Day 813: Biting The Bullet

originally published March 23, 2014 To my fellow fans of tweaked reality, I ask: what is the ultimate magic trick? Is it David Copperfield sending the Statue of Liberty into a temporary netherworld? David Blaine bending the laws of logic and physics two inches from a spectator’s nose? Jim Belushi keeping his garbage sitcom on […]

Day 798: MacBe— Sorry, The Scottish Article

originally published March 8, 2014 I live in a house with two theatre people. And just as they have learned to live with the eccentricities of a writer (it’s normal to scream obscenities at one’s fingertips, right?), I have come to adapt to the weirdness of their world. For example, during an exhibition of my […]

Day 637: Great White Way-Out Trivia

originally published September 28, 2013 As the lack of such topics on this site may indicate, I am not a raving fan of Broadway musicals. I’ve seen some that I quite liked and other that were Cats, but they just aren’t my thing. Naturally, I married someone who teaches musical theatre for a living. So […]

Day 348: Her Name Was Lola. She Was A Showgirl.

originally published December 13, 2012 What can we make of Lola Montez? On the one hand, here’s a woman whose claims to fame are being sexy, dancing on stage, and being sexy. On the other, we have a 19th century woman who looked at the ‘proper’ place for women in society and said “screw it”, […]

Day 328: The Fleet Painter

originally published November 23, 2012 The scene: Aboard the deck of the Dutch flagship, the Lowestoft. It is 1666, May 31, the evening before the start of the Four Days Battle between the English and the Dutch. The characters are four notable Dutch painters: Willem van de Velde the Elder, his son (Willem van de […]

Day 290: Op-Art – Beauty You Can Squint At

originally published October 16, 2012 Is it a sign of my maturity that my taste in art has evolved? I now see beauty in the great masters, and find myself moved by the color and composition of inventive modernity. But there was a time in my life when great art was defined by whether or […]

Day 251: Yoko, Pre-John

originally published September 7, 2012 Yoko Ono has been called many things: an artist, a philanthropist, the anti-Beatle, and several terms I don’t care to use in mixed company, unless I’m dealing with traffic. I never bought into the Dragon-Lady angle. It’s a cop-out to say that she broke up the Beatles, when clearly the […]

Day 242: The Unfinished Article

originally published August 29, 2012 There are days when writing my daily tithe feels like it’ll be the death of me. But unless something should strike me down in the middle of penning a kilograph, I won’t be leaving behind any grand unfinished work. Sure, I might perish before I turn 40, in which case […]

Day 234: Class & Elegance From The Bradford Exchange

originally published August 21, 2012 I have waited a long time for this day. No online catalog of kitsch, from the Franklin Mint to the R2D2 replicas on Skymall, comes close to the sheer volume of quirky miscellany as the Bradford Exchange. Indeed, this may be the first topic I re-visit, as they continue to […]

Day 201: The Diggers Take Aim

originally published July 19, 2012 There was a time long ago, before caring became unhip and irony closed its shutters on the glaring sun, when joining a movement was – to many, anyhow – a rite of passage within one’s internal sense of community. Sure, the “99%” movement is still going strong today… or so […]