Bite Me, Tony

It only took 4 years but I finally got around to watching Bong Joon-ho's bleakly funny, award-winning classic,  Parasite . Not too shabby considering the length of time it took for me to discover his 2006 giant monster movie, The Host , which is--unsurprisingly--often funny and a little bleak. The two movies also share the same lead actor, Song Kang-ho, who plays a down-at-heels dad in both films. In Parasite , his entire family is unemployed with little hope of remedying their situation anytime soon. The Kims live in squalor, earning spare change by assembling pizza boxes for a local pizza delivery company. Their semi-underground apartment is cramped, smelly and apparently infested with "stink bugs". The bathroom toilet is situated on a shelf next to a window, and only a couple of feet from the ceiling; actually using the toilet would seem to require some nimble bit of contortionism. Things aren't look rosy for the Kim Family. And then one day the son runs into an o...

James Purdy was a gay American author whose name I've occasionally seen mentioned in various magazine articles about gay American authors without ever familiarizing myself with any of his work. For some reason I always thought he was the author of  Deliverance ,  which was actually penned by James Dickey, who was decidedly  not  gay.  Purdy, in addition to being a novelist, also wrote short stories and plays, although none of his work gained widespread acceptance during his lifetime. A member of Gertrude Abercrombie 's underground salon  during the 1930's, Purdy was highly influenced by the " New Negro Renaissance ", then flourishing with the talents of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughn and Dizzie Gillespie. While Purdy's work was championed by a number of literary notables (as well as the wealthy and influential Abercrombie, self-styled  Queen of the Bohemian Artists ), many critics found his tales of societal misfits to be outside the bounds ...