B2L2 continues to publish on a monthly schedule, but now the month’s posts will be published in clusters of 2-4, roughly once a week, instead of all at once.
1. The Alien There are so many great monster movies. Monsters from the deep. Monsters from outer space. Monsters from the laboratory. The walking, crawling, shuffling, sprinting dead. My favorite monster movies? Off the top of my head? Nosferatu. Frankenstein. Godzilla. Alien and Aliens. Let’s…
In first grade, while doing a Svengoolie impression in the mirror in the bathroom, I was discovered by a teacher who moonlighted as an actor at the Robert Young Repertory Theater, a leftover from when Smithville was a resort town, a place where Chicagoans would…
Rumors have been flying across the internet regarding the whereabouts of Jimmy Gabacho. He hasn’t posted anything since March and was last seen in a seedy airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico, getting ready to catch the Cape Air flight 269 heading to the West…
Is the television theme song a dying art?
Although I watched a lot of television, few current running shows’ themes get me to hurry me back from raiding the fridge other than the intros to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Most of my favorites are from the 1970s — TV’s golden age for theme songs. Chalk it up to a combination of my age, gender, race and political affiliation. Maybe I should watch something other than Comedy Central and METV.
Everyone makes lists. Yours will be different — maybe better. Here is an ode to a neglected genre; my Top 10 list of TV Theme Songs. Looking back, I see a few common threads.
So, the other night I see a commercial. Some 12 year old is lecturing her younger siblings about how when she was young, if she wanted to see a show and dad was on the couch snoring, she had to live with it. She follows…
My father didn’t like kiddie movies, but he, having been informed by our mother that he needed to bond with the boys, would take us out on occasion. He took a two-week vacation from the post office every summer and tried out the fatherly…
Many think because I’m a work-at-home freelancer — or on the dole for three years, depending on how you look at it — that I watch a lot of television. They easily conjure that, what with all that time on my hands being a…
When some people have a bad day or a bad week, sometimes they head to the fridge and pull out the Rocky Road and their day gets better. Some people meditate, work out, or do yoga to relieve their stress. Some people throw pity…
If you accept that every moment is temporary, and every moment is as it should be, then the motivation to get up off the couch feels, well, small. There are inevitabilities in life. We accept what we can’t change. Aging. Cancer. Separation. Death. Decisions we…
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Perennial Classics, 1988. p. 294-295: Even in [Southern] states with black majorities, however, Southern Republicanism had to attract white support. And “carpetbaggers” (migrants from the North) and “scalawags” (native Southerners who cast their lot politically with the freedmen)…