Using a Password Manager

Keeping track of logins had become a source of stress and frustration for me years ago, but since I’m a glutton for punishment, I did nothing to change the situation: I kept a six-page list of usernames and passwords that I’d printed from an Excel spreadsheet (deleting the file, of course) and on which I had scribbled in a multitude of additional logins over the past several years. Goodness, I had a lot of passwords to keep track of.

But no more! I finally bit the bullet and subscribed to a password manager – Bitwarden in my case – and after a day of figuring things out and entering all of my information, I’m happy to say that I am positively giddy about my decision.

I’m no expert, so I encourage you to read more on-line, but in a nutshell a password manager keeps track of all of your logins, allowing you to change passwords quickly and safely (and to ones that are more challenging to hack into).  All you have to remember is one master password to log into your manager.  That’s it. If all goes according to plan, I will remember just one password for the rest of my life. This will no doubt come in mighty handy as I age, as there have already been times at Target when I froze because I couldn’t immediately recall my 4-digit PIN.

If the thought of having one service storing all of your data scares you, you are a wise person!  Read on.

It was tricky to know which password manager to use; I spent hours going down the rabbit hole of professional reviews, user reviews, ratings, features and costs, and it quickly became overwhelming. Ultimately, I decided to go with the one CNET described as the best free password manager – Bitwarden.  I have no problem paying for a service, and I may eventually upgrade to one of Bitwarden’s premium subscriptions, but I figured I had nothing to lose by just trying out the software and seeing what it’s all about.

I set up my account and immediately didn’t know what I was looking at. YouTube to the rescue! I don’t know the guy’s name who posted the following videos for the Password Bits channel, but his instructions were impeccable:

Bitwarden Beginners Guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30QqIeb1Pu4
Using Bitwarden on Android https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyqxR20I1NY

I followed these instructions almost to a “T”, deleting my saved passwords on Google, as well as my stored credit card information, and proceeding from there. I first got everything working seamlessly on my desktop and then set things up on my mobile device. Things don’t run quite as smoothly on my Android – I often have to do an extra click or two, and occasionally have to copy and paste a password – but it still works quit well, and I can open Bitwarden with my fingerprint. I suspect I’ll eventually get a finger scanner for my desktop so that I don’t have to use my master password on that either. (But keep in mind that if you NEVER have to enter your master password, you will likely forget your master password. This could come back to haunt you.)

Speaking of master passwords, if you lose yours you are screwed. Seriously. Your password manager will not be able to get it for you. Because of this, I have a copy of mine saved in my safe deposit box just in case. You could also ask a friend or loved one to keep a copy for you someplace safe. As for the rest of my passwords, for now I still have the six-page sheet in my house, but as I start to change passwords to safer word/number/character combinations, that sheet will become obsolete and shredded.

As for the legitimate safety concern of storing all of your passwords in one place, I encourage you to read this article and several others to help guide you to a decision that’s right  for you. 

ALSO, keep in mind something called the Double Blind Password Strategy.  This is a fantastic idea, and one that will ensure that your most sensitive login information – perhaps for banking, investments, email and social media – are never breached, even in the unlikely event that someone manages to access your password manager account. I will be utilizing this strategy once I get everything set up and synched with my wife’s account.

With Bitwarden, you can share logins with your partner for free, or with your family for a very reasonable fee.  So once I get my spouse set up, we will have shared access to some of our common logins, like travel and shopping websites.

If you’ve been on the fence about using a password manager, I strongly encourage you to hop off and give one a try.  It sure beats the alternative stress-inducing password management system: one’s brain.

3 Books on Filmmakers

You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life.  It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution.  I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer.  Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years.  The book is also a lens into how films are made.  How?  Almost always painstakingly.  Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all.  Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed. 

Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born.  His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress.  Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time.  First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.”  Namely, maids and butlers.  I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.

If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios.  Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.

Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result).  Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy.  Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)

But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix.  But wait…there’s more!  You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life.  Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.

I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years.  If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking.  I wish he’d rectify this habit.  But hey, he writes better than I do!

I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.

Book Review: Don't Make Me Pull Over

It wasn’t so long ago that if a family embarked on a vacation, driving was the only feasible way to do it.  I took my first flight (alone, no less) when I was thirteen years-old in 1981, and if memory serves, the ticket for me to fly to San Francisco and back cost around $350, a sum that made a visit to the West Coast impossible not only for my family – hence the solo venture – but for most families at that time.  Vacationing meant driving, which often meant cramming into an unreliable car without air-conditioning, DVD players, phones or hand-held electronic games, and arguing about who controlled the radio and who got to play the Hi-Q peg game next.  Sound like hell on Earth?  Well, it certainly had a few downsides, but traveling by car in the 1970s was actually a lot of fun, and in Richard Ratay’s Don’t Make Me Pull Over: An Informal History of the Family Road Trip, he takes the reader on a pleasant Sunday afternoon’s drive through our nation’s love affair with hitting the highway.  It’s a terrific read that offers equal parts nostalgia, history and hilarity.

