Different Slants

My wife Mary and I love to travel.  If you follow this blog you probably already know that.  Our first trip, beginning in 1975, lasted nine years and took us from Chicago to Martinique and back to Florida.  We came back for the purpose of starting a family.

Mission accomplished.  Now what?

Over the past 25 years we have enjoyed traveling to many countries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle-East.  The one draw back all these trips had was we had to come back by a set date.  We greatly prefer open ended travel.

So it is time to return to the nomadic lifestyle of our younger years.  To this end we are putting our house up for sale and buying a sailboat.  We have already disposed of all our accumulated furniture, most of our books, and some of our clothing.  We are sleeping in my office while the realtor stages our house (with better looking furniture than we had) for showing potential buyers.  It is a bit like camping and kind of fun.

Next week, we will fly to England to shop for our boat.  Since we want to start our travels in Northern Europe, it makes sense to buy the boat there rather than buy it in the US and have to cross the North Atlantic.  We hope a buyer for the house will have been found by the time we return to pack what few possessions we are keeping and ship them to wherever we find the boat.

Selling a house is more work than buying one.  It is a pain in the ass but the nine years we lived in the house were good ones for us.  Although leaving is a little sad, we are excited by the prospect of new adventures.  I will document our travels, as time permits, here and for the more nautically inclined, on the Cruising Tips website.

Between January 3rd,2008 and April 13th, 2008, after Rick Munden and I agreed to see if we could create a blog that people would actually read, I wrote thirteen off-the-wall movie reviews of favorite old movies plus much more that I felt would interest people.  Except for review # 12, in which I argued that Amy Adams wasn’t sexy enough to keep three men on a string in a British movie I otherwise liked very much, and in the process attempted to define screen sexiness and suggested it could be a good parlor game, most people didn’t read my reviews. I regret that.

However, hundreds read # 12, so I guess, as they say, sex sells.

I have since revised my opinion of Miss Adams and her charms.  Some women get much better as they mature, and she seems to be a good case for that.  But then, who am I to say?

If you are intrigued, go to the list on the right of this page and look at the list of categories, you can click on Katzman’s Cinema Komments.   I think you will find my eccentric take on the movies is well worth your time.

I quit writing reviews to concentrate on all the other true stories since posted.   They are worth your time too, as are Rick’s stories.

As far as Roger Ebert, in 1970 he ran a class at the University of Chicago Extension in Downtown Chicago called (cleverly) Film Criticism, which I took twice.   We got to know each other a little, especially when he found out I was selling thousands of Chicago Sun-Times with his column in it at my wooden newsstand in Hyde Park every week.   His class was wonderful and well attended.  I missed a couple of the classes when my newsstand burned down that winter, but that’s another story.

He was very generous with his time, was completely unpretentious despite his growing fame and remained friendly to me through the years.  When Bob’s Newsstand closed in 1985 after 20 years, when I was thirty-five and out of work, he offered to see if he could get me a job as a writer at the Sun-Times.  About a month later, I did get a call from someone at the Times offering me a chance to work for them.  I turned it down because I must have thought I had something better going, which it turns out, I didn’t.  I have often wondered which way my life might have gone if I had decided to say “yes” to the opportunity.  But the point is, Ebert kept his word.  Character, man.

Ebert and I share something else, unfortunately, besides a love of the movies.

(Read on …)