Monthly Archives: January 2013
The Unexpected Audience
There is a tradition in the writing workshop, that once a month, we head down to a dive bar and do live readings of our work for each other. Poetry, fiction, and non-fiction are all accepted. The screenwriters and playwrights are typically out of luck, but since each student needs to take at least one […]
Myths vs Math: Columbus and Eratosthenes
Novelist Washington Irving is probably responsible for misinforming more American schoolchildren than any other single individual. In 1828, he published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, a heavily romanticized account of Columbus’s life in which events that occurred only in Irving’s imagination were treated as historical fact. One such item was the story that […]
Zero Dark Thirty
I was curious about Zero Dark Thirty as soon as I heard about it. Who isn’t curious about the sequence of events that brought down Osama bin Laden? As soon as the the film came out, two things happened: it was immediately short-listed as a potential Oscar-winner and vilified as an apology for torture. The […]
Venus in Fur
Since Southern Rep was kind enough to host a “bloggers night” and comp me tickets for the preview performance of Venus in Fur (running through Jan 24th), I believe the quid pro quo is that I write about the show. Fair enough, here goes. The two-character script is handled convincingly by Todd d’Amour as Thomas, […]
Les Miz on the big screen
I’m a big fan of Les Misérables. I know it’s melodramatic, and ham-fistedly heart tugging at times, but it works for me. The first time I saw it, I was piecing things together after the wreckage of a long-term relationship, so Eponine was the character I identified with. A Little Fall of Rain still kills […]
The Heretic's Mirror 