Thursday, May 30, 2013

Frances Ha

          Ha?  Say Wha'?
     
                         Review by Ken Burke          Frances Ha

A marvelously quirky story, told in retro black and white, about an aspiring dancer, her usually-devoted roommate, and her life which just never seems to achieve lift-off.

Take care, curious readers, for plot spoilers gallop rampantly throughout the Two Guys’ brilliantly insightful reviews.  This is how we write, so as to explore what must be said as art transcends commerce (although if anyone wants to pay us for doing this ...); therefore, be warned, beware, and read on when ready to be transported to—well, wherever we end up.]

In the midst of the medley on what was the flip-side (that concept doesn’t mean much when you discuss CDs) of The Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road album there’s a quick tune called “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” with the following lyrics:

“She said she’d always        been a dancer
She worked at 15 clubs a      day
And though she thought I      knew the answer
Well I knew what I could        not say…”  
(take a listen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cxkYu4NyA to the song
or the entire 16:31 medley is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pM3PVzDUCY 
or the entire 47:33 album is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8y5kdiv0oY

 This could easily describe the life and “reflective attitudes” (to which we might say “Ha! Ha!” in that cruelly-condescending Stanley Kowalski tone if we were awful enough to be mean to one of the most charming characters you’ll ever meet on screen) of the protagonist of Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, Frances (Greta Gerwig, co-screenwriter with Baumbach)—we’ll get more clarity on the full title of the film as we go along here.  Frances is a struggling dancer, apprenticing with a Manhattan company but barely able to afford the rent on her Brooklyn apartment which she shares with her eternal BFF from her somewhat-recently-completed college days, Sophie (Mickey Sumner—Sting’s daughter, although that has nothing beyond trivia value to do with her role here).  Frances is lovable, determined, passionately devoted to her assumed-life-partner-in-all-things-except-romantic-love, Sophie (“We’re like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore,” Frances opines about their relationship), and not getting very far very fast with her career or personal life (“Un-dateable,” friend Benji [Michael Zegen] constantly “reassures” her).  To say that this film is charming is to say that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is melodic or that Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescos are colorful (which they are; if you’ve never seen the real thing or reproductions since the 1980-1994 restoration project, take a look at http://www.wga.hu/tours/sistina/index1. html)Frances Ha is mesmerizing in its charm, with a title character who’s so unique, so marvelously flawed, so determined to find some lemonade in the orchard of lemons that life seems to offer her that you feel you could comfortably spend a full 6-episode-Star-Wars-marathon-length-day in the theatre with her and not feel she’s overstayed her welcome (because, even as individual as she is, she’ll never pull a Jar Jar Binks moment on you), although the film’s actual running time of a mere 86 min. makes for a delightfully quick encounter of the best kind (that’s not what I had in mind, you pervert) where we get a pleasant dose of Frances, rather than an overdose.

When we first meet Frances (after a brief opening montage of scenes of her and Sophie) she’s in the process of what will become the breakup with her boyfriend, Dan (Michael Esper), when his suggestion that they move in together deteriorates into a clumsy refusal on her part because she doesn’t want to leave Sophie stuck with the lease and the need to find a new roommate (a constant problem for those who live in larger cities where specific-length leases are the norm rather than the month-by-month apartment arrangements that allow a lot more flexibility of lifestyle change; keep that in mind when you go off to metropolitan meccas to find your fortune but then get sidetracked because you find other opportunities instead—unfortunately, life and love don’t often run parallel, a situation that Frances could choreograph a dance to).  Ironically, Sophie then pushes the boundaries of their “eternal” connection by making the same decision herself, so as to snag a spot in her long-dreamed-of Tribeca (“Triangle below Canal Street” neighborhood in lower Manhattan, in case you need to know that) location, leaving Frances to her own devices until an opening comes at the place in Chinatown shared by Benji and Lev (Adam Driver).  While this arrangement keeps Frances off of the streets it proves a bit frustrating as both Benji and Frances remain “un-dateable” while Lev keeps them awake from the noise of his sexual conquests with a constant stream of changing partners.  That’s a mere discomfort, though, compared to the reality that Frances needs extra work through her dance company (she teaches classes to kids) in order to even pay her rent, but when that fails to materialize she’s seeing her future get desperate, even at the ripe young age of 27.  (Don’t ever get me started on how nice it would be to magically flow back to that time—well, for me, not to that actual year of 1974 [at least my mortal enemy, President Richard Nixon, resigned then, but there’s not much else from that era of disco and divorce; again, I refer to me on the divorce front, although the better second marriage with the dazzling Nina Kindblad would finally arrive after a mere 12-year wait]—more precisely, just to be that age again, if I could keep my present relationship, savings, and life-experience learned the usual hard way rather than just be the horny, almost broke, naïve grad student I was in 1974, but, as countless fantasy tales of such Dorian Gray-related adventures have shown, it wouldn’t work out well anyway so I’ll just have to remember what it feels like for Frances to think that your life has already foundered even before you’ve begun to approach the first years of middle-age, discomforting as the 30 mark is even when your professional and financial situations may seem stable.)

