Alberta Last Thursdays Merchants
07/01/2009
Alberta Last Thursday Street Scene at Dusk, Moon on a Wire
06/28/2009
Last Thursday on Alberta Street in the Summer
06/26/2009
Water Park in the Pearl, Fremont Bridge
06/23/2009
Picking the Old Folks Home for the Old Folks
06/05/2009
102nd and Burnside from Russellville Apts.
06/02/2009
Hotdogs, Hamburgers, Cotton Candy on the Portland Waterfront
05/28/2009
Photo Booths at Rose Festival Carnival
05/26/2009
Pizza at Signal Service Station
01/04/2009
State Office Building, Portland
12/16/2008
Broadway and Pioneer Square from Bank of California Building
12/02/2008
Fremont Bridge and Park
11/25/2008
Reggie's Barber Shop, MLK and Fargo
11/23/2008
Bus Leaving Hollywood Transit Center
11/11/2008
Burgerville Interior
11/08/2008
Typical Portland Oregon Backyard
10/29/2008
Obama Campaign on Killingsworth
10/27/2008
Bagdad Theater and Pub Interior
10/22/2008
Quad Standpipe, Notary, 631 Some Street
10/09/2008
Department of Environmental Quality Emissions Testing Center, Black and White
10/07/2008
genealogy
Fun with cowboys. Too bad a lot of the important dialogue is in Spanish... or maybe it doesn't matter in the end.
Fun murder mystery thriller, particularly enjoyable for being set in my various Portland neighborhoods.
I'm enjoying these stories immensely.
May 18 2009
Amazing exploration of secrets never told and the violence people hold inside. I enjoyed the North Dakota setting too - my great grandfather Jacob K. Smith lived in South Dakota in the years when this story is set.
May 12 2009
May 10, 2009
Leave Leeds, and take a 2 month voyage from Liverpool to New Orleans, then a few steamboats up to Pike County, Illinois and have them unload you in evening shadows on the wild Illinois river at Phillips Ferry (nowhere, nothing) with your trunk, 5 young kids and a bed. Make sure its 1831. Begin feeding yourself now. A farm woman's voice. I enjoyed this account immensely, and used the map in the book to track down the location of the homestead in Pike County on GoogleMaps.
May 7 2009
This extended essay conveys lively color and detail about its subject across all the centuries of human history.
May 1, 2009
Pilgrims, merchants, sandals and highwaymen - ox carts, horses and leaky boats - this was transportation in the wake of the Roman Empire. Leighton helps us imagine a world fueled by hay and wind, but also a world before so many concomitants of modernity - significantly transportation and communication were self-evidently one and the same. The whole story is fascinating, start to finish. I did wonder to what extent scholarship on these technologies has advanced in the 37 years since 1972.
April 30 2009
The editor has collected dozens of letters, journals, articles and book excerpts from the American agricultural frontier of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading these raw or lightly edited reports from the past we get a real sense of the reality of coming to a new place, clearing fields, building shelter, and living and dying on the land. My interest in this material stems from a desire to understand pre-industrial energetic economies. How did people extract energy from their environment, acquire food, and live on the land? There is nothing romantic about these stories at all, but there is something very real and close to the edge. Survival itself is always at stake. These are stories of people who were seeking ways to live in/on/off the land, not because of any modern consciousness about energy and humanity's place on Earth, but because that is what their parents had done and that is what people did. In America, these stories however, because they are largely situated in the generation or two before industrialization, give us a glimpse at the last form of American civilization before the industrial revolution. Subtract the industrial revolution and its immense changes from our lives and our stories might begin to resemble these stories. Subtract fossil fuels from our lives, and our lives might in some ways look like these lives.... but only in some ways, and only if the subtraction of fossil fuels didn't produce a more general civilizational collapse. One thing's for sure: I don't feel as if I'm reading only about the past when I read these 18th and 19th century writings. In so many strange (and, I insist, distinctly unromantic) ways they feel more real and more relevant to the human condition than many a tale of modern urban life.
April 23, 2009
A simple memoir of a farm boy's early years on the Kansas plain, the techniques, technologies and folkways of farming, the coming of tractors and cars, and then the great Depression.
