“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."—Louisa May Alcott

The King’s Necktie is a blog about politics and culture by Robert Edwards, a writer and filmmaker based in New York City. An Army brat, Edwards was born in a US Army hospital in Germany and grew up on and around military installations across the US, attending ten schools in thirteen years, including a brief overlap with Barack Obama at Punahou School in Honolulu. (Shockingly omitted from all of Barack’s books.) He served for six and a half years as an infantry and military intelligence officer in the US Army, and was a captain in the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. His father, Robert H. Edwards, was a rifle company commander in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965, as memorialized in We Were Soldiers Once….and Young” by Lt. General (Ret.) Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway.

After leaving the service, Edwards worked as a telemarketer, a private eye, and nightclub doorman before earning an MA from the Graduate Program in Documentary Film at Stanford. As a filmmaker, he wrote and directed the feature films Land of the Blind (2006) starring Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland, and When I Live My Life Over Again (aka One More Time) (2016), starring Christopher Walken and Amber Heard, as well as screenplays for directors including Bennett Miller, Mark Romanek, and Antoine Fuqua. As a documentarian, Edwards works with his wife and partner, director/ cinematographer Ferne Pearlstein (winner of the 2004 Sundance Cinematography Prize for her work on Ramona Diaz’s Imelda). Their most recent film was The Last Laugh (2016), about the Holocaust as the last taboo subject for humor, starring Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner, Alan Zweibel, Harry Shearer, Susie Essman, Gilbert Gottfried, Larry Charles, David Steinberg, Shalom Auslander, Etgar Keret, Renee Firestone, and many others.

Edwards and Pearlstein live in Brooklyn with their daughter, as mandated by law.

(And yes, I know the quote is really from Jean Meslier.)


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Dispatches from the American twilight. A progressive view on politics, culture, yada yada yada, from a former US military officer.

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Dispatches from the American twilight. A progressive view on politics, culture, yada yada yada, from a former US military officer.