Category Archives: Uncategorized

In my many years of travel, I’ve always made it a point to snap pictures of street signs or other signs that I find interesting or funny. It’s rather fascinating to observe how a culture communicates rules of the road or expected social behavior.  For example, in London, many of the signs are very polite.

At home I’m accustomed to the red Exit sign that shows me how to get out of any building. In the London Tube, however, there is what I consider a more gentle way of pointing out the exit.

At Tate Modern, this sign is posted on the elevator. I found it very thought provoking in that it asked people to be mindful instead of simply putting a wheelchair symbol and hoping for the best.

However, the use of symbols is employed around heavy tourist areas to accommodate those who don’t speak English. Around Buckingham Palace…

Yes!

Here is the leaning tower of Pisa being supported by a giant sausage – Amazing!

As legendary actor Tom Hanks said, “I like towers and I like sausages so this is a win win for me.”

GRAVITY is every bit as good as you’ve heard. It’s not just a nail-biting thriller, not just far and away the best cinematic depiction of what it’s like to be in space, not just the finest performance ever from Sandra Bullock. Even more important, it introduces new concepts to the language of film: swirling, swooping, gyroscopic curvatures that observe no earthbound rules, that can take you inside a space helmet and out again without cuts or dissolves; the opening shot alone lasts for nearly 13 minutes. They’ll have to invent a new term to describe this constantly malleable point of view. But the story doesn’t stop long enough to let you ponder “how’d they do that?”* For all I know, they built some rockets and shot two game movie stars into Earth orbit. You’ve never seen anything like this. Nobody has.

It’s a howling, crowd-pleasing, eye-popping triumph for director/co-writer Alfonso Cuaron. His resume is…

Hate New York City, it’s cold and it’s damp…

Who didn’t enjoy the “cold open” to the 2013 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony? It happened a few weeks ago, but HBO preemed it to the nation late last month. In the midst of La-La Land, where the remaining top-down portion of the music business truly resides (sorry, Clive), Randy Newman tickled the ivories and teased about my town. By the time “Rand” acquired tempo, there were Tom Petty, Jackson Browne and John Fogerty standing up there with him, ready to help blast out the lyrics to a ditty so rockin and ultra-ironic that it almost got voted the official song of Los Angeles, however it is you do that. However…

[LITTLE SANTA MONICA?!]

Muchacho, I hate L.A.!

Now, I have some perfectly rational friends, lovely people all, who live and even thrive in La-La…

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

That’s one of the greatest opening lines in literary history, for my money. It has stuck with me for nearly thirty years. In fact, I just quoted it by heart (double-checking only to make sure I got the comma right: I did). As everybody else who has encountered it also doubtless remembers, William Gibson’s brilliant novel NEUROMANCER begins with this sentence. I haven’t read the book since it was first published in 1984, but I still remember this line perfectly, because it smacked me like an open hand.

We know instinctively that a musical melody can get under our skins. Even a tune we had had quite enough of remains inside us, in some primal part of our brains that can whisk us back to the moment when it was contemporary and conjure long-forgotten emotions, both fond…