A Complete Unknown, which follows a fairly basic biopic blueprint, could satisfy everyone, and we’ve certainly got cinema bizarro like Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There or Bob-starring oddities like Masked And Anonymous to fill any taste. 

Watching Martin Scorcese’s superb documentary No Direction Home again recently, which follows Dylan’s 1966 tour of Britain in some dazzlingly vibrant footage, I was struck by how angry many of the British fans interviewed at the time were with Dylan’s new style. “I think he’s prostituting himself,” one barks. Yet to my eyes now, the hyper electric Dylan of 1966 is quite possibly his finest era. God only knows what would’ve happened if social media existed at the time.

Unknown works for me because it never quite pretends to be definitive, and knows there’s many more alternate Bob stories to be told. But hey, it’s turning new audiences on to Dylan music, got a bunch of Oscar nods, and is a reminder that after nearly 84 years walking this Earth, there’s still nobody quite like him. 

Is it 100% true? It’s pretty and darned entertaining, but perhaps its biggest success is in carefully keeping Bob Dylan’s true motivations a complete unknown. 

Who is the greatest actor of our time and why is it Willem Dafoe?

Honestly, in my mind, a good character actor beats the heck out of a box office superstar every day. Rising stars like Timothée Chalamet or Glen Powell, sure, they do fine stuff, but give me a good turn by a supporting scene-stealer like John Turturro, Michael Stuhlbarg, Stephen McKinley Henderson, the late great Lance Reddick, Walter Goggins or the inevitable Stephen Root, and I’m in heaven. 

And the king of the character actors these days has to be Willem Dafoe, surely the only man who can claim to have played Jesus Christ, the vampire Nosferatu and the Green Goblin. 

Dafoe is a character actor who’s worked his way up to the A-list. Anytime Dafoe is on screen, his wired presence takes over – in the space of a few days, I watched him as a hilarious bad actor-turned-ghost cop in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and then as a dogged eccentric vampire slayer in the superb new Nosferatu by Robert Eggers. (Because he’s Willem Dafoe, he of course also played that titular vampire himself in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, and got an Oscar nomination for it!)

As he ages, Dafoe has honed his intense charm to a fine tone, able to play creeps and heroes equally well. He turns 70 this year but seems as full of curiosity and a willingness to experiment as a teenager.

He’s been doing this for more than 40 years now and while, regrettably, he’s never won an Oscar, he’s been a key player in acclaimed movies like Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and The English Patient. He’s worked with the finest directors of our time like Wes Anderson, David Lynch, Werner Herzog, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos.

There is always a hint of tensely restrained violence to Dafoe, which contrasts with his generally genial offscreen character.

When he’s bad, he’s unforgettable. His lounge lizard killer (and hideous rotting teeth) in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart still haunts me, as do his blunt brutal hitman in The Grand Budapest Hotel or his layered Norman Osborn in the 2002 Spider-Man movie, which was so good he was brought back to reprise the role nearly 20 years later in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

But it’s the tenderness he can also summon up that hits the hardest, whether his remarkable Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s underrated Last Temptation of Christ, the mutilated Dr Frankenstein avatar in Poor Things, Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate or his Oscar-nominated turn in the heartbreaking The Florida Project. 

A lot of actors have a type, which they cash in on and play until the money stops rolling in (Chris Pratt, I’m looking at you). But Dafoe seems happy to try to be anybody, like a good character actor should. 

Dafoe’s not afraid to go hard in all-out weird cinema like The Lighthouse or Antichrist, then turn around and appear in the latest MCU blockbuster too. 

An incredibly prolific actor, he’s not always utilised to his full potential – I’m still struggling to figure out why the heck he was in Aquaman, really – but he pretty much always makes the movies he’s in a better place.

Stars come and go, but character actors – man, they just burn hard the whole way through. 

“Now it’s dark” – All our heroes go away eventually

It’s inescapable that older one gets the more people you lose, whether it’s family or the creators and icons you look up to. I could turn this into a full-time obituary blog these days if I wanted to, I reckon, but one also has to grasp for the light sometimes. All our heroes go away eventually.

And honestly, any celebrity death, no matter who, is probably never going to strike me quite like the big loss that blots out the sky for me, my father’s passing last May. That’s the kind of shattering experience you somehow get through, but you’re never really the same, are you? Life is marked in before and after now.

The last celebrity death I think I really cried over was David Bowie, because it just seemed so utterly shocking at the time – the man just put out a new album, he wasn’t even 70, and everyone knows you don’t up and die during an album release window. That one hurt, in the sort of unsettling way that maybe leaves a person thinking you’ll never quite let yourself be that vulnerable again to a celebrity death. And so, Prince, just two months later, was awful as well, but it didn’t hit me as a hammerblow to the brain. 

We’ve lost two of my favourites in just a week – film genius David Lynch, who left us at 78, and the legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whose death today at 95 was just announced. Two very different men but two whose work really shaped me and how I look at the world. 

