We actually did it: The Delmar Dads three-person movie group attended a film for 12 consecutive months to support the independent Spectrum Theater. It wasn’t all smooth sailing. On two occasions, one of us (me) had to seek special dispensation from club officers to move the night from the second Wednesday of the month to the second Tuesday. In addition, one of us (not me), didn’t attend the July...
The Movie Club went throwback this month and we saw Jaws, the iconic thriller/suspense blockbuster celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. I’m extremely familiar with Jaws. I happen to live with someone who has said Jaws is her favorite movie, and she went to see it numerous times in the summer of 1975 when it premiered. Since then, we’ve seen the film, or parts of it, many times. So there...
After a blip last month in which one of us missed, the Delmar Dads Movie Club was back last night with a full roster of our three founding members. It was Paul’s turn to choose, and this guy is on a winning streak. We saw Weapons, the kind of horror/mystery/thriller type film I would never choose, but am glad that he did. Weapons has one of those far-out concepts: what happens to a community when...
It’s not often I finish a book and experience a welling of tears and realize I’ve just read a great work of American literature. But John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath just did it to me. I think I read the novel in high school, although I remember nothing of it. I came into it this time fresh and without opinion. And the Joad family and their journey of survival blew me away. Tenant farmers in...
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a fan of multilinear films and novels, which are constructed around multiple protagonists with intersecting storylines and driven by a central theme. So when Owen told me he watched the film Crash (2004), I was keenly interested in his reaction. As a side note, I included Crash with the word ‘Sorry’ in parentheses, on my “List of Must-See Movies.” I...
A subset of the Delmar Dads Movie Club went to the Spectrum Theater last night and saw “Friendship,” a cringey black comedy starring the actor and comedian Tim Robinson, whom I’d never heard of, but apparently is popular. It was my turn to choose what film we’d see on the second Wednesday of this month, and darn if the pickings weren’t slim. I almost chose “F1” but was warned by someone trusted...
I’ve meant to read the British author Rachel Cusk for some time. She’s been praised by critics and awarded literary prizes throughout a writing career that has spanned twelve novels and several books of nonfiction. She writes about women, in contrast to another author I recently discovered, David Szalay, who writes about men. I probably should have started with Cusk’s acclaimed trilogy, Outline...
The first rule of the Dad’s Movie Club is that we have to follow all of the rules. We have many of them. Rule #5: Movie night shall occur on the second Wednesday of every month, unless a special exception is granted in a given month and all three officers unanimously agree to the exception, which has happened only once when movie night fell on my wedding anniversary and we voted to go on Tuesday...
In my continuing effort to support our only local theater, the Spectrum, that screens independent, classic, and cult-status films along with first-run mainstream movies, we went to see Sinners the other night. What a crazy, highly entertaining fusion of Horror, Western, Musical, Period Piece, Black genre, and Thriller. It sounds like it can’t work. It worked! Ryan Coogler, who directed Black...
It’s been a while since I’ve found a novel so compelling that I knocked off one hundred pages a day and finished reading the book in three days. Flesh, by David Szalay, is that novel. A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that Flesh is “a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.” The...
In my novel, In Flight, the main character, Robert Besch, suffers from a severe psychological disturbance called dissociative fugue—“a form of amnesia characterized by temporary loss of your identity and unplanned travel or wandering without apparent purpose.” It is typically triggered by extreme stress or emotional trauma. Robert survives a harrowing plane crash and risks his life to save fellow...
I was late getting around to it, but I just finished reading The Sympathizer, the 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen about a conflicted Vietnamese communist double agent struggling with his identity while living in the U.S. after the fall of Saigon. This post isn’t a review of the novel, which I found compelling. It’s simply an opportunity for me to point out excellent...
One thing I love about going to a bookstore such as City Lights in San Francisco—that original haven of the Beat Generation writers—is that I’m sure to walk out of there with a novel I’m not going to find at other, more mainstream bookstores. In this case, I bought the 2001 novel Platform by Michel Houellebecq, who I’ve never read and who is considered France’s most celebrated and controversial...
After winning the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel, “Orbital,” Samantha Harvey said in an interview with the Guardian, “When I’m down here on Earth, I find it difficult to be consoled by the things that we’re doing to the Earth and to one another. But when I zoom out, I can feel something that more resembles peace. I can look at it almost without judgment, just look at its beauty.” I...
The vampire never ceases to both fascinate and repulse. Eastern European folklore offered tales of reanimated corpses and blood-drinking spirits. In 1819, John Polidori’s The Vampyre was the first published vampire story. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), still widely read today, established many enduring vampire tropes such as vulnerability to sunlight and the power of seduction. In modern times...
