I am sick to death of reading about food. Over the past decade, the preciosity of the new approach to cuisine has contaminated almost everything. Don’t get me wrong. We certainly could use a rethink of the way we produce and consume what we eat. But does it have to come with so much Church Lady […]
The President of Chile is running about an hour late. Not surprising, perhaps, considering the dedication ceremony he’s attending is being held 25 miles from the small tourist town of San Pedro de Atacama, up a long and desolate road, in a support facility nestled at 9,000′ in the high desert of the Chilean Andes. […]
Early February. Three and a half weeks before the opening of Live Arts’ new main stage production, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), and a major scenic element for the climax of the play was not coming together well at all. The design called for the climactic sequence to be played in front […]
There’s a moment in Not Fade Away, the new film by “The Sopranos” creator David Chase that’s screening as the opening night feature at the Virginia Film Festival, that will simultaneously cause a chill to walk up your spine and a smirk to slide across your face. That reaction is well-known to fans of “The […]
The phrase “calm like a duck” comes to mind. It is late September, 11 days before the announcement of the lineup for this year’s 25th Anniversary Virginia Film Festival, and festival director Jody Kielbasa and his staff are scrambling to pin down films and featured guests. Kielbasa is a pretty high-octane guy. Former Virginia Governor […]
At some point quite early in your long life it dawned on you that you had already written the words the world is going to want to see on your tombstone. That’s not a particularly easy thing to live with. You wrote them in the song “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” about a rogues gallery of […]
Sissy Spacek recalls her Texas childhood and staying grounded by staying away from Hollywood in her new memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life. (Photo by Lynne Brubaker) If there’s a Dorian Gray trade-off that comes with being Sissy Spacek, it must go something like this. Even in recent films like Get Low, where she plays her […]