Cardinal Post

I initially wrote this simply to process my anger, but since HBO neglected to immediately release a new series to distract me and work is slow this week, allow me to present you with this belated rant on the finale of the HBO limited drama series  The Undoing .  ********* Spoilers abound ********** The Undoing is based on a book, called You Should Have Known . (If this somehow implies that the adaptation is actually a satire of Prestige Dramas this is hilarious! Hats off to all involved, send me your address and expect an Edible Arrangement if that is still a business.) Anyway, I didn’t read the book. In the series, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are a wealthy Upper East Side couple with a tweenaged son and a super involved father-in-law played by Donald Sutherland’s eyebrows.  In the first episode, Nicole attends a Private School Mom’s fundraiser meeting, where a new Scholarship Mom, Elena, breastfeeds while making direct eye contact with Nicole. Later, Elena is pr...

I've been trying to tell a holiday story about the ghosts of seasons past, but it's not cooperating. Like a lumpy box of lights I shoved in a closet last January, every memory I pulled out was tangled into another. And excuse the metaphor, but it’s the lights I keep coming back to.  I like lights. Blame it on the Celts, but I feel them in my soul this time of year. The aesthetic, the ritual, the skeleton outline of spindly branches across a darked town common; when they’re done right they bring me to a place of real, quiet joy. When they’re done wrong, I take it a little personally.   December 2006, the last weeks of the sheer-luck three month sublet I'd found across from Boston's Arboretum. All week was the screech of the T grinding into Government Center, the endless ring of the City Hall phones, the anxious buzz reminding me I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in this job and the clanging certainty that the disclosure of my fraud was imminent. The mornings, th...