There’s been a lot said about David Lynch this week and I don’t know much more I can add to the discourse other than to say, the man rewired your brains. I remember scrambling to watch Twin Peaks my freshman year in college, where I didn’t even own a TV, having to borrow a tiny portable model from someone in the dorm. I’d never seen anything quite like this combination of American mystery and menace. A couple years later a friend and I watched a VHS of Eraserhead and at the end sat stunned, gasping, muttering “What? What?!?” over and over again. Lynch did that for you. 

The night he died I watched Blue Velvet again for the nth time, and like any masterpiece, every time I see it, it unfolds slightly differently to me. The unmistakable brilliance of the opening credits, American beauty crashing up against the rot underneath – this week, this month, this deranged moment in American history, we all need to pay more attention to the bugs beneath the earth, chittering away. Kyle Maclachlan’s jaunty student discovering the evil underneath, and the unanswerable question – how do we get past the bad things?  

Jules Feiffer was a little more underground, perhaps, but his fingerprints were surely on something you watched or read – besides his long-running cartoon in the Village Voice, he was quite possibly the last living link to the Golden Age of comic books, blustering his way into a job with the legendary Will Eisner at just 16 or so and then ending up working on the iconic Spirit. He wrote books of comic history that broke new ground, he drew The Phantom Tollboth classic children’s book, he wrote scrappy novels, he wrote the screenplays for both Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman’s Popeye and two more different movies you could scarcely imagine. He was drawing right up until the end at age 95.

Feiffer was never a classically great artist, but that was the point – his scribbled, sketchy lines danced with expression, his bitter wit on everything from romance to Richard Nixon stung in a way most young political cartoonists would dream of. When I was a kid, my parents had Feiffer’s Marriage Manual on a shelf in their bedroom, where the kind of adult books were kept. I snuck a look at it and his wiry, intense takes on love and romance turned out not to be full of nekkid ladies, but instead a kind of naked, barbed genius that hooked me instantly. Cartoons could be about life! Whether it was books, comics, movies, plays, Feiffer was the kind of renaissance man creator that quietly helped shape the 20th century. He sure shaped me. 


“Now it’s dark,” the vile Frank Booth whispers in Blue Velvet shortly before unspeakable acts.

I’ve accepted we will see more and more go like they did in 2024 – author Paul Auster, whose tense and vibrant books never stopped wondering at life’s mysteries; The Chills’ Martin Phillipps, whose music summed up New Zealand to me; perpetually surly character actor Dabney Coleman, whose Slap Maxwell Story is still one of the best cranky journalists performances I’ve seen; CAN’s unmistakable voice Damo Suzuki and the MC5’s scorching guitarist Wayne Kramer; Gena Rowlands, whose naked honesty scorched the silver screen; the tragic Ed Piskor, prolific, detailed and often-dazzling cartoonist gone too soon to suicide; Donald Sutherland, who said more with a raised eyebrow than many do their whole career; smiling Carl Weathers, who seemed poured out of liquid muscles in the Rocky movies that I watched endlessly; John Cassady, whose ripplingly beautiful art in Planetary, X-Men and others seemed too good to be true; Paul Fry, one of my journalism mentors and a hell of a guy; the small press comics creator Larry Blake, whose precise art deserved a wider audience; President Jimmy Carter, perhaps the last good man. And so many more. That’s just the tip of those who left in the past year or so. 

It’s a lot. No matter what we do, they all keep going, and one day we’ll go, too. But they leave the shapes behind.

But maybe it’s Dad’s death, maybe it’s just that we live in a world of constant troubles and you can’t live with hate and regrets in your heart the whole time, but I’ve been trying to accept the dark and admire the light a little more this past 8 months or so. 

It all gets muddled together, the losses we face in this life. 

I hate that it does get dark, that David Lynch will make no more films and Jules Feiffer will draw no more cartoons, but they left us so much. I will pull out my Feiffer paperbacks and smile and I will head down to the marvellous local revival cinema and see some of David Lynch’s movies on the big screen next month. 

I keep dreaming about my Dad a lot lately, the brain puttering away while I sleep, doing the strange work of processing life. I don’t mind that. He’s still here, really. They all are.

In dreams I walk with you

In dreams I talk to you

RIP President Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter pretty much outlived all of them, didn’t he?

I published a lengthy piece back in September just before Carter turned 100, by far the longest lived US President in history. (Funnily, I actually first wrote it back in 2023 sometime, thinking it would be as a nice obituary tribute to run somewhere, but old Jimmy just kept on going!)

Anyway, it says all the things I feel about Carter, who was perhaps not the best of presidents if you measure his term, but, as his long life and endless service shows, he was one of the best of men. It’s a kind of life that seems very, very far away at the dawn of this next presidency, but it’s one that I keep hoping that someday perhaps will influence a braver, smarter generation.

Here’s my tribute to Jimmy Carter at 100.

To quote that great Blue Mountain song, which I sure hope an awful lot of people will get to hear in the coming days,

“Well he said I’d never lie to you, and what’s more he never did. Though the times grew mighty tough, he never flipped his lid. So shake the hand of the man, with a hand full of love. The one and only Jimmy Carter.”