Joseph Gordon-Levitt Becomes Stylish Actor with Good Taste

I was not impressed with Joseph Gordon-Levitt when I first saw him in Third Rock from the Sun, a loony sitcom about aliens reporting from Earth.

I thought that Kristen Johnson, with those long legs and great timing for wise-ass combacks, would be a force to be reckoned with. I was wrong.

Photo from http://moviehole.net/201593223joseph-gordon-levitt-to-guest-star-on-the-mindy-project

It is Gordon-Levitt who shines these days.

Slight of build with a face more cute than handsome, Gordon-Leavitt endows the crazy cyclist messenger in Premium Rush. He inhabits the character with a cocky taste for danger that makes this most mundane job as exciting and dangerous as climbing Mount Everest.

He pushes this ability to capture both sweetness and risk-taking in Brick, a film that reminds me mightily of Dealing or the Berkeley-to-Boston  40-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, an early Michael Crichton effort under a pseudonym with his brother Douglas. In both, students assume noirishly adult lines and lives.

Brick lacks the good-natured humor of Dealing, but the world has changed a great deal since those simpler times of the Seventies. It improves upon it with the subtle cleverness projected by Gordon-Levitt and some catching dialogue.

It is disconcerting when high school students act and talk with the worldliness of characters in a Sam Spade novel. Despite the milieu, it is well done.

Gordon-Levitt pulls it off. Writing of his role in an earlier film, the San Francisco Chronicle noted he "embodies, more than performs, a character's inner life," according to Wikipedia.

Stephanie Zacharek at Salon similarly praised his ability to create a "spell  in subtle gradation," also quoted at Wikipedia.


Gordon-Levitt adds elegance and sophistication to this worldliness in the shadowy (and disturbingly violent) comic book adaptation, Sin City: A Dame to Die For. He plays a supremely self-confident gambler, again pushing against the qualities that he seems to seek out in independent and studio films alike.


I've only seen the trailers from The Walk. It appears that Gordon-Levitt once again inhabits his character, based on Philippe Petit, who actually made the daring performance on a high wire between two New York skyscrapers.

It is interesting to see a young actor emerge into a formidable stylish. I hope I'm not wrong when I predict Gordon-Levitt will pick up a well-deserved Oscar one of these days.

Why I Miss Kyra Sedgwick in "The Closer"

The Closer is in reruns, and this gives me a chance to watch details of techniques that I didn’t notice when my goal was to follow the mystery.

tvguide.com

Kyra Sedgwick’s expressive face must surely be one of the reasons her character is so appealing.

I loved her as Brenda Lee Johnson, a tough-minded police chief detective who didn’t mind stepping on toes in her single-minded pursuit of truth.

She’s brash. She forgets dates with yummy Fritz Howard (Jon Tenney) of the FBI, and he love her anyway most of the time.

She makes tough decisions. Won’t cooperate with her? She will plop you down in the middle of a gang war, making sure your homies believe you’ve been a snitch, and if they should kill you – well, karma’s a bitch.

She smart, almost too smart for her own good. By turns charming and threatening, she is famous for closing the tough cases by eliciting a confession from the perpetrator when the evidence isn't enough to secure a conviction.

And brave. Did I mention brave? She may be scared, but like a good soldier, she does not let fear dictate her actions.

Throughout it all she looks terrific.

 And oh those expressions that move across her face when she savors a luscious chocolate, oozing with marshmallow or caramel, at the end of a long day. It is a face of utter sensuality and bliss. 

Or when she flirts. Or pretends she's going to apologize and then turns the apology into an evaluation: "I am so sorry that you are incompetent to do your job."

Brenda Leigh Johnson was not a super hero. She was a believable older woman character of strength and shortcomings in roughly equal measure. She struggled, she wasn’t always a good person, but she was always authentic.

She lived her values.

Brenda Leigh Johnson, I miss ya, baby.

Free Verse: Growing Older

One thinks for a moment

At the beginning

That life will be orchestras playing at weddings

Cake and bridesmaids’ bouquets

Nights a little tipsy

Or filled with hallucinations of a garden of stuffed animals

The roar of an expressway like a waterfall in the distance.

Driving in cars to airports

To pick up luggage filled with grass.

Boys who want to run their hands up your leg.

Sweet kisses, deep and filled with longing

And lust.

