It was one image. Just one image broke me. It wasn’t the cops standing idly by. It wasn’t the people on the floor of the House and the Senate who had broken their way in. It was the Dixie flag, being waved in the hallowed hall of this nation’s government. This nation fought a civil war that was anything but civil to keep the ethos and the intent of that flag (a battle flag, not the actual flag of the Confederacy, but the flag they used to fight for the preservation of slavery) out of its government. …
“Don’t move until you see it.”
My top five list of all time films (lists being my thing since before I saw “High Fidelity” and certainly before it came back into the cultural zeitgeist with a brilliant remake) is as follows:
- “Untitled (Almost Famous Bootleg Cut)”
- “La Vita É Bella”
- “The Philadelphia Story”
- “The Fisher King”
- “Searching For Bobby Fischer”
That last one is a personal darling, not only for its parallel to my own competitive history, but for how it displays the desperate need for a parent to safeguard their progeny’s actual childhood and their basic human decency, rather…
A Musical Journal of a Life-Changing Year (and change)
19) “No Sleep” — Caamp
Undoubtedly, it was a lean-ish year for new music that I adored. I’ll admit that it has been tougher and tougher to listen to the younger music, and between my waning excitement for battling crowds at SXSW (I prefer the elite treatment) and my abandonment of ACL Music Festival (I’ve been doing it for so long that I’ve seen just about every band I ever wanted to see at a sweaty mosh pit of music and madness), the amount of new music I found this…
I recently re-read “The Little Prince,” out loud, complete with my own inflections and drama, in the most serious and heartfelt voice I could muster. It was a recording for my daughters, Angel and Krystian, and it is what I read to them so that they would get to sleep at night when they were little. Two people who know about this gift have asked for the recording, and I deflected them as fast as I could. The book is for everyone who ever knows me. The recording is for the only two girls who have ever needed my voice…
When I was 8 or so years old, a fellow student at school started calling me “Slow Poke Rodriguez.” It made no sense as I was neither slow, nor named Rodriguez. Presumably, it was because I was shorter, a little more solid, and brown-skinned. There really weren’t any other comparisons. Thankfully, it didn’t stick.
At 14, the upperclassmen on my high school soccer team nicknamed me, “Beaner.” I laughed along with them, as they repeated it again and again, in a bid to be accepted. I wasn’t particularly talented, other than slide tackles (still have some of that), so I…
