Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They make a strange menagerie, the Hal Hartley clan. The people in his odd, alert comedies (Trust, Amateur, Flirt) inhabit some Long Island of the mind, where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment...
...group with an endless source of diversion. For the past few summers now, we have been playing the informal "alternative band name" game whenever we get together. To play is simple. Listen closely to everything you and your friends say. If you're quick enough, you'll pick out odd phrases that put genuine alternative band names--like Perfect Thyroid, Infamous Gnomosexuals, Accidental Groove and Burning Spear--to shame. Our list of outtakes from purely casual speech includes classics like Extraneous Stomach, Sneaky Bucket, Vomitous Swan and, my personal favorite, El Nino Lips...
...amazed to hear that my friends and I are not alone in this admittedly odd--but fun--game. A friend who I had not seen for a while just shared with me that she too had been playing this game with some of her friends. Her favorite Alternative band name creation, she said, was Sinister Fish. What...
When you've lived as strange a life as PATTY HEARST's, you learn not to do things regular people do, like open your mail. According to the New Yorker, Hearst's lawyer has a few questions for the Drug Enforcement Agency after the heiress received an odd parcel, called the two numbers on its address, found they were pay phones and immediately called the cops. Had she opened it, she would have found $20,000 to $40,000 worth of drugs. She was informed of this by the DEA officials who showed up on her doorstep moments after...
...team noticed that when the final game was over, he seemed almost giddy as he raced back to the locker room, like a joyous schoolboy liberated from class after the last day of school. He was equally gleeful on the first flight out to Salt Lake City, Utah, an odd boyishness for a player who was supposed to be old and tired and about to face a team that was rested and that held the home-court advantage. Some thought it came from the fact that he knew the Bulls and he had just barely dodged a bullet against...