One thinks this will last forever.

Enjoy being young, we are told.

We can see the physical changes.

The bodies grown wrinkled,

A bit stooped,

Slower, a bit musty.

But it’s not the body changes that dim the orchestra

And the street lamps wetly off the pavement.

One stares with far-off eyes into an unknown distance

Wondering where the others went who came before

And wandering off darkling into the everylasting night.

We’ve heard the orchestra before

Danced our dances.

No more young men who want to run their hands up my legs.

No more sweet kisses that last until dawn.

Only night.

Only the fading strains of the orchestra that is getting ready to pack its gear.

Quaint Lake Worth Has Art Deco Supermarket, Shops, Restaurants

On my most recent day trip to Lake Worth, I discovered Publix has given its supermarket an Art Deco flare, in keeping with many of the historic homes in that city.

Even the loading dock has decorative elements. Notice the Key West style home in the rear at left. I love the colors of our subtropical environment.

 This block of shops once housed a Church of Religious Science that was a source of great support and friendship during my early time in South Florida in the 1980s.

 Facing toward City Hall are the great trees in which I often observed a large flock of parrots make their evening stop.

I noticed this shop door on the main street; do people really need to be coached to experience gratitude?

I enjoyed seeing this Christmas village in one shop window. It reminded me of the one I inherited from my mother and grandmother. I gave it away some time ago, when it back pain made it too challenging to put up each year.



Murals seem to be cropping up everywhere. I caught the next two in Lantana, slightly south of Lake Worth. One is on a Greek restaurant on U.S. 1.

The patriotic mural, declaring Freedom Is Not Free, was on the side of a municipal recreation center building.

Gluing Fabric Is Much Easier than Upholstering Doors

Upholstering the old-fashioned closet doors in my living area proved a big task, covered here.

For the bedroom doors, I tried a much easier, efficient, and economical process: I created panels and hot-glued them to the 7.5-foot panels.

Burlap has a nice heavy texture and it is easy to create straight lines, even without a proper fabric cutting table, which I don't have.

Just pull a thread. If the fabric is loomed straight, you end up with straight lines. This is relatively easy with a coarse weave, but it takes a bit more time than writing the sentence.

The fabric panels create a more modern, plain feel that I like. The slight bubbles in the top photo are less noticeable on the tall door as a whole. Moreover, the closet is in a narrow alcove, so one really doesn't often step back to view them as I have here.

This bottom photo shows an uncovered door. I have only this one left to do.

I steam-ironed the burlap, and I used a loose stitch around the edges to create a neat edge line.

I would not recommend this in a child's room or for anyone who is rough. I slide the doors gently on the tracks, using only the handles or the raised edges.

Semi-Retirement, The Fork in the Road, and Choosing Truth over Comfort

Recently I have realized that I have saved enough to revert back to being an adjunct professor. I enjoy working on the Fashion After 50 website; I have additional online teaching possibilities that I don't fully use.

But I like comfort. I like the extras that working full-time allows, even when the restrictions -- no vacations except a week (five days) after every four-month term,  have to punch a time clock like a kid on her first job, responsibilities that crowd out my creative work and make it more challenging to exercise -- cramp the possibilities of growing fully into who I am.

As so often is the case, a serendipitous nudge seems to point in a certain direction.

Writes Alice Gardner, in her wonderful little book, Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice:

"If there was one factor most responsible for the continued awakening of those who seek the truth, it would have to be that of consistently choosing to seek truth over the comforts that appear to be available along the way.

"Each stage of development that we move through has its own kind of comforts inherent in it and we may be tempted to settle for those comforts instead of some far-away-sounding spiritual destination that mind isn't even sure exists. (p. 129)

 "By what means can we avoid these kinds of diversions?

"There is, of course, not a method, but only a cultivating of an awareness of our deepest intentions and a willingness to look inside ourselves to find our own most authentic responses to each moment.

"If there was anything that might be called a method to deal with how to make the little decisions in life without compromising truth for comfort, it would be to unearth this internal navigation system [that each person has] and be true to it and to ourselves in all of the little day-to-day decisions that come along, as well as the occasional major decisions." (p. 130)

That seems to be an answer of sorts, and I have a timeline for easing back into adjunct work in a way that will cause, hopefully, the least financial disruption to my goals.