The other night I was walking on the main street in the small town where I live. The city had just recently decorated it with Christmas lights. It has just turned dark, and as I walked along the street merchants and people in the stores waved at me and I waved back. It was warm out and although it was the night before Thanksgiving, I had elected not to wear a coat. I mention this only because since it was so Capraesque it was truly a "moment" for me.
Another happened the evening of Thanksgiving. We were all at my sister's lovely home. My son Jake and his partner Domingo had just arrived. They immediately joined in a game of "Apples to Apples". I sat out in the sun room with my Dad. I watched as they all sat around the table and laughed and joked and talked. It was a thing of beauty and wonder to watch. I said to my Dad, "you can't buy wonderful moments like this." He agreed.
If when I die if I am allowed to go back and revisit a time in my life, like the girl in "Our Town", I would go back to a time like Thanksgiving 2012. When we were mostly all together, and we were mostly healthy, and we were happy, and we were most definitely all in love with each other. This is life my friend. That elusive, sudden, and wonderful gift. Drink it in while you can.
Having what I refer to as "moments" is when you suddenly appreciate how wonderful that moment is.
I have had more than my share.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Art Prize of Grand Rapids.
I am so grateful that I was able to be part of the world's greatest art exhibition and prize exhibition. I was able to compete against artists from all over the world. And it was a fabulous experience. I learned so much. Next year will be different.
One complaint I heard vicariously from a fellow artist was that if you are "just" a conventional artist i.e. painter, sculptor, line artist you get no notoriety. It seems like the lady that recreates "Starry Night" out of dryer lint, or the woman who recreates Marilyn Monroe's face out of broken combs gets all the publicity. Yes, that is a valid point. It does seem that way. But I was so gratified today to learn that the "City Band" and the "Elephants" both made the top ten. They are both wonderful. I was also gratified to see that the luminere exhibit Friday night made the top ten also. That was truly a moment. I will tell my great grandchildren about that.
I will not live long enough to have great-grandchildren, but if I did, I would tell them about Friday night.
One complaint I heard vicariously from a fellow artist was that if you are "just" a conventional artist i.e. painter, sculptor, line artist you get no notoriety. It seems like the lady that recreates "Starry Night" out of dryer lint, or the woman who recreates Marilyn Monroe's face out of broken combs gets all the publicity. Yes, that is a valid point. It does seem that way. But I was so gratified today to learn that the "City Band" and the "Elephants" both made the top ten. They are both wonderful. I was also gratified to see that the luminere exhibit Friday night made the top ten also. That was truly a moment. I will tell my great grandchildren about that.
I will not live long enough to have great-grandchildren, but if I did, I would tell them about Friday night.
Friday, September 28, 2012
Little Moments
Life is but sorrow interspersed with a few moments of joy. Tonight I witnessed the luminere exhibit at ART PRIZE. It was a moment.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Gone
When young people die I always think
"That doesn't seem fair."
But then I think of how life hangs by
such a delicate thread
and it's all over so very soon anyway.
Nobody is guaranteed the next few minutes
and so there is really no such thing
as a 'premature death.'
Soon we will all be dead longer than the
pyramids were ago.
We all only taste life on the tip of our tongue
and then it's gone,
gone like the sun falling in a purple sky,
gone like a campfire in the rain,
gone like the feeling of joy at your graduation,
gone like that look in her eyes as she held your hand,
gone like your unborn children,
gone like the bait on your grandson's line,
gone like the daylight as you close your eyes
and fall into a long pleasant slumber.
"That doesn't seem fair."
But then I think of how life hangs by
such a delicate thread
and it's all over so very soon anyway.
Nobody is guaranteed the next few minutes
and so there is really no such thing
as a 'premature death.'
Soon we will all be dead longer than the
pyramids were ago.
