Month: November 2007

  • Excerpt From A Failed Attempt At A Novel

    My family had always been a remarkably insulated and self-contained unit. Despite my parents’ divorces (they divorced when I was eight years old, remarried two years later, and divorced again just after I graduated from high school) there really hadn’t been much in the way of drama or anything you could call real tragedy in…

  • From Spain to Iceland to Italy in Minnesota

    FILM The Orphanage After falling more and more in love with Pan’s Labyrinth every day for the past year, I’m fairly certain I’d go see anything with Guillermo del Toro’s name behind it. Yet I do have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed when I finally realized that he didn’t actually direct the soon-to-be-released…

  • In Thrust I Trust (Again)

    Bonding. Its something that women tend to fret about with men, as in "go and do your male bonding thing." While I am sure men like me are essentially Pavlovian and conditioned to do what women say, it gets more complicated when I think about cars. I don’t need to bond with my buddies, but…

  • Another Reason Beowulf Blows

    By now, it’s fairly well established that Beowulf is an irredeemable, gawd-awful film. As if moviegoers needed another reason to hate the thing, I noticed something truly heinous about the animation: While the male characters were rendered in the spirit of realism, left with fairly expressive human faces, the female characters were idealized to the…

  • Meritage: All the World's a Stage

      Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But…

  • A Host of Curiosities

    BOOKS & AUTHORS, AND MUSIC TOOMuldoon Rocks the House Paul Muldoon is a curious character, even by artistic standards, and he’s been on a serious roll of late. To his growing list of accomplishments — including ten collections of smart, allusive, and often very funny poetry, as well as a Pulitzer Prize — he recently…