H N Arabian Blog - Random Tales

  Movie Review:  Sinners Ryan Coogler’s Sinners arrives like a juke-joint sermon delivered at midnight: sweaty, loud, seductive, haunted, and impossible to ignore. Reuniting with longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan, Coogler crafts a fever-dream Southern Gothic that fuses vampire horror, blues mythology, historical drama, and musical spectacle into one of the boldest American films in years. Set in 1932 Mississippi, the film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Jordan), World War I veterans and former Chicago gangsters returning home with plans to open a Black-owned juke joint. Their dream of music, liquor, and liberation collides with supernatural terror when a mysterious vampire presence begins circling the Delta night. The premise sounds like exploitation pulp; the execution is something far richer and stranger. Jordan gives perhaps the finest performance of his career — or rather, two performances. Smoke moves through scenes with weary gravity, while S...

  Albert Brooks’s Lost in America plays, at first glance, like a shaggy midlife-crisis comedy—a yuppie temper tantrum played out on the open road. But revisit it now, and it feels sharper, almost diagnostic, a satire that cuts cleanly into the American habit of confusing freedom with liquidity. David Howard (Brooks), a Los Angeles advertising executive with a gift for slogans and self-delusion, believes he has cracked the code. After being passed over for a promotion, he quits his job, persuades his agreeable wife Linda (Julie Hagerty) to do the same, and cashes out their savings. The plan: buy a Winnebago, hit the highway, and “drop out” in the spirit of Easy Rider . It is rebellion as a line item—a carefully budgeted escape from the very system that made them comfortable. Brooks, who directs with a deceptively loose hand, understands that David isn’t a radical so much as a consumer of radicalism. His grand gesture is less about rejecting corporate life than about curating a be...

Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime  by Eric O’Neill   BOOK: - 042426 -When the Spycraft Goes Digital, So Do the Lies Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime by Eric O’Neill Eric O’Neill has long traded in the currency of secrets. As the former FBI counterintelligence operative who helped bring down Robert Hanssen, one of the most damaging spies in American history, he knows how deception works at a human level — how trust is built, manipulated and ultimately betrayed. In Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime , O’Neill extends that understanding into the digital age, where the tools have changed but the psychology has not. The book arrives at a moment when cybercrime has shed any lingering aura of abstraction. Data breaches, ransomware attacks and AI-driven scams are no longer distant headlines; they are part of the texture of everyday life. O’Neill’s aim is not to dazzle with technical mastery but to translate this sprawling threat landscape into something legible — and, more importantly, personal. H...

  GREAT OUTDOORS: 042526 The Twisted Catalpa: A Local Tree with a Story to Tell On the grounds of the Lincoln Public Library stands a tree that rarely goes unnoticed. Its trunk spirals upward in thick, rope-like ridges, as though shaped by a patient hand over decades. At first glance, many observers—myself included—have mistaken it for a black locust, drawn in by the deeply furrowed bark and dramatic twisting form. But a closer look, especially in late fall and winter, reveals the truth. Hanging from its branches are long, slender seed pods—often a foot or more in length—swaying like narrow ribbons in the wind. These “cigars,” as they are sometimes called, unmistakably identify the tree as a Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) . A Tree with Character—and History According to Lincoln Public Library records, this catalpa was planted in the early 1900s and quickly became a fixture of the grounds. Its unusual twisting trunk has inspired decades of curiosity. Was it shaped by vines? ...

  FILM: 0501234 - “15 Minutes” (2001) — A Boston Globe–style Review There’s a nasty little idea pulsing beneath 15 Minutes : that in America, notoriety isn’t just a byproduct of crime—it’s the goal. Director John Herzfeld builds his film around that premise and then lets it spiral into something lurid, uneven, and strangely prophetic. Robert De Niro plays Eddie Flemming, a celebrity homicide detective whose media savvy is nearly as sharp as his instincts. He’s partnered (uneasily) with Jordy Warsaw (Edward Burns), a fire marshal drawn into a case that quickly metastasizes from routine investigation to something far uglier. Opposite them are two Eastern European criminals—Emil (Karel Roden), a manipulative opportunist, and Oleg (Oleg Taktarov), his dim but eager accomplice—who discover that filming their crimes might be the quickest route to fame in a tabloid-hungry culture. That premise—kill, record, become famous—feels less like satire today than diagnosis. In 2001, Herzfeld’s ...