April 19, 2009
Contains good background on the introduction of novel transportation and daily life technologies (and many other technologies) in America as it emerges from the pre-industrial world.
April 19, 2009
A straightforward history of American agricultural history and policy in the twentieth century - as mainstream and uninteresting a perspective as you could hope for, and thus quite interesting. Hurt notes in passing the importance of gasoline tricycle Farmall type tractors in the 1920s - the substitution of gasoline power for horse power changes everything, in economic terms, and as we know now, ecological terms. Each horse not used provided an additional 5 acres of land no longer needed for feed crops. Tractors enable larger farms, but also require them. Farmers seek monoculture solutions to enhance income. Animals and multi-crop farming decline. Local nutrient cycles are broken, leading to commercial fertilizer use. Food production for farm use shifts off the farm - quickly farmers to become shoppers in the local market. Much of this is unstated, but you can see the ecological backstory if you know it. From Mr. Hurt's perspective, 20th century American farming is a big long story of growing dependence on the Federal government, and he is critical of the very idea of the small farm and the independent farmer, or the myth of the independent farmer. It's not just that he is reporting that they haven't worked - he seems clearly to want us to get over the idea that they could work. He doesn't believe that such farming is practical, and appears to accept the idea that the only thing that will work is the big federally subsidized nationally organized ag system. It's hard to imagine a less creative and more mainstream approach to the future, but as a description of the past it has value. This is no Omnivore's Dilemma, but worth leafing through.
March 13 2009
Twenty-six years of incarceration, age 23 to 49, with 4 years to go in 2009. It's something to think about, no matter how you think about it.
April 12, 2009
This is a seminal book by a thoughtful author. I'm modeling my own writing project on what George Monbiot does.
March 31, 2009
Continuing my research for a book on transportation, energy and What It All Means, this book provides a glimpse at the world when long distance travel first became a readily available middle-class commodity. Reading this, you can feel the wonder that was early train travel, the way it transformed people inside, stressed social relationships in new ways. Some might think of social relationships on trains as a kind of epi-phenomenon but from my perspective the social relationships created by affordable long distance travel appear quite instigative of social and economic change.
March 13, 2009
This is an amusing reading for one such as myself married to a family with British Jewish roots. I could never really decide whether Kate Fox is simply playing with stereotypes or describing actual differences between the English and others. This is comparative anthropology, but with only one culture under study, and other cultures referenced by hearsay. It doesn't feel rigorous as anthropology, but it is quite enjoyable as humor.
Mid-March 2009
Young adult fiction, lottery games, reasonably good for what it is, and a good reminder that you too can write a novel.
March 11, 2009
I'm running my fingers over the same old wounds, but Morris is a straight shooter and he does an excellent job. I find my support for the basic case of Zionism, the Jewish national claim to self-determination / autonomy / statehood in the historic homeland, to be enhanced, not diminished, by a frank acknowledgement and exploration of its sins. We'll wait a long time before the "other side" produces a similar accounting of its deeds and aims, and sadly, such an assessment is probably a prerequisite for the peace we all seek. Mid-March, 2009
In 1919 roads were bad, the War was over, and the future General Eisenhower was among those on a military mission to drive a large convoy of very primitive trucks across the American continent for the first time. They drove approximately on the Lincoln highway route. The Lincoln highway was to be the first transcontinental highway. They visited towns. People welcomed them, saying "Hey, a big convoy of trucks! Never seen that before." Then it was time to go to sleep. (I'm writing a book about transportation and society... this was background history. From a theoretical perspective this book explains nothing, but from the dry facts of road development you can gain intimations about the forces shaping motorized transport and their future social implications. There is food for thought here, but it will require more cooking.) March 3 2009
Like most people, I've often had my interest piqued by a clever presentation of a seeming incongruity around a major historical event, particularly the 9/11 attacks and the Kennedy assassination. In each case I've gone some distance down the hallway, always hoping for the deep dark conspiracy to be revealed to be true, and then slowly realized that nothing in the conspiracy theory really made sense when you compared it to the logic and the totality of the "conventional wisdom." I hate to think of myself as one who simply accepts the conventional wisdom. I think of myself as always open to alternative theories. But as Bugliosi demonstrates to my satisfaction, the conventional wisdom on the Kennedy assassination makes a heck of a lot sense. I'm not interested enough in the Kennedy assassination to hear out the rebuttals to each and every point he makes, although I'm sure that someone is busy making those rebuttals. Interest in the assassination is a generational phenomenon, and that generation is now in its late fifties, at least. Iinterest in the assassination is of greater interest than the assassination itself. In the end most of us are not in a position to ascertain the truth about most historical questions. Instead we are forced to align ourselves with a tone and sensibility, as much as with an interpretation of the evidence itself. We are recipients of