Film, Television, Sex, Music, Literature, Pop
Dazed and Confused Since the outbreak of Covid in March of 2020 — twenty-two months now — I continue to make this sad confession: “I still have no idea what is going on.” I am not, of course, talking about the obvious contours of the crisis. A dangerous virus is getting people sick and killing..
A Cloud of Sadness One of the most “centered” people I know — a winsome young lady whose good cheer promised better times when our entire extended family was feuding — confessed to being bewildered by a cloud of sadness descending on the world. She’s not alone. The Weinsteins, on their DarkHorse Podcast, recently wondered which author..
The Regularizing Influence: I was a nerdy grind in my late 1970s public high school, but the television was on quite a bit at home, with the usual cycle: afternoon re-runs of the Rifleman and Ozzie & Harriet, followed by evening news, a break for family dinner, a few mom-approved sitcoms and then, sometimes, nightly..
In the era of blogs and podcasts and independent, streaming news, I’ve been hesitant to agree when people blame “the media” for our problems. Personally, I can’t imagine taking CNN or MSNBC’s word for anything. I certainly don’t agree with everything I hear on Fox and I can’t imagine slogging through a daily diet of..
Review Sometimes a really awful movie franchise comes along and you are almost lucky enough to miss it completely, but a local theater crime last week, described as an unprovoked double homicide, can’t help but pose the question: does Critical Race Theory, popularized in C movies, lead dumb people to do evil things? Time, and..
A Dream: The rooftop patio of a red brick restaurant. Bougainvillea, Spanish iron hinges everywhere, flamboyant Toucans, a great concourse of friends and family — and Joe Biden, who is my responsibility for some reason. He’s standing in one of those shower stalls you see on the beach, except that it’s up on the top..
I woke up this morning with a kind of agitated melancholy, trying to summon up the plot of a dream that involved the landscapes of the San Gabriel Valley in my youth. It was some sort of Alta Dena/Sierra Madre back street, hilly, lined with tire shops and liquor stores. A guy in a jean..
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford University, reminds the alumni, on the anniversary of George Floyd’s death, that awful things have happened in this country, that these awful things are being studied, that new “clusters” of race-specialist faculty are being hired to combat the awful things, that they have a flashy new acronym (“IDEAL” — Inclusion,..
Seen yesterday: at least a dozen spry old guys in their late 70s, at various points on the beach, trotting along in wet suits, with long boards under their arms, flirting with bikini-clad women five decades their junior. Silver-chested endless summer. Jimmy Buffett lives. Surf culture, which was once young, cheap and rebel-spirited is now..
Is it just me or is it even more crazy than usual? Most of us sense the big streak of pure crazy at the heart of the world’s order — that vast pool of “plain wrong” billowing up like dangerous waters below us. Christianity makes it no less than a central dictate: “Do not love..
