Homecoming – Part 1

YCI

The Yancey County Public Library, formerly the Yancey Collegiate Institute.

Writing… or any kind of work that requires planning and forethought… is not coming easily to me lately. I started out 2013 very hopeful, ready to take on the challenges the year was going to throw at me, determined that I would maintain the sense of calm and control which I’d attained while spending Christmas with my family and away from the concerns of work. For the most part, I succeeded. From the perspective of my ability to manage the chaos around me, it’s been a pretty good year.

Continue reading

Merry Christmas!

No blog this week. No podcast either. Just a photo I traveled 1000 miles to get, of a Christmas Tree in a very special place. It’s not art, it’s just a snapshot. To me, it says that the Wilsons endure, no matter the odds.

Tree

 

Merry Christmas from Edwin & Evelyn, Susan, Charles, Steven & Renee, Jamison & Jen, Andrew, Dawson & Brittany, Patrick, Ethan, Christian and Leighton.

A Christmas Miscellany

Just a short entry to share some gems of Christmas 2013.

docsavageDoc Savage – Man of Bronze #1 (Dynamite Comics)
Dynamite continues its trend of bringing classic pulp and adventure heroes to modern comics with modern comic art. The result is a triumph. I’m not a huge Doc Savage fan. I’ve read a couple of the books, and actually watched the entire movie with Ron Ely. On second thought, maybe I am a huge fan. Who else would sit through that movie? For the uninitiated, Doc is a genius and a superb athlete, one of a team of heroic geniuses who’ve pledged themselves to help those in need. All of them are engineers or scientists, all are capable of discovering the solution to a complex technical problem and thus saving the day. They’re idealists, too. Doc believes that criminal behavior is merely a disease and can be cured. It’s a very American concept. They’re both intellectuals and jocks (celebrating the American worship of both sports figures and men and women of science), their headquarters is on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building (celebrating both capitalism and technological advancements) and they have a healthy dislike of involving the legal authorities when solving problems (celebrating the American spirit of independence, even from American government.) The artwork is beautiful, and the writing crisp and entertaining. This is a promising series that I intend to keep following. Continue reading

Celebrating the Outsider at Christmas – Bell Book and Candle

51+PNg8JS7LI’ve mentioned the film Bell Book and Candle in my rundown of favorite holiday movies in the past. I revisit it now because it’s such an atypical Christmas film. I recall my mother taping it for my father back in the early days of VCRs, when some of us wanted to capture every film and TV show for posterity. We didn’t know YouTube was coming, or Netflix, or DVD collections of complete runs of TV series. One movie cost at least $40 then, and older films which hadn’t won Oscars or been box office smashes weren’t as quick to be released. Local TV stations were still showing movies then, albeit with large chunks missing to allow space for commercials. My family spent many hours sitting in front of the TV remote in hand, pausing for commercials, trying to get the most pristine copy we could.

Continue reading

Anti-nationalist sentiment – The Pursuit of Happiness (1934)

First up, thanks to all of you who sent notes of encouragement after last week’s lengthy discussion of Alzheimer’s. It’s not an easy road to travel, but since when was life ever easy? It’s good to know how many people I have in my corner.

pursuitNow on to the blog I started writing two weeks ago, a group of thoughts about a movie I watched even more weeks ago, almost by accident. It’s old. So old that, if you search it on IMDB, it doesn’t even show up on the initial list of possible films, even if you type its exact title. It was made in 1934, and I discovered it because I was watching some films with Joan Bennett on YouTube. (Not a lot of Joan Bennett’s films are available on NetFlix streaming!) I was watching Joan Bennett films because I was reading a biography of the Bennett family, which was recommended by Lara Parker in her latest book, which I reviewed recently. All this discussion of her early film work got me interested in seeing some movies. That’s the way my mind flows. One thing to the next.

Continue reading