For reasons I should maybe sort out with my confessor, I spent a good chunk of the weekend listening to Billy Joel & Bruce Springsteen aka the soundtrack of my childhood home. Gotta say that I found myself more compelled–to my surprise and dismay–by the Swan of Lawn Guyland than by The Boss. Billy Joel has some well-wrought tunes, you guys. Some notes: # Sort of amazing how many different moods Billy Joel can infuse with kitsch. And how little... Read more
I’m just quoting one paragraph but there’s so much to consider and be thankful for here: This connection to health care is central to the Tents’ mission. The speaker continues, “The chief purpose of this organization is to care for the sick, comfort those who are distressed, bury the dead, and provide home for the aged.” These are universal concerns, as pressing today as they would have been during the organization’s founding in the 1860s. But when you realize the... Read more
Halloween season means spooky movie revivals! AFI showed a whole mess of films by the great Val Lewton, of which I revisited Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and Curse of the Cat People. And the Regal at Gallery Place showed the director’s cut of Little Shop of Horrors–the cut with the unhappy ending. I was in hog heaven. Some notes: Cat People: AFI showed Cat People as a standalone, and then did a double feature of The Seventh Victim and... Read more
So I commemorated the Fifth of November by attending a reading of Equivocation, Jesuit priest Bill Cain’s tragicall comedy about an alternate history in which James I commissioned Shakespeare (here “Shag,” whatever, we all know who this is) to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. It’s not a perfect play; it does get preachy, and you can see contemporary Catholic obsessions and tics peeking out from amid the Jacobean trappings. E.g. the idea that destruction of community bonds are... Read more
for Commonweal: “Your new neighbors”: Few phrases evoke such a mix of hope and dread. They’ll provide barbecues and babysitters, or else they’ll be the occasion for 911 calls and “Clean It or Lien It” signs. Karen Zacarias’s play Native Gardens, which recently ran at Washington DC’s Arena Stage, uses the new neighbors as a microcosm of social and demographic change. Zacarias wants to offer hope of reconciliation in an increasingly divided country. But reconciliation turns out to be much... Read more
A couple notes of Halloweenery for you. First, I did a piece for a Scottish Catholic paper on the Church in horror films, and I think it turned out pretty well. I even truffled up a religiously-tinted horror flick set in a Glasgow housing project: No matter how much deserved criticism or casual contempt other kinds of films offer Catholics, in horror our Faith is often the haven of last resort. When nothing else can explain your situation and nobody... Read more
for Modern Age: Alan Moore lives in the past, and who can blame him? The rent is cheaper there. Jerusalem is not the first novel from Moore, though the Hugo-winning author is better known for writing bleak and gory comic books: the antisuperhero masterpiece Watchmen, the dystopian V for Vendetta, the Jack the Ripper tale From Hell. Moore frequently delves into the weird. His Swamp Thing series explores that age-old tale of “sentient plant meets girl.” But in Jerusalem he... Read more
YES here I am with MORE about that noir procedural/Reagan tribute fanvid, that glorious neon wheel of cheese, Miami Vice. Season two ahoy! # The back end of this season slows down considerably, and you even get the occasional bad episode (“French Twist,” “Free Verse”). On the other hand, you get a lot of fun episodes and one genuinely magnificent one (“Bushido,” see below). For the season finale they give Tubbs a family, which obviously goes horribly for everyone involved,... Read more
via a married friend who says almost all of this resonates! …ADB: And so we go into marriage unable to convey that knowledge to a partner. We don’t understand them. They don’t understand us. We don’t understand what marriage is. Let’s stress that. Ira Glass So what would you say to all the people getting married this month? What would you tell them? Alain De Botton Be incredibly forgiving for the weird behavior that’s going to start coming out. You... Read more
is at Commonweal: Donna Deitch always intended Desert Hearts to be not only a lesbian classic, but one of the great romances. In the commentary to the director’s 1985 adaptation of Jane Rule’s novel Desert of the Heart, Deitch explained: “It was my express purpose to make a film fashioned on an old-fashioned love story…. This was meant to be a universal love story.” more–this was a pretty personal piece for me. Read more
Eve Tushnet
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