In this our modern world, to wake up and find something awry with one's email is like discovering that the sire's fields have been sown with salt, the cattle are gasping and carbuncular or the river is burning. Not good. Repeated requests for my password produce nothing. Nothing but more requests and more empty screen space. Communiqués? They are no more. But I am, and I am more than concerned. Or am I? This is the strange part, that I roll out the door for San Francisco and really don't think Read more [...]

Such strange feelings in advance of the event. And actually, they are emotions I have experienced before. But on this occasion they added up to, let us say, a general sense of intensification of ritual space. More precisely, I decided to let them sum themselves in this particular fashion. Meaning, that I was open to the possibility. Ready for it. And in the end what was there to say but 'Happy New Year.' Thus, Rosh Hashanah 2013. A.k.a., 5774. And trust me, I had to look up the latter. Okay, it Read more [...]

Hailed as Woody Allen's best film in years, I can only add to the general praise – and muse a bit. First, I entered the cinema with no precise expectations. The Guardian in the UK and given it a stunning review, of which I deliberately only read the first few lines. Why know more? I like Woody Allen's film. When he's hot, he's hot. And although a few years older, he is more or less of my generation. Or his fans, like me, are of a certain generation. And to hear that he has a good film out, well, Read more [...]

I never thought of it as a rose garden, but that's because kids don't. It was that area along the front sidewalk in which my mother's thorny flowers grew, plants approximately the same height as myself, each with its dugout watering basin. The latter accompanying many horticultural efforts around the house, round holes in the desert which I assumed were part of gardens everywhere. And there was nothing attractive to me, a six or seven-year-old, in either her flowers or the hard-packed ground from Read more [...]