Poor Frances just keeps hitting the rocks, no matter what she tries to do in a more positive vein throughout the film.  Her attempted celebratory dinner with Lev (far right in this photo, Benji in the middle) after receiving a much-needed tax refund (In the shape she’s in she had to pay to begin with?  She must have listed her address as the Tea Party Arms.) goes awry when her credit card is declined so she has to hunt all over the area to finally find an ATM machine while he waits somewhat-patiently back at the restaurant; despite her hopes for holiday-season work in a Christmas dance revue she gets none so she heads back to Sacramento for the holidays where she squabbles with her parents and family friends; after she returns to NYC to live temporarily with a member of her dance company, in an attempt to show her acquaintances that she still has up-and-coming cachet, she makes charges she can’t afford to pay on a new credit card to spend a weekend in Paris only to sleep through much of her limited time and fail to make contact with an old college friend there until she’s on her way to the airport’s departure terminal; finally she ends up back at her old college (not specified; maybe Vassar, maybe not) up the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, NY where she takes a menial job as a dorm Resident Assistant (not that she’s the most available or comforting voice when a student needs her emotional support but she does make an effort), which also includes being a wine pourer at swanky institutional events.  There she meets up again with Sophie who had moved away to Tokyo with off-again-on-again flame Patch (Patrick Heusinger) but was back (with him) at the alma mater for a high-roller auction; Sophie admits that she’s tired of Japan, doesn’t want to get engaged to Patch, and desperately misses Frances, all of which seems to inspire our beleaguered protagonist to get back to NYC, force herself to choreograph a modern dance number that will be performed to public acceptance by her old troupe, find herself stable enough to rent her own apartment, and seemingly begin a nice, long-overdue romance with Benji (Sophie and Patch seem to be there in support as well—at least I think it was him that we see quickly in a short shot—but this film is intentionally limited on clear explication of much of anything, preferring instead to offer what Paul Simon cleverly called “incidents and accidents” [from “You Can Call Me Al” on his magnificent 1986 Graceland album (which also played into the ongoing success of marriage with Nina, but that’s a long story best saved for another time]; take a listen if you like at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0gUpzFPxk4, a brilliant music video where Simon does little except instrumental backup while Chevy Chase perfectly lip-syncs the lyrics in a seeming single shot throughout the song, one of the most simple-yet-effective-performances of this type that I’ve ever seen]).

