the groundhog day project

A weird thought occurs to me. First, a note: most of the following post was written early to make time for game night and a busy day that began with taking my daughter Saer to the airport to go visit her grandparents and aunt and uncle. My other daughter, Hayley, is away visiting relatives and old friends with her mother. My son is in his room watching a show on Netflix . I'm here watching Groundhog Day for (probably) somewhere over the 400th time in the 22 and a half years since it first was in the theater. And, as Larry parked the newsvan in front of the Pennsylvanian Hotel (really, the Woodstock Opera House), I found myself thinking about last year when I made my pilgrimage to Woodstock, and how it felt like home to be in this place I'd seen every day for, at that point in this blog, six months. It was entirely the opposite of how it was for Phil. He got to Woodstock, where he'd been three times before, and to him it was alien, abhorrent. For me, it was a fantastic plac...

When I was looking up information on the USC Shoah Foundation yesterday , I happened upon an interview with Steven Spielberg from USA Today with a (mis?)quotation as its title-- 'This is what I was put on earth to do' - Steven Spielberg Maybe he said that to the interviewer, but the only line I can find in the actual text of the interview that is similar to that is this (with a little context): When young people come up to me and instead of saying they liked my last movie, they say, "My grandparents gave testimony [to the foundation] in 1995." Hearing that make me feel I was put on this earth to make a difference, not just in the lives of movies audiences. The testimonies help others hear stories that are not easy to tell or listen to. I'm not going to talk about the holocaust again today, or the whole poetry after Auschwitz thing. Let's leave Adorno behind, maybe even leave Everything Is Illuminated behind for the most part. Today is Day 729 of this ...

Maybe Chris McCandless is insane. I mean, despite everything I said yesterday . Maybe we need to label it "insane" when someone can see the cracks in the veneer and the cracks in the facade of the world he or she has been born into and raised up through and in which he or she is expected to find a career and work and procreate and pop out another generation to do the same thing... ad infinitum. We've got to label that "insane" because what else are we going to do? Listen? See what he or she has got to say and risk seeing the faultlines ourselves? No. Fuck that. Watch your television, binge watch your Netflix and your Hulu and Amazon Prime , glue yourself to Instagram and Twitter and Facebook , check out of the real world except for (or maybe even during) those hours you are expected at your desk or the checkout counter or the garage or wherever the fuck it is that you work. If it gets to be too much, there's alcohol and medication and more of that telev...