Monthly Archives: August 2005
Karl Rove: The Man Who Followed Ripley
On Thanksgiving in 1973, [George H.W.] Bush, through an aide, asked Rove to take the family car keys to Union Station and give them to his son, who was arriving from his first semester at Harvard Business School. Rove recalls the scene in a kind of gauzy cinematic slow-mo: “He was wearing jeans, and a [...]
The Hunger
Caleb Crain’s review of William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life in The New Republic is juicy: wasting women, wickedness, and flesh. Lots of it. (At least they didn’t have trans fats in the 19th century.) Of one of Howells’s characters Crain writes: Bartley Hubbard was fat the way Tony Soprano is fat. He thrived where [...]
The Other Sister
The Young Girls of Rochefort is a revelation—a staggering, eye-popping delight. Not only as a Jacques Demy/Michel Legrand candied confection with dance numbers but also as a showcase for the throaty, arresting French bombshell that was Françoise Dorléac. In the current issue of Film Comment, Melissa Anderson traces the short-lived but incandescent career of Dorléac, [...]
Plaintive and Penetrating
Welcome to Kill Fee. Not to be confused with the killdee or killdeer, which is described in Merriam-Webster as “a plover found throughout temperate No. America and in southern areas in migration to So. America, being about 10 inches long, grayish brown above, ferruginous in the rump, and white below and with two black bands [...]
Notes from a Native Mother