You Sunk My Battleship! The war in Ukraine has had many interesting twists and turns, but none more so than yesterday’s sinking of the Russian Flag Battleship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. As all the news pundits have been saying, this was less a strategic military victory than a meaningful symbolic victory for Ukraine, who has claimed credit for the sinking. Naturally, Russia is denying that the ship was sunk by a Ukrainian missile…
All The King’s Men Every time I think we have finally gotten past the shadow of the Donald Trump presidency, something takes me back and I find myself thrown back into the desperation of feeling like I’m that poor inmate stuck under the thumb of Ida Lupino, who plays an evil warden in the 1955 film Women’s Prison. The horror of that film is less about what goes on physically in the prison than the…
A Walk in the Clouds There is a wonderful 1995 film with Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn called A Walk in the Clouds. It is set in the vineyards of Northern California and is an epic tale of a family’s struggle to maintain its heredity among the changing winds of time that buffet the world after WWII. There is something about that time and place that resonates with me and whenever I see or think…
The Glorious Mid-Century If you spend any time watching House Hunter shows on HGTV or DIY Network (aka Magnolia Network), you have watched people rave about mid-century this or mid-century that. It is not atypical that we look back at the past with rose-colored glasses. Every generation does it to some degree. The past always looks rosier, probably because we remember the good and forget the bad. There is also the reality that looking back…
Winstons I Have Known I don’t know nor have I known too many Winstons in my life. The name first came into recorded existence in 1880 and since then there have been over 27,000 males recorded with that name. In the most recent year on record, 2018, there were 787 male newborns named Winston in the United States. To put that into perspective, my name, Richard, during that same span of 1880-2018 had 2,574,832 male…
The Land of the Dollar Bill For some reason that 1974 song by a band called Paperlace, The Night Chicago Died is running in my head like the sound of running feet and the shouting in the street. I had a peaceful enough Saturday that had no particular connection to Al Capone’s gangland Chicago, but when does that matter when a line of lyrics gets wedged into your brain? The reason I suspect I am…
The Real Reality TV Hero We all spent the better part of five years dealing with Donald J. Trump, who was, by any rational standards an abject failure as a real estate developer and general businessman. Those of us from New York City (I was there 1976 through 2019), and especially those of us who spent some of those years in the real estate development game, as I did between 2008 and 2017, were always…
Oh, Amelia I have mentioned that National Geographic is one of my last vestigial magazine subscriptions. I don’t stack them side-by-side in yellow-spined glory on some dusty basement shelf, as I remember them from my youth. But I do let them linger on the bedside table, the office glass-top table and the bathroom magazine caddy well beyond their otherwise useful life. I actually do glance through and read parts of the hard glossy copy, but…
The Not-So-Great Gatsby I was just reminded that its been 100 years since that summer on West Egg (the North Shore of Long Island) when Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby dallied with the rich and famous of East Egg. Clearly, 1922 was a carefree moment in U.S. history when the War to end all wars was behind them and the world looked like one big party that would never end. The old money crowd was…
Heading Into Darkness I’ve never been one that was terribly afraid of the dark. As a young child I preferred to have the door cracked open, like most kids, but I also always wanted a glass of water before bedtime. That makes me think it had more to do with wanting some attention and assurance of connectivity than any particular fear of the loss of light. These days we sleep with blackout shades (which Kim…