We’re getting to know the finger food at Symphony Hall; the chicken skewers are the best, and the salmon pat? was also very good Friday night when Aimee and I attended another “Repartee” night with the BSO, courtesy of Mr. Brown. Our musical introduction was provided this time by orchestra bass trombonist Douglas Yeo, certainly […]

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Thursday was a busy night in the Boston film community. The choices ranged from a theatrical screening of the upcoming HBO Peter Sellers film, a preview of Mike Nichols’ Closer at the Harvard Loews, a preview of The Sea Inside with a q & a with Javier Bardem at the Boston Loews, and finally, a […]

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Channel 2, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, was always my favorite station growing up; I think it was mostly because it looked the best, crisp and clear compared to the soft, fuzzy look of ABC on Channel 13 and the weak static of Channel 11’s CBS. Tom Brokaw was my favorite of the Big Three […]

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I don’t know what history will write for the Pixies after 2004… Maybe they’ll put out an album, not quite as good as their old stuff, and fade into uncomfortable oblivion. Or perhaps they’ll never play again. Whatever happens, I’m happy I’ll be able to look back on this tour and say I got my […]

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So it probably doesn’t have anything to do with my expos? on the subject from three months ago, but the strange street sign reading “Antrim At” has been changed to the more traditional “Antrim St.,” as of this weekend. I don’t know if the city stopped working with the company that made the sign in […]

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Aimee and I enjoyed a nice holiday weekend with her family in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York, plus a little road trip detour through Connecticut on the way back home. The weekend started with a frantic last-minute effort to get the calendar done at work, which I think pretty much happened. I then caught […]

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Is there any way I can reserve a new 2004 Jetta now, and pay for it in a few years, when I get the money and need a new car? Because by the time I’m ready to buy a new Jetta, it certainly won’t look anything like I remember.VW released photos of the fifth-generation Jetta […]

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Eight of the last ten years since moving east for college, George and his family have invited me to their home to celebrate Thanksgiving in the Poconos, since I wasn’t about to trek to Alaska for a four-day weekend a month before going home for Christmas. It’s time to move on, though, and this year, […]

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I just finished watching the first season of the BBC tv series “Spooks,” or, as it’s known in the US, “MI-5.” What, I ask, is wrong with “Spooks”? American audiences are too literal? It sounds too much like a horror film? Whatever you call it, it’s a good show, a full 59:00 of drama, with […]

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It’s been at least a year or so since I’d been to the Avalon, and it had somehow grown in size in my mind, into a venue too big to see a decent small show. I was pleased, then, when it was announced that Badly Drawn Boy’s planned Avalon show had been moved down the […]

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A busy day in both Boston and Cambridge ended with a great evening spent with Tim and Mari, as we enjoyed the “exotically hip atmosphere” at Pho Republique (and it’s ‘fuh,’ not ‘foh,’ by the way…) in their new ‘hood, the South End. We couldn’t make their wedding last month, but we got the scoop, […]

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It may not seem an obvious destination this time of year, but how else would I be able to learn the true value of the Minneapolis skywalk network? Minneapolis was host to the 14th annual Association of Moving Image Archivists conference: three days of seminars, presentations, and discussions on the history of film preservation, techniques […]

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Every time I see this sign, I wonder what it’s doing here, on the corner of Arlington and Newbury, at the edge of the Public Garden in Boston. It’s straight out of an English motorway, with that distinctive typeface, the bird’s-eye representation of the street layout, and the mysterious “C-28, C-9” indicators. It’s a dead […]

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The one bright spot was going to be for Knowles’ defeat of Murkowski in Alaska, but it looks like that went down the tubes, too, along with pretty much everything else last night. More than half of the people in this country chose that which has an extensive, proven track record of being detrimental to […]

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I can’t remember when I started following election news every day; it was some time before the Democratic primaries, so almost a year has gone by in which I’ve experienced the ups and downs, the paranoia and optimism, the anger and satisfaction that comes with paying attention to one thing for too long. The circles […]

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