• Film/TV - Personal Reflections

    To That Bounding, Swirling Dog in the Park, and Leonardo da Vinci, and
    My Sister Edie

    November 22, 2024 - By 

    A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last. Onwards it goes, resuming its…

  • Film/TV

    “Will & Harper” & the Long Road of “Transitioning” To a True Self

    October 19, 2024 - By 

    We Americans are suckers for buddy road trips. Two young-ish guys, a guy and a gal, two gals, it matters not. Fill up a suitcase, an ice chest and the gas tank, take the top down if you can, plop into the car, and tool on down the highway, stopping where and when you please, keeping the trigger finger in your brain always cocked for adventure. It’s a vast and gorgeous country, after all, and most of the people in it are right nice when you get out and meet them face to face. Road trips are a fine way…

  • Film/TV - Music

    Jon Batiste Learns to Breathe in Monumental “American Symphony”

    June 23, 2024 - By 

    There’s a scene some 40 minutes into Netflix’s stirring documentary on musician/composer Jon Batiste when his adult self is back on the piano bench with his long ago teacher from Juilliard School of Music, working on Beethoven’s “Appassionata” sonata. Batiste starts in and his teacher brings him up short within seconds, even grabbing his hand off the piano as he sternly implores, “You have to breathe; you are not breathing!” The teacher demonstrates, Batiste tries again, the teacher stops him again and says, “If you don’t breathe, it’s like a computer, it doesn’t express anything. You want life. Breathe!” In…

  • History - Photography - Politics/Culture

    Photojournalist James Nachtwey: Pictures Worth All the Views a Heart Can Bear

    March 20, 2024 - By 

    So much suffering. Catastrophe upon catastrophe, really, the long chronicle of humanity’s vast inhumanity and indifference to our fellow humans a kind of psychosis draped in the flags of country, religion, revolution, and perhaps the most fundamental, reptilian attachment of all: greed. We want to look away, of course, the poet having long ago told us we “cannot bear very much reality.” In truth, it is natural, and human, and necessary, to carry on so the world’s accumulated misery does not plunder our own capacity for the joy and love and yes, frivolity and ease that should also be everyone’s…

  • Film/TV - Personal Reflections

    Why I Quit Watching “The Sopranos”

    January 27, 2024 - By 

    When my daughter was four or five years old, we took her to a highly touted “children’s movie” animation having to do with the escapades of a pony finding its way through fraught circumstances. I remember neither the title nor anything else to do with the plot save this: at one point, the pony was tied to a stake and thrashing helplessly as foreboding music swelled and some evil force prepared to descend upon it. The movie ended for us right then because my daughter began to sob uncontrollably, fear and sorrow etched full upon her face. After a few…