Lance Mannion
Sun Apr 24 04:30:55 EDT 2011
Home: http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/
Feed: http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/index.rdf

Strange framing of a story about bowling - Photo by John Haner, the New York Times. Assuming the people who would know aren’t lying, dreaming, engaging in wishful thinking, or kidding themselves, this is a story about a bowling alley that is not closing. Not right now, at any rate. Someday it will. For a while, though, it’s bowling as usual at Maple Lanes in Brooklyn. An application to rezone the property was first submitted three years ago. Preliminary plans were last updated in August for the 72,000-square-foot site, which is set to hold brick apartment complexes and a synagogue. According to the Department of City Planning, the...

Something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone for Mannion Family Movie Night tonight! - Nothing for kings, nothing for crowns! Bring on the lovers, liars, and clowns!

The Puritan on Facebook or Help me self-aggrandize by following me on Twitter - Read this this morning in Alessandra Stanley’s review in the New York Times of Cinema Verite, an HBO movie about the making of An American Family, the 1973 PBS documentary that changed television forever or, you know, not. Documentary storytelling was the Trojan horse in the age of hyper-self-consciousness, in which privacy is as antiquated as gaslight and people are the curators of their own lives on Facebook, Twitter and all those other forms of aggrandizing self-expression. Ok, I don’t know about you, but I use Twitter and Facebook for shameless self-promotion. I’m trying to lure people into reading my...

Show me when the killing’s done - Inspiration Point on Anacapa Island, part of the Channel Islands National Park, the setting for major events in When the Killing’s Done, a new novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle or as our old pal Nance, a Boyle fan, likes to call him, T. Unpronounceable Boyle. This review is T.C. Boyle’s own fault. Every word of it, his doing. I don’t mean that he’s responsible in the sense that what I’m about to write is a direct response to what he’s written in his newest novel, When the Killing's Done. I’m not that kind of reviewer. You know. Focused. I don’t...

Yippee-ay-ki-yay! - She's done the rodeo gamut: cattle roping, goat tying, you name it. But barrel racing is her passion; she has the bruised, scraped knees from hitting barrels to prove it.—from Tuesday’s Times Herald-Record story on local rodeo champ, Rachel Sameuls, age 17. The world as it’s covered in Blogtopia (h/t Skippy) is a world defined by television news and the editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. It’s a gray, joyless world in which everything revolves around politics and politics is mixed up with a deracinated, sexless form of television celebrity, and everybody,...

In praise of monarchy---well, of a monarchy - England and the world are probably lucky the current Royal Family isn’t as “interesting” as this gang. Is there some big social event happening in England this week? Somebody’s getting married or something? The news of Kate and William’s wedding bores me to the point that it bores me to even think about how much it bores me. I’ve never been interested in the Royal Family as people only as a starting point for working backwards through British history. Pick a king, or a queen, any king or queen, and it won’t be long before what you’re talking about is...

My beautiful deathbed conversion - Wide awake at four o’clock this morning trying to read myself back to sleep by reading about people who, wide awake at four o’clock in the morning, heard the voice of God calling to them. One of them doesn’t think the voice he heard was God’s, exactly. He believes it was the voice of “the mind” of the universe. It’s the mind we all share in. It’s what the the “mind” speaking to us in our heads draws its voice from. I think he means something like Emerson’s Over-soul. But it might as well be God. The other didn’t hear...

Onward Christian soldiers, at 24 frames per second - Post script added Sunday afternoon. Are Christian movies that bad? Movies like Fireproof, Facing the Giants, and the new Soul Surfer? Are they that bad compared to, say…well, just about every other movie playing at the cineplex today? The headline on this post by Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir asks Why are Christian movies so awful? But that’s the copy editor’s question. O’Hehir himself isn’t wondering why they’re awful, just so damn mediocre. “Lame.” Does the Lord really want to be glorified by way of something that looks like an especially tame episode of "Baywatch"? That strikes me as facile....

