Bite Me, Tony

We are halfway between Christmas and New Years, that treacherous stretch that has tended to find one of us in the emergency room for several years running. So far, we've avoided any major catastrophes although the holidays haven't been entirely without incident. But, enough about that: why borrow trouble, eh? 2023 has sucked about as hard as any other year in recent memory so it will be with a sense of-- measured --relief that we see it recede in the rearview mirror of 2024. Because, let's face it, 2024 is sure to be fraught with its own set of issues, seeing how two separate, but ongoing, wars will likely continue to dominate global concerns, while here in the U.S., the presidential election promises to be the ugliest--and most consequential--in recent memory. And that's saying something.  While Pope Francis advocated for peace in the Holy Land and extended Church blessings to same-sex couples , Donald Trump's Christmas message was simple, crude, and predictably v...

  For the past five days I have been attempting to write a post about Alan Hollinghurst's 1998 novel, The Spell. Turns out it's a much more difficult task than I'd anticipated. As an admirer of Hollinghurst's debut effort,  The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), and the Booker-Prize -winning  The Line of Beauty (2004), I expected to have similar regards for The Spell . As it happens, I don't. Not that The Spell is a bad book. It's just that the British author has set such a high bar for himself that it's a disappointment when a work doesn't clear that bar.  The Spell  is an intergenerational tale that presents a quartet of gay, middle-class Brits whose lives and tangled relationships intertwine, unravel, and reinvent themselves, as their desultory circle expands and contracts amidst paroxysms of lust, drugs, betrayal and unrequited love. That's the plot, in a nutshell. It may be a satire, as some (including the author) have claimed, or it may be a com...

If you are of a certain age, your first encounter with the iconic Japanese  kaiju , Godzilla , likely came via late night television sometime in the 1960's, when your best friend stayed over and the two of you cowered behind throw pillows as a fierce, mountain-size behemoth ate up Tokyo on the TV screen. You'd have seen the reworked Americanized version that inserted Raymond Burr into the action because, in those days, TV networks didn't traffic in subtitles, or foreign movies bereft of recognizable American actors. And while the enraged roars of the rampaging Godzilla echoed throughout the house, your parents would have provided background noise arguing over Scrabble at the dining room table. Okay, so that's my story--or at least some vague approximation of my story--and I'm sticking to it. The 1954 black-and-white movie hit, Godzilla (titled Gojira in Japan) had a huge impact on me as a kid,  and helped cement my lifelong interest in giant movie monsters, an...

Salt burn  - definition: A condition arising when fine salt coagulates proteins near the surface of a fish being prepared and prevents any further penetration of salt into the flesh.  Saltburn is both the title of director Emerald Fennell's latest movie, and the sprawling home of the film's aristocratic family and their transient menagerie of long-term guests. I found an ambiguously tasty irony linking all these clarifications that only became clear to me once I googled the meaning of  salt burn . I'll let you figure this out for yourself once you've watched this spectacularly dark, psychological thriller from the director of 2020's much-lauded  Promising Young Woman .  Oscar-nominee Barry Keoghan, fresh off last year's  The Banshees of Inisherin , returns to the screen as the utterly  plain  (to put it, kindly) Oliver Quick, an unfashionable, socially awkward sad sack who, thanks to a scholarship, is beginning his freshman year at Oxford . While...