Here’s a question that indelibly colors its speaker: “Where you at?”
Having lived in Metropolitan New York, I’ve doubtlessly heard it. Now relocated to Las Vegas the phrase echoes frequently. It insults my ears. It diminishes the level of regard the speaker will be held.
“Where you at?” sits among the worst of first impressions. Continue reading Bloody Mouth
Americans are too enamored of SCANDAL. Few transgressions are worthy of such designation. The misused and abused word itself. Thanks to the giant scarlet S, peccadillos barely deserving shrugs balloon into outrage.
We resort to SCANDAL too easily. Same with hero. Who can’t be a hero in America? It’s so easy now one needn’t bother swiping Pauline off train tracks at the last minute or yanking cats from tree limbs. The valor invested in hero, like the disgust which should weigh SCANDAL, has been devalued. Otherwise why call such stalwarts “everyday heroes”?
Isn’t that an oxymoron?
We now bestow ever-fleeting glory on mundane acts. It’s lazy tabloid media usage. Continue reading Small Beer
Unlike morally smug, ethically deficient conservatives and the Scripture misinterpreting evangelicals who enable them, the rest of us have had no hand in our own conception. Randomly created, we are born. Inevitably we die. If we’re lucky we begin enjoying semblances of control several years into seeing first light until our mortal forms lose vigor, and blindness begins the cascade rendering us past tense.
I read somewhere sight is the first of our senses that extinguishes; hearing the last. Maybe it’s apocryphal but Lillian Hellman yelled final tender endearments to Dashiell Hammett just as he succumbed on his deathbed. Seems right. The two writers were true to their beliefs as well as one another in a fashion that flouted convention.
Besides, who among us wouldn’t prefer going out hearing how we were adored? Loving phrases over a corpse comfort mourners but do the dead derive any benefit from them? Doubtful. Continue reading Our Time on Earth
We’re dumbing down Sherlock Holmes. If the recent Robert Downey, Jr., efforts making “Sherlocking” more accessible for the earbud/self-absorbed set weren’t puerile enough, BBC TV has gone whole-hog to render Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective and his associate Dr. John Watson relevant for 21st century viewers.
No need to wonder what Conan Doyle might’ve made of those revisions. He would’ve looked at them as if H.G. Wells had monkeyed with his template. On absinthe.
The Downey reboots were jarring. Are jarring. Will be jarring. Holmes as imagined by Sax Rohmer. Or H. Rider Haggard. Ripping yarns instead of Victorian Age mysteries. Holmes mirrored his time. Downey’s Holmes distorts it. Continue reading Not Your Father’s Blue Carbuncle