If you know what punting twated means, then you’re a visitor from an alternate universe, or are receiving signals from a dimension that is opaque to the rest of us. I was sitting in a bar, biding my time while waiting for my family to show up so we could go see King Kong. A…
Today, while enjoying a rainy Christmas afternoon with my mom in her room, I noticed a translucent bag with brightly colored stuff in it. “What’s this?” I asked. “Oh,” my mother replied, “some girl was delivering these to the residents [of the nursing home].” On closer inspection, this is what I found.
I’m having a great time in D.C. repairing with la familia. They’re having an unusually warm Christmas, high 40s/low 50s, a spot of rain here and there. So much for the snow I always relish. My mother still hasn’t fully recovered from her catastrophic illness earlier this year, so instead of hauling her to my…
In 1997, I stood in line with hundreds of others outside of a theater in Oakland. We were waiting to see <span style=”font-weight: bold;”>Titanic</span>. On first viewing, the movie swept me away with its broad romantic gestures. The final 45 minutes were as big as the legend itself. On second viewing, the first 2 hours…
Seems like I don’t read nearly as many novels as I used to. For a writer, this may seem like some secret shame: a decreasing dependency on the written word is like an “actor” slumming on TV. I won’t bitch and moan about how most modern literature bores me to tears, but I will say…
It’s been a long time — 25 years to be exact — since I felt such a strong reaction to the prospect of a fantasy movie. Bryan Singer of Usual Suspects and X-Men fame abandoned the lure of doing a third X-Men movie to apply his vision to the first Superman movie since Christopher Reeve…
Today, I had the pleasure of discovering the San Francisco Zoo. Although I’ve lived here for eight years and have no conscious reason for having blown off the zoo for so long, I figured it was time to take the plunge. The zoo surprised me many times. It is much larger than I though it…
In my most recent post below, I heaped generous backhanded praise on TV’s Lost. I’m about to upgrade that backhand to a Wushu bitch slap. To say I feel deceived and cheated by a TV show would be to give it entirely too much credit. Yes, I was suckered into J.J. Abrams clever world. I…
I’m happy to see that the dime novel—known in the UK as the penny dreadful—is alive and kicking in the form of TV’s Lost. Penny dreadfuls embodied cheapness, in both their content and production, which is not a trait Lost shares with them. No, Lost is penny dreadful because it’s so incredibly bad and contrived,…
There’s something visceral and grandiloquent about buying a new bed. There’s the ceremony (sprawling across endless beds in a big showroom, the dismantling and removal of the old bed, the nail-biting anticipation as the delivery boys haul your new mattress up the stairs), the cherry-busting (where you lay down on your new mattress in your…