We all only taste life on the tip of our tongue
and then it's gone,
gone like the sun falling in a purple sky,
gone like a campfire in the rain,
gone like the feeling of joy at your graduation,
gone like that look in her eyes as she held your hand,
gone like your unborn children,
gone like the bait on your grandson's line,
gone like the daylight as you close your eyes
and fall into a long pleasant slumber.
So
So there you have it. The following is my dozen picks for the best TV shows in the last 10 years. My apologies to "Dexter", "Nip/Tuck", "Six Feet Under", and a myriad of other shows that were excellent and didn't get mentioned.
But omitting garbage like "The Sopranos", "Sex In The City", and "Desperate Housewives" was no accident.
But then again, there are new gems and new garbage coming out everyday. Stay tuned.....
But omitting garbage like "The Sopranos", "Sex In The City", and "Desperate Housewives" was no accident.
But then again, there are new gems and new garbage coming out everyday. Stay tuned.....
Thursday, September 6, 2012
The Best TV in the Past 10 Years: #1: Breaking Bad
AMC
Well, here we are. At number 1. And if you have bothered to watch any TV at all in the last 10 years, you must have known this was coming. "Breaking Bad" is one of the greatest things I have been privileged to witness......ever.
Albuquerque High School Chemistry teacher Walter White has a problem. He has stage 3 lung cancer. He hasn't told his family. But he is most troubled by the fact that he has not been able to adequately put aside enough money to take care of his family or send his son Walter Jr. to college after he's gone.
Walter has a brother-in-law who is a DEA agent and occasionally he lets Walter ride along on routine busts - provided Walter stays in the car. On one of these excursions, Walter witnesses one of his flunkie burn-out students narrowly escaping from the bust. Walter has an epiphany and devises a scheme to supply the needed money for his family.
Walter decides to seek out the drug-dealing flunk-out student - Jesse Pinkman - and make him a proposition. Jesse will use his street level connections to move the product, and Mr. White will cook the best and purest meth-antphetimine on the planet.
Thus begins a saga of epic proportions. And it is a tale that I believe is the best TV in the past 10 years. Maybe ever.
Creator Vince Gilligan has taken a good premise - not the greatest premise ever - but a good one, and made it a masterpiece. There are lots of reasons.
Beyond Gilligan's vision and writing the casting was fantastic. Brian Cranston as Mr. White is truly a mystical thing of beauty. Known to millions only as the Dad on "Malcolm In The Middle", Cranston definitely gets to sit at the big people's table this Thanksgiving. Could Tom Hanks have played Mr. White? Nope. DeNiro? Maybe, but not as well. And who the heck decided to give totally unknown Aaron Paul a shot at playing Jesse Pinkman? I don't know whose decision that was but give them a raise! This kid is brilliant and for my money makes the show. Jesse was originally going to be a temporary character, but sometime in the first season it was realized that Mr. White and Jesse Pinkman were one of the best TV partnerships since Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.
Oh but it doesn't stop there. Playing Mr. White's wife Skyler is the lovely and "Murder One" alum Anna Gunn. After a couple seasons and Walter deciding to finally confess what he's been up to, Skyler leaves him in a righteous huff, only a season later to also reach a line that she reluctantly decides to cross. Therefore she too is 'breaking bad." Next there is Walter's brother-in-law Drug Enforcement Agent Hank Schrader played by brilliant (and also a "Murder One" alum) Dean Morris. This guy knows his stuff. He brings a reality to this character in a way that is not usual. He falls totally in the moment and becomes this guy. What an actor.
Somehow Walter and Jesse hook up with the slimiest of slimey lawyers in form of Saul Goodman. Another of the cast members delivering brilliance. Bob Odenkirk plays Saul. Saul sets Walter and Jesse up with a big-time-run-the-whole-west-coast Drug Kingpin played as a mild mannered businessman by Giancarlo Esposito. RJ Mitte as Walter White Jr. deserves mention too. All excellent.
