The most remarkable section of the book, which maybe shouldn't be a surprise, concerns van Gelder, a producer and engineer so significant in the 1960s that there is now a reissue series in his name. Van Gelder talks about the construction of his studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, about decorating it based on the temperament of who he'd be recording, and even about scheduling photo shoots separate from the recording session so he could switch equipment around rather than reveal what brand of microphone he had used. It's a story of a time and place, and of the lengths to which people went when jazz topped the charts.

There's something to be said for overcoming a color scheme. Red-and-green means Christmas, yellow-and-black looks like a bumblebee, and orange-and-black more often than not means Halloween. But in the 1960s -- and still today for a cadre of jazz faithful -- the combination of orange and black means something very different: Impulse! records and, by association, the great John Coltrane. The orange and black spines of the label's releases stood out on the record shelves and became such an enigma that fans began wearing the colors like avant garde mascots.

This is the way to love ... This is the way to love ...

Melanie is looking for a sign. She sees a woman in a huge white dress with mirrors all over it and a mirror on her forehead. She sees a woman wrapped from head to toe in gauze and wearing a helmet. She sees a man throwing boomerang aluminum dishes and tying his sculpture to fences. Everywhere she goes, Melanie is looking for a sign.

If you ever for a minute think addiction is not a disease, read this book right now. If you ever for a minute think( and don't we writers do this more now than again) that writing is a waste of time, read this book right now. If you ever think your life is meaningless, read this book.

What a gift it seems at first to be traveling to DIA Beacon, to be flying along in the air conditioning under the trees, to be so free, so expansive. No longer in the shadows, seeing just the rectangle of sky, but now the entirety, the all around of light and, oh, wow, the shock, of mountains on mountains. Next, the zip over the bridge, the up and down of cute little hills with mansions nestled in dappled light. Look, a riding academy! Isn't everything just so lovely, so perfect?

When England was "christianized" they rejected the Anglo-Saxon epic poetry that had been all the rage because it was "heroic" and heroic is antithetical to the Christian theology. How, then, did America, founded by the errant Protestant Christians, become a land of Pick-Yourself-Up-By-The-Bootstraps individualism and heroism?

NEGAR-Support of Women of Afghanistan was invited to attend the transfer of power ceremonies in Kabul on December 22, 2001. Shoukria Haidar, the President of Negar and Nasrine Gross, Negar representative in Washington (and President of Kabultec) made it there just in time: Shoukria one day before and Nasrine as the ceremonies were getting underway!

Below is a report from Nasrine who returned to the United States after staying in Kabul for forty days:

Since the early 60s, Richter has been taking found art to new heights of evasiveness and contradiction. Richter's works from tourist snapshots, family photo albums, newspaper clippings, and a daunting array of other images, all sourced from his seminal scrapbook "Atlas," to create both the first and last photo-realist paintings. Although Richter's primary concern in these works seems to be exploring his relationship with reality through a camera, slide-projector, and canvas, he might take it the wrong way if you called him a realist, in fact, he might take it the wrong way if you called him anything but Mr. Richter.

In an age in which liberal churches and synagogues see membership declining and fundamentalist ones grow as they fan hostility to science, it is refreshing to find an artist who uses historical genetics as the basis for a new concept of holiness. Chris Twomey combines her skills as painter and photographer to reinvent and democratize the Madonna ideal by combining joyous photographs of very particular mothers with their naked babies on one hand with graphic evocations of cell structure and mapped intercontinental migrations of mitochondrial DNA on the other.

The first part of the film, though only nearly half as long as the second part, was pure Solodnz -- incorporating his subversive humor with captivating characters. The acting was flawless, the structure of the story was strong, and the characters were well-developed and clearly motivated. The last line of this part of the film, the professor tells Vi the only redeeming quality of her story was that it had a beginning, middle and an end. Sadly, the second part goes to show this can not be said of Soldonz's film.

In the end it was Aileen that really made the decision to die, not the courts. She said, "Let God be my judge." She didn't fear death. Aileen Wuornos lend a lonely life, clinging to the only intimacy she ever saw, and when that was taken from her too, she took her sentence, and cursed out the judge that gave it to her.