interpretations not examiners of evidence, and each person must find story tellers and interpreters that he or she trusts. The story itself and the reality it reflects is more difficult to judge. For most people, most of the time, knowledge is a matter of who you trust and what methodology you trust, not what you know. This difference between examining evidence and accepting historians is obscured by the fact that historians attempt to bring us into their examination of the evidence, entrain us in their captivity to the evidence. But what they are really doing is attempting to gain our trust in their method, not in the evidence itself, which is largely beyond our reach. No matter what evidence they present, we are ultimately evaluating the intellectual architecture around the claim, the social context of the historian who makes the claim, and the historian him or herself.. Evaluating historical truth is an exercise in evaluating the apparatus and social context in which those truths are developed and presented. Thinking critically about history is really all about thinking critically about how history is presented, how historians are educated, how historical ideas gain currency. All of that is long way of saying that Bugliosi seems to be a reasonable fellow and presents the evidence in ways that makes sense to me and seem to uphold the general conclusions of the Warren Commission, as he presents them. The worry I have about Bugliosi is his annoying tendency toward hagiographic representations of the Kennedys themselves, who appear in this book as entirely noble, when everything we know about this family, from the fascist father to the philandering President suggest that these were no noble innocents. Even Hoover appears merely as a concerned and threatening busybody, and not as the psychopathic blackmailer that we now know him to have been. An author who distorts by not acknowledging this reality, and presents only the public image of Kennedy while delving deeply into the private lives of Oswald and Ruby, does raise questions in my mind. However if one reads only the first section about the four days around the assassination, a book in itself and never mind the next 1000 pages, one will have a very thorough and fascinating story of the assassination and rebuttals to various theories of which one was only vaguely aware. I didn't even read most of it, but I enjoyed it and learned a lot. February 24 2009
The problem with interesting fiction is that you begin to care more about the author than the characters. Nobody gives a damn what the author of a formulaic romance of adventure book was thinking or feeling when the book was written because everything is so obviously on the page. It's a shallow pool. But with a book like Mating the author's intelligence is written into every page. Mating is not about social theorist and anthropologist Nelson Denoon and the female anthropologist protagonist who loves him, or about their mutual thoughts about anthropology and social change. No, as one reads the book it is increasingly about questions such as "has Norman Rush done a persuasive job of writing an interior female character?" (Really, not so much), and "does Norman Rush subscribe to a Denoonian socialist feminist utopianism or merely use this a interesting framework on which to hang a good read?" (hard to say.) Denoon and the female protagonist are so very clever, and in so much the same way, that it is difficult to read them as anything other than an interior dialogue of the author, a device for him to express his ideas and explore his own mind. We spend the novel not so much reading the story as imagining the author behind the story. Alright. There is nothing wrong with an author intentionally or unintentionally writing a book about himself. You can read many books that way, and for many years criticism was all about finding the author behind the text. For my part, while I subscribed to textualism in my words, I've found that in actually reading all I can really think about is the author and the single mind that lies behind the diverse realities in the text. The more interesting the book the more this is true. I spent many many evenings reading this book, and enjoying it and complaining about it to Leora too.. How often do we encounter a book in which the fate of a village is at much at issue as the fate of the protagonists? This is a socialist adventure, although individuals are allowed, after a fashion, to steer their destinies. It does seem to go on and on, but I kept reading because there was a certain interest in the on-and-on-ness of it all, and Rush was busy telling a good story about his own mind, set in a utopian village in the Kalahari in the form of a love story between a man and a woman. In spite of the fact that I was never really convinced that the protagonist was a woman and not a man, the sincere effort of Rush to create a female character, yet somehow, ineffably, writing thoughts and approaches that were male gendered, was an interesting exercise to witness. The problem of writing across one's gender has always seemed to me to be a fairly deep one, and I can't think of any particularly convincing modern efforts by men or women to write interior characters across the gender line. Perhaps a blind test would be necessary to really evaluate the proposition that author gender is always written into character, no matter how hard the author may try to imagine the other gender. And what of culture? Can authors write cross-culturally in a convincing way? And convincing to whom? To one external to the culture, or to a member of the culture? Surely there must be PhD dissertations written on this very subject. . February 2009
A young adulthood in contemporary Bejing and a fascinating description of life in another world on the very same planet. February 10, 2009
Fascinating, as I write my own family history. January 19 2009
Books Read in 2008
2008 Summary - I recorded about 38 books in 2008. I've read more in past years. I do a lot of my reading online now. I read to my children less today than I did several years ago.
