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,..
Category: Culture - page 13
Film, Television, Sex, Music, Literature, Pop
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..
So there’s a film that can’t be finished, right now at least, because the director is alleged to be some sort of sexual predator and all the attention and speculation is giving the predator “health issues.” The details of this particular story, for the sake of my inquiry, don’t matter. This is just one of..
It’s a sprawling night time landscape—full of chain link, vacant lots, ranch houses, horse corrals, trailer homes—and I’m walking it in a robe, without any particular concern for my appearance. It must be two o’clock in the morning, but the neighborhood feels safe. It’s just that I have no idea where I am. I consider..
Don’t Analyze These I should have used the peephole in the hotel door, but I just let him in. It was a dumb thing to do. There was cash all over the room, and this guy was huge — and miffed about something. “Is Frank still here?” he asked. “Yes,” I told him. Frank Sinatra..