The cinematic seventh seal has been broken with Bill Murray’s deconstructionist Karaoke version of Roxy Music’s "More Than This" in Sophia Coppola’s second movie, Lost in Translation. Murray plays the role of Bob Harris, a fictitious character mimicking his own real-life stardom, struggling with the both success and ultimate meaninglessness of his grandiose life. While filming a multi-million dollar whiskey commercial in Japan, Bob meets a young American woman named Charlotte also staying in his same swanky Tokyo Hotel. Charlotte, a young twenties-something Yale graduate is struggling to find her identity within in her new marriage to a glitzy photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who remains out of focus when it comes to their seeming incompatibility. Bob, a married man of 25 years, is always trying to come to grips with his struggling relationship coupled with a career crisis.

Can masturbation cause blindness? Does being a homosexual mean you are insane? Is it normal for your boyfriend to touch your anus? Does cunnilingus cause birth defects? These are the questions the students struggle with as they line up at the door of Professor Alfred Kinsey's office. What is perhaps most shocking about the film, Kinsey is not the discoveries he makes (most woman orgasm by stimulating the clitoris not the vagina) but the level of ignorance about sex in the 50s. Viewing the 50s from the present, it never occurs to us that the Cleavers might have assumed, as did the recently married woman interviewed in Kinsey, that babies come from a woman's navel, as newly weds.

So I'm sitting in the theatre, already content on giving a couple more bucks, and wasting a couple more hours, out of pure loyalty to the guy, just because of record. I figured, why not, he might have something up his sleeve. I didn't expect that much from him, but Kill Bill Volume 2, I gotta say is fucking awesome. There are some drawn out monologues like the one Bill (David Carradine) goes on and on about some comic book for two minutes that made me bored to tears. Monologues about comic books, are no longer clever subjects about a subculture, but sound more like generic banter from Clerks. Then there's the part where Uma is getting trained by her Kung Fu expert, that though are entertaining often drag and should have been shortened. But even with all this, the movie was great. Not because there were some good parts to outweigh the bad. It's just that the good parts weren't just good, they were fucking amazing. I mean, amazing like they should be shown in every film school to every film student to say, hey, this is fucking cinema.

I'll never know what it feels like to live

with the dead...

One of the biggest problems in American Cinema is the lack of minority representation, especially of Asians and Latinos. These groups have been systematically shunted to the sidelines of contemporary American cinema. The African American community has enjoyed more exposure than other minority groups. Black males on television are represented three times more than they are in the general population. Of course, the roles they are given can be -- and often are -- criticized as stereotypical. Asians are hardly seen in movies at all, not even in stereotypical roles. And, for the most part, when you see a Latino in a film, you only need to wait a couple of seconds before a crime goes down.

Bob Dylan needs me to be writing about his book like he needs an armadillo in his cornfield: he doesn't, and would hardly notice it only by chance, by looking at one specific spot at a chance time, anyway. Probably wouldn't even know about it. But that's what so much of life comes down to anyway, if you're going to see it, it's because you're really just really looking at what you can see when you can see it, if you've got a smart eye for looking anyway, and so a friend asked me to write about this book that Bob Dylan wrote about himself, and the book, Chronicles, Volume One, is itself what people call a non-linear narrative relating primarily the circumstances of three transitional periods in the artist's vocation. Since Bob Dylan is such an honest writer and I am too, I said that I would write about his book, even if my words about his words don't matter to anyone.

Not God describes itself as "a play in verse," and accomplishes this by alternating short poem-monologues between two dramatis personae called "Patient" and "Doctor." Under scrutiny, however, it is neither play nor verse. As a play, it sacrifices any and all chances at dialogue by stringing together a disconnected series of anecodes. It lacks the crescendos and dénouement one expects of drama. As a collection of poems, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, it fails to do what could not be done better with good prose. I can imagine Not God as a funny and perhaps even lucid memoir, but as a book of poems? Not so much.