Frances Ha has an intentional sense of 1960s French New Wave low-key spontaneity to its scenes, dialogue, and plot movements (along with the retro black and white cinematography there’s even use of soundtrack music from François Truffaut’s 1959 classic, The 400 Blows, while Frances is on her montage-ATM-odyssey) so that scenes have an unscripted quality to them, the characters are unpredictable but basically likeable, and Frances, an attractive-but-not-conventionally-beautiful-woman, dutiful-but-not-gifted-dancer, charms us with her optimism even in the face of constant personal shortcomings (she’s even perceived by many around her as not being emotionally in sync with her supposed-to-be-adult-by-now 27 chronological years).  We want her to succeed, which she seemingly does (the ending is more rushed than any of the previous quickly-changing-and-edited-scenes so that we get a good feel for her future more so than its confirmed success is explained to us); however, the allusions to the quirky style of the first of many mid-20th-century New Waves just reminds us of how conventional this purposefully-offbeat character study is when we already have such a rich heritage going back to Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Jules and Jim (Truffaut, 1962), etc. to draw on.  I’m not saying that Baumbach can’t conjure up his own New Wave facsimile (it was too wonderful a period in filmmaking not to pay homage to through contemporary revivals, even as Woody Allen did with Deconstructing Harry [1997]), but given the heritage that this film is intended to evoke I just can’t say that it does much more than that, despite the charming presence of Frances and Sophie especially, with their bond that can’t be duplicated (just as Frances tries to recreate the play fights that we saw between her and Sophie early on [as referenced in the second photo above] with Rachel, her later dance company roommate, but with a totally disastrous result, just as with Alvy Singer having a flat recreation of his previous lobster calamity with Annie as he’s attempting to date someone else after their breakup in Woody Allen’s 1977 masterpiece, Annie Hall [still very high on my all-time favorites list]).  So as not to overdo the Frances-Sophie connection we slowly lose their interaction, first when Sophie moves to Tribeca, then to Japan, catching Frances off-guard and with minimal contact after each move; this leaves Frances more vulnerable, more genuinely unsure of what direction to even attempt as her life stagnates, all of which is engaging to watch but none of which really takes us to a higher cinematic plateau once we’ve become accustomed to the recurring honestly of presentation being employed here.

I enjoyed Frances Ha a lot, especially the accessibility that I felt into the limited-reality-but-higher-aspirational-lives of Frances and Sophie, but once I got comfortable with the unpredictability of where this looking-for-life-in-too-many-of-the-wrong-places-still-maturing-girl-story was unfolding, I don’t feel that I got much more than what I came to understand within the first 15 minutes or so (despite the consistently effective acting and consistently-seeming-spontaneous-mood throughout) as the film progressed into just more of the same of Frances’ trials and errors.  It’s all very charming, certainly something I’d recommend over most of the high-volume, popcorn-chomping fare that’s dominating the release schedule as we roll into summer blockbuster season, but I just don’t think that Francis Ha (by the way, the title refers to her printing her name on a slip of paper to put into the mailbox slot for her new apartment; she can’t fit “Haliday” in the short space allowed so rather than rewrite it in smaller letters she just folds the paper so that her name to the world is now “Frances Ha,” keeping with her devil-may-care-attitude toward whatever challenges confront her in the big city and in her maturing years) gets enough beyond its initial attraction to rate any higher than 3 ½ stars of 5 (with the understanding that it takes the likes of The 400 Blows, Breathless, and Annie Hall to ever reach my lofty realm of 5).  I recommend the deliciously-unorthodox Frances Ha, but not as something that takes you to new cinematic heights and sustains such lofty achievements, rather as an enjoyable character study of some truly viable screen presences that you wouldn’t mind seeing again in a few years, in the manner that Richard Linklater’s Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) keep popping up every few years to update us on their evolving entanglement (with the latest episode, Before Midnight soon to be released and then reviewed here).  While you’re waiting for any of these folks to reappear, though, you might want to content yourself with my musical tribute to Frances Ha, a song seemingly (although there are all sorts of interpretations out there to ponder) about love hitting obstacles and possibly overcoming them rather than being crushed by the intrangence of past expectations, as was a once mighty ancient empire as alluded to in David Grey’s “Babylon” music video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmK-YWSJ8Eg (a 3:28 version originally on the 1998 White Ladder album), but you might also enjoy a longer 8:22 live version at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI4F3fGbzk preceded by some chatter on how the song came about that sounds like a scene right out of Frances Ha (and it's great to hear such a beautiful song done with just 3 acoustic guitars; further, this pairing reflects the 2000 American re-release of the album which also includes a concluding acoustic version of this mesmerizing song).  So, "Let go in your heart, let go your head" (just like Frances and Sophie) until I see you again next week.

