tmelinaraab commented 7 months, 1 week ago
I try to take as a maxim Charley's words when he is threatened by a gangster after failing to throw a match: "What are ya gonna do--kill me? Everybody dies."
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
If I could have only one piece of music to listen to for the rest of my life, it would be the Stockholm recording of "Love Supreme." As close to perfection as I'll ever see.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
AS he might have said: The f*ing master.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
Rice vermicelli with vegetables and tofu, beef, or pork. Yum. (And a whole lot of it for not much money.)
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
The one I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
A stellar album by the only reverend who might have converted me. The title song is is, of course, magnificent R&B but don't miss Green's cover of the Bee Gees' "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?" He blows away the original.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy novels are outrageously over-rated. The engaging Swedish movies based on Larsson's books indicate that a good editor could probably have made a decent novel or two out of them. The first editorial task--deleting the silly and pedantic descriptions of various bits of computer hardware and software.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
Ray Bradbury's inventive imagination holds up long after I've forgotten "hard" science fiction authhors.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
It would be enough to praise Dashiell Hammett simply for being the creator of Sam Spade but he is so much more. Hammett is arguably the progenitor of noir crime fiction, a powerfully descriptive writer, and a complex thinker.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
Body & Soul (1947) is among my ten or so favorite movies. A movie about boxing and becoming a mensch through struggle. John Garfield's portrays Charley Davis in a story of human strength and unsentimental redemption.
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
Chandler is a master of detective fiction; his work is enjoyable as a quick read but deep and interesting when taken just a bit more slowly; I am tremendously inspired by his essay, "The Simple Art of Murder" as words to live by
tmelinaraab recommended this 7 months, 1 week ago
writer of exciting but complex crime novels; politically progress without being obviously so