I thought you meant Noel Murray.

I feel similarly traumatized by Bell's worm anecdote on Ferguson.  She even described how distended her belly was by them, and how she shat them all out into the toilet after taking some medicine.  It was pretty revolting.  As I recall it, Ferguson was trying to wrap things up or something and didn't seem to quite…

I felt the same way about the wolf in "The Crossing," as well as the dog that shows up at the end of that book.  Animals are such innocent vessels into which we invest/project aspects of our better selves, it seems natural to me that we're more affected by the way they're treated than by the abuse or death of other…

I saw them back in the fall for the first time, after some missed opportunities.  Leithauser's performance of "All Hands and the Cook" was one of the most powerful things I've seen at a concert.

More cowbell!

Letterman is the only other person I know who liked this movie.  He absolutely raved about it when he had Sandler on the other night, said he didn't want it to end, was arranging a screening for his staff, etc.

There’s no way a man like Emmerich could have directed such plebeian garbage.  After all, he is the son of a [sneer] wealthy businessman.

I just read Ebert's review, rolling my eyes when I saw the 3 1/2 stars and feeling a stab of disappointment in him that I don't experience when he likes otherwise lousy movies (he also gave "2012" 3 1/2 stars), since I know he's a passionate reader of Shakespeare.  But I'll be damned if it isn't a well-written review.…

I haven't been this happy since the end of WWII.

Every movie should end with him getting killed, whether he was in the preceding movie or not.

That reminds me:  Stranger Music, a 1993 selection of poetry, songs, and even passages from his novels, is a great place to start.  A few years ago, I managed to score a mint hardcover first printing signed by Cohen (and stamped with his Order of the Unified Heart seal) for $9 from a seller on Amazon who obviously…

I haven't heard the Rifftrax for Paranormal Activity.  Whenever Katie's onscreen, do they crack incessant fat jokes, like they did with that similarly curvy chick in The Room?  Much as I love Rifftrax, that kind of shit drives me crazy.

Thankfully, the woman who plays the girls' mother in PA3 has an amazing ass and thighs, nicely displayed in the "attempted sex tape" scene at the beginning of the movie.  Maybe her underwear and jeans are anachronistic for the '80s, but I was glad for that particular lack of authenticity.

I just got home from seeing Paranormal Activity 3 in a theater packed with a mostly black audience, and it was a pretty fantastic experience. During one especially tense scene, a woman broke the silence with a loud fart and completely owned up to it, explaining, "I couldn't help it; it just made me so nervous!"…

I hadn't listened to his music for a while and was feeling ambivalent about his tour, but at the last minute I laid down a shitload of money for fifth-row seats at the Fox Theatre in Detroit, and I'm glad I did.  It was incredibly inspiring to see a guy pushing eighty, having re-learned the guitar after putting it…

In addition to his two novels and his lyric poetry, the prose poetry of his Book of Mercy is pretty amazing.  Much of it is very personal, written when he turned 50 and was in the midst of a nervous breakdown and then-failing career, but his angry, anguished thoughts about Israel stuck with me and are still relevant.

Cohen would still have a reputation as a great writer even if he'd never become a musician.  I'm not sure if his poetry, fantastic as it is, necessarily expands appreciation of him if you're already familiar with his songs, so I'd start with The Favourite Game, which is as stylistically precise as anything by, say,…

I'm not crazy about most of R.E.M.'s covers.  They usually sound like they were being performed at gunpoint.

At the very least, I like it for Cohen's evil cackle after the "monkey and the plywood violin" line.

Is it ever really interesting to prefer Dylan?  He’s like Luke Skywalker, and Cohen is like Han Solo.  Plus, the Canadian alternative to most anything is usually a much cooler choice.