If you’d like to know more about Frances Ha here are some suggested links:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y08JRewL29I (32:30 interview with director/co-screenwriter Noah Baumbach, actor/co-writer Greta Gerwig, and actor Mickey Sumner from the 50th New York Film Festival)





We encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.  You’ll also see our general Spoiler Alert warning that reminds you we’ll be discussing whatever plot details are needed for our comments so please be aware of this when reading any of our reviews and be aware of our formatting forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our control, as well as problems we’ve encountered with the Google RSS Feed Alert when used in conjunction with iGoogle and Google Reader.

Please note that to Post a Comment you need to either have a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com.  Thanks.

By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile.    Ken

P.S.  Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.


Wednesday, May 29, 2013

What Maisie Knew

     "Suffer little children ..."  (Matthew 19:14)
           
                Review by Ken Burke            What Maisie Knew

Based on a novel by Henry James, this is the sad tale of a child carelessly left behind as her parents’ marriage crumbles only to find happiness with her new stepparents.

[Take care, curious readers, for plot spoilers gallop rampantly throughout the Two Guys’ brilliantly insightful reviews.  This is how we write, so as to explore what must be said as art transcends commerce (although if anyone wants to pay us for doing this ...); therefore, be warned, beware, and read on when ready to be transported to—well, wherever we end up.]

While box-office cash is flowing non-stop toward such pop-culture fare as Fast & Furious 6 (Justin Lin; just over $117 million after 1 weekend), The Hangover Part III (Todd Phillips; just past $62 million in the same span), and the animated prehistoric The Croods (Kirk De Micco, Chris Sanders; over $179 million, but, admittedly, after 10 weeks), I have the luxury of ignoring all of that sound and fury in favor of a very small film about a very small child almost lost in the whirlwind of the seemingly-more-important aspects of her parents’ lives in Scott McGehee and David Siegel‘s direction of What Maisie Knew, based on the 1897 novel by Henry James.  The setting has been changed from London to Manhattan, most of the names and all of the occupations have been adjusted as well, but the essence remains:  2 constantly-bickering people, Suzanna (Julianne Moore) and Beale (Steve Coogan), who have lost all touch with their former feelings for each other, play their little daughter, Maisie (Onata Aprile), like a ball bearing in the pinball machine of their loud, ricocheting lives with no regard for her well-being except as it serves their individual egos and warped sense of parenthood.  Sadly, even after 4 weeks in theatres, What Maisie Knew is making a fraction of the turnstile-heavyweights’ grosses (which also include Star Trek into Darkness* [J.J. Abrams; over $156 million after 2 weeks], Iron Man 3* [Shane Black; close to $373 million after 4 weeks, past the $1 billion mark worldwide], and The Great Gatsby* [Baz Luhrmann]; almost $118 million after 3 weeks], all of which I’m glad I saw as opposed to the others above which I’m glad I skipped [although the latest Fast & Furious sounds like it would be a fun thrill ride if I should suddenly be blindsided by some free time and a bargain matinee), a bit over $301,000 so far (a pittance in contemporary film-income figures, no matter how low Maisie’s unreported budget might be), which is a terrible shame that reception has been so tepid for this film (not surprising, given that it’s expanded to only 27 theatres while most of the ones noted above are playing in anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 venues) because the acting is superb throughout—especially by Aprile, whose camera presence portends great possibilities as she grows—and the tale of a child sidelined by her parents’ selfish individualism is easily as relevant today as it was over a century ago when first put to paper by James.


* Star Trek into Darkness reviewed in this blog in the May 24, 2013 posting, Iron Man in the May 11, 2013 posting, and The Great Gatsby in the May 17, 2013 posting.

