Archive for August, 2009
Foreign Film Fragments
Weeks ago, after I posted “Cliff’s 10 Best Movies of All Time,” an appalled colleague of mine asked if I had purposely omitted foreign films from my list. The answer was no. I stand by the list, but the question got me thinking about why there are only American films on it. I concluded that [...]
The Books of August
When it came to literature, my high-school education was a pretty shoddy one. For that reason I spent many years afterward catching up on books that most of my peers read when they were in ninth or tenth grade — A Tale of Two Cities, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the like. Sometimes [...]
I’m Supposed to Like It, But I Don’t
Recently a colleague of mine, knowing me to be a jazz nut, asked to borrow my Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington CDs. I missed them while they were gone. Never mind that I hadn’t played them for months; something about not being able to hear them suddenly made the records seem like booze and me like [...]
