Flash and Filigree

GREEN FIELDS COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL – COMMENCEMENT 1995

February 8, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

Ladies and gentlemen, teachers and seniors, this is a ritual we’re enacting—a rite of passage, if you will, and a mild and pleasant one, comparatively speaking. None of the seniors will be required to kill a lion singlehandedly, or have a body part removed. All that’s necessary, in our gentle rite, is that the seniors be draped for a bit in these anachronistic vestments, sit with modesty and patience through some brief solemnities, and be handed a piece of sheepskin, […]

Categories: Sweet Reason & Sour • Tags: Graduation, Larry McMurtry, Speech

REFLECTIONS ON QUARTERBACKS

February 3, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

As we suggested already, there is no more high profile position in NFL football than that of quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys, America’s team, as they often call themselves; though there are many, including these writers, who think the moniker is a stretch. Just after we finished an earlier blog about the stylistic differences between the Achilles-like Tom Brady and the suburban dad, Hector-like Peyton Manning, we turned on the concluding minutes of a critical game between the Cowboys and […]

Categories: Curve Balls • Tags: Dallas Cowboys, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry, NFL, Superbowl, Texas Rangers, Tom Brady, Tony Romo

NOTES ON QUARTERBACKS – BY WHICH WE MEAN NFL QUARTERBACKS

February 2, 2013 by Flash and Filigree

In a now almost forgotten book called The Immediate Experience, an equally forgotten critic named Robert Warshow, in a volume of perceptive essay topics ranging from the 1930’s to gangster as hero and the Western, argued that popular culture is designed so as to help us organize violence and thereby help us make violence acceptable. Warshow was writing in his most explicit essay—the one on the Western—about the gunfighter as the figure who organizes violence for us. But the gunfighter doesn’t really work anymore. […]

Categories: Curve Balls