Mannion Family Movie Night: The Odd Couple - “You leave little notes on my pillow. I’ve told you a hundred and fity eight times, I can’t stand little notes on my pillow. ‘We’re all out of corn flakes, F.U.’ It took me three days to figure out F.U. was Felix Unger!” You can watch with us. The whole movie is on YouTube, starting here.

How a fossilized dinosaur bone is like a painting by Andy Warhol and other notes from the T. rex obsessed - One summer day in 1990, a fossil collector named Sue Hendrickson, walking what millennia ago was a riverbed in South Dakota, looked up when she might have looked down, or left, or right, or up again but at a different angle or into the sun or right at it without seeing it, spotted it, or what was possibly it, but probably wasn’t, though you never knew, sticking out of the face of a cliff. Sue and the crew of fossil hunters she was working with started the long, tedious, careful, careful process of digging it out. Seven years, a lawsuit,...

The Mannionville Daily Gazette’s Favorite Blog of the Day - Writer George R.R. Martin’s blog which he insists is Not A Blog. Because…well, you can guess why. Game of Thrones Exclusive Preview Here’s Matt Zoller Seitz’s review of Game of Thrones in Salon.

Your not so far-flung correspondent - Taking the A Train this morning. Well, first I’m taking a Metro-North train. Then I’m taking the A Train. But not all the way to Harlem. To the American Museum of Natural History. I’m covering the opening of their newest exhibit, The World’s Largest Dinosaurs. There’s a behind the scenes tour planned, so maybe I’ll get to talk to this guy--- The event starts at 10:30. I’ll probably post notes as I go on Twitter. Full post to follow later in the week. At the end of the month I’ll be going back to the City to review another play...

Ayn Rand and the God-less Republican budget - “Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus said and for two-thousand years his followers have been killing people in his name. “Sell everything and follow me,” he said. “Do not store up treasures on earth,” he said. But still plenty of his followers preach the Prosperity Gospel and teach that not only does Jesus want you to be rich, money-grubbing is practically a sacrament. What I’m getting at is that selfish people---which is pretty much to say, people---have been able to twist one of the most self-less and self-denying teachings to justify any and every selfish and self-serving...

Compromised - Democrats, particularly the one in the White House, need to get it through their heads that when you go to Republicans offering to compromise they don’t see reasonable and well-meaning adults with whom they can deal fairly and honestly and whom they are therefore obliged to meet halfway. They see the same thing a cat sees when it looks at a wounded bird.

Before the devil knows he’s dead - Director Sidney Lumet. 1924-2011. There’s a moment in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Marisa Tomei, as a cruelly neglected wife having an affair with her brother-in-law, walks away mostly naked from the bed where she’s just had an afternoon of not much delight with Ethan Hawke as the brother-in-law. And of course she’s gorgeous in that vulnerable this is a person you know way Tomei is gorgeous, even without her being lit or photographed to look gorgeous. That’s because the shot isn’t about her being naked. It’s about the look she fixes on Hawke while she is...

In his defense, it is a long walk from the parking lot to the mall doors and the guy did steal his spot - A little run of the mill road rage carried over into a parking lot. You’re at the mall, looking for a place to park. You eye a slot, you’re all set to pull in, somebody else slides their car in ahead of you. What choice do you have? Police say Peralo confronted a 43-year-old man over a parking spot about 5 p.m. March 27. He was carrying a .32-caliber Beretta in a holster. You don’t want to pull the gun. You know better than that. You just want to show the bum took your slot he’s messed with the wrong...

Tonight’s Feature for Mannion Family Movie Night: Ivanhoe! - This better hold up or my eight year old self’s going to have a lot to answer for for recommending it. “It is our pleasure you should appoint her, so that one at least shall mourn you when you lie cold beneath your shield.”

Moloch - Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”---Genesis 22:2. There’s a divisiveness fundamental to the Republican Lottery-style economic policies---“Give us your money and we promise you’ll hit the jackpot!” You. You will hit it. Not any of them. You are or will be one of the winners. They are the losers. And it’s not up to you to worry about what happens to them. You don’t even have to worry, because they’ll be fine, the good...