Morality questions pop up more in this show than the little gophers at Chuckie Cheese. "Breaking Bad" offers a look at these questions, and as I have wondered many times in my 26 years working with criminals... where is that line? And what exactly made the point in time when it was crossed, the right time? When, why, and under what circumstances, would any of us decide to "break bad?"
I'll admit I haven't seen the entire series, but I very much look forward to seeing it all. I will always be intrigued and wonder how it will inevitably arrive at the only logical conclusion this madness can bring.
Well, here we are. At number 1. And if you have bothered to watch any TV at all in the last 10 years, you must have known this was coming. "Breaking Bad" is one of the greatest things I have been privileged to witness......ever.
Albuquerque High School Chemistry teacher Walter White has a problem. He has stage 3 lung cancer. He hasn't told his family. But he is most troubled by the fact that he has not been able to adequately put aside enough money to take care of his family or send his son Walter Jr. to college after he's gone.
Walter has a brother-in-law who is a DEA agent and occasionally he lets Walter ride along on routine busts - provided Walter stays in the car. On one of these excursions, Walter witnesses one of his flunkie burn-out students narrowly escaping from the bust. Walter has an epiphany and devises a scheme to supply the needed money for his family.
Walter decides to seek out the drug-dealing flunk-out student - Jesse Pinkman - and make him a proposition. Jesse will use his street level connections to move the product, and Mr. White will cook the best and purest meth-antphetimine on the planet.
Thus begins a saga of epic proportions. And it is a tale that I believe is the best TV in the past 10 years. Maybe ever.
Creator Vince Gilligan has taken a good premise - not the greatest premise ever - but a good one, and made it a masterpiece. There are lots of reasons.
Beyond Gilligan's vision and writing the casting was fantastic. Brian Cranston as Mr. White is truly a mystical thing of beauty. Known to millions only as the Dad on "Malcolm In The Middle", Cranston definitely gets to sit at the big people's table this Thanksgiving. Could Tom Hanks have played Mr. White? Nope. DeNiro? Maybe, but not as well. And who the heck decided to give totally unknown Aaron Paul a shot at playing Jesse Pinkman? I don't know whose decision that was but give them a raise! This kid is brilliant and for my money makes the show. Jesse was originally going to be a temporary character, but sometime in the first season it was realized that Mr. White and Jesse Pinkman were one of the best TV partnerships since Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton.
Oh but it doesn't stop there. Playing Mr. White's wife Skyler is the lovely and "Murder One" alum Anna Gunn. After a couple seasons and Walter deciding to finally confess what he's been up to, Skyler leaves him in a righteous huff, only a season later to also reach a line that she reluctantly decides to cross. Therefore she too is 'breaking bad." Next there is Walter's brother-in-law Drug Enforcement Agent Hank Schrader played by brilliant (and also a "Murder One" alum) Dean Morris. This guy knows his stuff. He brings a reality to this character in a way that is not usual. He falls totally in the moment and becomes this guy. What an actor.
Somehow Walter and Jesse hook up with the slimiest of slimey lawyers in form of Saul Goodman. Another of the cast members delivering brilliance. Bob Odenkirk plays Saul. Saul sets Walter and Jesse up with a big-time-run-the-whole-west-coast Drug Kingpin played as a mild mannered businessman by Giancarlo Esposito. RJ Mitte as Walter White Jr. deserves mention too. All excellent.
Morality questions pop up more in this show than the little gophers at Chuckie Cheese. "Breaking Bad" offers a look at these questions, and as I have wondered many times in my 26 years working with criminals... where is that line? And what exactly made the point in time when it was crossed, the right time? When, why, and under what circumstances, would any of us decide to "break bad?"