My son has been reading this series intensely, so I had a look. Good stuff! December 6, 2008
Nov. 3 2008
October 2008
October 18, 2008
My son read this to me at dinner. This 4 page story would make a fantastic short ghost film. October 17 2008
Remembering what it is like to be a teenage boy. Very witty. October 2008
Hey, I remember that world... sort of... except that I was never really part of it (I thought of myself as modern orthodox, not ultra-orthodox) and memory does fade after two decades. Or does it? Even if I wasn't in it, I was right there next to it, and sometimes even in it, if briefly. Hard for me to believe now. In some cases I actually know more about things the author explains than the author himself does. In some cases I think I know what the orthodox people he describes are thinking better than he does. That's not a criticism, just an expression of how deep I really was in the edges of that world. Eisenberg does a great job of taking the initiated or uninitiated visitor on a tour of ultra-orthodox life as it is really lived. For me it is almost healing... for most it will simply be fascinating. September 15 2008
To my daughter in August and September, 2008
The mirror of the crisis of capitalism, and how crisis is used to advance fascist interests. August 2008
First read to me by Mrs. Murata in 6th grade, I've spent the last few weeks reading this to my daughter at bedtime and she has been entranced. It is always fascinating to reexperience something as an adult and marvel at all of the things one missed or didn't understand the first time through There were many such things as I read the book again but I think that the message about totalitarianism got through to me even in 6th grade. July 30 2008
This history of an obscure Oregon line and the competition to build it (they built two, one on each side of the river) provides a window into both Oregon / Northwest history, and into the flavor and vibe of late 19th and early 20th century railroad magnates, and the bare knuckled politics, violence, bribery and back country dealings that they engendered. Also, we get a sense of just how hard it was to work as a laborer on the railroad - hard and hot. The photos are beautiful too. July 28 2008
A fondly remembered (from 1971, my 6th grade year) tale about being true to yourself and not immitating others. I discovered it in a box, yellowing and falling apart, and read it to my son this evening. Simple fable, great pleasure. July 14 2008
Completed in early June, I began with Leora reading this book to my daughter 6 months ago or more when she was not quite 7 years old. Because I read only every other chapter, on alternate nights, I have no idea what it is really about. But by the time we reached the end, my daughter took over the reading and would read me to sleep for several weeks. So, again, I missed a significant part of the story, and I still have no idea what it is really about. She however thought it was wonderful, and who am I to argue? It was in the last 6 months, while reading this book that she became a reader, capable of reading almost anything. The other major reading project in her life has been to have read to her, by Leora, the better part of the entire Anne of Green Gables series. But frankly, I've lost track of all the books she is consuming. June 22, 2008
Short stories. Cavemen and the title story are particularly good. April 2008
April 2008
A romp through the swell 1920s. It could not possibly be lighter. April 11 2008
March 2008
I was walking by Powells Books when I saw in the window this 25 cent 1938 pamphlet on a subject of longstanding interest to me - the historical social mores of sleep, courtship, night and gender relations. Four dollars later it was mine. April 10 2008
I greatly enjoyed this backwards through time exploration of the history of the Sarejevo Haggadah, and the hands and places it might have passed through. April 8 2008
To my daughter, March 30 2008
March 28 2008
Wow! This wonderful high energy story is one of the best I've read in a while. The protaganist is relentlessly and enjoyably pissed off at the world and everything and everyone that gets in her way. She reminds me of a modern day female Holden Caulfield (Catcher in the Rye), utterly convinced of the idiocy and foolishness of the adults in her world, and determined to claim her own angry deranged vision. Like Caulfield and his sister, her love for a younger cousin keeps her centered and human. I read this in 24 hours, and recommend it very highly. I want to read more from Helnwein. March 23 2008.
