Left to my own devices

Almost five years ago, I wrote about all of the music concerts I'd been to over the years (well, going back to the late-1990s, which is when I began going to live shows in general). Given my penchant for lists, of course I ranked the experiences. It was fun revisiting those times and, because I've been to nine more music events since that blog post, so figured it was time for an update. 2019 saw Ashley & I attend seven(!) concerts. We were really on a roll. The last one we went to was The Ocean Blue at Lincoln Hall in early November of that year. Then, of course, the pandemic happened in early 2020, and the world shut down. It was only at the very end of last month that Ashley & I ventured out to a concert venue again and enjoyed a live performance ( Suzanne Vega ). In total, I've gone to nine more shows since the last time I wrote about concert experiences, so there is an updated list, for anyone who cares. The 29 concerts I've been to, ranked.

In the wake of a leaked draft opinion showing the United States Supreme Court could be set to overturn Roe v. Wade, I've heard some renewed talk from folks on the left about how we need to increase the number of Supreme Court justices. This is something Democrats have looked into doing before and, perhaps naively, I find it perplexing. Not, at its core, the idea of changing how many justices sit on the SCOTUS bench, but the reasoning. Those on the left who have broached the notion have done so as a sort of remedy for the court becoming more conservative. I'm just not seeing what the numbers have to do with it. What matters is the who, not how many.

With the recent release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness , we have yet another movie tackling the subject of alternate realities. The sublimely resonant Everything Everywhere All at Once also recently engaged with the theory of the multiverse, though it is not at all a new cinematic concept. One such example is the underrated 2011 feature, Another Earth . I have enjoyed the aforementioned films, to varying degrees, though I question their premise. Not that there are multiverses, but that they are all so similar. To be clear, several multiverse films have done a good job of providing creative variations of our own reality, with some of the ones we've seen presented consisting of worlds made out of paint, or cartoons, or floating objects. While that makes for eye-popping filmmaking, it is, on the whole, fairly surface-level. What gives me pause is that almost all of the parallel universe/multiverse presentations we've witnessed consist of the same characters as our...

I recently mentioned to an acquaintance (I am not using the word "friend" here, as the reason will soon be evident) that I was thinking of deleting my Facebook account (again). There wasn't one, specific reason for this, more so an accumulation of... dissatisfaction. Interactions (or lack thereof) on that particular social media platform have felt hollow for some time. And the Zuckerberg app, more than other outlets, tends to bring out the worst in my emotions for some reason. "But how will I know what's going on with you?" the person asked. And there's the rub. This person has my phone number. They can call or text at any time, yet never do. In truth, they rarely interact with me on Facebook, yet I know they see what I put up there because they report back to various people some of the stuff I post. So it goes. At any rate, I reminded them of how they have my phone number. We'll see if they ever reach out.

There may come a time when some of us realize we may not live as long as we'd wanted, or expected to. It may not come as a "Eureka!" moment, perhaps more as a slow, steady registering of potential reality. I use the word "potential" deliberately, as none of us knows precisely what the future holds. Still, we can have a fairly good idea after a certain point.

Last month, I announced the nominees for the 25th annual Matt Awards , where I highlight my favorites in film from the preceding year. And now, just a couple days ahead of the BAFTAs, and a few weeks ahead of the Oscars, here are the winners for the 2022 Matt Awards ! Here we go... 

A nation has invaded a neighboring country. The leader of the invading nation says they want to restore land rightfully belonging to them. No, this isn't Russia attacking Ukraine. It's Germany invading Poland in 1939. There are enough similarities, I'm not sure why I didn't see them before. In truth, in the weeks of Vladimir Putin's saber-rattling leading up to where we're at now , there was an internal pipe dream that, no, the former KGB officer was somehow bluffing. Alas, it was a hollow hope. Russian military forces have moved into Ukraine and, while news reports are all over the place currently, word is that Kyiv and Chernobyl have fallen. This article tries to lay some sort of reasonable foundation for why Russia is doing what it's doing. I'm not buying it. There is truth that "the West" probably cannot truly have an understanding of all the dynamics at play in that region. Conversely, it's pretty apparent -- on a surface level -- wh...