A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The following column was first published in the Opinions page of  Catalyst  on March 6, 1986, the day after my 23rd birthday:   It's cold outside and darkness is setting in as I fidget on a hard concrete bench at the bus stop. I have done everything that I had to do today -- wrote my column, studied for tomorrow's test, called a few contacts for stories and all the other jobs on my list. Now I'm free.  Out there, somewhere, a bus is making its way through heavy traffic, depositing people here, picking up people there. Its course is not a straight line from point A to point B; it zig-zags all over the place. It will take 20 or 30 minutes to reach campus. If the traffic is heavy, perhaps longer.  I look around. There are 15, maybe 20, people sitting, standing, pacing back and forth. On a bench to my left, a pair of basketball players concentrates on their textbooks.  A wizened old woman, obviously neither student nor faculty -- her clothes seem almost as old as she is -- smok

It's Sunday,. December 16, 2012.  It's nice outside - sunny, 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and not humid - and I really want to go for a walk or simply go to the "little pool" on 97th Place and read a book out in the fresh air.  Problem is, I can't do any of that because on weekends my mom's Nursing South Corporation aide is only here to perform what is called "personal hygiene duties" and can't stay longer than one hour. In fact, she's not even here yet and it's almost 1:30 PM.  So because my mom is confined to bed and practically helpless, I am here in what used to be our dining room trying to write anything...a review, Facebook posts, emails or a blog entry.  I need to exercise my mind somehow, since I can't watch TV or listen to music during Mom's waking hours in case she calls for me from her room. I love my mom dearly and I try to carry out my duties as a caregiver with as best an outlook as I can muster, but some days, like toda

Cover Designed by Alex Diaz-Granados. (C) 2012 Alex Diaz-Granados  Pros:  Well written and extensive on movies covered... Cons:  though the book as a whole lacks a unifying focus. A love of movies since childhood and a passion for writing combined long ago to drive the author into creating an account at Amazon and later Epinions so that he could write movie reviews. While those reviews have expanded into other content areas, movies remain the primary driving force for Alex Diaz-Granados. The result is this self-published book featuring just some of his eight years of movie review work at Epinions.com. After an introduction that discusses the passion the author has had all his life for movies¸ it is on to the reviews. The book is broken down into four chapter sections covering movies he liked and movies that he didn’t. The reviews are extensively detailed both in terms of plot and storylines as well as analysis of the films regarding these same details. As a result

Mom as a teenager (circa 1943) Although I do not plan to turn my blog into a dreary litany of gripes about my current situation, I need to be able to get a few things off my chest.  I don't have too many people to turn to these days, and although I could probably start a discussion on my Facebook page about the dark side of care giving, I think that would do more harm than good. I'm writing at a moment of relative peace and quiet.  Margarita, the morning aide, came by and cleaned up Mom in bed since my mother no longer gets up to take showers even when she has assistants.  Margarita is only here for an hour on Saturdays and Sundays, so much of her time is devoted to cleaning Mom and doing light housekeeping chores in the bedroom, kitchen (if I haven't done it yet) and living room areas. Because Mom wanted to sleep late today, I ended up giving her breakfast at an hour more suitable for lunch: 12:15 PM.  I've been up since eight in the morning, having fallen as

If you are a regular visitor to my blog, you've probably noticed that as of late most of the entries are movie reviews, some of them which are complete and others which are essentially "teasers" which contain links to the original versions at Epinions.  Over the past few months, that's all that I've really been doing; I've written a few "op-ed" columns about Trayvon Martin and the civil war in Syria, but not much else which can be called original blog content. If this disappoints some (or all) of you, I apologize. I started this blog last year with every intention of providing a variety of entries that weren't limited to movie reviews and/or the creative process. I wanted to explore all kinds of topics which may be of interest to a diverse audience, and that is still my hope, because I want this blog to, as the Vulcans say on Star Trek, "live long and prosper." However, I must point out that this is possibly one of the lowest points

After nearly nine years of being an online reviewer at both Amazon and Epinions (and, for a time, anyway, at the now-terrible Viewpoints), I have decided to compile some of my reviews and publish them in book form.  (We can't survive on IS income alone, right?)  I can't take the time or money to hire an agent or go through the process of sending out manuscripts to the big publishers in hope of getting published, so I decided to "self-publish" through Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace (both Amazon companies). The book, Save Me the Aisle Seat , is now available as an ebook for the Kindle, and within a week it should be available in print at Amazon and maybe a few other places. I'd like to thank my friend Leigh Egan for her valuable assistance in completing this challenging project. I hate to have to shill my book like a medicine salesman selling snake oil, but if anyone here has a Kindle (of any model), please, please consider buying it!  It's price

Jaws was a very big deal back when I was 12! (C) 1975 Universal Pictures It's been a very long time since I've read Stephen King's The Stand (in either the original or the Uncut, Unabridged editions), but among the many details and characters in that huge doorstop of a novel, King had one of his main dramatis personae (Frannie Goldsmith) keep a journal in which she sometimes wrote about the pre-Apocalyptic world so that her unborn child would have some idea of what life in the pre-plague years had been like. Because I have not cracked The Stand open since at least the year 2000, I am not sure if Fran merely jotted down lists of people, places, events, foods and other slice-of-life items which were part of her life or if she wrote more detailed descriptions, but I figured I would try to do something similar here, not only to give readers a glimpse into pre-21st Century America but also to help me jog my own memory about my younger days. From the 1970s, starting aro