Category: Blood, Water & Šljivovica, 1981-2014
Inspired by Michael Ignatieff’s “Blood and Belonging”, these posts explore my 3 decades in a Serbian diaspora from an adoptee’s POV. In them, I look at the similarities and contrasts of the the immigrant and the adoptee. Both are viewed as dangerous outsiders, but they are in no way the same. The difference – the chasm that exists between an adoptee with no known roots and ghostly familial ties trying to raise two boys, and tradition- and family-bound immigrant clans. Drink plays a large role in this society, so this is also an exposition of my slide into the arms of the Liquid Vampire. I was handed the role of a lifetime, so in “Letters to my Boys”, I look at the adoptee as father in the context of that Serbian experience.
Fodder for Fiction: Adoptees & Orphans in Literature, Film & the Arts
How are Adoptees and Orphans in portrayed in Literature, Film and the Arts? Who are they? Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Orphan Annie, It seems as though writers make adoptees and orphans their protagonists a lot. Is it because they’ve more mysterious / tragic pasts, uncertain presents and futures? Is it because their presents and…
Adoptee as Vampire
Adoptee as Vampire Vampire, noun: A revenant is a deceased person returning from the dead to haunt the living, either as a disembodied ghost or an animated (“undead”) corpse. In European folklore, a corpse supposed to leave its grave at night to drink the blood of the living by biting their necks with long pointed…
Betty Blue & My life for the next 30 years
Big picture post about how this movie ripped me from a parochial life in the backwater of London, Ontario and sent me headlong into the Toronto life. add in the handful of European adventures, but ends with her explosive personality finally making me pitch everything I loved for a life among the Dead Souls. Well,…
Sally of the Sawdust
The first time I saw a WC Fields pic was in 1979 at UWO’s University College theatre. They’d been screening DW Griffith’s pics Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The brief respite from these Hollywood’s classics was the silent short, Sally of the Sawdust. When her circus mother dies after being disowned, young Sally (Carol…
Bravo!
I am truly amazed by all actors, musicians and assorted entertainers. Regardless of talent, genre, hype, etc., the ability to PERFORM on cue in front of a single person, a group of people, or in front of the disinterested, curious, or rabid masses, is something very, very special.
Blood, Water & Šljivovica: In the Shadows of the Ghost Kingdom 