Category: Art

  • Man, Am I Tired

    Not sure what happened. I went to bed at my normal-ish time last night. I did stay up and watch the Oscars, so maybe that had something to do with it.

    I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the Oscars, but it has been over 15 years since I have seen all the best picture nominees, let alone half of them. But I am a movie fan, and I like the spectacle, and it is something fun to debate with friends, and I wanted to see what Conan would do. With all of that said, it was a rather dull affair. My kid wanted to stay up and watch it with me, which I agreed to, but she was out by 9pm.

    When the Oscars were over, and the kid off to bed, I started to watch Becket. I hadn’t seen it since high school, and I didn’t get too far into it. I found Peter O’Toole’s Henry II grating on my nerves, which I understand was the point. Then I thought about watching Lion in Winter, which is also about Henry II but at the end of his life and with succession being the driver of that plot. Though Lion in Winter is not a sequel to Becket, with O’Toole playing Henry II in both films, it sort of very loosely, kind’a is.

    I bring all of this up for no other reason than it occurred to me last night.

    And this morning, I just felt off. Very tired, a little anxious, and all around uneasy about myself and the day before me. The last time I felt like this was when I was working a particular job that I started to despise, and knew it was time for me to leave. But I couldn’t pin down why I was feeling this way, especially on a day like today.

    But there is a very harsh reality with being the age that I am and also having responsibilities of my family; I had to push through it. I had to make breakfast for the gang. I had to get people up and on their way. I had to do laundry and clean up. I had to making chicken stock for dinner, and lunch for the wife. In a little bit, I will take that chicken stock and tech my kid how to make Greek Lemon Soup.

    I just have to keep pushing through, but that feeling hasn’t gone away today.

  • Short Story Review: “Keuka Lake” by Joseph O’Neill

    (The short story “Keuka Lake” by Joseph O’Neill appeared in the March 3rd, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Annie Collinge for The New Yorker

    I don’t know if you know this, but grief is a really popular theme for short stories. (That and bad relationships with parents, but that’s a story for another day.) Grief lends itself easily to the dramatic, and is also individualistic, and it can also be shocking as to what emotions and memories it will bring up. Everyone grieves differently, and maybe I was a little flippant at the start of this, because maybe my past grief still makes me uncomfortable.  Parts of “Keuka Lake” tapped on my past grief, but in the end Joseph O’Neill’s story meandered, leaving an unsteady feeling to the work.

    The story starts off with a banger of a first paragraph, letting us know that Nadia, the protagonist, has been involved with someone from a teenager to the day she became a widower at fifty-four. Her husband was killed in a car crash near a town in the Finger Lakes, and Nadia never knew why her husband was driving up there. And then the story just flutters about. We follow Nadia to a visit to her sister on Montreal, and then an early return to the States, where she gets a speeding ticket. She then looks up a former boyfriend, who is a lawyer, to take care of the ticket, and though she never sees the lawyer, Nadia engages his secretary to look into the reasons why her husband was in the Finger Lakes.

    I say that the story “meanders” and “flutters” because the story never feels like it takes anyone seriously. The tone that is taken towards everyone that isn’t Nadia is condescending and rather dismissive. I understand that Nadia is lost without her husband, and she isn’t sure how to react or behave normally, as everything has a level of annoyance to her. But at the end of the story, I can’t say conclusively that Nadia learned anything. There is no catharsis, or release, or even a realization of anything. I believe the last section of the story was to provide that, but it felt too random and disjointed, though I understood that Keuka Lake is near the town where Nadia’s husband was killed, and I guess we are all the fish in our grief.

  • Random Pictures

    Busy day, and trouble finding a topic, so how about the last five pictures off my phone.

  • Site Redesign… Eventually

    I have been thinking about this for awhile now; I need to redesign the site here. It feels like I need to update some stuff, maybe make it look a little better. To be honest, I have never found a layout that works for me, in all the years that I have tried creating a blog site. Even going back to 1999, and my first Blogger page. Building a page and site and all of this has never produced a site that I was comfortable with.

    I know the first question one needs to ask themselves when they start building out their site, is what is the purpose? What is the point? Well, I want to place that I can write daily.

    Okay, mission accomplished.

    But… I must say that the reason just about all of you come to this site, talking like 75% of you, is to read the reviews I write. So, that would lead me to believe that I should play up the review stuff, and not do too much of the “personal blog stuff.”

    I don’t know… I never feel comfortable with building this thing. Makes me feel a little selfconscious, and also rather clueless to technology.

    You know… I’m just going to copy Fox Reviews Rock layout. It’s simple, effective, and rocks. It’s a cooI site and I like what they do.

  • The Power of Patrick Swayze (Unedited)

    So, I was all gearing and ready to go, to sit down and knock out a blog for today. My wife had left the tv on as she was finishing her lunch, and being that I was planning on working on the couch, I needed to shut the tv off to concentrate. But what was on tv was the final fifteen minutes of Red Dawn. The real Red Dawn. The 1984 John Milius directed Red Dawn that started among many, Patrick Swayze. It had been a couple of years since I had seen it, and the ending is pretty good, with the brothers on the bench Ikiru style.

    And then Road House came on, (I guess it was a Patrick Swayze marathon) and I totally got sucked into that movie. Make no mistake, and I have written about both Road House movies before, the original Road House is a bad movie. But man! It sure is a fun bad movie.

    BUT… I had work to do, so I thought it best to talk about the Power of Patrick Swayze.

    Actually, I wanted to talk about bad movies, and how I find myself needing them more than ever.

    And I love movies. I love seeing them in a theatre. I love watching them late at night. I love reading about movies, and how they were made. And I agree with the notion that good movies, even gut wrenching, tragic, everyone dies dramas, will always leave you feeling better than when you started.

    But right now, with the way the world is, a bad movie that just wants to be entertaining, and that is what Road House is, feels correct for these times. Bad yet entertaining movies know they’re bad, and not good for you. But I know that eating ice cream and cookies for dinner is bad for me, but some nights, it’s what I need to make it to the morning, and try all over again.