THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Almost everyone I know has at least one moment in their lives, usually seen only in retrospect, where things could have turned very bad very quickly.  A few years back, my father tumbled down the stairs at his house, his body finally halting on the cold concrete floor of the basement, and had he landed just an inch one way or another, he would have died at the base of those wooden steps. A few years after that, my grandmother had a vessel in her leg burst, and had she not called my dad -- which she initially wasn't going to do, because she didn't "want to be a bother" -- she would have bled out in her own house that she had lived in all her life. My friend had his car stall out on the train tracks while an approaching train blew out a warning, and had he not got it rolling again in time, I'd likely be speaking of him in the past tense. This year, between Christmas and New Year’s, I slid at a decent rate of speed on slushy roads into oncoming traffic on US-31, and ...

In the first month of my History of Rock & Roll Era class, we hit "Be My Baby" (1963) by The Ronettes , and who can argue with such an incandescent blast of raging hormones and girl group glee? If you need a reminder, here ya go: The song was added to the National Registry of the Library of Congress in 2006: https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/BE%20MY%20BABY.pdf More info on "Be My Baby" is here: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-ronettes-be-my-baby And here's an essay from the BBC on why "Be My Baby" is oh so perfect: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200811-why-be-my-baby-is-the-perfect-pop-song Amid its many charms, "Be My Baby" has quite a remarkable drum figure, courtesy of the legendary Hal Blaine (of the L.A. group of session musicians who became known as The Wrecking Crew, who of course have their own documentary ). That insistent drum beat has popped...

(open on my chair, laptop at my side) Many years ago at NCMC, when I could actually teach a film course on Stanley Kubrick and students would actually show up, the Liberal Arts Administrator right next door to my office fancifully told me I should go to the Sundance Film Festival to study up on film, as if time and money were no object to a freshly minted community college professor. Thankfully, a couple years after that, Michael Moore started the Traverse City Film Festival, which I went to for many years as the next best thing to Sundance. Sure, the TCFF had singular moments – I got to see Borat (2006) in a packed theater months before it had a release elsewhere – but generally, it was pretty punishing to sit next to entitled TC limo liberals as they munched on snacks and checked their cell phones and saved small uncomfortable seats. As much as I wanted to support local endeavors, especially those in the film biz, I went to TCFF less and less until I stopped completely a few years ag...