THE NEW YORK TIMES reports today that its Manual of Style and Usage has been updated, including several changes in the way their writers and editors will employ terms related to this thing you’re lookin’ at. Internet is now capitalized, but “the web” and “website” are not. Also, the hyphen has been removed from “email” (although…
Read more
UPON THAT FATEFUL DAY, time was suspended, ordinary routine ground to a halt, and people from all walks of life found themselves standing together to record a moment that, for all they knew, might be their last. Here it appears a pair of business men, perhaps traveling salesmen, have paused to commemorate this strange phenomenon…
Read more
THIS IS MY mea culpa. My note left in the top dresser drawer. My videotaped confession. I’ll say it just this once. Then I can’t be held responsible for whatever happens from here on out. Have you ever fabricated a story, and then, having developed the details to within an inch of reality, and committed…
Read more
THAT WAS A FASCINATING CHAT I had with a young, Russian-born woman on a film set this afternoon. She’d spent childhood in a Utopia-seeking society based on precepts of revolution, so her belief in the potential for improvement in the people and things around her would rival that of your personal trainer. Our conversation was…
Read more
OKAY, I’M ABOUT TO sound a bit self-contradictory, but bear with me. I love creative people, in all their wacky, whimsical, wavering ways; I am one after all. But I’ll also be among the first to acknowledge how troublesome their – our –wacky, whimsical, wavering ways can be. Perhaps the stereotypical trait that troubles me the…
Read more
WEEKS AGO, in an earlier post, I wrote about watching as a few feet away, surgeons removed gallstones through a tiny incision in a woman’s abdomen (U Can’t Touch That, June 26). Such encounters, in which I come face-to-face with experiences, and people, that I might not have otherwise, continue to be among my favorite things…
Read more
THE LIFE OF A CREATIVE isn’t all Peace Love & Understanding, and I might have tempered much of the pain this ego caused me and others if I’d heeded what I read in two little Hallmark cards (oh great fount of wisdom). The two said, 1. “I’m a legend in my own mind,” and 2….
Read more
HERE’S A CONFESSION FOR YOU. Right now I feel like that party-pooper guy at the kegger. The one who blurts out that binge drinking can lead to stroke and sudden cardiac arrest. I don’t want to seem like that guy. But I feel like it sometimes when I come across an orgy of grammatical errors and bad…
Read more
THAT MONTH-LONG stay this summer at an artist residency in Portobelo, Panama left quite an impression on my wife. So this weekend when we rode our bikes past a wooded area in Oak Cliff and speculated about what was rustling the trees a few yards away, I wasn’t surprised by what she said. “Monkeys. Whenever we heard rustling…
Read more
QUITE SOME TIME back I made it my personal modus operandi to shirk, or at least shrink back from, technology. But this year I finally popped the red pill. For one thing I am currently committed to creating whatever I’m going to create by way of these plastic chiclets now clicking beneath my fingers (augmented,…
Read more