I had expected Ratay’s book to read more like a memoir, and although we do get to know his family – often with comedic results – Don’t Make Me Pull Over is first and foremost a history book, and Ratay deftly introduces sundry topics in an entertaining way.  We learn about the U.S. Interstate, the birth of the garish Holidome, speed limits, the advent of the speed gun and the equalizing force of the Fuzzbuster, the use of TripTik booklets (remember those?), video games, car games, restaurants and the creation of drive-through windows, an achievement Ratay is certain his father would rank as one of the greatest advancements of the twentieth century (well above personal computers, but not quite as high as graphite-shafted golf clubs).

Despite the ample history that’s packed into this entertaining read, the star of the book has to be Ratay’s father, a no-nonsense kind of guy who wants to “make good time” whatever the cost, who bargains with hotel clerks over price, and who settles disputes in the backseat by detaining the offender with his right arm while maintaining control of the steering wheel with his left.  In one hilarious chapter, Ratay tells of his father’s insistence on driving the car for as long as possible before refueling (“No sense stopping sooner than we have to.  We’ll lose twenty minutes just getting off and on the highway.”).  You can guess where this leads, but the results aren’t any less slide-splitting.  Ratay’s portrayal of his father reminded me a lot of David Sedaris’s father in his terrific memoirs, both idiosyncratic but likeable guys who’d probably make great supporting characters in a 1970s sitcom.

Ratay also writes about the experience of traveling as a child, and he fondly recalls the freedom that riding in the backseat used to entail:

After finishing my meal, I’d grab a pillow and retire belowdecks to the floorboard, where I stretched out for a nap on the warm and comfy shag carpet, positioning my belly just so over the hump of the transmission housing.

This stirs my own memory so well that I can almost feel the rumble of the wheels vibrating against my chest.

Because the book is a look back, it naturally leads to a final chapter that accounts for what we’ve lost along the way, and Ratay’s argument isn’t without merit.  He writes about his family’s first trip taken via air in 1981 (the year of my first flight), and laments that they’d taken a trip but hadn’t made a journey.  “The plain fact was that other than purchasing our plane tickets, we’d made no real effort to reach our objective…There’d been no hardships, no squabbles, no hours of tedium, not even a worry that we’d missed a turn…Our flight had allowed us to soar over all the things that once made a family vacation…a family vacation.”  There’s something to this, I think, and add to that technological advances and our desire to be entertained, even those of us who still take road trips may not experience them together as much as individually, each family member glued to his or her own device.

Don’t Make Me Pull Over is a great read by a very capable author.  I’ll be curious to see what Ratay comes up with next.

Rocketman Review

Right off the heels of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I still have not seen), director Dexter Fletcher along with screenwriter Lee Hall attempt to tell the tale of Elton John, a man who needs no introduction but whose life on screen is a mere shadow of the real life lived.  Biopics of musicians are tricky territory for film, as fans often walk away pointing out all of the errors of the story, while non-fans walk away with just snippets of the whole.  Although Rocketman falters partly because of anachronisms (and there are many), its real downfall is its inconsistent story-telling technique and its failure to capture the essence of the man being portrayed.

It starts off oh so promisingly, with a beaten down John admitting himself into rehab and addressing his younger self, who unexpectedly belts out “The Bitch Is Back” before transporting both Eltons to the streets of 1940s London, with gloriously saturated colors and a gaggle of dancers accompanying the song.  While witnessing this opening number, I think – okay, we’re in for a fanciful ride of rehabbing Elton looking back on glimpses of his life, out of order, grand, exaggerated, and accompanied by one of the finest musical oeuvres of the 20th Century.   I’m all in.

But the story devolves quickly into a very chronological and predictable narration of Elton’s broken life that betrays the promising start to the film.  We’re introduced to John’s uninterested father, his inconsistent mother and his supportive grandmother, and while there is some pain portrayed for sure, none of it is so terribly traumatic that it explains what happens later in John’s life – when his addictions manifest themselves into massively self-destructive acts.   By the time he auditions for music publisher Dick James, pounding out snippets of songs not composed until the 1980s (“I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues” and “Sad Songs”) the movie has lost all credibility: it’s neither a fanciful dreamlike whirlwind nor is it an accurate narrative.  Instead, it vacillates between a very boring and inaccurate portrayal of Elton’s real life and jarring dreamlike scenes that bear no relation to what’s preceded them.

