The Righteousness of Failure I watched a screener last night that my wife gets as a member of the SAG/AFTRA Nominating Committee. It’s the movie called Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway and I have been seeing trailers of it lately, so I was anxious to see it. It comes nineteen years after Erin Brockovich showed the world the power of class action suits against corporate polluters. This excellent new movie has a…
Cat on a Curtain A metaphor I have enjoyed using for many years is that of a cat on a curtain. We can all envisage a scared and jittery cat jumping up to cling to a sheer curtain and digging its claws into the flimsy fabric with its unsupported draping flow. It is an image of utter fear combined with a very insecure foundation of support for the wary feline. The metaphor conjures an…
Memory Lapse Yes, Ambassador Gordon Sondland forgot he had said this and that, that he had done this and that and that he had called President Trump from a Kiev restaurant and then admitted to embassy staffers that Trump cared only about his own political goals in Ukraine. Yes, Trump doesn’t seem to remember what he said about this or that or in whatever formal response to the Special Counsel he may or may…
Sunshine Came Softly In 1966 I was twelve and had just moved from Bitter cold Wisconsin to bitter cold and snowy Maine, all in the month of February. Donovan, the folk/jazz/psychedelic/rock/pop singer from Scotland was breaking into the United States music scene with his Sunshine Superman album. The strange and lilting voice of the Highlander has always struck me as the quintessential voice of the Sixties. Maybe it was the cadence or the melody. …
The Ferrari Effect Last week I wrote a story about cancer. It used a little movie called The Art of Racing in the Rain to develop the theme that life is fragile and fleeting and that everyone needs to learn how to operate under the inclement conditions of life. The story is told through a golden retriever named Enzo, as in Enzo Ferrari. And sure enough, the main protagonist ends up becoming a test track…
The Reality of Being Demented For those of you who want to put your hands over your ears and not listen, now would be the time to do it. Donald Trump is demented and his Congressional sycophantic Republican acolytes are both enablers and at very least misguided. Yesterday was the first day of the public impeachment hearings. Starting our day at our friends’ apartment in San Francisco, and given the three hour time zone difference,…
The San Francisco Treat Several months ago I happened to ask my wife to make some Rice-A-Roni for me for dinner. Neither she nor her brother (who was helping with the cooking) took the request literally and they ended up making rice with some spices and other additions that seemed to them to be a far fresher and more interesting dish than anything that might come out of a box. Rice-A-Roni was invented sixty years…
Coloring Outside the Lines What we learn in kindergarten is supposed to stay with us and help us for the rest of our lives. As best I recall, we weren’t doing geometry in kindergarten. We were learning how to socialize. That means getting along with others and behaving ourselves under the guidance of authority. I can’t prove it, but I suspect there was some coloring going on during kindergarten. It makes perfectly good sense to…
The Land of Plenty Kim and I are spending the weekend in the wine country north of San Francisco Bay. What an unusual place this is, and I mean this whole area in general. To begin with, California enjoys a history that seems so much richer than much of the rest of the country. This was the place of the largest mass migration in history. It has been called “the land of milk and honey”…
Does Dying Really Hurt? Lawrence stood well over four feet tall. That was his protective armor against a world that enjoyed denigrating people over physical attributes like height, over which people had very little governance. If he had said he was well over five feet tall, that would have been defensive and not at all funny. If he had noted that he was proud to be a short person he would have sounded both defensive…