Bite Me, Tony

As you may or may not know, I deleted my Facebook account a few months back with the idea of giving more attention to this blog, and making a dent in that impossible pile of books growing next to the bed. I also hoped, with all this new freedom, that we could become more involved with the Broward/Miami-Dade cultural communities. I've done fairly well on the blog, although the book pile hasn't seemed to have shrunk any. And as far as getting out and doing more, well.... Last weekend we seriously overextended ourselves and packed too much into three days. On Friday, we went to The Original Miami Beach Antique Show, where our friend, Kevin, had secured a booth for the five-day event. Hence the free tickets. This event is billed as being "the largest vintage and antique show in North America". People from all over the world hawked everything from signed Warhol prints to art-deco figurines, tiny Picasso sketches, circa 1800's Tiffany lamps, ornate French cameo glass,

According to Wikipedia, airport novels are "designed to meet the demands of a very specific market...and are superficially engaging without being necessarily profound, usually written to be more entertaining than philosophically challenging. An airport novel is typically a fairly long but fast-paced boilerplate genre-fiction novel commonly offered by airport newsstands, read for pace and plot, not elegance of phrasing". You can read the entire Wikipedia entry on airport novels  here if you're so inclined but if you've spent any amount of time at all in a terminal bookshop, you already get the gist. For the record, I've read more than my fair share of airport novels over the years and actually found myself enjoying a few of them, so I lay no claim to literary taste. Having said that, I am still more apt to undertake an expeditionary trek through the K2 bottleneck with George Santos acting as my guide than to pick up another paperback by Dan Brown. Or John Grisham.

Having survived the recent holiday season with minimal trauma and only one emergency room visit (neither of us were this year's ER patient, thank the gods!) I guess it's time to take a look at the past year in culture. I know I may not look like a culture vulture but I sort of am. No, I don't keep up with the Kardashians or tune in to the vulgarity of Real Housewives ;  I avoid Bachelors and Bachelorettes at all costs, although, judging from the commercials, that dude on The Golden Bachelor shed more tears than Lana Turner did in her entire career. We don't dig superheroes, either, so that fact, even more than COVID, kept us out of movie theaters for much of the past few years (there were a certain number of exceptions, of course). Still, I have been keeping up with current releases, hence this post.   May as well start with music, a topic I don't often discuss on this blog. To be specific, let's talk about music videos, since I'm a visual kind of guy