This is the real deal. For some of us, it's the end of the end. The magic is over. Space travel, the future we were promised, has been put on hold.
It was May of 1961 when Alan Shepard was shot into space in a tiny capsule on the back of a Redstone rocket. He could just as easily have blown up on the launching pad. I watched it, as did most of America, as it happened. Life stopped. They brought a television into my 7th Grade classroom, which was a big deal in and of itself. We held our breath and prayed. It was a Catholic school, so praying came naturally, but I’ll bet that everyone who watched it was praying. There were no atheists in American on that bright spring morning. It was only fifteen minutes, and it was suborbital, and we watched it from beginning to end, and even though Yuri Gagarin had outdone us not too long previously, it was still the beginning. Space had arrived.
Keep in mind that scientists had been working on rockets for quite some time now, and the idea of space flight was a public obsession. That was the definitive frame of the future, that we would fly out into space and learn and explore. We would break away from the Earth. It was the next step in our evolution. Schools that weren’t heavily teaching the sciences and creating the next generation of engineers to make this happen were not doing their job. We were coming off a decade of B movies where all the space travel was by metaphorical communists disguised as aliens, come to destroy the American way of life. The next decade would bring Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the American way of life would be as pioneers of the galaxy, and space was the final frontier.
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon that night in July in 1969, the dream was a reality.
The shuttle was to be the next step in this process. We would build a space station in permanent orbit, and travel to and fro in our shuttles with little or no fanfare, and this would be our launching pad to the planets. And from there…
The shuttles started flying in 1982. They ended last year.
The idea of space and pioneers and frontiers inspired more than one generation, but for so many reasons, we look elsewhere for our inspirations today. Perhaps the core reason is that, when you come down to it, the rewards of a space program are pretty small in terms of practical benefits. You put a lot of money in, and you don’t get a lot of money back out from it. The original space race was motivated by global Cold War politics, and money didn’t matter. But sooner or later there are just so many resources, and one has to decide how best to use them. Space, which for all practical purposes was for pure science, was not one of those best uses.
Pure science is the same as pure art. You don’t do it to make money. You don’t do it for glory. You don’t do it to beat somebody else at it. You do it because it’s there, and because you have to. Art for art’s sake. Science for science’s sake. Philosophers can attempt to explain these, but we intuitively know them for what they are. They are the best, and most difficult, aspirations of the human spirit, to know and to create beyond what has even been known or created in the past. And it diminishes us when we cut off an outlet to those aspirations. The end of our dedication to space is one of those cut-offs.
Space will continue to happen. Private enterprise will give it a shot. Other countries than the US, as part of their development and self-determination, will give it a shot. Eventually the US will probably get back into it with all heart and soul and give it another shot. It’s not over, not by a long shot. But it is hibernating for a while.
So today was one of those really sad days, where we know that we have lost something. But only for a while. Kids will visit the Enterprise on their school trips to Manhattan, or roam through the Air and Space Museum in Washington, or visit any number of other science venues throughout the country, and the dream’s embers will continue to glow just a little bit. And from those embers, some day new flames will rise. So while shedding a bittersweet tear for the lost dreams of the past, one holds on to the promise of new dreams for the future. As JFK put it, It is one of the great adventures of all time.
An adventure postponed, for the moment.
There is a growing tension in the performing arts between desperately wanting an audience and bemoaning its behaviour. Symphony orchestras, regional theatres, ballet and opera companies across North America are feeling stiff competition to lure ticket buyers who they believe are increasingly distracted by interactive entertainment and social media. But when those sought-after new audiences do show up, they don’t always behave the way that venerable institutions and veteran audiences expect. 
There's something about 3D that Grinwout's finds intrinsically uninteresting. Oh, it's fine for a gimmick, but when push comes to shove, it just isn't all that great. First of all, there are plenty of people who can't watch 3D movies without getting a headache, and others whose vision is such that they can't even see it. Under the best of circumstances, let's admit it, it isn't all that good, which doesn't help. There's a lack of naturalness to the visuals you're seeing, and it can keep you from enjoying the movie. The funny thing is, while we can watch a black-and-white film and immediately accept its reality, with 3D, which is geometric progressions more "real," it feels less real. On top of that, you have to pay a premium for 3D movies in the theaters. 
The Mother of the Blues? She claimed to have invented the term. She also claimed to have invented Bessie Smith, although Smith may already have known exactly what the blues were and how to sing them when the women met probably some time right after WWI. 
Amazon's Omnivoracious, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the book, has brought forth the original catalog copy from 1952. If you're a Charlotte fan, it will give you a nice warm glow to read it. If you're not a Charlotte fan, you obviously have never read the book, and you need to drop everything and do so now.
