I am plopped on my couch with a cat and am seriously concerned I might fall asleep before I can do a blog entry. I stayed up too late last night, which is a real hazard when the Lions play a night game. It's a few hours later and somehow, I'm still awake, but probably not for long. We got a second wind and watched the new episodes of Abbott Elementary and Silo, but now I'm back to being exhausted and ready for bed.
The great Detroit Tiger radio broadcaster, Ernie Harwell, died yesterday at the age of 92. It was the news I knew was inevitable, since he had been diagnosed with inoperable bile duct cancer, but was dreading all the same. I knew it would be hard to take. If anyone seemed like he should live forever, it was Ernie. It doesn't seem fair that someone as gentlemanly and decent as Ernie Harwell should be taken away from us. Like generations of Michiganians, I grew up with Ernie's voice. He was one of the people that introduced me to baseball and the Detroit Tigers. He was part of my childhood and young adulthood. There are so many memories I have that are tied to that distinctive Southern accent: my dad outside working on the house or in the yard with his old paint-splattered transistor radio, and Ernie describing the action at Michigan and Trumbull; upstairs in my room on a warm summer night in the great year of 1984, the sound of crickets outside, a breeze pushing up the blind...
After a little trepidation based on its middling reviews, we went to the cinema to see Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . Perhaps due to my lowered expectations, or maybe because I'm just a pushover who goes to the movies WANTING to like what I've paid to see, or possibly because it actually IS a good movie, I ended up enjoying Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . (I will henceforth simply refer to it as Springsteen ). From what I gather, the main complaints about Springsteen is that it doesn't have enough music and that it falls prey to rock biopic cliches. First, about the music: I don't agree with those criticisms. It has just enough music. The movie is, among other things, about Bruce's creation of the Nebraska album. He has finished the 1981 River tour and is renting a house in Colts Neck, NJ, getting inspiration from Flannery O'Connor, the Terence Malick movie Badlands, reading microfilm newspaper accounts of the real-life murders that ...
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