May 2011
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Weekend Music I listened to Tom Waits Nighthawks at the Diner for the first time a couple of days ago. He performs this story–it's not exactly a song, though it has a musical accompaniment, and I noticed that he didn't write it, which led me to discover that it was once something of a hit for…
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An email from Rob Grano: You all have heard of the Catholic TV network EWTN. I'm recommending to Fox that they change their name to EITN. EnhancedInterrogationTechniquesNetwork That's pretty much all they've talked about since Ben Ladin got nailed. The motto could be something like, "All torture talk, all the time." I haven't watched Fox lately,…
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This 1966 adaptation of Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target is worth seeing if you like detective stories. But Macdonald fans may, or rather should, find it disappointing. The plot is adapted in a reasonable way, but the portrayal of Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer, is badly flawed. He's played by Paul Newman, who insisted on renaming the…
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After our last hurricane I said I wasn’t going to leave for the next one(s), so I may end up a bit like this guy (or maybe just dead). The last line is funny.
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Sunday Night Journal — May 8, 2011 I was out of town this weekend and didn't get back in time to do any writing, so I am revisiting a couple of old SNJs which had not yet been moved from my original site to this one. I was thinking about Perelandra the other day after reading…
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Flooding in Memphis.
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Weekend Music Note: I'm posting this early because I'll be offline Friday and most of Saturday. Somewhere around 1981 or 1982, at an outdoor arts festival in Huntsville (Alabama), I saw a troupe of dancers perform to this music. Not surprisingly, I don't remember anything about the dance, but the music was so great that…
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I used to really like National Review. I still read their web site. But I have had about all I can stand of the term "enhanced interrogation."
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It's beginning to sink in on me that I have not grasped the extent of the devastation from the tornadoes in north Alabama. Two things have helped bring it home to me: This map (a pdf file) shows the number, path, and intensity of the individual storms. Bear in mind that the typical touchdown point of a…
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The outward exhibition of infinitude is mystery. I figured out years ago that most of the art I really care about, in every medium, has one thing in common: that it conveys to me a sense of mystery. This goes a long way toward explaining that phenomenon. I love the sense that there is always…
Light On Dark Water 