Being There: Be there

Veteran filmmaker Hal Ashby was on one hell of an unprecedented hot streak during the 1970’s. Though he personally won only a single Oscar in his entire career, (not for his direction, but for his editing of 1967’s eventual Best Picture winner, Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night) the ten year period that followed his directorial debut with The Landlord in 1970 saw six of Ashby’s films accomplish to rack up 7 Oscar wins and manage 16 other nominations, all in a decade that boasts the release of arguably some of the greatest films of the last century.

Visioneers: Misery, Discomfort & Chronic Uncertainty Love(s) Company

Most of us have seen it all before… The everyman character, struggling to remain in control of a rapidly deteriorating situation while trapped in the unnerving dystopia of an all-too-likely and not-so-distant future. We’ve seen Terry Gilliam’s brilliant and heartbreaking Brazil. We met an unspoken social requirement by enduring The Matrix and traversed a rite of passage by seeing Stanley Kubrik’s disturbingly violent A Clockwork Orange. Some of us even go back far enough to remember B-listers like Logan's Run, the original Rollerball, A Boy and His Dog and a good number of similar films that were mass produced during the 1970’s, interpreting the future as a world full of technological wonders that most often culminate in humanity adopting a less than ideal level of detachment from itself. The general idea behind Visioneers is certainly nothing new, but the execution is a fine mix of the delightfully fresh and the hauntingly familiar.

Harold and Maude: The Perfect Marriage Of Music & Moving Pictures

It was only a matter of time before I got around to posting a review of my favorite film of all time, Hal Ashby’s 1971 black comedy, Harold and Maude. Sure, there is no shortage of more contemporary pictures available for a good panning and a current film called Avatar seems to be all the rage right now. But this movie is my fave of faves and rather than put off the inevitable review I'll eventually be compelled to write, I figured I could just pound it out now and check it off my “To Do” list.

The Horror: Brando Gets A Contemporary Makeover

While trying to put together a better avatar for this blog, I began experimenting with the stock filters in Photoshop and thought I might try my hand at recreating the now famous Obama "Hope" poster. Naturally, I am not the first person to co-opt this now historic design for my own use. Far from it. The web is actually rife with enough of these rip-offs to classify any such effort as passe. Fortunately for me, not only do I not have any high resolution photographs of myself, but I have a short attention span, and became distracted by a flying insect above my desk and lost interest in the avatar project.

Accept Nothing Les: Woodgrain Gibson Les Paul (Studio Model)

Ever since I began the "skeletons" project last month, I've been trying to think of a follow up to "Your Board Sucks". (Steep Spiral Staircase: December 24th, 2009) I contemplated a skeleton behind a drum kit, but over the last week, became caught up in drawing all of the components to a Gibson Les Paul, my brother's instrument of choice and, for my money, the finest looking solid body electric guitar in the galaxy. After several days of painstakingly detailed work creating each individual screw, knob and switch, I suddenly found myself beyond the point of no return. It took much longer than I had anticipated, but finally applied the finishing touches this afternoon: the strings, the tuning pegs and the transparent pick guard. (Click here for a closer look.)

Blood Meridian: Cormac McCarthy (Vintage International)

Author Cormac McCarthy has received quite a bit of attention over this past decade, and for good reason. Beginning in 2000, the film adaptation of his 1992 New York Times best-selling novel All The Pretty Horses catapulted him into the mainstream, garnering more press than even McCarthy himself may have been comfortable with. Though the film version, directed by the multi-faceted Billy Bob Thornton, didn't perform well at the box office, much of Hollywood took notice (including film veteran Tommy Lee Jones) and there emerged a certain renaissance for McCarthy's brand of bleak, gritty tales of the soft-spoken cowboys and brutal outlaws that once crisscrossed the deserts of the Southwestern United States.

X-Ray Specs: Sleeplessness, Worry Usher In Year's First Flash of Fleeting Genius

I couldn't get to sleep last night. Nor did I have much luck the night before. The constant concern over my sate of joblessness has got me all tied up in strangling knots of worry and crippling self doubt. I tend to lay awake all night, groaning out loud over perceived missteps and rolling over and over on a pillow that can't seem to settle on the right temperature. Always too hot or unreasonably cold. I sing songs to myself and try with all my might to think of nothing. Trying to seek out some sort of impenetrable psychological darkness that'll distract my aching brain long enough that I can slip into it's folds and away to sleep. But I've gotten nothing of the sort in the last 48+ hours. Though I did find something that I had forgotten I was looking for.

The Wire: David Simon's 5 Year "Love Letter" to Baltimore

If you spent any part of the last decade wasting your valuable entertainment time with The Sopranos, only to feel slighted and spit upon by the creators when the series finally wrapped while still embroiled in a sea of creative controversy and airing its final insulting episode on June 10th of 2007, I know a way you can almost recoup that time via a better series that never quite received as much attention, yet was more truthful and engaging to the discriminating viewer.