Dateline: Aubais, Southern France – IT’S NOW MORE than a week since I ventured first to Paris, ahead of President Donald J Trump, and then on down to the Département du Gard.

Like many French citizens, and those of many countries, I expect, I was pained but not surprised by Trump’s use of France’s Fête Nationale to posture for the world’s media – his attempt (you might say) to impersonate a world leader.    His performance in Paris – and the media throughout Europe had a mocking field-day with it – was simply lamentable. Or to employ his own lame tweetage … it was: “SAD”.

OF COURSE George Orwell’s dystopian political fable 1984, first published in 1949, has strong relevance for our age. It has relevance for all ages.

It’s no surprise that the book leapt to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list the weekend that our current US President was being inaugurated. Or that the very word dystopia has also leapt into such common usage – and for many people has switched in application from describing some fantastical future to labeling our real-world present.

“THIS WILL HAVE BEEN another Happy Day … after all” is one of the many repeated and deeply ambiguous refrains that we hear. It forms a rough, hemp-like strand running through Samuel Beckett’s horribly ironic, cuttingly satirical play Happy Days.

IT’S ENTERED THE LANGUAGE and become a fixture, that not-entirely-convincing adage: Six Degrees of Separation. Only four other intervening people, supposedly, are needed to connect any two individuals in the world that we might pick.

BETTE MIDLER – “Hello Dolly” – On Broadway! “What else do you need to know?” ask the TV commercials for this apparently hard-to-fail concoction.

Well, in response to those ads … I’d say that, apart from dates, times, ticket-prices, etc … we might also need to know that this classic musical from 1964 is these days looking and feeling tired.

THE KKK IS A BENIGN FORCE. That is, when it’s the Kinetic Kevin Kline.

Of course this multidextrous actor repeatedly brings his universally acknowledged comic genius to film, tv and theater performances – as well as, just as often, profoundly serious dramatic mastery. But this time it’s specifically his movements that dominate, during his tent-pole performance in the new Broadway revival of Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter”, at the St James Theatre until July.

DATELINE : Austin, Texas – THREE INTO ONE WILL GO. It’s proven every year at South By South West. The proof comes as we convene in the Texan capital during March, braiding together the festivals’ three strands: of music … of film … and of digital arts and sciences — that third category being stamped since 1999 with the vague rubric “Interactive” … which is still accurate more often than it isn’t.

NOW IT’S THE TURN OF THE IRISH. America’s media industry has been, like it has for many years, observing Black History Month in February, and as we make the turn into March it’s considered a good time to be emphasizing all matters Irish – if only because St Patrick’s Day happens to fall a little over half-way through the month.  

AS THE MOVIE industry indulges itself in awards and congratulations at Oscar time, here on the East Coast the medium of stage drama has hit one of its own commanding heights. And crucial to its success is a movie star, Jake Gyllenhaal.

On January 14 2017, the PBS NewsHour Weekend carried  David Tereshchuk‘s interview with the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, part of his overall profile of Khan as the first Muslim to run any Western-world capital city.

With the Gilded Age of Trump about to dawn … I’ve become almost desperately eager as a news consumer for some different journalism to leaven the prevailing diet of outraged disgust vying with abject hero-worship.

WASHINGTON SLOUCHES TOWARD Inauguration Day like the poet’s rough beast – and yes, I have found myself in the nation’s capital once again.

I’ve mercifully not been covering preparations for the (gilded?) Trump Presidency, but I did complete a journalistic exercise that has its own relevance for our new age.

WE IN THE MEDIA MADE MORE MISTAKES in 2016 than in any previous year, ever. I feel confident in baldly stating that as incontrovertible fact.

Where, after all, is the data to contradict me? And to whom would I have to apologize anyway?

A PRESIDENT-ELECT STARTS, as he said he would at some point, to act Presidential. In the early hours of Wednesday November 9th Donald J Trump claimed victory and said among other things “We must reclaim our country’s destiny.”

It was a somewhat elevated version of his “Make America Great Again” slogan, stepping up a bit from the 3rd-Grade level vocabulary that has characterized Trump when not sticking to a scripted delivery.  

IT CAN’T HAVE ESCAPED your notice, especially given American election coverage, that the media possess an deeply inbuilt tendency to finger-point and to blame.

An early professional role-model of mine decreed to those of us under his influence that: “All serious journalism boils down to two simple variants – WE NAME THE GUILTY MAN … and … ARROW POINTS TO DEFECTIVE PART”.

ECLIPSED, that striking depiction, as fictional drama, of women in crisis – Liberian women to be specific – closed last night after its 15-week Broadway run.

But not before dedicating its 117th Golden Theater performance to saving the lives of Liberian women in reality. That life-saving work is being carried out on the ground by The Women: Global Cancer Initiative (TheWomen.org) whose main international program is testing for and treating female cancers in Liberia, and also sexually-transmitted diseases.  

THE THEATER WORLD, rightly, was shadowed but not fully darkened by the Orlando terrorist hate-crime, as the Tony Awards ceremony presented the all-conquering Hamilton cast performing the Battle of Yorktown – rather bizarrely, but pointedly and arrestingly – with firearms completely removed from the scene.  

THE DEVIL IS REPUTED by some to have had all the best tunes. But those claiming to be on the side of the angels can often have the better technique.

Sometimes, though, they’ll employ that advantage in what amounts to an abuse of power bordering on the devilish.

UNNOTICED GLOBAL developments are something of an obsession with me. I had my attention stirred recently by a lot of media attention that focused on the whole continent of Africa being officially expected to lower its economic growth-rate this year. But I was stirred even more (with angry disappointment) by how few media outlets stressed how phenomenally high the continent’s growth-rate has been over the past twenty years.   

THE SOUTH BY SOUTH-WEST Festival of 2016 finally finished this week. In the end it seemed, more sprawlingly than ever, to take over the city of Austin for even longer than I previously remember – and I’ve now been an attendee for a dozen years or so.