François Pignon (the Moroccan-born Jewish actor Gad Elmaleh) has it pretty rough. He’s a good-natured but horse-faced valet who can’t convince the love of his life to marry him. Out moping one afternoon, he is caught on film while standing on a street corner, by chance next to a supermodel who’s out on a romantic … Read more
“When you wake up in the morning, don’t kvetch! Say ‘Yippee’!” So suggests the wisdom of this happy collective of Hasidic Jews in this delightful, if somewhat workmanlike, documentary from Paul Mazursky. Mazursky, once a presence in Hollywood (he created the outstanding Enemies: A Love Story before flushing his career down the toilet with some … Read more
I shall spend a lot of this summer reading Polybius. The rise and fall of empires is in the air, and Polybius is the most coherent historian of the rise of Rome—not least because he was a Greek and smart. When Polybius describes how the Roman general Titus Flaminius accomplished his mission in the Second … Read more
There are two things I’ve learned from reading and talking about the decline of modern newspapers: The average consumer doesn’t give a damn, and a key survival strategy of those who remain in mainstream newspapers is denying the self-inflicted wounds of compromised news judgment. To the first, there isn’t much I or any other ex-newspaper … Read more
It’s dusk, and there’s an unmistakable whiff of charcoal in the air. It’s the sign of the outdoor cooking season, and is as eagerly awaited as the return of the red-winged blackbirds to the tree by my driveway. I look at my own shining, gray monster on the deck and I start thinking of the … Read more
Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults … Read more
About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of … Read more
Young, a poet and contributor to the catalog for the ongoing Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibition, is appearing as part of the Rain Taxi/Walker Art Center Free Verse series. You hear too much nonsense about poets whose work is steeped in jazz or the blues, but Young’s work is … Read more
Twin Cities native Tommy Nehls was talking on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, where he has been living since 1986. Nehls sounded alternately incredulous and bemused that an obscure record he made with a bunch of high school pals had become a hot (and pricey) commodity among a small but international community of vinyl fetishists … Read more
Using samples from obscure movies, as well as their own singing, mixing, and instrumentation, Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto construct melodic sound collages and electronic songs so catchy as to be genre defying. On the Massachusetts duo’s 2003 release, The Lemon of Pink, for example, the title track alone contains seamless movements between folk … Read more