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I think I am supposed to like Bright Star. I am interested in John Keats, I loved Campion’s The Piano and I have a high tolerance for slow period pieces about love. But this film left me cold. Even the credits annoyed me. Keats deserves better. [Read more →]
There is still a month or so left to make a weekend trek to Maine and have Wild Lobster at its peak. If you don’t have time to make the trip, The Lobster Place (in NYC’s Chelsea Market or by mail order) sells Wild Maine Lobster year round. My recipe for spicy Lobster Fra Diavolo with Spaghetti is an easy way to enjoy the end of the lobster season in your own home.
I love a good adventure novel! Exploring the Arctic, searching for the source of the Nile, exploring the Amazon basin, all from the comfort of your local library. Most of us will never in our lives go anywhere that is truly unexplored, but I have great respect for the men (and occasionally women) who were unafraid of the unknown. In The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, author David Grann presents not only a great tale of adventure but also a great mystery: what happened to Colonel Percy Fawcett? [Read more →]
I keep running into George Santayana. Last week, for example, I was rummaging in the basement and came upon a galley of Irving Singer’s book George Santayana: Literary Philosopher. I’ve only had time to read about half of it, but it’s a wonderful book. If Singer, a professor of philosophy at MIT, is as good in class as he is on paper, he must be one hell of a teacher.
I find Santayana — an atheist with a passionate attachment to Catholicism — a fascinating figure, principally because I share two of his fundamental notions. [Read more →]
As readers may recall, a month or so back I named Georgia’s Mikheil Saakashvili as the craziest world leader of them all. Well because you certainly won’t have heard this if you watch the evening news, and probably not even if you read the newspapers, I just thought I’d deliver an update on the continuing deterioration of his already fragile mental state. [Read more →]
Chelsea Lately (Weeknights, 11PM, E!) — I don’t know how she did it, but my “I’d-disregard-all-of-my-other-friends-forever-to-actually-be-her-friend” friend Jennifer Aniston appeared on my other “I’d-disregard-my-friend-Jackie-forever-to-actually-be-her-friend” friend Chelsea Handler’s late night show, Chelsea Lately. This meeting of female greatness was the best thing to happen to me since the remote control was invented… and was quite a feat for Chelsea. [Read more →]
Delonte West, a guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers, was pulled over for speeding on his motorcycle in Maryland this week. The traffic stop became an arrest when police discovered that West had not one, not two, but three guns on him at the time. Apparently, he had a handgun in his pocket, another in his pant leg, and a shotgun in a guitar case strapped to his back. Seriously. I am not reading you the plot synopsis from Mad Max. [Read more →]
10. “Okay, I get the top bunk and the bottom bunk!”
9. “What’s it worth to you for me to keep my clothes on?”
8. “You got any underwear you don’t need?”
7. “Seriously, My Silent But Deadlies have been known to peel paint off the walls.”
6. “Which of the Jonas Bothers do you think is the cutest?”
5. “I bet I’m bigger than you are!”
4. “What do you mean you can still see me? I’m wearing my cloak of invisibility!”
3. “I have a surprise for you. It’s in my trouser pocket.”
2. “I have a tendency to walk in my sleep and do this ‘stabby’ thing.”
1. “Care to tuck me in?”
Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.
It was hot and it was crowded: Venice in August was just that far from perfection.
There was surely no more entertaining story in the news this week than BigGovernment.com’s takedown of ACORN. From start to finish it was a masterclass in absurdity, as the prep school types who did the guerilla filming led a series of bumbling ACORN employees to come up with ever more inventive ways of helping them organize a child prostitution ring. I single out ACORN ‘chief organiser’ Bertha Lewis for special praise however [Read more →]
I started out life as a Latin teacher, and apart from being able to spend time poring over smut no one else could understand and being called a scholar and not a pervert –- it was long ago and in those days the former term was considered preferable -– the appeal was that the subject domain didn’t change very much. You could delve deep and really understand what you were doing.
Oh, Saint Heraclitus, where did I go wrong? I fell into the blogosphere, and I will never be the same again. [Read more →]
This is the second time I’ve read about a stranger hitting someone else’s kid in less than two weeks. What is going on? Maybe too many people are reading my blogs and taking them too seriously. I’m only kidding (sort of) when I say I’ll slap your kids around if you wont parent them or if they hurt my kid. Apparently Gloria Ballard thought it was fine to spank another woman’s son after the two-year-old baby boy said something that annoyed her.
Is this bitch for real? Lady, you’re lucky this went down in Cincinnati, because if that were my kid, your ass would be in the hospital, not jail. [Read more →]
My late father enjoyed the repeated telling of old, corny jokes to his children. I, in turn, often told the same old jokes to my children.
One of the old jokes was about an armed robber who confronted a man in an alley and said “Stick ’em down.”
“Don’t you mean stick ’em up?” the would-be-victim asked the robber.
“Don’t confuse me,” the robber said. “This is my first job.”
So last night I was watching Anderson Cooper when he announced some breaking news. An old man named Jimmy Carter had implied on NBC that some Republican who called President Obama a liar was a racist. Apparently Carter knew this because he lived in the South, and there was a lot of racism in the South, even today. And, presumably, as this Republican is from the South, then there was probably a hint of racism in what he said. But that’s not all — according to Carter there is also a lot of racism in the criticism of Obama we hear in general. Because Obama’s black and Carter comes from the South, and there’s a lot of racism in the South — or something like that.
Chess is a game that requires the ability to think dozens of moves in advance. It also requires you to be conscious. Vladislav Tkachiev learned this the hard way, after the #58 player in the world was defeated during a match in which he repeatedly dozed off. (In Vladislav’s defense, he was drunk at the time.) [Read more →]
“Nature’s first green is gold.” By the time I’d finished reading and seeing the movie “The Outsiders” that poem was all I could remember. Robert Frost became an idol to me of sorts and after just one viewing of the film version of “The Outsiders,” I could recite all 8 lines of that poem by heart. By the time I had seen the movie, all of its stars were already known to me via other films. When “The Outsiders” film was released I was only 7, but in the late 80’s I had seen much more of Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio and of course Patrick Swayze in other films. [Read more →]
June 2, 2009
I dream Gail and I are on our last night in Vegas but, unfortunately, we have to spend it at an art conference. I fulfill my obligation by commenting on the giant bird suit of a friend of mine, but Gail feels we have to spend the rest of the night seeing and being seen. We are in a giant art cafeteria and there is no place to sit down. I am depressed that we have to leave and this is how we spend our last night. [Read more →]
Quentin Tarantino said, “Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews.” Inglourious Basterds is part spaghetti western, part war film and part Jewish revenge fantasy. While it lacks the power and fun of earlier Tarantino efforts like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Inglourious Basterds is an entertaining film that raises intriguing issues. [Read more →]
For those who may not know, I’ve been deciphering mythological messages in TV shows, music, and movies long before Lost, and will hopefully continue to do so long after its finale next May. It’s something that most people don’t think about, but I believe that these stories and themes are reflections of our collective unconsciousness, and that storytellers are able to tap into them. In other words, I feel that today’s writers, musicians, poets, and artists are like modern-day shaman who channel messages that all of us are ready to know consciously. [Read more →]
