Left to my own devices

Those of you who really like movies and follow awards season probably have your own ideas about what were the best (or at least your favorite) films of the past year.  Yours truly does, as well. Enter The 2026 Matt Awards! Like the Oscars, these nominations and awards are for movies from the year before (so the 2026 Matt Awards are honoring films from 2025). This all started in 1998. I was a huge fan of Leonardo DiCaprio at the time (still appreciate his work to this day).  Titanic  was released in December 1997, and I saw it 5 times at the theater. In early 1998, the Oscar nominations were announced, and Leo was nowhere to be found. Salty at the perceived snub of my  crush  favorite actor, I decided I could do better than the Oscars, and so the first Matt Awards were born. DiCaprio was nominated for  Titanic  and, of course, he won. Over the years, the Matt Awards have allowed me to recognize (if only for myself) the best in cinema of the preceding ye...

    I'm not a big fan of recent buzzwords such as "trauma" and "closure." I dunno, it just seems like they're so much pop-psycho-babble that have been used so much as to become annoying. Those words have, however, seemed appropriate for how I've been feeling the last couple of weeks. Allow me to explain. I turned 50 on December 27th. It was a great birthday -- probably my favorite -- and has left me feeling all sorts of positive emotions in its wake. One aspect of it did, however, send me on a particularly deep emotional journey, one which I've oddly found to be quite healing. Where to begin? I've been thinking about this a lot, and don't really know the best way to frame it, or how to begin describing it, so... here we go.   

A few years ago I was walking around the St. Louis Galleria during June. It was Pride Month and, as I made my way past the mall stores, noting how so many of them had pride flags in their windows, I became a tad misty-eyed marveling at how far we'd come. I couldn't help but think of younger Matt, back in the 1990s, who was terrified at the prospect of coming out, and wondered how much stronger he would have felt if he'd been able to see pride flags displayed at public places. A gay friend I was with at the Galleria (and, honestly, I can't remember who it was now) scoffed at the displays, and his reaction caught me off guard. He bitterly remarked that it was just some hollow corporate show, put on because being gay was in vogue. I didn't really understand that because my mind was still cast back decades earlier to when seeing such an exhibition -- hollow or not -- just wouldn't have computed for me. I responded to the friend with something like, "Well, I sti...

Peter Lovesey has died . That name may not mean much to a lot of you. That's fine. He was one of my very favorite authors, though I haven't found many people on this side of the pond who've heard of him. I was at our local Barnes & Noble last night, and saw that they have four of his novels (though not his latest, which was published in December). He wrote over forty books, as well as dozens of short stories. He was prolific, but it never seemed to impact the quality of his work. Reader, I can't adequately convey how much enjoyment I got from reading Peter Lovesey's work. While writing is something I've liked to do since I was 8-years-old, reading is something I've always been more particular about. There are a lot of books I've started, then abandoned because I just couldn't get into their rhythm. You see, the style has to be just right. It's not easy to explain, but a few authors who have consistently been on go-to status for me are: P.D. J...

It was the mid-1990s. I walked into the record store (aptly-named Record Service), and took stock of where I was. It was situated in an old building on Green St., in campustown. The immediate thought I have when remembering it is 'brown.' I remember the walls as being brown, the shelves were brown, it was just... brown. It felt cozy. There was a sign on one of the walls for a place upstairs called Figaro's. It specialized in classical music. My heart fluttered slightly, as I was partial to classical music, and so seeing that there was some place devoted to it seemed pretty awesome. But, I didn't go there, as I wanted to primarily focus attention on what was on offer at the main record store. It was my first time in that shop. I was familiar with classical music. I was not, it turned out, familiar with what a lot of what Record Service had to offer. There was so much to take in. A few items I remember that stood out were: the greatest hits collection (the best of...

Tonight I learned that Kevin Drum has died. He passed away on Friday, March 7th, from Multiple Myeloma (the same illness that took my uncle Paul several years ago). Drum's diagnosis came in 2014, and he talked about it openly on his blog , up to and including just a few days before his death. I knew of Kevin Drum through his blogging. During the early aughts, when I started to become more politically aware and involved, I began reading certain online musings by folks -- Andrew Sullivan and, on a local level, IlliniPundit, to name a couple. Drum's blog at that time was Calpundit . Eventually, he began blogging at Mother Jones . When they parted ways, he started what would be his final online venture. So, yeah, I've been reading Kevin's musings for over twenty years.