February 2012
2 posts
The World Is A Bit Like That
A highlight of Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes is a short called “Cousins”, in which Cate Blanchett plays herself, as well as a fictional non-famous cousin named Shelly, whom she meets over some coffee in the lounge of a hotel. Blanchett is all smiles and Merchant-Ivory demeanor. By contrast, Shelly would not be out of place at a Jet show in her native Sydney. ...
November 2011
2 posts
Gram Parsons
This past November 5 would have been Gram Parsons’ 65th birthday. Ms. Anne Cunningham and I celebrated by venturing from our home in Saugerties across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge to Club Helsinki in Hudson, NY to see a Gram Parsons tribute show. A southerner now residing in the nearby Berkshires named Johnny Irion got the call as Gram, and Otto Hauser was on drums. A fine show as far as...
September 2011
1 post
July 2011
4 posts
Midnight In Paris
The upcoming month of September, 2011 marks the ten year anniversary of a tragic event that forever upended life in America, leaving our reality forever and irrevocably altered. I’m speaking, of course, of the now infamous fracas between Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey over her selection of his novel The Corrections for the Oprah Book Club. A cursory summary of the events: On...
The Hangover II
In Todd Phillips’ latest installment of The Hangover series, we have another engagement story, but as we know from the first movie, it’s an engagement that will end in marriage despite having every conceivable reason for being broken off. Unlike the slightly more sensitive males of the “Bromance” genre, a salient characteristic of protagonists in mainstream...