We don't need Scrooge anymore, right?  

So why is he still around? Is it because of Hollywood's lack of creativity--their seeming need to remake anything? A Christmas Carol has begotten Jimmy Stewart's It's a Wonderful Life, Disney's Scrooge McDuck, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Bill Murray's Scrooged, etc., etc. Is the Scrooge meme just mindless proliferation in the name of tradition, in the same way your closet piles up with the sweaters from Kohl's Aunt Marion gives you every year?

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Dance: it's all just movement. This less-than-inspiring thought comes to me as I'm watching TU Dance's fall concert open with "Sense(ability) Sketch 1," a first step towards an eventual evening-length work on Ayurveda. Some people are wheeling around in anguished twists and shaken-free leaps, some are riding cheerfully by on bikes, the harsh modern classical music has words, and yes, apparently the whole is about Ayurveda. Yet confusing as this mélange is, my eyes track it, and something in the back of my brain registers pleasure. I feel like my cat watching his cat-sitter video: I don't know what those little shapes are up to, but I can't stop watching them!
            

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Megan Rye's brother, a sculptor and a Marine, came home from Iraq with thousands of images shot on his small, digital camera. Megan's paintings of those images are not quite photorealistic--instead taking on an almost comic book quality. I'm both a human being and a comic book geek, so the show resonated with me. The figure in my favorite painting in the series, Alien, seems to carry all sorts of cultural weight--Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe, the Tusken Raiders from Star Wars. Both terrifying and heroic. Or not, depending on what you bring to the piece yourself--that's the heavy thing with politics and art. In this way, the show is a departure for Ralph Burnet, the owner of Chambers and the Burnet Gallery. Burnet is known for collecting what can probably now be referred to as the masters of the apolitical, audacious Young British Artists movement. We also talk at the tail end of the video.

If Thomas Friedman is convinced the world is flat, he needs to take another look at how our movies are distributed. You'd think that with the rise of Netflix and with subtitled "independent films" playing in every other mega-multiplex, you could pretty much see any movie anywhere these days. In truth, most movies made outside the United States cannot be seen by American audiences.

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There's no way around it, Shadowlands, the play by William Nicholson about the brief, late-in-life love affair between writer C.S. Lewis and poet Joy Gresham, is a sad, sad story.  

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The theatrical phenomenon Wicked has taken up residence at the Orpheum for the next five weeks, where it will play to sellout crowds and receive a stamp of ecstatic approval from its adoring fans, many of whom are seeing it for the second, third, or fourth time. People love this show the way they love the Beatles, pizza, puppies, and Levi's: unabashedly, unapologetically, and universally. And I think I know why.

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Okay, you might be asking: do you really expect me to read your review of a DJ on the eve of the most important election of all times? Really, dude?

Look, if you're like me, you've turned over the tea leaves obsessively enough--Karl Rove's electoral prediction, Al Giordano's prediction, fivethirtyeight.com's math, realclearpolitics.com's map, etc., etc--that you probably have enough tea leaf sludge to make one of those weird green tea smoothies at this point.

But you haven't read my Girl Talk review yet.

And let me tell you this: based on what I saw last night, the kids aren't alright.

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