Everyone loves dragons! At least they love them now. Between ‘Game of Thrones’ and all those cute & cuddly dragon movies for kids, you could almost say that a Dragon is a girl’s best friend. Of course the fearsome, fire breathing, mythological beasts are MONSTERS. The kind, wise, large, flying dogs of dragon cartoons are a new incarnation. I’m not sure what to make of them as monstrous dragons—the real deal dragons—play a special role and the new incarnation just can’t cut it. G.K. Chesterton (famous for the Father Brown mysteries) summed it up well when he said: “Fairy
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Mark Twain—Is This for REAL?
My late parents had thousands of books. I’m not exaggerating. There are overstuffed bookcases in every room (except the bathrooms) of their large apartment, and no one was allowed to leave my mother’s memorial gathering without taking at least one book home. Between my father’s passions for Art, American political history, baseball, the American Songbook, and 20th century literature, and my mother’s deep interest in social work & psychology, her love of the theater, and her lifelong fascination with mystery fiction, the bookshelves were swollen and double-stacked. Add a smattering of cookbooks, biographies, memoirs and miscellaneous fiction and non-fiction virtually
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Murderous Art!
One of the great pleasures of living in New York—or another Art-center—is the possibility of returning over and over again to visit world-class collections of art. The depth and breadth of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection is extraordinary. For the second year in a row, it won the number one spot in the Top 25 Museums of the World from Trip Advisor. With the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam coming in at number 14, Musee du Louvre in Paris at 13, the British Museum in London at 8, the Prado in Madrid at 7, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg at
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Dada and Pushing Envelopes
If I say Dada, you might grimace or grumble. Isn’t that the art movement involving nonsense, and didn’t Marcel Duchamp call a urinal a “Fountain” and declare it to be a work of art? Yes and Yes, but there’s a great deal more to the artistic movement with a long list of luminaries including Max Ernst, Hannah Hoch, May Ray, Jean Arp, Sophie Tauber, Kurt Schwitters, and other artists throughout Europe and the U.S. who ventured outside the usual boundaries of ART. They pushed the envelope in the early part of the 20th Century in ways that resonated with artists
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Autumnal Energy
Autumn…even the word is cool and active. The lazy, hazy summer is simmering to a close and the world starts to get serious again. A summer breeze picks up speed and becomes an autumnal wind and every year I feel energized and ready to restart the year. Autumn is the best time of year to clean out attics—both real & metaphorical—and we all know what lurks in attics: secrets, surprises and monsters! Inside my late mother’s attic crawl space there were suitcases, photo albums and an old Smith Corona portable typewriter. I took one look at it and recalled the
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Jen, Jen & Jen
A blog post about three actresses called Jennifer may seem like a departure, but bear with me and I think you’ll see where I’m heading. Jennifer Garner, Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Aniston seem to be everywhere—even for those of us unable to name their recent movies without a search engine. I’m not a particular fan of any of these Jennifers, but I also have nothing against them. They personify the current crop of actor/personalities, so they are a great starting point for this post. Successful actors can, and often do, become “cottage industries” based on the persona they project to
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Sherlock & Sons
I grew up on Sherlock Holmes—the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories and all those movies on TV. I was particularly fond of Basil Rathbone and now I’m a fan of the newest incarnation starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the master detective. Some of the old movies were dramatizations of the original stories, but others took Holmes & Watson out of their period so they could fight Nazis during WWII. Those movies stretched credibility, but they were still fun to watch on TV when I was a child. By the time ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’ by Nicholas Meyer was published in 1974 and
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A Murderous Life
My mom got me started reading mysteries early. My first Agatha Christie was ‘Death Comes as the End.’ I picked it up during my early mummy hunting phase because it is set in ancient Egypt. At that time I wanted to be a writer AND an archeologist. The latter ambition faded, the first did not. Mom’s lifelong mystery obsession probably began with Nancy Drew. That popular series began in 1930. I tried reading a few, but was never swept up in the stories. They were tame when compared to the ‘grown up’ murder mysteries scattered all over the house. Mysteries
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The Real MONSTERS!
The fanatic manipulating a child into becoming a suicide bomber, the man holding girls prisoner in his home for decades, the trophy hunter aspiring to kill the last of its kind, murderous dictators, child molesters, killer drug kingpins … The real MONSTERS are human. Humans have a long history of tyranny, mass murder, and crimes against all of humanity. As a species, our big, creative brains are scary. Once focused on evil, we take it to the max. When a person commits a heinous act, the language we use to describe him—or her—often harkens back to a time before psychology
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