I am so woefully behind in my blogging that I am only now getting around to subjects that weeks or months old! However, if the thought has survived rattling around in my head all this time, I suppose it deserves recording. Like many people, I was happy with the final episode of Mad Men‘s demi-season. …
Cara fulfilled her great vacation wish and and hiked some of the trails in the Badlands, the strange topographical formation left when the great ocean drained away. Below: Top of the world, Ma!; Cara channels James Franco in 127 Seconds; At long last, buffalo; where NASA faked the moon landing.
On Wednesday we motored across Tennessee to see Graceland, the surprisingly modest home of Elvis Presley. Meh. Banal testosterone-infused sixties styles. The miracle is that he happened; his personal effects are just leftovers. Here is his grave, left, and on the right, the only bit of wit I saw in the place : Afterwards, we …
Walter Hill‘s wonderful 1980 film The Long Riders told the story of the James Gang–the outlaws Frank and Jesse James and the Younger brothers–and their depradations in Missouri, Arkansas, Minnesota, Texas and other locales. Although we’re not going to Texas, we’re hitting all their other stomping grounds, and then some: a 13 day, 17 state …
On April 19th two years ago, Levon Helm passed away. Here is his final resting place, at the Woodstock Cemetery. Like almost all final resting places, there is something ineffable about his, an inadequate valediction that only goes to show how gloriously rich and complex life is. After all, what could you put here that …
The Oscars will be presented tomorrow night, and right now smart money for Best Picture is on Gravity, an engrossing and technically advanced film about one of the oldest plots in the book, that of the marooned person who is running out of time and resources. It’s a fine film, very well directed, featuring two …
Pete Seeger, a great American, has died. In 2006, Alec Wilkinson wrote a profile of Seeger for The New Yorker. It ended like this: Here is a story told to me lately by a man named John Cronin, who is the director of the Pace Academy for the Environment, at Pace University. Cronin has known …
My friend Dave Jensen and I went to the Capitol Theater in Port CHester last Friday night to catch the Midnight Ramble Band. The band did nothing to diappoint, and even supplied a surpise: the rpesence of Billy Payne, the keyboardist of Little Feat. Payne’s presence added a different flavor to the show, mostly through …
As we all know, the idealistic sixties died in the selfish eighties.The spirit of “All You Need Is Love” was cooed away by the spirit of “Material Girl.” In the eighties, the spirit of making money was wild upon the land. Big takeover companies took over businesses and fired all the employees to raise the …
We really enjoyed visiting the Muhammad Ali Center in downtown Louisville. I was impressed how the center handled all aspects of Ali’s career–boxer, activist, humanitarian–in a straightforward, warts-and-all manner. You hear him calling white people `devils’; you also hear him say that a 60 year old man who thinks the same things that he did …