Life is Beautiful Do you remember the 1997 Italian film by Roberto Benigni by the same name? You should, it was a Best Picture nominee and won Best Foreign Film and Best Actor for Benigni, who played the happy-go-lucky Guido, who guides his little son through the horrors of Nazi concentration camp life by making a game of it all. It is a poignant, funny, but ultimately sad movie that has a powerful and…
Dying Too Soon Today my youngest son and I went to go see a movie that had a lousy Rotten Tomatoes score of 43. I was skeptical of the score since the fan rating was 79 and it starred Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup and Michelle Williams. The movie was After the Wedding. It’s the story of a successful entrepreneurial woman (Moore) and her sculptor husband (Crudup) who wants to make a large charitable gift to…
Indian Giving One of my favorite possessions is a stone and copper outdoor statue of a reclining Socrates. This is a life-sized Socrates, who’s draped toga is a rough field stone that is shaped just so, to look like a reclined flowing robe. Nature crafted it thus and caught the eye of the artist. The artist attached a head, arms and feet made of copper and adding the element of realism to the subtle…
Just Another Monday Morning Labor Day 2019 has little labor in store for me. I am up early, as usual, only a bit earlier since I was exceedingly tired last night and hit the hay by 9:30pm since I had Nyquiled myself into a stupor. It takes a lot of tired to cause me to be unable to write and I had a sufficient dose to do the trick. I still can’t tell if I’m…
Every Picture Tells a Story There are two ways in which we acquire art. The less obvious way is that when I have bought a house (primary or secondary or, even tertiary) I am usually quite rabid about getting the place set up to be immediately useable. To me, usable means with art on the walls. That approach requires me to be a devotee of art.com, where I shop for and buy relatively inexpensive artwork…
Summer’s End No matter who you are, in the United States we all know summer starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. And the July 4th holiday is more or less mid-summer. That’s how we roll in the good old US of A. It doesn’t matter that colleges end in early May, and public schools end in late June. Most colleges start in late August, but at least most public schools start…
Cogito, Ergo Sum This morning my head is swirling with thoughts after watching a Broadway rendition of Hadestown. The show is a revival of a Greek mythological story, like so many other great tales. The details of the myth and the story are somewhat irrelevant, but suffice to say that it does what it is supposed to do, which is to ignite thought. I imagine that the Golden Age of Greece certainly raised the…
Loving New York In 1964 I made my first trip to New York City. I may have been here before that but at age ten I can remember the visit with my mother and sisters on a visit from our home in Middleton, Wisconsin. We drove there in our white Chrysler New Yorker, strangely enough. We went to see the World’s Fair, which proved to be especially significant to my view of the future…
This is the Job The eerily omniscient Mark Felt movie ended at 9pm. What an unbelievable story; a President with henchmen installed in DOJ, CIA and FBI and all other agencies who give more loyalty to a misguided and ill-intentioned traitor of a leader than to the nation and people they are meant to serve. That couldn’t possibly happen again, could it? And now I was looking for another movie to take me through to…
Coping: If You Can’t Fix It On my flight to San Diego, the movie list included Brokeback Mountain. Between Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway and Randy Quaid, it’s quite a movie. It is, in my opinion, one of the best stories about the human condition that I can think of. When I went back several years ago to find the original book by Annie Proulx, I was surprised to find that it…