  Movie Review | The Boston Globe (Sunday Arts) FILM: 042626 -‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ burns with the truth of I, Tina There are music biopics that polish a legend into myth, and then there are films that risk something messier: telling the story as it felt from the inside. What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), drawn from I, Tina by Tina Turner and Kurt Loder, lands firmly in the latter camp—raw, unsettling, and powered by a performance that refuses to be forgotten. Directed by Brian Gibson, the film traces Turner’s journey from Anna Mae Bullock, a church-raised girl from Nutbush, Tennessee, to an international icon who had to fight—physically, emotionally, and professionally—for every inch of her autonomy. The spine of the film is not fame but survival, and that distinction gives it its enduring charge. Angela Bassett’s portrayal of Tina Turner is, by now, the stuff of cinematic legend, but revisiting it underscores just how precise and athletic it is. This is not mere i...

  FILM: 042226 -  ‘Song Sung Blue’ finds grace in the grit of a borrowed spotlight By Harry Arabian There’s a particular kind of New England appreciation for the earnest striver — the person who knows the odds are long, the stage is small, and the applause is fleeting, but shows up anyway. Song Sung Blue , Craig Brewer’s tender, uneven, and ultimately winning new film, understands that instinct intimately. It’s a movie about imitation that, at its best, feels entirely authentic. Inspired by the real-life Milwaukee couple who built a modest following as a Neil Diamond tribute act, the film stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as Mike and Claire Sardina, a pair of working-class dreamers who transform themselves into “Lightning & Thunder.” Their act is, on paper, kitsch: rhinestones, smoky bars, and a catalog of songs everyone already knows. But Brewer isn’t interested in the spectacle so much as the need behind it — the quiet desperation that turns performance into survival...

  A Silver Ball, a Long Arc of History Review: “Pinball: A Graphic History of the Silver Ball,” by Jon Chad There’s a particular music to a pinball machine — the sharp clap of the flippers, the ricocheted chatter of metal on metal, the sudden celebratory chime that feels both earned and accidental. Jon Chad’s Pinball captures that sound on the page, translating noise, motion, and history into a graphic narrative that is as instructive as it is playful. At first glance, the subject might seem slight. Pinball? A diversion wedged between pool tables and Pac-Man cabinets? Chad’s book, however, argues — persuasively and with considerable charm — that the silver ball has traced a far more consequential path through modern culture than its flashing lights suggest. The story begins not in neon-lit arcades but in the salons of Europe, where early tabletop games like bagatelle entertained aristocrats. Chad sketches these origins with a light hand, connecting them to the physics that still ...

  Permit for Performance It was one of those suspiciously perfect spring Saturdays in Harvard Square — the kind of weather that resurrects long-forgotten yard projects from shallow graves. Mary announced, with the triumphant calm of someone holding both sunshine and moral authority, “It’s finally a day to celebrate the nieces’ birthdays at Club Passim.” I immediately recognized divine intervention. A family gathering was clearly superior to raking the spice garden and constructing what Mary had begun calling — with unsettling seriousness — “the humane hen house.” The town had recently granted me a permit for four hens. Four hens meant free-range eggs. Free-range eggs meant breakfast glory. Breakfast glory, apparently, required carpentry. We strolled to the bus stop at Watertown Square and boarded Bus No. 76 like two citizens fleeing agricultural responsibility. By the time we reached Harvard Square, the family had assembled outside Club Passim — Mary’s sister, her brother, the ...

*FILM: 021126-What the Springsteen Film Gets Right About Nebraska**  Opinion |  The Silence Between the Songs:  What the Springsteen Film Gets Right About Nebraska By the time Bruce Springsteen recorded Nebraska in December 1981, he was already a stadium act. He had the band, the myth, the upward arc. What he did not have—at least not publicly—was quiet. That’s why any film that chooses to narrate the making of Nebraska is taking on something slippery. You cannot film silence the way you can film a concert. You cannot dramatize restraint the way you can dramatize applause. And yet the recent Springsteen movie centered on the album’s creation makes a bold wager: that the most revealing chapter of an American rock icon’s life happened not under lights, but in a small New Jersey bedroom with a four-track cassette recorder. The film’s narration leans into introspection. It frames Springsteen not as the denim-clad evangelist of working-class redemption but as a listener—a...

