It’s been some while now since I decided to discontinue this blog, but my initial reaction was that I’d allow it to sit fallow – to ignore it, essentially, and let it sit silently in its corner of the web, even though there continues to be a steady trickle of visitors, mainly for my pictures of Okinawa than for anything else. Yet tonight, my last night in New York City for the foreseeable future – I decided it would be an indignity to just let the blog die in this fashion, given that it was for a brief time a love and passion of mine. I should give it a fond salute and farewell before declaring it officially dead, which, I suppose, I am now doing.

I came to New York some two decades ago and in the meantime managed to think about a lot and accomplish very little. I don’t regret my time here, even the many missteps I’ve made. But a fond New York memory for me will always be the time when I returned to graduate school, moved to Brooklyn, started this blog and used it to learn, a little more than I would have otherwise, about the world we live in.

As I head to the west coast, I think more and more about returning to writing, but won’t do so until I have a sharper sense of what I want to say. In the meantime, good luck and best wishes to everyone who’s stopped by and paid a visit.

 

Since many visitors to this blog are old Okinawa hands, I thought I’d pass along this site, which has a number of photos from the island from the immediate post-World War II era to the early 1970s:

http://www.rememberingokinawa.com/page/remembering_okinawa_home

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=208450420723769081139.0004ae910732a82aeae60&msa=0

Have fun!

If someone hadn’t already spoiled the ending of last night’s episode of ‘Game of Thrones’ for me, I would have had the same reaction, but not as funny.

I agree with the AV Club reviewer who said that this could be one of the gutsiest decisions by a TV show, ever. I know the show’s simply following the plot of the book, but there have been plenty of productions that lose their nerve and find a way to save a charismatic and telegenic character from the death he or she suffers on the pages – especially when that death comes so early in a multi-part and still unfolding story.

It’s something of a sport among movie lovers to debate where the inflection points in the long arc of Woody Allen’s career are to be found, but it’s a hopeless enterprise, in my book. Yes, ‘early’ Allen is better than ‘late’ Allen, but this kind of a distinction doesn’t really mean much; I think it’s a big question whether or not films like “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” or even “Hannah and her Sisters” could even be made today. Even if they were, how would they be received and reviewed?

Better to just enjoy a good film when it comes along. Allen’s latest, “Midnight in Paris,” isn’t perfect (I think it’s unforgivable to make Rachel McAdams into such an unlikable character), but there are plenty of good jokes, not least of which is the one Allen makes at the expense of Christopher Nolan’s baroque-epic “Inception”, a movie which I loved but whose utter lack of humor diminishes it in my mind, as time goes on.