The Last Station: Better than Anna Karenina
February 10, 2010
The other night I went to see a movie all by myself. In a movie theater! As I walked by the Paris Theater in New York City on my way to work one day, I saw that The Last Station was playing there and decided, on a lark, to see it after work. I hadn’t read a review of it, didn’t even know if it had a happy ending or not. But the fact that Christopher Plummer (the Baron from The Sound of Music) and Helen Mirren were in it—and there was a picture of them, as old people, in bed with… more
Comments (4)Perfect Happiness and Other Questions
January 20, 2010
My local paper, the Morning Call, asked me to answer these questions, from a book called Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire, which Rodale published last year. It’s a great book, featuring cultural figures from Jane Goodall to Johnny Cash answering a series of personal questions made popular by the French writer Marcel Proust (their answers appeared in a series in Vanity Fair magazine). It’s lots of fun to answer the… more
Comments (7)Secret Stress-Relieving Remedy! Sunday Movies
January 8, 2010
I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time relaxing. With all the work and chores that need to be done, it feels impossible to slow down. And yet, I know I need to. Sometimes I just want to be taken away to another world, another time and place. I used to LOVE, love, love going to the movies—to see the kind of movies I like—foreign, obscure, slow, and intense. But with kids taking up my whole life, and living in a place where movies like that come around once in a blue moon—well… more
Comments (14)Top Ten Reasons Why Art is Essential to the Human Spirit
June 12, 2009
I am staying in this really cool hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, called 21C. It’s a museum dedicated to 21st century art, so as you can imagine, there is art everywhere. As I ate dinner by myself in the absolutely yummiful hotel restaurant called Proof, gazing at amazing and bizarre horse photographs (with a wonderful video loop of a kid eating soup projected onto a painted table and chairs on the wall), I was reminded that art is so inspiring and important. It IS essential to the human… more
Comments (12)What the Hex?!
March 11, 2009
You may be wondering about my beautiful logo at the top of the page. It’s a hex sign.
What’s a hex sign? It’s a traditional form of decorative art of the Pennsylvania Dutch (who aren’t Dutch at all, but German immigrants) and it’s got a mysterious past. In its most innocent form, a hex sign is “just something nice” to decorate barns, homes, furniture, or anything, really. Some people claim that the hexes have mystical properties (and in fact, one translation of the Pennsylvania… more
Leave a CommentADVERTISEMENT
