Drove up to my house last Friday afternoon, found a guy in a car with Virginia plates in my driveway. This isn’t exactly a vision we’ve never experienced before. We’re the first driveway off the first street off an exit of a reasonably busy road that forbods people from making a left hand turn and …
On Sunday Ginny and I went to the Burns Center for a big screen viewing of what has been one of her longtime favorites, Gone With the Wind. I had seen the film the view times, and it was never one of my favorites. But the critic and historian Molly Haskell (pictured at right, with …
Many years ago, Walter Kirn worked in the cubicle next to me at Spy, and he was a most entertaining neighbor (in fact, Walter was succeeded by Jim Collins and then by Larry Doyle. On the other side, I had Joanne Gruber. Spy provided me with tremendous neighbors.) During Walter’s short tenure, we spent pretty …
Yesterday my sister Rose Marie drove up from Maryland for a post-Christmas visit. We had a very fine time, playing Guitar Hero, looking at some of dad’s old slides, continuing our holiday of overeating at Mughal Palace in Hawthorne, and going to the late show of Avatar in 3D at the City Center Imax in …
Being from Chicago, but by way of Honolulu and Jakarta and many other points west and east, President Obama may not be fully steeped in the doctrines of the Chicago School of Management, as expounded by the eminent Professor Al Capone. Employing phraseology composed by wordsmith David Mamet, Mr. Capone discoursed on the fundamentals of …
LIEBERMAN NEEDS AN UNTOUCHABLE LESSON IN TEAMWORK Read More »
A couple of weeks ago in London, at a fundraiser for a prisoners’ rights organization Reprieve, the British writer Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy (better known in the US as The Golden Compass) unveiled an alternative Bible passage that suggested a different fate for Jesus. According to a report in …
“Provided that a character is smart enough and manipulative enough,” reads a post on tvtropes.org, “they can get the people around them to do just about anything. Sometimes this can be accomplished by the power of charisma, but other times it needs to be perpetrated through an elaborate scheme. This scheme takes into account everything …
Greg Olear, the author of a novel called Totally Killer that is “part thriller, part satire, part period piece” that has to do with the collision of conspiracy and pop culture in New York in 1991, writes about his “unlikely influences” on a blog on the Powell’s Bookstore site. After citing Weird Al Yankovic, Mad …
This is high season for sexual censoriousness. Facts are in short supply, but conclusions are abundant. We do know that David Letterman has allegedly been the victim of a crime involving affairs with members of his staff. We don’t know whether Letterman was married at the time of any of these events (as if it …
AFTER POLANSKI AND LETTERMAN, CAN “AN EDUCATION” SURVIVE? Read More »
That fine old sixties exclamation “That was wild!” has never been particularly useful to me; I always found it vague. Well, never has it seemed more perfect than in describing Inglourious Basterds, the new film by Quentin Tarantino. It is wild! Funny, tense, violent, exciting–it’s really enormously entertaining. In some ways, it’s even more entertaining …