This was a nice book to pluck off my dad’s shelf for our backpack trip. (Too bad I didn’t remember to pluck a plastic bag for it out of the kitchen drawer – it’s a little thicker than it used to be now). The landscapes of Wyoming, my birth state, are brought to visceral life,…

Love between rich and poor, regret, and commitment are the major themes in this bio-drama. It’s packed full of good actresses. Fun to watch, but a bit heavy on the violins and saccharine for me, and kind of an unclear message (at least for me). It’s my first trip to movie theater in a while…

This is a pretty convincing portrayal of the contrast between the ghettos and upper class neighborhoods of Johannesburg. The story has plenty of setup for both comedy and melodrama, but wisely chooses to keep it subtle and believable on both fronts. The theme of personal growth threatening our learned methods of survival is one that…

This is the finalé of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra season finalé we’ve been attending for two weeks. Jeffrey Kahane has conducted and performed seven great Beethoven works so far, returning from his months of recovery from hypertension with a Herculean performance. The piano introduction to the Fantasia sounds as difficult as any of it, but…

I can’t help wondering to myself whether Jeffrey Kahane can maintain the intensity of the performances he delivered last week through another long weekend. Tonight he has no help from the orchestra – the piano sits alone on the stage. Only Beethoven will be there to keep him company on the music stand, Sonata No.…

East Moon treats us particularly well tonight. Mom, Ann, Sean, Doug, Liz and I have a serious, subdued meal governed entirely by the dictums of propriety.

We all return to Boettcher Concert Hall to see if Jeffery can pull off the two remaining concertos, Nos. 1 and 5. He does so with the same composure we’ve come to admire fondly. The impossibility of the task is less imposing now that we’ve seen him do it a few times, but I’m still…

My mom is here visiting, and to mark the occasion Dad has procured tickets for all of us to this Colorado Symphony Orchestra season finalé. The CSO director Jeffrey Kahane has been gone for months to recover from a serious case of hypertension, but he has returned for this performance. We’ve missed him, and feel…

I felt like I learned something about Hispanic culture in Los Angeles from this movie, which is a measure of success even for pure fiction. A Quinceañera is a girl’s fifteenth birthday, and the introduction plunges you into a youthful world. Characters who identify with their cellphones are plunged into adulthood when confronted with a…

An ideal movie to watch while sick at home and writing some simple code for a project. The vision of a future world buried in garbage and with a professional wrestler as president of the US is great, but you have to sit through too much formula without enough of this kind of good stuff.…