Around Here

A half mile of the main street downtown was closed for the annual art fair last weekend. Food, music,  and rows of art booths stretched all the way to the bridge. I used to cover it every year for the daily  paper back in the day. Last year, I went there with a neighbor couple for the first time in some time.  Jim  and I soon found a beer and pizza outlet and camped out there while Carly drifted away to shop the  tents. She came home with a haul of jewelry and assorted chachkas for the house. Some months later  she got a call from her credit card company to verify whether she had purchased an expensive treadmill  in Tampa. Of course she had not. Her credit account was promptly terminated and a new one opened in  its place. Carly suspected it was one of the itinerant “artists”, from the fair, who had tried to leverage  her credit to fraudulent advantage. I told her I had been contacted by mine once, on the occasion of a  suspicious purch...

The tawdry grandeur and cruel magic of a dying circus in depression-era America is the lost-world setting for this romantic and suspenseful tale starring Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, and Christopher Waltz. The Great Depression was a massive re-boot. Many things, many people, made it. Others didn’t. Old Hollywood meets modern candor and style in this sunset-touched and engaging movie. Hal Holbrook does a nice "Rose Dawson" turn as the ancient, and lone surviving, reminiscer. (2011)

T hanks for the good word, mon vieux. Speaking of Capote, The Grass Harp has been in my Netflix  queue ("very long wait") since forever. It can't be that much in demand. WTF? I first heard "come a  cropper" (suffer a misfortune) from Walter. The phrase had something to do, at one time, with falling  headlong off a horse. Speaking of Walter his mother was a dedicated amateur astrologer who created  my complete chart back in the 70s when I was barely out of my teens, and immersed in art and  photography. She predicted I would write - but late in life. I tend to think of astrology as bunk, but I  have always filed what she foresaw under "things that make you go hmmm..." I think you've been   there  in the weeds with me more than once. Our backgrounds, the early years and  all, are so similar, but our temperaments and therefore our responses just different enough to be tasty. One of the most poignant aspects of the Tom story , that I didn't ...