Happy Birthday to Me

My last truly important birthday was probably my 18th, and that was a long, long time ago. I still feel like I’m 18, act like I’m 12, and sleep like I’m 5 months old. But life doesn’t often let you live in the blissful ignorance that I’ve mastered. Nothing will make you feel the icy fingers of mortality around your neck like cleaning out your childhood home, putting it up for sale, and preparing to close that lengthy chapter of your life. That’s what has occupied me for the past two weeks. My sisters and I looked through our parents’ …

Continue Reading

Movie Review: Star Trek

2009. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto. Directed by J.J. Abrams. There’s a particularly good episode of Northern Exposure — one of television’s funniest and most-thoughtful series — in which the Native American character played by Graham Greene is studying white American culture for examples of healing and instructive myths. He notes that various tribes have stories that help put the universe in perspective and help explain the often-unexplainable burden of being human. After questioning everyone in town, he finds that no one can name myths in white culture similar to those you find in Native American culture. He then stumbles …

Continue Reading

Movie Review: Wendy and Lucy

2008. Starring Michelle Williams. Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Summer is the time of blockbusters — screen-filling spectacles of ‘splosions and sequels. The fantastic and futuristic epics that challenge the stabilizing structures of logic while we suspend our disbelief. Reinterpretation of familiar narratives and remakes of films that were better in their first iteration. But once in a while, you are reminded that there is drama in everyday life, and a story that will break your heart behind every person with a downcast face you pass on the street. That’s why we need the blockbusters and explosions. There is just too …

Continue Reading

Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008. Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett. Directed by David Fincher. There are many deaths in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; that is, there are many lives lived. I say that because, if what this story tells us can be boiled down to a single point, it’s that, in order to live, you must accept that you will die. To make this point as simply and gracefully as the movie does, it shows us the life of a man born into a physically old body that becomes younger as he ages.  In all other ways, he experiences the joys and …

Continue Reading

Passings: Jeff Hanson

Found out late this afternoon that Kill Rock Stars recording artist Jeff Hanson, 31, has died. This tragic news, on a cold and rainy day in Minneapolis, is sad and sobering. I first heard him being interviewed on public radio a couple years ago, describing how he sung his trademark falsetto (forgive me if that’s not the right term) as a child, and utilized the same style when he became a songwriter. I picked up his self-titled LP, and was impressed with the delicate, unconventional songs. If you are a fan of Elliott Smith or Iron & Wine, this is …

Continue Reading