Film, Television, Sex, Music, Literature, Pop
Story Dollars Stories are cheap. We tell them to each other every day. I write them here for free, except for what little ad revenue comes in off my blog. In keeping with my resolution to think “keenly” about spending a small fortune making a movie, I wanted to riff a little on what prompts..
A Feature Film I had lunch yesterday with a very successful Christian writer, producer and media professor; we want to collaborate on something, and the likely candidate is a Courage, New Hampshire feature film. At the risk of sounding like I’m stalling, I need to think this trough more keenly than I have in the..
It’s a winter cabin and I think I’m a teenager, but it’s a Scandinavian family I’m hanging out with in a cold, northern forest. One of the daughters is called “Susie of God.” I ask the teenager my age if he’s studying European History. He says, “yes and next week Czechoslovakia.” I ask if I..
A kiss for luck.. So I tried to understand why old pop love songs made me a little blue—actually more than a little blue, why they put me in touch with my mortality as I was driving around town last week. It occurred to me that I wasn’t moved by the celebration of human love,..
What do Old Men Do with Love Songs? My older sister once observed that the Beach Boys made false promises about what growing up would look like, but I think you could say the same thing about symphonies and drunken hornpipes as well. Music serves up the sort of euphoria that can evaporate in the..
A multitude of counselors Unable to sleep, in the wee hours this morning, a Facebook red square blinked across the room at me: An old friend and former employee was concerned about a YouTube video he had been trying to process. Issues of history and family and salvation were at stake, so I hit the..
So I’m in Pasadena right now, sort of over-planning a 40th year high school reunion, and I got to wondering about the human need to party. I’m in the celebration business, more or less all the time. We call it “Riley’s Farm,” but it’s a bit more like Bing Crosby’s “Holiday Inn” — one seasonal..
There are two halves to this duplex, and from the beginning a gentler, more quiet branch of humanity, wearing conservative Sunday School clothing, is gathered in one half. I greet them upon entrance and departure, but apparently tonight is about the wedding going on in the other half of the building, where a huge hypocrisy..
In which I claim John Piper is too stupid, or evil, to be a man of God.. When you’re trying to divide and conquer, foment racial tension, and thereby shore up a voting block anxious for more goodies, it never hurts to have a reformed mega-pulpit like John Piper’s on your side. But it still..
The farm is a huge, sprawling bizarre, heavily populated day and night, and it appears to be in the same place, but it now has Corfu-like colonnades, very narrow cobblestone roads, beach fronts, the steam horns of shipping in the harbor, and tightly spaced medieval and renaissance store fronts, along with the standard western towns..
