Coda: Blue Jasmine's Bird of Paradise

Yes, all the excitement and raves, to this viewer, are right on target. Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine is engrossing; Cate Blanchett's performance, while mannered, is riveting. During one scene, when Jasmine moves through the San Francisco apartment of her sister (charmingly and passionately played by the excellent Sally Hawkins), I experienced a sharp shpilkes in my connectigazoid..actually, My Better Half was elbowing me. A background prop, there I suppose to show her sister's declasse sensibility, is a piece of Do It Yourself art work of a Bird of Paradise or the like, and visible at 32 seconds into the above trailer, that MBH had assembled when she was 8 years old. Whether mindful of a particularly memorable, if difficult, period in her family history, she, and we have always kept this in our home. Relegated in recent years to our basement/laundry room area, after it's appearance in Blue Jasmine, natch, it took on a new resonance and, of course, a heightened sense of irony, so we brought it up to our parlor floor, where we are looking for a place to mount it. A photo of our heirloom appears below: 

Birds of Paradise by Judith Tantleff-Napoli, at the time age 8

 Tempus fugit, ars longa...

Coda: Are Billionaire "Citizen Kanes" Good for American Newspapers?

Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos's $250 million purchase of the Washington Post struck the AMerican newspaper industry like a bolt of lightning. Giving the paper hope for continued solvency, but openong up a myriad of questions about the future of journalism at the Post -- and in the industry at large. Gloria Goodale in the Christian Science Monitor looks at the plusses and minuses resulting from this transaction and whether it will lead to more: " “Clearly we are seeing notable great dailies come into the hands of very wealthy individual owners,” says Mark Jurkowitz of the Pew Research Center. "These are a new class of owners,” points out Mr. Jurkowitz. “They are more unfettered.” In the case of Mr. Bezos, he notes for instance, the Amazon founder and new Globe owner will be able to operate without having to explain his actions to outside shareholders... Gloria Goodale's article here