Live comedy energizes me if it’s powered by two things: love and truth. [Read More]
Lunch with David
Thank you for the pain and the glory. For the angst and the fame.
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Rabbinical Reflections on the Season
Once again, here we are, in the juxtaposition of Jewish and Christian redemption and renewal holidays – Passover and Easter, respectively – and I find myself acting in two plays, one of which tells the Old Testament story of Joseph in musical form. [Read more]
Christmas for All Mankind
We all have our favorite Christmas films, the ones that stir good cheer and remind us of family and home. But what of Advent, the season that culminates in that celebration? What films capture the painful waiting, struggle for peace, and desperation for change that often accompany this period before the joy? Alfonso Cuarón’s violent, R-rated Children of Men (2006) […]
Portland pays an old debt of gratitude to Billy Hults
It’s taken three decades for Billy to receive public recognition for the magic he stirred up in Portland. He’s been honored as a “side player” by the Oregon Music Hall of Fame, an eight-year-old organization that few musicians here on the coast have heard of. Better late than never, some might say. Lessons can be gleaned from the lag time. [Read More]
No-see-ums, the entropy effect and non-linear time
So I awoke today to the morning light streaming in at just the right angle to reveal that the no-see-ums had invaded my bedroom via a teeny-tiny-itsy-bitsy unnoticed hole in the window screen. (Egads!) My room was a flutter with dust-mote-sized, blood-sucking denizens of suffering and I was feeling a bit helpless as I ran for the duct tape and realized that during the night my bug bites had multiplied 3-fold. (DRAT!) [Read More]
After the Wind Rises? (movie review)
When I hear the name Hayao Miyazaki, I think of clouds. Like the kind we see in Cannon Beach on magical evenings after the sun has set, when gold lines our horizon and pink rims giant, puffy pillars. I think of long grass, like on our sand dunes, bending gracefully before mounting winds. And I think of flying images from his films: robots, planes, pig pilots, cat busses, girls on broomsticks, skyscraper-tall gods walking through forests… [Read More]
The ‘Grand Anderson’ Hotel
You’ve heard of hotels where every room offers a different theme, right? Down the coast in Newport, they have one dedicated to great writers. So, with The Grand Budapest Hotel opening, it made me wonder: If Wes Anderson were a hotel, and his movies were rooms, which room would you book?
How the World Can Be the Way It Is
I’m reading a book by this title, by Steve Hagen, published in 1995. The book has recently been revised and retitled Why the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense, published by Sentient Publications. Hagen is a Buddhist teacher with lots of credentials. Anyway, the book so far has been pretty repetitive, basically saying that Reality (with a capital R, the real thing) is different from what we think it is.
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Into Hellfire Via Portland Frost
From the first line, I love this book, and it’s not even the first line but the quote before the first line that jump starts the whole thing. See, it’s Flannery O’Connor.
I’m haunted by O’Connor. This southern woman with pheasants on her farm who died before forty and wrote short stories about serial killers shooting good Christian grandmas and four-year-old boys drowning themselves in baptismal rivers. [Read More]