“YOU DON’T HAVE TO be a videogame freak.” I heard that reassurance on my way in to see Steven Spielberg’s newest extravaganza ‘Ready Player One’, which arrives in theaters everywhere next week. It’s based, after all, on Ernest Cline’s 2011 barnstormer young-adult novel of the same name – which memorably made USA Today hail the author as “the hottest geek on the planet”.

Dateline: Austin, Texas – I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SAY ‘SIDESHOW’. But I’ve noticed something while here on my annual foray to SXSW, that gigantic combination of movies, music and all matters digital (plus growing spin-offs like education, video-gaming, comedy and more) that now pulls almost half-a-million participants into the Texan capital.

A DEVELOPING STORY that’s being tucked away here and there across our national media deserves a lot more attention. Its main attraction? Well, it features a crude and deeply corrupt President who is also allegedly a sexual predator.

LIKE MANY POWERFUL STORIES, this one starts in a black South African township. One day in the early 1950s, a boy was photographed jumping for joy.

Much later – this week in fact – the boy died, by then a world-renowned troubadour called Hugh Masakela. Fans everywhere mourned his death from prostate cancer at 78 years of age.     In South Africa he was dubbed Bra Hu (‘Brother Hugh’) a comradely designation earned largely for the activist tilt of his work.

STORIES, I’VE HEARD TELL, are the lifeblood of societies and cultures. Whether they’re factual reporting … convincingly true-to-life fiction … or gripping, incredible fantasies … we all do seem to need ‘em. They can pump through our system with rousing drive, or calm and reassure us like a soothing heartbeat.

Actor John Lithgow, in his much-traveled one-man show that came to rest and opened tonight on Broadway, poses a fundamental question to his audience when the show begins. Why do we tell and listen to stories?    

SHE BOUNCES, almost tumbles onto the stage, All-American. But with the look of a French écolière as well. The high-necked, long-sleeved gray smock-dress, red beret and a single tightly-braided pigtail provide the Gallic touches.

IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN. It’s The Media Beat‘s annual celebration of entertaining media errors (and efforts to put things right) that have caught my eye since our last unashamedly un-collegial exercise in journalistic schadenfreude … lo, these full twelve months ago.

TRAVEL JUST FOUR MILES from Heraklion International Airport on the Greek island of Crete, and you have gone back four thousand years to the Minoan Civilization.

IT’S NOT MY TRADITION – indeed I don’t really have one – but I appreciate the Jewish practice of Yahrzeit, honoring the dead one year after their death, in part by lighting a candle.

Here’s my lighted candle.

My wife for a quarter-century and more was Melissa Huff Bellinelli Tereshchuk – what a plodding polysyllabic procession if I line up all her names, as she once did for a lark on a business-card. She died on October 15th last year. Her death came after seven years of being treated for ovarian cancer.

IT CANNOT BE OFTEN that the work of a septuagenarian artist goes viral. Patrick Hughes, a trompe l’oeil specialist from the UK has just opened an exhibition in the art Mecca of Chelsea, New York, one of several held here during his long career. But he comes on this occasion trailing clouds of digital glory.  

Backstory – November 2015: A tourist from Australia sees a Hughes piece on show in Birmingham, England … is bemused by its puzzling visual effects … shoots a none-too-steady video of it by simply walking his iPhone slowly in front of the work … posts it to social media sites …. and eventually it ends up being seen – if we count all platforms from YouTube and Facebook to WhatsApp and Reddit – by over 19 million people, and still counting …

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.