Read to me by my daughter, March 22 2008
Read to me by my daughter, March 22 2008
Outloud to my son at bedtime....
Inspiring. March 13 2008
March 6 2008
Little windows on contemporary China - if not perhaps great literature, still illuminating. Late February 2008
Yep, that's Fry of the Fry and Laurie videos. This is massively amusing and gloriously raunchy. Fry manages to be funny about sex in more different verbal positions than I had thought possible. Half of the novel is epistolary. While visiting a fine English estate, and solving a most peculiar myster, he also manages to weave in a good Jewish / Zionist / English historical narrative that is remarkably plausible and completely unexpected. He makes a compelling case for secular view of the world. He seems, as an author, to be having one heck of a rollicking good time, even if, assuming he has any relation to his main protaganist, a poet, he probably sweated blood to write it. Nobody knows how to end a novel, and neither does Fry, but that detail hardly matters. Apparently he also wrote a book called "Liar." I look forward to reading it too. February 29 2008
I was half way through this way cool story of contemporary mysticism and spelling bees before I realized that the title had nothing to do with the apiary profession. My spouse finds me the most wonderful books to read. I had never thought about even the possibility of a relationship between Jewish mystical practices and spelling bees, but Goldberg weaves them together as if they were always meant to be part of the same story. She also does a fantastic job of getting inside the minds of a fifth grade girl, an adolescent boy, a more than a little troubled mother, and an oblvious (aren't we all) but well intentioned father. Half family drama, half mystical exploration and mystery story, this will be one to return to some day. Richard Gere was in a movie based on this book too, and I simply must see it to find out if they did this little novel justice. February 25 2008
Who am I to complain? Ben Schrank wrote a novel, I didn't. But I thought this could have gone in a much creepier and more other worldly direction that it did. I won't tell you what does happen, but the metaphors stay sadly, and merely, metaphorical and the golem never becomes real in the way I expected. Kind of enjoyable... kind of a big let down. I would have written a different novel. Maybe I should some day. February 21 2008
This wonderful tale of an upper middle class Victorian life has taken over my life for the better part of the last two weeks, read piece by piece, 20 minutes at a time as I commuted on the MAX to downtown Portland. Initially, the book seems impossibly dense, going into minute detail about the pre-Victorian lives of Florence Nightingale's ancestors. A fellow commuter on the train, observing me reading it, pronounced that she had tried to read it and found it impossible. I was at that point almost ready to agree with her, but soon enough it gripped me. We learn the minutist details of Florence Nighingale's life from the extensive correspondence she engaged in with friends and family. We are offered a portrait of her sexuality (unclear if the concept even applied), her likely medical diagnosis upon returning from the Crimean war (a rare bacteria found in goat milk, which she probably consumed to avoid the water and alcohol that was available there), and a portrait of how this highly educated woman battled against the extraordinary sexism that was normative in Britain in her era. We find that she had an extraordinary father who chose to educate her as well as any son. We are reminded that a woman of her age and class could go almost nowhere without an escort, and that for much of her childhood and young adult life she, a person who craved solitude, was like any woman of her class, never alone, even in sleep, but always attended and accompanied. I found this as engaging as any novel, and as much a portrait of Victorian England, particularly its upper middle classes and their habbits and manners, as of Florence Nightingale herself. In the end she invents the profession of nursing administration and changes her world's perception of the roles and aspirations that women could have, but the strain of her battles against convention and in wartime create a most peculiar and strained personality. It appears though, that while she twisted under the load, she did not break. The final images we have of her are of a conventional, solicitous (if largely by the written word) and loving auntie to many members of her extended family. February 18 2008
A children's story of evolution, very nicely explained. Read to my daughter again, January 31 2008
Compelling and engrossing narrative of a young teenager co-opted into the government forces in the 1990s in Sierra Leone. Beah's tale reminds me of some Holocaust stories I've read. I must remember to go back and read this one again some day. January 31 2008
I translated to English for my daughter this tale in Hebrew of a father who embarrasses his son. January 28 2008
