Welcome Back

Word of the day: nugatory : trifling, worthless, ineffective

Long time, no post!

Here's what's new on the homefront: I'm been working, of course, enjoying any free time I can get with Julia. I got a good head of steam going with my novel, finishing up a screenplay, and starting a novella. I've started applying for jobs in Georgia, planning future day trips... Less than 3 months of HPB!

Gabriel, the lazy listener, is continuing to grow, babbling like crazy, enjoying the hell out of his life.

Julia is super-busy, teaching at 3 schools, wrapping things up at Denison, winding down at the great CCAD, and traversing to and from Marion. It's good to see her doing what she loves. She's reading like crazy too!

Let's see, here is a hasty, ridiculously concise round-up of movies Julia and I (or just I) have seen over the last month:

- Rabbit Hole is probably the best movie I've seen in a good year. It's one of the most extraordinary depictions of grief I've ever seen, every bit as good as the Pulitzer-Prize winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire (who penned the screenplay), moving, with the finest performances of Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart's careers.

- Unstoppable is a straight-up, full-barreled, well-shot adventure with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as the everyday men in charge of stopping an out-of-control train carrying dangerous chemicals.

- The Resident is a decent direct-to-DVD B-movie with Hilary Swank as a new tenant in a New York City apartment with a creepy landlord (an effective Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

- Fair Game, a patient, slow-burning, layered re-enactment of the Valerie Wilson affair, has Sean Penn and Naomi Watts as Joe Wilson and Valerie, and their relationship, heated, antsy, well-versed in each other's passions, anchors the film.

- It's Kind of a Funny Story isn't. It's a blah affair, with all sorts of likable actors (Zach Galifinakis, Emma Roberts, and Viola Davis among them) in a nothing story about a whiny, lost kid checking into a psychiatric wing at a Brookly Hospital, from the writer-director team of Half Nelson no less.

- Due Date has some big laughs, and Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifinakis certainly deliver as the mismatched traveling companions, but it's never as hilarious as you keep waiting for it to be. Still, it is funny, as all Todd Philips movies are.

- Never Let Me Go is a devastatingly poignant adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, a subtle, composed, diligently-etched tale with masterful performances (Carey Mulligan earns particular kudos). It's a story full of big ideas, the kind of movie that lodges in your conscience and nestles there for days - we bask in its sadness, the pull of the inevitable in Ishiguro's ineluctable world of mystery.

- The Switch is a modest comedy, with Jason Bateman on point as the New Yorker who is the father to his best friend Jennifer Aniston's son, a fact she is unaware of. It's an amusing, affecting situational comedy.

Well, next time I'll talk about some books I've read recently, but I'm almost out of time. I want to get some work done while Gabriel is still sleeping and try to come up with some ways to entertain him this rainy afternoon.

Today's artist is the great sociological photographer Jacob Riis, who emigrated to the U.S. from Denmark in the latter half of the 20th century. He was an acclaimed journalist, but spent his early years in New York living on the streets. He is most famous for his black-and-white photographs of the dirty neighborhoods, the violent slums, and the dangerous alleyways of New York City. He snapped shots of it all: overcrowded apartments, rundown tenements, poor children sitting on the curbs, half-dressed kids leaning out of smeared windows. He was one of the first artists to make use of flash photography and he utilized it in in his seminal, still-studied How the Other Half Lives, an 1890 novel/expose on the deteriorating conditions of the inner city. Critics accused him of being a muckraker, of staging his photos, of seething with disdain and condescension for his subjects.

The above image is one of his most famous photos, "Bandits Roost," in which thugs stand outside an alleyway at 59 1/2 Mulberry Street in Manhattan, a notoriously crime-infested, scary neighborhood, later torn down.