-
Waking Up From History: The Big Chill and Forrest Gump
*SPOILER ALERT**QUESTIONABLE ANALYSIS ALERT**CONTAINS INFORMATION BASED ON WIKIPEDIA* Plot summary, The Big Chill (1983): Seven alumni from the University of Michigan in their thirties, known for their political activism in the 60s, converge on the South Carolina vacation home of Harold and Sarah Cooper to attend the funeral of fellow classmate Alex, who committed suicide while living with the Coopers. After the burial, everyone stays for the weekend. Harold and Sarah are living a respectable middle-class life, with Harold about to sell his small business to a large corporation. Sam is a popular TV star on a “Magnum P.I. type detective show. Meg is a single real estate attorney in…
-
Travelogue: New Orleans (2016)
Apr 21, Thursday: Just got back from a 24-hour place called Daisy Dukes on Chartres St. where I had an alligator po’ boy and it was everything that I thought it would be. Super tired from this morning’s travel, I vowed to stay away from the bars for now. Strolled back to my hotel, the French Market Inn, on Decatur St. near the steamboat dock through the drizzle and sidestepping the drunks sleeping in the doorways. That’s New Orleans for me—off the track, wet, stinking in a sweet spicy way and chunks of the sidewalk covered with plywood and scaffolding holding up facades and everything off kilter and kind of…
-
The Story of Dan, Part Two
The NeighborhoodI grew up in a suburb bordering the City of Chicago. This meant rectangular blocks—a regular precision of eight per mile on the long side, and sixteen across, just like the big city. The East Chicago and Hammond refineries and steel mills were only 10 miles away, so things would get fragrant on a day with the breeze blowing in off the lake. There were taverns on the corners of the secondary streets, and long alleys behind the houses for garbage pickup and we thought, while growing up, that the rest of the world was arranged this way. This gridiron was the stage of the drama of my youth. …