This is an absolutely gripping can't put it down until you've read the last page memoir of man and his sociopathic narcissistic social climbing money grubbing thieving and murdering mother and brother. I was fascinated and horrified (in a delightful way) on every page of this book. This will remind you of every narcissistic self-aggrandizing person you've every met, but taken to a level that is simply stunning. And it's not just about criminality, but it seems like a metaphor for other bigger things than one duo's psychopathology. It reminds me of the American corporation as well with its ethic that one's own interests are the paramount value and the ballsy in your face never-cop-to-anything style that corporations and sociopaths like Sante Kimes rely on. We watch as Sante Kimes, combines a career of petty shoplifting and car thieving with bank and real estate fraud on a large scale, scores a millionaire husband, manipulates her family member's lives in the most intimate and personal ways, and uses anything and everyone that gets in her path, while still attracting friends and being remembered by the author, her son (Kent Walker), as a warm and fun person who wrapped him in a cocoon of love. The book reads like Kent Walker sat down at a tape recorder and just started talking, while Schone knit it altogether. Normally that would be a recipe for disaster, but Schone and Walker have done a great job. This is a story that can only be told from the first person perspective by the man who lived it. Walker is self-reflective and contrite about his own role in facilitating his mother and brother's criminality and cruelty over the years, and makes what seems like a reasonable and plausible case for his own efforts to avoid being drawn into their dramas and scams. He acknowledges that love and greed stopped him from cutting off relations entirely, although he appears to have made numerous efforts to report his mother's fraud and murder plans to the police over the years, and seems to have been largely ignored. Who do you have to kill before they'll arrest you around here? In the end we are left with the pathetic and yet remarkable image of a tired and essentially insane old woman serving 120 years for murder and related fraud but still plotting her strategy to persuade the world that she was framed. Walker acknowledges in the end that his mother and brother are irredeemable (worse than Charles Manson says one attorney who knew both), and regrets, if only partially, the years when he believed and acted otherwise. This book is so over the top, and so mind blowing, that it must be read to be believed. It is also interesting at this stage of my life to be reading memoirs from people who are about my age (48) or even a little younger, and finding these memoirs set in the very world and at the very same time that I was living my life. So as this drama runs between Las Vegas, Hawaii, San Diego, and Los Angeles in the 1970s through 1990s, I am reminded that I was walking those same streets as these people, and was roughly the same age as the author. You always suspected that there was more going on than you knew, and this memoir tells you one completely idiosyncratic slice of that hidden world that was all around me... and yet the decades and the places are all so familiar. I was there, doing other things... but these folks were there too, and look at the mess of a life they were living. We probably passed each other on the freeway. January 26 2008
This is the best book about internet culture that I've ever read. It may also be the only one, but never mind that. Beatrice has done something I've never seen before. She has gone and captured what online culture and the offline world around it felt like in the late 1990s through early 2000s. Her particular angle is the bizzare world of Buffy the Vampire fandom, something that my wife partook in but that I never grasped at all. But her comments on that experience and related internet cultural realities are spot on. Here's one comment I particularly liked, in "The Internet Wants Your Daughters". "You don't expect electricity to take responsibility for your kid's health. Why expect the internet to prevent your kid from getting hurt?" January 22 2007
Fascinating reading for the MAX commute. January 19 2008
January 18 2007
To my daughter at bedtime, January 13 2007
A coming of age (a little late) tale, spanning Korean, African-American and low rent diner cultures. Enjoyable. January 12 2007
This dark comedy was a great pleasure because it was set in my "hometown", the West Los Angeles and Hollywood Hills of my childhood (1970 to 1977) and early/middle adulthood (1987-2002). Selwood's character spins about my familiar streets and locales including Franklin Avenue, the Bronson Caves, the La Brea Tar Pits, Cheremoya Elementary School, and implicitly even Ledgewood Drive and Beachwood Canyon, although I don't recall seeing them mentioned by name. The author, curiously, now also lives in Portland Oregon. Good for him for making dark comedy of Los Angeles, a city that in all my years of living there I found to be only dark and not very funny at all. January 9 2007
Taking a break from biking in the new year, I enjoyed reading this book on the bus and MAX, going to and from work. I enjoyed the real-world historically and technically grounded components of the story (bomb dismantling and Egyptology) more than the flights of poetic imagination. I had previously seen (but barely remember) the movie, and this book brought back a few scattered memories of the movie, but not enough to get in the way of enjoying it. January 8 2007
Books Read in 2007
2007 Summary -- There are 123 entries for 2007, the majority representing children's books read to my daughter (and sometimes to my son, but he has not been very interested in being read to lately.) I recorded all the adult books I read completely, a few that I read partially, and I skipped only the few that I abandoned in the middle.
