The Inviting Life

 Hello again, citizens of the blogosphere!  I hope you have been getting along okay.  Today is officially the first day of spring. Here, in James Bay, the Great Blue Herons have made their way back to the park.  Majestic prehistoric-looking creatures. A few things have crossed my path this week, that have, in Marie Kondo's words "sparked joy".  None of them involve folding underwear in tidy concentric bundles. Come to think of it, I should be putting away laundry right now, but, before I unknot my knickers, I thought I would share a couple of things. Retro Pick: The China Syndrome (Criterion Streaming Service or rent from Pic A Flic Video).  If you liked the grimly fascinating HBO mini-series Chernobyl, bookend it with this retro thriller.  Featuring Hollywood luminaries Michael Douglas, Jane Fonda, and Jack Lemmon. China Syndrome raises formative questions about how safe nuclear power plants really are.  At its core (see what I did there...

 Hello, people of the blogosphere.  How are you?.Are you managing okay?  Spring is on the horizon and, if all goes to plan, vaccines.  It is hard, for even for the most curmudgeonly among us, not to be feeling at least a sliver of optimism.  So, in keeping with a certain happy hopefulness, I thought I would share a couple of things that brought me happiness this week, along with one of my favourite recipes.  Last year, alas, we do not get around to watching many movies.  Shift work (me) and long work hours (Steve) conspired in such a way to make hunkering down, even for a couple of hours, a challenge. Our attention spans were fractured from workplace worries and demoralizing news headlines.  This year, we decided to make a concerted effort to watch movies, and boy oh boy, we did not expect our dedication to pay off the way it did with Lee Isaac Chung's lovely,  semi-autobiographical movie Minari.   MOVIE PICK: Here is a review f...

Throughout my life,  individual and collaborative works of art  have inspired, enlivened and imbued my life with deeper resonance.  My passions are not relegated to a single genre.  I am an omnivorous consumer of all facets of the cultural diaspora, movies, music, comics, books, TV, photographs, and paintings.   My intention in creating The Inviting Life is to share recommendations based on my explorations of pop-culture and art house ephemera. Some selections will be high-brow, others low-brow, a few will fall resolutely in-between. Interspersed amongst these writings there will be recipes. It may seem incongruous, combining cultural criticism (criticism being somewhat of a misnomer as I am 90% enthusiast and 10% critic) and food-writing but I would argue that there is more than one way to find sustenance in this world. We can nourish ourselves in ways both elemental and spiritual. And, if   I cannot chat about these things in real time with you dea...

        This summer I took a  short break from Facebook. During my sojourn, I thought long and hard about whether I should retain some sort of online presence and if so, what should that ideally be?  I haven't always been my best self on Facebook and, while I have endeavored to improve my communications by keeping my caustic wit and misanthropy in check and avoiding time-wasting arguments, I often wondered if I was truly contributing anything meaningful or if I was merely being solipsistic and narcissistic.        Prior to my mini-break, I had been trying to wean myself away from screens with varying degrees of success. I  sit down at the computer for a couple of minutes here or there throughout the day.  Cumulatively, those minutes add up.  For a while  I gravitated to Twitter but I quickly tired of the Twitterverse (the woke hand-wringing does get to be a bit much, even for me, a died in the wool "leftie l...