“Hypothetically, scale of one to ten, how difficult would it be for someone to disappear?” Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) / Ozark, Season 1, “Sugarwood.”   The Hero is one of two partners in an up-and-coming Chicago financial management firm meet with a real estate agent to look at a huge new office space for their growing […]

The Challenge of Conservative Stories John Fraim   “Both Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead are obliged by the nature of their dramatic structures to consider the fundamental questions of politics, and both invite deeply conservative interpretations. Conservatives are acutely aware of our pop-cultural deficit, and sometimes argue that we need more conservative stories on film, on television, […]

Pull away from your various addictions for just 15 minutes to listen to this important TED talk by Johann Hari. The Opposite of Addiction Isn’t Sobriety. It’s Connection. Lost Connections on Amazon

John Fraim My family home was in the six hundred block of Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. It was only three blocks from one of the greatest things I had ever seen constructed, a magnificent place called the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It occupied that strategic corners of Los Angeles where two of the great streets […]

“Southern Point” by Grizzly Bear (2009) / Play While Reading Below In my mind, Grizzly Bear is the great rock/pop/alternative band today. First, a short background on the recent history of Grizzly Bear thanks in part to Wikipedia. In the summer of 2008, Grizzly Bear opened for Radiohead on the second leg of their North […]

The Duffer Brothers / Creators of Stranger Things   “There’s a particular feeling that I experienced in those summers in North Carolina that we are attempting to recapture because they were the best times of our lives … As much as Stranger Things is a love letter to these films and books we grew up loving – […]