I'll admit I haven't seen the entire series, but I very much look forward to seeing it all. I will always be intrigued and wonder how it will inevitably arrive at the only logical conclusion this madness can bring.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The Best TV in the Last 10 Years - #2: Rescue Me
FX
NYFD fire-fighter Tommy Gavin is a complicated guy, in a complicated city, doing a complicated job. Tommy deals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from 9/11 manifested in the form of an on-going relationship with his dead cousin Jimmy Keefe. Jimmy died at Ground Zero on 9/11. Tommy is a raging alcoholic whose lost his wife and family because of the booze and the job. But he still loves his ex-wife Janet and can't stand to see her with anyone else - even though he himself cannot seem to stay out of the pants of his dead cousin's widow Sheila. Tommy also worries about his kids who he believes need his guidance even though he's an out of control juice addict.
Tommy by himself takes the term "self-destructive" to a whole new level, but he is surrounded by a team of like-lunatics who seem to ground him in some strange way. They've been there, they are there, and they get it. The other fire-fighters include the hapless and often clueless Mike Silletti played by Michael Lombardi. This character is often the butt of the others' jokes, but he remains naive and almost innocent. His closest buddy is Sean Garrity, who is also fairly brain-dead most of the time. He often comes up with the most bizarre schemes with Mike, and the others look on in disbelief. Sean also gets mixed up with and marries Tommy's crazy sister Maggie (Tatum O'Neal). Hoo-Boy. Then there's Bart Johnston, a fire-fighter who relates with Sean "Puffy" Combs and wants to be called "Sean". So now we have two Seans. (What show has two primary characters with the same name?) So they are called "white Sean" and "black Sean". The suave, charming, handsome ladies man is Franco Rivera played remarkably by Daniel Sunjata. This is a great performance forming a character that can both be deep and shallow at the same time. And rounding out the inner core is Kenneth "Lou" Shea played by for my money the series stealing John Scurti. John Scurti is one of the greatest actors that ever graced the TV screen, making Lou an everyman - we all know this guy. And Mr. Scurti plays this effortlessly creating a character that we laugh and cry with. It's no wonder Lou is Tommy's best friend.
That's the inner core, but there are so many outstanding characters and performances here that they could never all be adequately be given credit due. There's the beautiful and talented Andrea Roth, as Tommy's ex-wife Janet, breathing angst and disgust, confusion and love into this crazy mixed up life they have. Wonderful. Callie Thorne as Sheila is perfect. James McCaffrey as the ghost of Jimmy Keefe, sure brought this dead guy to life for me. And I have to mention the hilarious Lenny Clark and Charles Durning as Uncle Teddy and Tommy's dad Michael respectively. These guys were spot on.
I was only in NYC once when I was an early teenager, and I've never hung around with fire-fighters, but I know these guys and I know this city. Maybe I've spent too many years with Corrections Officers, but I know how Tommy, Lou, white Sean, black Sean, Mike and Franco think. I know what makes them tick. And that's because the writers, the crew, and the cast are just that good. These fire-fighters wouldn't know how to act in a job that wasn't dangerous, and they don't understand why that should take a toll on anyone else.
Tommy is on this self-destructive collision course and it is apparent in the amount of booze he puts away. It's how he almost gets Janet to come back but then goes to spend the night with Sheila. But it's also in the subtle way he always has to be the first one in a fire and the last one out. He insists on being the guy that takes all the chances. He wants to connect all the dots again, but he just can't remember how. But please understand: amid all this pathos, this show can be one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. There is a lot of hysterical stuff going on here. Laugh out loud stuff.
Like I said, Tommy is a complicated guy, in a complicated city, doing a complicated job. And can I take a moment and say that Denis Leary is brilliant in this. He has become a truly wonderful actor who somehow brings his famous ranting nightclub act and his character's confusion, anxiety, PTSD, and all the rest and puts it into his pathological blender and pours it out for us to enjoy. And it becomes vintage wine before our eyes. And without ever saying it, his character Tommy Gavin begs the show's title: Rescue Me. His inner being cries out "Please, somebody, rescue me." And who knows? It may be possible.
