Bite Me, Tony

This is not for you. (1) (1) The only words on the dedication page of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.  Believe you me, he means it. At 662 pages, House of Leaves is Danielewski's magnum opus , a work deified by a large and devoted cult following, and swallowed hook, line and sinker by numerous literary critics from such august  institutions as The New York Times (go figure), The San Francisco Chronicle , The Wall Street Journal , Newsweek and The Guardian . My question is this: what is wrong with these people ?   What? You think I'm being unfair? Okay, maybe just a bit. Not everyone who holds House of Leaves  in high esteem is a pretentious douche attempting to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by claiming that they  get it . I'm pretty sure I got it , and by it , in this case, I mean Danielewski's number. With regards to the book as a whole, it is all about the footnotes. I'm not fooling myself into believing my completion of ...

Cult Movies (#1) Camp movies, so-bad-they're-good movies, box office bombs, sexploitation cinema, out-of-the-mainstream movies, movies that are outright indescribable. They all fall under the umbrella of a film that appeals to the sensibilities of a specific set of filmgoers. I'm talking about  cult movies . As a rule, cult movies are "gems" often rediscovered years after their original release, usually via word of mouth, midnight showings, revival houses, even YouTube and cable TV. Some eventually become hits, others bona-fide classics. If you believe wikipedia there are hundreds, if not thousands, of cult movies in existence. Don't believe wikipedia . I'm not certain exactly what their criteria is for defining a cult movie, but the large majority of films wikipedia has listed are most definitely NOT cult movies. Just so you know. Okay, so having given you some idea of what cult movies are, or may be, I've decided to briefly examine a few of these film...

So we went to Paris last month and I'm just now writing about it because it has taken me this long to get over the jet lag and the cold I apparently caught while we were there (sorry if I sound like a certain president). It wasn't my first time in the City of Light but it was certainly the rainiest and most crowded. I guess everyone had the same idea we did and decided to travel to Paris before the Olympics start later this month. I don't even want to think about how jam-packed the city will be then.  As it was, our average time spent waiting in line to get in anywhere -- the Louvre , Versailles , Musee d'Orsay , for example--was 2 hours. And, during much of that time, it was raining. Not the brief, summer afternoon downpours we regularly get here in the tropics, but a light, relentless veil of fine spray chilled by harsh winds and unseasonable temperatures. We'd packed for springtime in Paris, not Reykjavik, so were ill-equipped to schlep around town in such intemp...