Maisie’s parents are an odd pair to begin with, Suzanna as a successful-but-aging-rock-star (with the success indicated by her lavish Manhattan multi-story apartment with a recording studio on an upper floor and the aging aspect indicated by the tour she leaves on at the end of the film—the bus is nice but hardly the vehicle [or fleet of them] that implies the continuing attraction of a major star [Mick Jagger probably has one this size all to himself, if not a private jet] and the tour city list isn’t that impressive either), Beale as an art dealer, probably Susanna’s equal in income and certainly in temperament, although she’s the one who usually flies off the handle first at any comment or situation, no matter how innocent the actuality.  They aren’t married and don’t even have joint ownership of that major-league apartment (which works against Beale when Susanna throws him out, but he retaliates by upping the ante in the custody fight through marrying Maisie’s young Scottish nannie, Margo [Joanna Vanderham]; not to be outdone, Susanna retaliates by marrying Lincoln [Alexander Skarsgård], a decent young bartender from an upscale establishment in their tony neighborhood), but in an effort to satisfy their own self-important self-images they make surface efforts to put Maisie at the center of their lives, at least temporarily, but that quickly devolves to Beale flying off to Italy leaving the child with Margo (not a bad thing at first until Margo realizes how little the marriage means to her once-attentive husband and seeks her own privacy away from Maisie) or Susanna too invested in her devolving career to be available for her daughter, resulting in one night where Lincoln has to watch over the child at his bar (he realizes immediately that this is not an acceptable arrangement, but he has little option within his 10-day supervision of Maisie until he attempts to force the girl back onto distraught Margo).

None of these 4 adults (and I use the term very loosely where Maisie’s real parents are concerned) dislike nor abuse the girl (except by their varying degrees of absence in her world), but far too often she’s just an inconvenient reality within lives that weren’t intended nor ready to share with a child.  Margo has a marvelous daily connection with her when the film begins, but that’s based on a job structure that allowed Margo to go on with her own existence at the end of each day; when Maisie becomes what Margo’s entire life is supposed to be about (based on Beale’s blasé indifference) the kid becomes an occasional burden.  For the others, she really never should have been there in the first place, except to stroke the assumed relationship development of Beale and Susanna, along with the collateral reality that Lincoln acquires with his new marriage (leading to possessive jealousy from Susanna when he attempts to show interest in Maisie, further providing proof that she the WORST. MOTHER. EVER!—despite the underlying but poorly-expressed love she has for her daughter—as acted in a disgustingly-effective manner by Moore, whose general likability as a person is about all that keeps you from reaching into the screen and strangling her selfishly-childish character).  For much of the film, Maisie is the most adult of all of them, not from annoying precociousness but rather from a need for self-protection in situations that too often leave her otherwise defenseless—especially when not being retrieved at appointed times, taking solitary cab rides across town, and generally not having parents available to give her guidance on how to navigate life’s questions and mysteries.

Gradually, as stepparents Lincoln and Margo share more time in their singular-evolved-into-mutual-care of Maisie their attraction grows as does the little girl’s affection for them as a loving couple that is not only there for her needs but also that has a heart connection long lost in her biological parents (possibly they did feel that way when their affair first began, but that’s another lifetime removed from the story at hand).  When the new spouses decide upon a getaway to a beach cottage that Margo has access to, they are visited by Susanna on her bus, who assumes she’s come to retrieve Maisie and take her along on the tour south to some exotic places intended to fascinate her daughter (as best my memory serves, that included South Carolina, where infidelity seems to be no restraint on people’s careers—at least if you’re trailblazin’ Republican former Governor/current Congressman Mark Sanford—but even if I’m wrong in that specific destination [it could have been North Carolina, where Democratic former Senator/Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards gave a new meaning to infidelity by fathering a child with a campaign worker while his wife was dying of cancer, later was indicted—but not convicted—for alleged violations of campaign laws; clearly, Susanna’s going to feel at home wherever it was that her tour was headed] the reality is for Maisie that anywhere outside of NYC would be a new place for her, potentially an exciting trip to take with her now-more-maternal would-be parent).  However, while Maisie accepts the lavish gifts that Susanna brought for her she decides she’d rather stay with her stepparents than go on the road with Mama.  This provides a nice ending for what had previously been a heartbreaking story of child neglect (however unintentional, as her parents and guardians were just too wrapped up in their own lives to give the nurturance needed, as none of them were really ready yet to be parents), but it does come as a rather facile wrap-up for all of these lives—Susanna now alone trying to keep her faltering career alive, Beale back to England for awhile (with no thought of Margo accompanying him and only a passing, then rejected, consideration of taking Maisie), and the new spouses seemingly ready for their anticipated post-divorce lives together, likely graduating to adoptive parents of our young heroine.  It’s a sweet resolution for Maisie after all the trauma she’s endured, but for me it just felt too obvious and easy, even if it does follow the original book.

