Agent Palmer

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.

The Cap: The Price of a Life is Roman Frister’s autobiography, written in a nonlinear fashion of his survival through horrendous situations throughout concentration camps and hate during the Holocaust.

I don’t know about other Holocaust survivor autobiographies, but Frister has somehow found a method of lightening the load of this heavy story while also expanding the poignancy to greater heights.

The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”

For those unaware, A Complete Unknown is a 2024 film based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. They both focus on the events leading up to the evening of July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band. If you don’t know why that seems worthy of an entire movie or book, then it’s likely you are under the age of 50. The good news is…

I was too young to experience the Late Night Wars. They were well over – or at least not as hostile – by the time I was able to stay up late enough to watch any of the Late Night offerings, but I did choose a side. I was a Letterman guy.  At the time, I just preferred Letterman to Leno. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his post-Late Night era Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.”…