Just a quick note to say I'm taking some time-off LB to reflect and reset after the rollercoaster ride that was July 2023. I've enjoyed the heck out of reading all y'alls thoughts on film and look forward to getting back to it myself when the time is right. In the interim, I may just watch some movies!
peace & love
Last week I stumbled into a random revisit of a handful of loosely-related movies from my callow youth. I’m slo-o-o-wly reviewing them in release order, starting with 1975’s Aloha Bobby & Rose. Next up in this trek through mid-70s to mid-80s indie joints: Melvin & Howard (1980).
I was just 20 years old when Melvin & Howard was released; headed into the final year of my first degree: a BA in Sociology (for me, the default refuge of the academic agnostic). I remember…
Don DeLillo looms large in my reading life, along with Cormac McCarthy, Jennifer Egan, A.M. Homes, Robert Stone and Ray Bradbury. White Noise is easily DeLillo’s most accessible novel. The book is a brilliant, mordantly funny interpretation of American Leben und Tod in the mid-80s: that paranoid era of Ronald Reagan, the Evil Empire, SDI and Iran-Contra.
DeLillo is lauded by his peers: “A man of frightening perception” (Joyce Carol Oates); “The poet of entropy” (John Banville) and “The laureate…
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.
Cormac McCarthy in All The Pretty Horses
Back in the 90s, a big part of my public librarian job was collection development: ordering books, music and film for the 4…
