Author: Bob
The park now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios, a name I have never gotten quite comfortable with, turns 30 this month. Except it really turns 31. As it was known back then, The Disney-MGM Studios was a hybrid, a mutant, not just Disneyland with a different story. The team that...
I am not a Catholic. I am not even a Christian in the way that Christians define themselves. I am no architect or art historian. I speak very poor French. Why does the burning of Notre Dame arrest me, stop my breath and line my brow? I think it is...
Simply getting older-participating in the entropy attendant to a certain number of solar orbits-confers nothing. Even the much-vaunted acquisition of “life experience” isn’t much good unless, with reflection on it, some testable hypothesis about how the universe might be put together and improved is validated or revised along what prove...
We have made up something called “The New Year”. TNY happens arbitrarily on December the 31st at midnight. Don't get me wrong, it’s a grand tradition and we’ve imbued it with useful layers of cultural mechanics. It is a nod toward biblical “Jubilee”-the erasing of old debts and a new...
In our Zen tradition, we learn from the Buddha’s perspective that there is no-coming, no-going. That is a teaching that can liberate people from the ideas of birth and death that, he taught, keep us caught and unable to have the freedom to deeply live our lives. Another way of...
A while back, I discussed (politely, with just a light dusting of snark) what I call the “danger of the THING”-that all pervasive one “new idea” that will cure what ails ye. My social media is still flooded with click bait of various kinds from TED talks to books to...
Travel broadens you, they say. Well, exploring other cultures doesn't always require a passport. I spent the weekend at Playlist Live. It’s an annual conference bringing together people from the digital media industry. Generally, they fall into three groups. The first is folks working in this relatively new content and...
In the early summer of 1992 I got a call from my boss. “Bob, I need you and your crew to meet me at the company plane in a couple of hours packed and ready to shoot on location for a few days.” This was not an unusual call. We...
He was burnished auburn and had a philosopher’s face and began a slow and methodical descent, each hand and foot hold effortless but the obvious result of long practice. Finally, the branch bent just enough for him to catch the edge a stronger limb to continue his traverse. I watched...
I am not a qualified cultural anthropologist, but I’m going out on a limb and suggesting that we live, perhaps more than ever, in a culture drunk on increasingly transient notions of celebrity. These days, star status goes well beyond the latest actor, musician, author or 7 second political Tweet repost-winner....
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old...