The fascinating story of the Harrison brothers and their clocks is as much about the culture as the science of 18th century England. December 30 2007
We talk a lot about the difference between religious and scientific explanations of the world around here. I read this to my daughter at bedtime, in response to her recent requests to know how things really work and really got started. Upon reading about the evolution of hands, she immediately devised and demonstrated a Lamarkian theory of how, over the lifetime of an organism, as it practiced standing up straight it got better and better at it. I, in turn, tried to explain natural selection, but didn't get very far. She wants to know more. December 29 2007
To my daughter at bedtime, December 29 2007. I seldom record reading to my son because he reads on his own. But, for example, today he and I went to the library together, looked for books together, picked up some books for his sister, checked out a comic novel about Thor for him, stopped at the cafe next to the library, and so on.
Science fantasy adventure, part of chapter 4, to my daughter at bedtime, December 28 2007
I endorse Wolf's perspective. Having said that, it must be noted that she is (intentionally?) naive about the history of American fascism, which really begins not with W. Bush but with the Eisenhower administration, as the military industrial system began to infillitrate and control the political establishment. And, bad as Bush is, and bad as Reagan was, American fascism has ideological and corporate roots that go back even further than Eisenhower to the begining of the 20th century (think of Ford and, in the 1930s, Lindbergh, for example.) The fascist shift has been slow, but inexorable, for almost 100 years now. This is a book worth reading. December 27, 2007
A favorite story (how many times have we read this over the years!) to my daughter at bedtime, December 25 2007
If you've ever worried about raising a teenage boy, this is a wonderful book to read. I started at 9 am and read straight through to 2 pm on a lazy Monday, December 24 2007
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Across the Universe
A dizzy Saturday night with Leora. We both particularly liked the rendition of I wanna hold your hand. June 27 2009
Skyscraper
A documentary with my children. June 2009
A Midsummer Night's Dream
After I reseeded the lawn, we went to the park with Roberta's family, and my son's friend Mason, and saw a delightful "authentic" production of this play, with the actors reading their parts from actual "rolls." All and all, it was a good Father's Day. June 21 2009
Domes
A documentary about building domes, viewed with my children, June 20 2009
Oh Brother Where Art Thou
Watched in pirated 10 minute segments on YouTube. I enjoyed it more on this repeat viewing - it's quite a good flick. June 11 2009.
