Speaking of people on my blogroll: Pop culture critic, blogger, and transgendered activist extroardinaire Roz Kaveney of Silence Exile and Crumpets was just in town, promoting her new book Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films — which I’m hoping to crack the covers of eventually.
Roz is brilliant at analyzing the various mechanics and […]

[Read more →]

I’ve been meaning to mention for ages now that I have a poem in the latest issue of the Chicago poetry journal After Hours … and I’ll be reading it in public this Friday night.
I’ve always been really bad about actually submitting my poems for publication — I always think, here I am fussing around […]

[Read more →]

Well, the Andy White show I posted about last Sunday was lovely. It was a shockingly intimate setting, a cozy and beautifully decorated back room at the Celtic Knot where Andy played for a group of about 20 of us, and he was just as charming and entertaining as any Andy fan would expect.
He […]

[Read more →]

And now for something a little on the lighter side — and a nice follow-up to Valentine’s Day.
ABC’s “All of My Heart” + Brideshead Revisited = high school drama club heaven, circa 1982. Possibly the best combination since peanut butter and chocolate … the British horror of peanut butter notwithstanding.
(Note: This may not be […]

[Read more →]

Markos from Daily Kos has a new gig writing opinion pieces for Newsweek, and he’s been in rare form with his first couple of efforts. From this week’s column: “In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.’ While the quip has provided […]

[Read more →]

The most entertaining Norman Mailer story I’ve read since the wake began:
“The stories of his macho posturing are legion, from the time he dismissed America’s leading women writers as ‘fey, old hat, quaintsy and dykily psychotic’, to the day he encountered a passing punk while walking his poodles in Brooklyn. According to Peter Manso’s biography […]

[Read more →]

It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these little Chicago roundups, but there are so many head-splittingly good things going on this week that it seems like a dandy time to reinstate the tradition.
• First up, this weekend is the opening of the brand-new Theater Oobleck show Spukt, written by the mercurial Dave Buchen. […]

[Read more →]

I haven’t weighed in on the whole gay Dumbledore thing, partly because everyone is already talking about it, and I usually view OcPot as a place to post about things that deserve more attention than they seem to be getting.
But Minnesota Malcolm brought it up in the comments to this post last night, and […]

[Read more →]

Via Roz, which Dyke to Watch Out for am I?

Which Dyke to Watch Out For Are You?created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Mo
You are Mo, a guilt-ridden, kindhearted liberal who doesn’t relax enough. You are ordered to buy a pint of non-organic, dairy ice cream and watch Comedy Central for a week. PBS will still […]

[Read more →]

The official/final trailer for The Golden Compass is out, and the more I see of this film the better it looks. I am somewhere between guardedly optimistic and completely geeked out.

 
Also, here’s a nice little featurette called “Defining Daemons,” which looks at the animal companion-spirits that accompany the characters on their journeys.

 
Personally, I […]

[Read more →]

So yeah, I haven’t really tended to be one of those fancy-schmancy bloggers who manage to blog about things on the same actual day they happen. My schedule tends to keep me careening along in panic for several days at a go, and then I manage to steal a few hours to spit out a […]

[Read more →]

Eric Alterman has an outstanding column in The Nation on how the media’s mean girls (of all genders) develop the narratives they use to bring down the presidential candidates they take a dislike to. With examples of what they did to Gore in 2000, and what they’re doing to Obama and Edwards right now.
Two of […]

[Read more →]

I just updated the News page over at The Head of Orpheus, the Russell Hoban Web site I maintain, so I figured I might as well cross-post the info here as well (with a few slight formatting tweaks).
Autumn 2007 is shaping up to be a great season for Hoban fans, with Russ’s next novel My […]

[Read more →]

I just finished reading Armistead Maupin’s newest book, Michael Tolliver Lives — well, inhaling it really, because reading Michael Tolliver Lives is less like reading a novel than it is like opening a richly detailed letter from an old friend you inexplicably lost touch with about 15 years ago, and suddenly here he is giving […]

[Read more →]