Eat to Live? Live To Eat?

If you like to cook yourself, and you watch the programming, you might have the occasional dream to have your own show on. The network, er, feeds into this desire with the reality show The Next Food Network Star, in which people compete to get their own show…. What is the point of having theatrical films, 24-hour cable networks, blogs, online videos, and books devoted to whatever topic you’re fixated on, unless you’re going to absorb some actual information and tuck a little data away in your brain?

Continue reading

A Dark View of Family Life

Time and again, The Sopranos has created fascinating characters and allowed us to indulge our fascination with the Mob – and the Mob’s fascination with its glamorous image – while always reminding us that these are animals, who would as soon kill you as look at you…. Son A.J.was too mentally weak and emotionally fragile to either follow in his father’s criminal path or to build a new life of his own; he finally swore he saw through the whole masquerade of our society, built on lies and blood, but then succumbed to an easy job and a new car. Even the authorities were no better.

Continue reading