More troubling is the lack of joy portrayed in the film.  Yes, the story is coming from the viewpoint of Elton at his lowest point in life, but to deny this character the sheer elation he experienced in the 1970s is to deny the man his due.  The now-sober Elton has admitted many times that he had a blast during the 70s, despite – or perhaps because of – his self-destructive tendencies.  In the film, he’s always somber, always self-conscious, always struggling, so that the scene at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where Elton is first discovered by American audiences and where he and his nameless band levitate during their performance, utterly falls flat.  It should have been electric.  Near the film’s end, Elton tells his mother, “I’ve fucked everything that moves.  I’ve taken every drug known to man. All of them. And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.” The audience would be correct to cock their heads in confusion and utter, “Huh?”  We didn’t get to see Elton enjoy a second of it, and the only thing Elton John fucks on film is his manager John Reid.

And why on earth is the band nameless?   Throughout John’s heyday, his bandmates Davey Johnstone, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson were essential.  There are no scenes showing their camaraderie.  No scenes where the musicians bring the songs to life, making brilliant recordings at the Chateau d'Hérouville in France.  No scene of them appearing at Madison Square Garden on Thanksgiving Day in 1974 with none other than John Lennon in what was to be his last live performance.  Not everything could be included – I get it – but some part of their glorious ride should have been depicted.

I found it particularly funny that in the scene in which John fleas to rehab, they show the Twin Towers among the New York Skyline, as if that historical accuracy was essential, but not the fact that John went to rehab in Chicago.  Look, you can play with facts in films.  I get it.  Artistic license is important (just ask Oliver Stone), but why work so hard on irrelevant facts and not at all on others that Elton John fans will deem essential?  You want Elton to sing “I’m Still Standing” after rehab instead of eight years before, that’s cool with me, because the lyrics of the song support the scene.  But what is gained by making the band a four-piece instead of a three-piece at the Troubadour, or having Elton play “Crocodile Rock” three years before its release?  If you’re going for fantasy, go all in.  If you’re going for a realistic biopic, stick to as many facts as you can. 

The film does shine in a few different ways besides the opening scene.  Taron Egerton is terrific, and he looks enough like John to pull off the ruse.  He also sings the material, which is impressive.  I also love the use of John’s musical themes in the orchestral score, sometimes very subtly.  And the scene of John playing ”Pinball Wizard” while rotating between costumes, signifying not only the passage of time but his rise to superstardom, work extremely well.

Unfortunately, little else about the film does.

Joe Jackson at Thalia Hall (again)

Joe Jackson has been busy lately.  After not one, not two, but three tours supporting his very strong 2015 release, Fast Forward, he immediately took his band consisting of bassist Graham Maby, drummer Doug Yowell and guitarist Teddy Kumpel to a studio in Boise, Idaho (the location of last summer’s final show), and quickly recorded an eight-track album called Fool.  It too is strong, and at last night’s return to the fabulous Thalia Hall in Pilsen, Chicago, he and his band played five tracks from the album along with a selection of other songs spanning four decades to an enthusiastic sold-out audience.

To commemorate Jackson’s forty years in the industry and to mix things up a bit from his previous tours, the band highlighted tracks from four other albums from four different decades, though two of them were way too predictable: Look Sharp from the 70s, Night and Day from the 80s (those are the predictable ones), Laughter and Lust from the 90s and Rain from the 00s.  It’s these latter two along with the six newer tracks (one from Fast Forward) that made the evening interesting, along with a rendition of “Steppin’ Out” that mimicked the original recording to perfection, including a glockenspiel and Jackson’s Boss DR-55 drum machine whose “club beat” was used in the original.

All of the musicians were excellent and given various moments to shine, though Jackson took more solos than I remember from previous concerts, including one from his once-ubiquitous melodica.  But it was drummer Doug Yowell’s high energy performance who really sole the show.  Animated, forceful and dexterous, Yowell blew me away with the beginning of one of my favorites, “Another World,” when he managed to play the drum beat and accompanying cowbell and timbale beat simultaneously.  My drummer son and I turned to each other with mouths agape.

The biggest surprise of the evening was the final track from 1991’s Laughter and Lust, the moody tune of resignation to love, “Drowned,” along with the opening – and closer! – “Alchemy” from Fool.  That’s right, Jackson both opened and closed with the same song under dim, red lights.  I loved it, if only because it meant that we didn’t have to hear the band end with “Slow Song” again as they had repeatedly since 2000.  Adding “I’m the Man,” “Got the Time,” and Steely Dan’s “King of the World” were welcome crowd-pleasers near the evening’s end, and the new song, “Fool,” was among the most exciting songs of the night.  Jackson pointed out that it is sometimes the fool – or jester – who makes life sane (“If you lose your sense of humor, you’re fucked.”) and the song’s playfulness seemed contagious to the four musicians on stage.

All in all it was a great concert.  Jackson continues to use an iPad teleprompter for his lyrics, which is a little odd for songs that he’s been singing for forty years, but hey, if that’s what the guy has to do to keep touring, then I’m all in. I’ve seen Jackson perform eight times now, and this show ranks in the top three for sure. Keep ‘em coming, Joe!