NYFD fire-fighter Tommy Gavin is a complicated guy, in a complicated city, doing a complicated job. Tommy deals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder stemming from 9/11 manifested in the form of an on-going relationship with his dead cousin Jimmy Keefe. Jimmy died at Ground Zero on 9/11. Tommy is a raging alcoholic whose lost his wife and family because of the booze and the job. But he still loves his ex-wife Janet and can't stand to see her with anyone else - even though he himself cannot seem to stay out of the pants of his dead cousin's widow Sheila. Tommy also worries about his kids who he believes need his guidance even though he's an out of control juice addict.
Tommy by himself takes the term "self-destructive" to a whole new level, but he is surrounded by a team of like-lunatics who seem to ground him in some strange way. They've been there, they are there, and they get it. The other fire-fighters include the hapless and often clueless Mike Silletti played by Michael Lombardi. This character is often the butt of the others' jokes, but he remains naive and almost innocent. His closest buddy is Sean Garrity, who is also fairly brain-dead most of the time. He often comes up with the most bizarre schemes with Mike, and the others look on in disbelief. Sean also gets mixed up with and marries Tommy's crazy sister Maggie (Tatum O'Neal). Hoo-Boy. Then there's Bart Johnston, a fire-fighter who relates with Sean "Puffy" Combs and wants to be called "Sean". So now we have two Seans. (What show has two primary characters with the same name?) So they are called "white Sean" and "black Sean". The suave, charming, handsome ladies man is Franco Rivera played remarkably by Daniel Sunjata. This is a great performance forming a character that can both be deep and shallow at the same time. And rounding out the inner core is Kenneth "Lou" Shea played by for my money the series stealing John Scurti. John Scurti is one of the greatest actors that ever graced the TV screen, making Lou an everyman - we all know this guy. And Mr. Scurti plays this effortlessly creating a character that we laugh and cry with. It's no wonder Lou is Tommy's best friend.
That's the inner core, but there are so many outstanding characters and performances here that they could never all be adequately be given credit due. There's the beautiful and talented Andrea Roth, as Tommy's ex-wife Janet, breathing angst and disgust, confusion and love into this crazy mixed up life they have. Wonderful. Callie Thorne as Sheila is perfect. James McCaffrey as the ghost of Jimmy Keefe, sure brought this dead guy to life for me. And I have to mention the hilarious Lenny Clark and Charles Durning as Uncle Teddy and Tommy's dad Michael respectively. These guys were spot on.
I was only in NYC once when I was an early teenager, and I've never hung around with fire-fighters, but I know these guys and I know this city. Maybe I've spent too many years with Corrections Officers, but I know how Tommy, Lou, white Sean, black Sean, Mike and Franco think. I know what makes them tick. And that's because the writers, the crew, and the cast are just that good. These fire-fighters wouldn't know how to act in a job that wasn't dangerous, and they don't understand why that should take a toll on anyone else.
Tommy is on this self-destructive collision course and it is apparent in the amount of booze he puts away. It's how he almost gets Janet to come back but then goes to spend the night with Sheila. But it's also in the subtle way he always has to be the first one in a fire and the last one out. He insists on being the guy that takes all the chances. He wants to connect all the dots again, but he just can't remember how. But please understand: amid all this pathos, this show can be one of the funniest shows I've ever seen. There is a lot of hysterical stuff going on here. Laugh out loud stuff.
Like I said, Tommy is a complicated guy, in a complicated city, doing a complicated job. And can I take a moment and say that Denis Leary is brilliant in this. He has become a truly wonderful actor who somehow brings his famous ranting nightclub act and his character's confusion, anxiety, PTSD, and all the rest and puts it into his pathological blender and pours it out for us to enjoy. And it becomes vintage wine before our eyes. And without ever saying it, his character Tommy Gavin begs the show's title: Rescue Me. His inner being cries out "Please, somebody, rescue me." And who knows? It may be possible.
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