Most of us probably come to Sedaris first as an audio experience, maybe hearing him on This American Life, as likely as not with the Santaland Diaries. You immediately know that you want to hear more, so you seek out the audio versions of his books, and discover that the one or two stories you've heard before were not flukes. He is an expert performer of his own work, either cold in a studio or hot in front of an audience. He doesn't have the vocal chops of, say, James Earl Jones, but if Jones were reading Sedaris, it just wouldn't work right. Then again, Sedaris would have been a lousy voice actor for Darth Vader. But he's perfect for David Sedaris, and that's more than you can say for a lot of writers and their own work. His writing just happens to translate perfectly to his voice.
James Bond goes on long after the passing of creator Ian Fleming (right) in 1964 (the year the film Goldfinger was released). Bond was iconic to begin with, or at least once Fleming got the hang of the character. In the first couple of novels the author seems to be finding his way, but by the time he got to Moonraker, he knew what he was doing. There is a combination of plot and explanatory detail that normally readers would find annoying, but with Bond, the explanatory detail is the liquor he consumes or the cities he visits or the cigarettes that he smokes, all of it relayed in a professorial matter-of-fact style that ultimately set the character as not real to anyone, but at the same time, more real than real. Hyper-real, in other words. There was never a spy anything remotely like the fictional James Bond, who became the quintessential version of what what we think of as a spy. How many other characters can you think of that have both outlasted their author and outlasted their fictional portrayers? In the movies Sean Connery was the quintessential Bond just as Bond was the quintessential spy, but that didn't stop Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, Brosnan or Craig. Nor will it probably stop the next fellow. 
Darth Vader vs. Voldemort. Sauron vs. Voldemort. Batman vs. Spiderman. Dracula vs. the Wolfman.
The Power Broker is the best biography I have ever read. Let's get that out of the way first. And I've read, and loved, a lot of biographies. But never have I come away from a book with such a strong feeling of knowledge of its subject. Robert Moses was a most amazing figure, a strong-arm character, a conniver, a dreamer, very much the power broker as the title says. He built big, and often terribly wrong. I don't think I would have liked him as a human being. I've often wondered if author Robert Caro felt likewise.
Mick is the greatest R&B singer this side of the Atlantic and I don't mean maybe. I play guitar (electric) Chuck style we got us a bass player and drummer and rhythm-guitar and we practice 2 or 3 nights a week. SWINGIN'.
"If it's too loud, you're too old." And, by now, probably half deaf.
1Q84 was Grinwout's first exposure to Murakami. It's a multi-narrative novel in which time shifts from the contemporary year 1984 to the year 1Q84, and unusual things ensue, including the sudden appearance of a second moon. It's a book unlike any in our previous experience; we followed up with Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It's a dual narrative this time out, from the same narrator in different, inner realities.
World's Fairs existed (and still exist) to exhibit our best products, to demonstrate the inventions that could change the future, and to bring disparate people together to learn about one another. At a fair today, that might mean that up-and-coming nations display their wares and tell the visitors how great it would be for them to move some of their corporations there, for mutual benefit. At fairs in the past, that might have meant that rounding up a group of natives from some undeveloped country and moving them lock, stock and yurt onto the fairgrounds so that the civilized world could gawk at them.
Kurt Cornutt addresses some of this on the Oxford University Press blog in an article called The Love Songs of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald aspired to greatness in his novels, but meanwhile he pumped out a lot of short stories, simply for the money:
Whatever that means.
Imagine a real life-sized version of the Enterprise. Where would you put it? Las Vegas, of course. Farfetched? Not at all. It almost happened.
Look at Frances Hodgson Burnett. She wrote 52 novels and 13 plays. As primarily a writer for adults, no doubt she would be surprised to learn that she is now known for exactly one book, The Secret Garden. A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy may ring some bells among readers who like to go exceptionally deep, but that's about it. At the height of her quite extensive fame, Burnett moved into an estate in Kent:
"Read books. As often as you can. Mostly classics."
When something new comes along that's really popular, we at Grinwout's feel an obligation to check it out and give it a try. So, we checked out Pinterest and gave it a try.
The top ten films of all time? The best films? The most popular films? The films you watch over and over again? How do you make those determinations? When people ask my favorite films, despite the fact that I consider myself something of a film buff, and I've seen a lot of movies and spent plenty of time seeking out classics, and I can name both American directors who wore eyepatches, and I really do think Citizen Kane is amazing, I am reluctant to offer an answer. It would take a lot of time to compose a list of my "favorite" films. What do I recommend? It depends on you. If you've seen a lot of movies, including the complete Ozu, I might suggest something different than if you've never even seen The Wizard of Oz.
