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An Undated Musing
I found this, undated, in a notebook I carried around for a while ( Read more... ) -
Inglourious Basterds
Inglourious Basterds is not history, nor is it meant to be historically accurate. Inglourious Basterds uses history as a setting and a story with which we are all too familiar, and it twists it in a way many of us have thought of, if only for a moment. The old hypothetical question about going back in time and choosing to kill Hitler before his ( Read more... ) -
Morpheus' Tears
Can crying in your dreams give you the catharsis you need in the waking world ( Read more... ) -
Behind an Iron Door
I have a certain pathetic urge right now to be immune to other people's power to hurt me, either on purpose or by accident. ( Read more... ) -
A Word on Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale
Forest Lawn Cemetery sprawls across a prominent hill in Glendale, California, my home town. It is a swath of lovely green on a map, as Google will easily show you, but the experience of the place isn't to be found on the internet. Behind elegant brick walls and tall black gates, the entryway has a complex of quaint buildings to the right and a ( Read more... ) -
Cleaning Out the Past
Last night, I dreamt that I returned to my first apartment on Jackson Street with my mother in tow. It was the same little studio, but it was full of stuff that I'd left behind, the way that many kids leave things behind in their old rooms when their parents own their own houses. It was a glorified storage space, waiting for me to go through it, ( Read more... ) -
The Sound's the Thing
The other day, while watching Nightmare on Elm Street, I caught a detail that hadn't stood out to me before. And it's not like I haven't watched the movie a thousand times since I was a kid (and it's not like I haven't noticed new details each time), but something gave me pause that wouldn't have occurred to me when it first came out. And that's ( Read more... ) -
The Suit Makes the Woman
A friend joined me for the first of many horror movies I watched this week, and it was one he'd only seen in bits and pieces: Hellraiser. And since I love sharing my favorites with the uninitiated, I was all excited to watch his reactions as much as the film itself - and that was when I noticed that one of the main characters continually drew him ( Read more... ) -
Dreams on 08/09/09
I dreamt that I went to my dad's old neighborhood in Moreno Valley, only to find something that was part wasteland. My dad's old house still stood, but the one next door was half torn down and the ones down the street from that were completely cleared. Further down the street, some people had turned the unused lots into gardens; the folks who ( Read more... ) -
Shamed Into Silence?
"Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on ( Read more... )