Ah, but there’s the rub:  It doesn’t follow the book to completion, just to the point of this supposed happy ending.  In the original narrative (no, I didn’t read it—I have a reputation to maintain, after all—but summaries abound with a little Web surfing) we follow Maisie into her early teenage years, where she sees the possibility of throwing in her lot with the newly-minted couple of Sir Claude and Miss Overmore/new Mrs. Farange (Lincoln and Margo in this cinematic adaption) but instead chooses the dull but reliable Mrs. Wix, who evolves from governess to guardian (we get a quick version of Mrs. Wix [Paddy Croft] in the film but only as an undesirable alternative to Margo, soon to depart from the current plot), as the literary Maisie determines that the love bond of her stepparents will likely deteriorate just as did that of her actual progenitors.  Thus, what Maisie knew in the book seems to be a bitter but useful life lesson about human frailty whereas the filmic Maisie only seems to know that younger, less self-absorbed parents are a better deal than what she’s been negotiating for the previous 90 or so minutes.  That could have been a much more insightful conclusion for this film, which takes a well-prepared shit sandwich and puts a little whipped cream and a cherry on top to leave us all with a more pleasant taste after what we’d had to digest from the lives of Susanna and Beale up to the finale.  The existing easy ending is what holds this film back for me from a higher rating, that after all of the carefully-explored dialogue and deterioration of a relationship and how it collapses under the weight of its self-indulgent co-conspirators we come to such a conveniently-pleasant conclusion, apparently as an attempt to salvage something uplifting about the possibilities of human warmth and caring.  Maybe I’ve just seen too many Bergman films—where satisfactory resolution was never an option—to allow me to have better appreciation for what happens here, but after such a masterful buildup in the filmic version of this story of a too-long-under-appreciated child I just felt at the end that the whole potential of the presentation got on the bus and went south with Susanna with the assumption that true love is secure back at the beach house where Maisie’s life will continue to blossom.  Maybe so, but I think that literary Realist Henry James, despite being a life-long bachelor (possibly gay, not that there’s anything wrong with that), had a better grasp on what likely awaited his novel’s central character due to the vicissitudes of human relationships.

As is often the case with my reviews, I’ll leave you with a musical allusion to what I think you’d experience in the film, with my choice this time being Jackson Browne’s “In the Shape of a Heart” (from the 1986 Lives in the Balance album) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWIJ8RAcsHQ, a performance from the Jackson Browne: Going Home 2010 DVD.  This sad song about a failed relationship gets to what was “coming apart” between Susanna and Beale; there’s no child in Browne’s narrative to be either traumatized or rescued (depending on how you think Maisie will develop in her post-biological-parents years), but it’s just as well so that another innocent soul doesn’t have to endure the “shallows and the unseen reefs that are there from the start,” a tragedy that Susanna and Beale simply refused to acknowledge or correct, even if they ever had the ability to do so.  “I guess [they] never knew …”

If you’d like to know more about What Maisie Knew (because she probably won’t tell you on her own just yet), here are some suggested links:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkY2v5N4beI (for once, an interview with a film’s screenwriter, Carroll Cartwright, rather than the director and one that runs 43:35 to boot)





We encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.  You’ll also see our general Spoiler Alert warning that reminds you we’ll be discussing whatever plot details are needed for our comments so please be aware of this when reading any of our reviews and be aware of our formatting forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our control, as well as problems we’ve encountered with the Google RSS Feed Alert when used in conjunction with iGoogle and Google Reader.

Please note that to Post a Comment you need to either have a Google account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before you preview or post.

If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my new email at kenburke409@gmail.com.  Thanks.

By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile.    Ken

P.S.  Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker.