July 2025

I'm not a romcom person, but in the distant past I learned the hard way that you gotta watch your girlfriend's favorite movie, no matter what. Plus I'll almost always watch a movie I haven't seen before. The title, the plot structure, and the genre make it obvious that Harry and Sally end up together, but you don't watch this kind of movie to be surprised at the ending: you watch for how it all shakes out.

A war movie where the characters never shoot their guns, except at the sky in the penultimate scene? You'd think that's crazy, but it works: Jarhead is a war movie, but it's not about fighting. It's about all the other things that make up a war -- logistics, boredom, stress, discipline, terror -- and what happens to you when all those irresistible forces roll over you and lay you flat.

My favorite scene is the one where the soldiers struggle through the desert against a blacked-out sky, the only light thrown by pillars of flame from burning oil wells as liquid crude rains from the sky and turns the world to ink.

The process of training the titular "dirty dozen" into uncouth, unorthodox, but dependable soldiers would be a mere montage in a lesser movie. Here it's half the running time or more. As the soldiers interact with each other, rebel against discipline and take justice into their own hands, I am reminded of The Wages of Fear, which benefits from spending thirty minutes dwelling on the characteristics and attitudes of ordinary men who, in an utterly naturalistic way, become extraordinary.

The autobiography of Joe Bonanno, formerly the head of one of New York's criminal "Five Families." Worth reading for extensive discussion of how the Sicilian Tradition is not limited to the cliches of mob movies -- as long as you believe Bonanno, who is surely not a disinterested reteller of historical events.

This detective novel is both a gritty murder mystery and a beautiful realization of an alternate-universe version of Sitka, Alaska -- a Jewish Sitka that never was, a post-Holocaust outpost of Yiddishkeit at the frozen edge of the world. The setting is potent; one could easily set a series of books here. The ending seemed to come on a little too quickly, but I tend to see that in most crime or thriller novels, so I wonder if it's just me.

I'm the host for this month's IndieWeb Carnival, and the theme is totems: items of great personal, spiritual, or religious meaning, which may serve as the emblem or symbol of a group of people.

The IndieWeb itself is a living totem that we indie-website-havers create with every post. What's your totem? What does it mean to you? How did you acquire it: purchase, creation, trade, gifting, theft? Is your totem connected to the Internet, perhaps? Is it something you look at every day?

These are just a few prompts. Go forth and blog.