Get Smart (1965)
I've been watching episodes from the first season with my children. This is perfect for my 6th grade boy, and my 3rd grader likes it too. Barbara Feldon is very cute and her humor quite intelligent - I never got the raised eyebrow and ironic wink with which she delivered every line, back when Eric and I would watch this show after school in the 1970s. She's such a pleasure to watch, and the Mel Brooks humour is just as puerile and stupid as can be - perfect. May 24, 2009
Air Guitar Nation
I cringed when Leora told me we were going to watch this yesterday evening, and resisted for five minutes... but then was completely seduced. This is hilarious. May 23, 2009
Brother from Another Planet
Unbelievably tedious story of an alien who lands in Harlem in 1984 - all Leora's fault. Redeemed only by offering us a glimpse at narrow ties and other interesting cultural artifacts from 25 years ago. I think Leora meant to get something different. May 18 2009
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
When first seen in 1987 this was a sweet and very funny comedy. Rewatched this evening, it remains just as sweet, and almost as funny (particularly with the pleasure of Leora seeing it for the first time), but it is just remarkable how OLD it seems in terms of the physical culture - telephones, clocks, PA systems, images of female beauty and a thousand details scream "1987!" Twenty two years pass and the transparent present and invisible now become the visually tangible past and the blatantly old, but it's still a great little movie. With Leora, March 4 2009
The Sound of Music
I watched the first third with my daughter, before going outside to plant a lawn and dig in my garden. I kept trying to figure out how my little Jewish girl, just 8, understood "You are 16 going on 17" (as sung by a young Nazi!) and what it and so many other inputs from her culture are doing to her understanding of herself, of love, and of romance. She seems very interested in the romance stuff and asks interesting and age appropriate questions. Such a contrast to my 12 year old boy, for whom such matters are of little admitted interest. Yet just the other day he told me of a story he was writing that involved a boy and a girl going on an adventure together, so who knows what lurks? April 27 2009.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
With the children, evening of March 24 2009
Keeping Up Appearances
My children are tearing through every episode of this British sit-com. It's so cute. Mid-March 2009
Firefly
Rewatched first episode - it could've been a contender. Early March 2009
Enchanted (2007)
I don't know what is wrong with me, but lately I've been seeing a lot of really dopey lightweight movies that seem really profound and funny. Cynicism meets sincerity, divorce lawyer meets cartoon princess, and guess who wins? With Leora, Mid-March 2009
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
Enjoyable fluff. March 1, 2009
Twelve Monkeys
Continuing my tour of dystopian movies, we watched the 1990 film Twelve Monkeys with Bruce Willis, et al. It's OK, but I wouldn't really call it a dystopian movie. The real mysteries it explores involve altering the flow of time and meeting yourself visiting from the future. It's a time travel story... and naturally the future is dystopian, and naturally the present contains premonitions of a dystopian future.... but the dystopia itself isn't particularly interesting. What you find are just the usual mad scientists, trying to find the secret of the usual world destroying virus, and seeking the usual total obedience and control, with the usual hero trying to determine his own destiny, save the planet, change the course of history and win the girl. All of that is good clean fun, but doesn't really say very much about an actual future on Planet Earth. Within the stereotypes it deploys, it tells a bofo adenture story, but a rather muddled one. It forced us to spend a lot of time analyzing this or that scene, figuring out what was really happening, and in the end we decided that often the move wasn't complicated and subtle so much as unclear and muddled -- it didn't know what it was trying to imply any better than we did. Was there really an intended mystery to unravel or just a core confusion mascarding as artistic ambiguity? February 28, 2009
The Princess Bride
With my children, February 21, 2009
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Very fun and it has the first singing commentary I've ever heard. A birthday present to Leora, February 20 2009
Happy Go Lucky
I love films about "ordinary" people. The character's happiness (she even experiences pain as amusing) raises deep questions. But isn't her failure to understand the driving instructor's reaction to her, her inability to adjust her affect to his perceptions, really her flaw, and not his? He was supposed to be evil and twisted by hate... and he was... but her blissed out reality left her blind to him and how he would respond. It was a great film. On a date with Leora at the Laurelhurst, followed by Cuban food. January 17 2009
Abbott and Costello, Keep 'em Flying
My son loved this, his first Abbot and Costello movie. He declared it "even better than the Marx Brothers." January 17 2009
Mad Max: Road Warrior
Parts of this flick hold up nicely, but the sexually transgressive evilness of the bad guys just doesn't have the edge that it did 25 years ago, and in light of modern sensibilities takes on a dinstinctly homophobic tinge, that frankly seemed unremarkable when I first saw it, but just seems bizarre now. Then also, we realize that Mel Gibson was just starting to become the asshole with a Christ fixation that he later became, walking about with a cross bar on his shoulders, doing the labor of Sysiphus for an ungrateful world, getting ready to make his big Jesus movie, etc. etc. Still and all the movie still does a fine job of imagining a dystopian future. In some ways, over a quarter of a century later, it is still the most compelling dystopian film I've seen. January 2009.