The Land of Elvis Every once in a while an entertainer comes along that captures the imagination of the nation and ascends into immortality. In this generation that honor seems to belong to Taylor Swift, but in my generation no one ever got bigger than Elvis Presley. He represented and transcended the decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s all at once. Very few of us that came of age in those years could deny…
Living Under the Iron Dome I’m killing time this morning on Central Park South, waiting to head out to Brooklyn and then LaGuardia for a flight to Nashville. That’s an unusual place to be for me so I am watching too much news of the world. That’s what gets me thinking about the Iron Dome. That, of course, is the name given to the missile and drone defense system installed by Israel (with lots of…
4AM Again In the early decade of my career, while living in Rockville Centre on the South Shore of Long Island, I was 36 scheduled minutes on the Long Island Railroad into Penn Station. Penn is at 7th Avenue and 33rd Street. My office in those days was at Park Avenue and 48th Street. Once I had tested the waters of New York commuting, I knew that I was not built for rush hour travel,…
Nashville Cats It’s been almost sixty years since John Sebastian of the Lovin’Spoonful penned the lyrics to his eighth Top 40 pop song Nashville Cats. Since then, Nashville has only become more central to the music world and it seems to be in evidence even on the plane flight from LaGuardia to the Nashville Airport. Almost every person on our short, small plane Embraer flight seemed to be a country music star except one. She…
Rishi Sunak for King of the World I awoke this morning at what I’ve learned MSNC calls “Way too early”. Having flown back to NYC yesterday for a dinner (actually a grazing gathering) at the Pierre Hotel, my circadian rhythms are all messed up. I should have been able to stay up late on west coast time, but I was too tired. That meant that I had lots of time to sleep in this morning,…
Slip Slidin’ Away We’re into the first week of the Trump “Hush Money” trial in Manhattan as the jury selection process or “voir dire” is underway. As of yesterday, seven jurors including the foreman have been chosen. That leaves five more regular jurors and six alternates to go. I have predicted for some time that the criminal prosecution process was going to be the great unraveling of the Trump candidacy and perhaps the Trump existence…
Western Dreams Like many men my age, I grew up during the cowboy era with the likes of The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Have Gun will Travel, The Rifleman, Bonanza, The Big Valley, Rawhide, Zorro, Maverick, Wagon Train, The Virginian, and even F Troop. If we had dreams in those heady days of the 50s and 60s, they were about being either astronauts or cowboys. I didn’t really think too much about either in a vocational…
Cataracts There are very few of our senses that we prize more than sight. i think I am on safe ground with that statement though I imagine people who are blind or became blinded might make a valiant effort to disagree. If you lose your sense of smell or taste, I dare say you would go on in life with only minimal adjustment. Many of us start losing our hearing as we get older and…
We saw Civil War and found it confusing and mildly upsetting. I wouldn’t particularly recommend it, but must note that Canadians in particular might enjoy the trivia that in the circumstance of that Civil War, their currency is the only one with value remaining.
An Uncivil War This afternoon, Kim and I will join brother-in-law Jeff and his wife Lisa at our local Angelika Theater for an opening weekend showing of Civil War, the Alex Garland movie about an all-too-close-to-home dystopian near future for America where certain factions revolt against the established U.S. government leadership. The perspective it takes seems very pertinent in that it follows the actions of a group of imbedded photojournalists who are tracking and reporting…