*BOOK: Stanley, Jason - How fascism works_the politics of us and them* Opinion: How Democracies Fade How Fascism Works By Jason Stanley On Sunday mornings, when the news feels less like information and more like weather—something heavy rolling in off the horizon—I sometimes think about how democracies actually die. Not in a blaze. Not always with tanks. Sometimes with language. In How Fascism Works , philosopher Jason Stanley argues that fascism is less a uniform and more a pattern. Less a single regime than a set of habits. His book, How Fascism Works , reads like a field guide to political corrosion. Not alarmist in tone so much as clinical: here are the signs, he says. Here is how “us” hardens against “them.” What struck me most is not any single pillar in his framework, but how ordinary they feel. Start with the mythic past. The promise that once—before the wrong people arrived, before norms loosened, before the culture softened—we were great. It’s a comforting story. It reduc...

*BOOK: Tkalčić, Hrvoje - When worlds quake* Hearing the Earth Think A Sunday reflection on When Worlds Quake by Hrvoje Tkalčić On a quiet morning, before traffic begins its low mechanical growl, the world feels still. Solid. Trustworthy. We walk across pavement and hardwood floors with the casual confidence of creatures who assume the ground beneath us is permanent. Hrvoje Tkalčić would like us to reconsider. In When Worlds Quake , earthquakes are not spectacles of destruction, nor cable-news footage of buckled highways and trembling chandeliers. They are signals. Messages. The Earth speaking in vibrations too deep for our ears but not beyond our understanding. And the miracle, Tkalčić argues gently but insistently, is that we have learned to listen. The book is not a disaster chronicle. It is a love letter to inference. Tkalčić, a geophysicist who has planted instruments in some of the planet’s most inhospitable corners, writes with the steady patience of someone accustomed t...

*BOOK: 021526- Eight Books On One Shelf * Eight Books On One Shelf On one shelf in my house, the 20th century argues with itself. Not loudly. Not in headlines. In spines. Eight books, pulled from a larger crowd, sit there like a quiet curriculum for a restless age: Juneteenth , Lord of the Flies , The Bluest Eye , For Whom the Bell Tolls , Catch-22 , Moby-Dick , Nausea , and On the Road . Read in sequence, they form less a syllabus than an emotional weather map — the pressure systems of identity, violence, war, absurdity, obsession, and finally motion. I start with Ellison because in Boston — in America — history is never past. Juneteenth insists that identity is not a lifestyle accessory; it is an inheritance, complicated and unpaid. Ellison writes as though memory itself were a civic duty. Before we debate policy or culture or the latest outrage, he reminds us that dignity has a ledger. The country keeps books, even when we pretend not to. From there, Golding removes the adults...

  With You I’m Born Again,  Waiting for the Flight, Finding the Past You don’t go to the airport expecting to be taught anything. The whole place is designed to move you along — shoes off, laptop out, boarding group called before you’re ready. Which is why the dress catches you off guard. It stands behind glass at Denver International Airport, a rust-colored skirt falling in a way that suggests it hasn’t quite decided to stop moving. The placard says With You I’m Born Again , first performed in 1980. It doesn’t need to say much more. The fabric already knows. Cleo Parker Robinson Dance is marking its 55th anniversary this season, though the number feels almost beside the point. Longevity is easy to measure and harder to understand. What matters more is how something survives — and what it refuses to let go of. CPRD has survived by remembering that dance is not spectacle first, but practice: something handed down, body to body, often within families, sometimes within communitie...

*020826-Fossil Fuels and Global Warming: A Geological Reckoning*  Fossil Fuels and Global Warming: A Geological Reckoning Global warming is often framed as a political debate or a technological challenge, but at its core it is a geological one. Fossil fuels represent carbon that Earth removed from the atmosphere and stored underground over hundreds of millions of years. By extracting and burning these fuels in just a few centuries, humanity has effectively reversed a slow, stabilizing geological process at unprecedented speed. Climate change is not merely an unintended consequence of modern life; it is the predictable outcome of disturbing Earth’s long-term carbon balance. The combustion of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide that was once locked away in coal seams, oil reservoirs, and gas-bearing strata. This carbon was sequestered during periods when biological productivity, burial, and tectonic stability allowed organic matter to escape oxidation. In burning fossil fuels, we ...