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Please check out my new blog, The Red Margins:
www.theredmargins.com

I'll keep using Green Moon Pax for photos and activities with family and friends, while The Red Margins will focus on art and literature. Thank you for reading!
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Alexander Payne is a director that I love. LOVE. But The Descendants is to Payne what Elizabethtown was to Cameron Crowe---an inexplicable mess from an otherwise gifted director. The critics are falling over each other talking this movie up, but my companions called it "maudlin" and "phony" and I agree.

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Our friend Kim mailed us this photo recently. This is circa 1987, about a year after we met. We were at Kim's house for a weekend salon, where we did everything from literary criticism to trash pickup. I always feel like Jay hasn't changed much over the years, and then I see a picture like this and I can't believe it was us.

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Here is the back cover copy for an old edition of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I find it both comic and endearing in its earnestness. It's like an SNL skit of a local cable show on literary appreciation:

"This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, some with sex or drink, and some--like Mick--with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty."
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Which my cousin called "the most beautiful, brilliant, terrifyingly disturbing movie of my lifetime." 

I'm not the biggest fan of Lars von Trier, but I'm dying to see this one.
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After a lackluster year, the good movie prospects are starting to roll in:

--The Descendants:  every new Alexander Payne movie is a reason for celebration.

--Shame:  a movie about sex starring Michael Fassbender, who played Rochester in the last Jane Eyre movie.

--A Dangerous Method:   a movie about sex starring Michael Fassbender AND Viggo Mortensen.

--Corialanus:  adaptation of the Shakespeare play, and Ralph Fiennes's directorial debut.

--My Week with Marilyn:  Supposed to be good.

--The Artist:  a silent movie about silent movies.

--Young Adult:  Charlize Theron as a high school queen whose gone downhill.

--We Need to Talk about Kevin:  based on a fantastic novel, with the always fantastic Tilda Swinton starring.

--Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:  with Colin Firth.

--Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows:  a sequel to my favorite movie of two years ago.

--Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol: I'm ready for a good action movie.

--A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas!

--THE GIRLWITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO!!!

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This puzzle was in a book of sudoku that I recently bought. It was intimidating at first, but I love it. Check it out here, sudoku fans.
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When you have a disaster that's really not too bad, it's a "Hindenpoodle."
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Feeling Tawdry?

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If so, I've got a new romance recommendation for you:  Sleeping Beauty, by Judith Ivory. I'd noticed her books before, but the covers looked cheesy and turned me off. But this book was one of the best romance novels I've read, right up there with Jo Goodman, Lisa Kleypas, and Laura Kinsale. And, in a nice change, the heroine is a little older and much more experienced than the guy. Although I don't mind the ingenue template, it's impressive to see the author create passion out of the characters' emotional connection rather than from the girl's inexperience.
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