Blogging here doesn't seem to be part of my routine this summer; I hope to be back in a more regular pattern of posting when school is back in session. In the meantime, my micro-blogging continues at Twitter and at my always casual Tumblr site Fraktastic, I have posted videos and a few thoughts to mark the passing of Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Much of my summer has been taken up with moving and other house-related tasks, and these have been claiming much of my mental energy. I haven't made it to the movies often enough (Ratatouille is the last one I saw in the theaters). And although I love some of the summer shows (Big Love is especially good this season, and So You Think You Can Dance rivals Idol as a performance spectacle), we often end up spending some of our media time on HGTV programs about decorating makeovers, which appeal to the new homeowner areas of the brain more than those that appreciate good television as such. If I totally lose my mind, I will be sure to post a lengthy discourse comparing the aesthetics of Color Splash and Divine Design, the two shows I most highly recommend. If you share my domestic frame of mind, I also can recommend Tracy Kidder's masterful 1983 book House, a narrative of residential architecture and construction in 1980s New England, and William Alexander's The $64 Tomato, a humorous memoir of a part-time gentleman farmer in upstate New York.

The other thing I have been doing is working on the Coen Brothers chapter of my book, and a propos of that, here are some movie-themed t-shirts for you from Last Exit to Nowhere including one for the Hotel Earle (Barton Fink), Hudsucker Industries (The Hudsucker Proxy, which I probably like more than you do), and Little Lebowski urban achievers (The Big Lebowski). Other fictional t-shirts from Last Exit include The Overlook Hotel (The Shining) and Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner).) (via Fimoculous)