Written November 11th, 2014, “After Thought” written March 2023 As fate so often plays out, a chain of completely random choices concerning what movie to see turned into an absolute feast for my mind. A different movie was actually planned; a typical Hollywood action/drama, but obstacles of timing and...

I hope Emma will forgive the intrusion, but this shot from “Bird Man” perfectly captures the “beautifully broken” protagonist mentioned below by Jane’s Addiction. Written December 22nd, 2022 My mind is driven by associations, and in that regard I feel extraordinarily lucky to have a deep reservoir of memories....

Written February 18th, 2018 From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being...

Originally written March 8th, 2006, expanded January 2023 “The Japanese have a word, AWARE, for the feelings that arise from the beauty of an ephemeral thing.” Those words were featured in an article that I came across recently while paging through a National Geographic magazine. There it paraded a...

Written (Mostly) May 16th, 2009 I have never considered Willie Nelson among the great guitar players of the world. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t considered him much at all, and certainly not among my pantheon of Guitar God’s. From my view of things, he was just another...

Written September 27th, 2022 For those unfamiliar with the phrase, it was Joseph Campbell who first introduced the concept to me. First from his famous interview with Bill Moyer (The Power of Myth), and later from his first book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. It was there that...

Written April 26th, 2009 I have no explanation for my resistance, but for some inexplicable reason a curious apathy had kept me from watching this movie, even though it had won an Academy Award for “Best Picture” in 1999 and all the reviews I read supported that honor without...

Written February 23rd, 2020 This note is long overdue. In fact, I find it embarrassing to admit just how many years have passed since I first intended to write about this. I began an essay a decade ago due to my love of the song in question, but it...

October 24th, 2020 Don’t ask why it took seventeen years for me to finally get down to the business of watching this movie, because I wouldn’t have an answer for you. It just doesn’t make logical sense, especially since it had been near the top of my ‘really need...

Written October 15h, 2021 I have purposely placed his portrait right up front, with full intent, in order to make it necessarily unavoidable. The painting is by Louis Michel VanLoo and dates roughly to the mid-1770’s and captures Denis Diderot, the aging ‘radical’ of the French Enlightenment, at what...