At The Awl, a gritty interview with Daily News crime reporter Kerry Burke (who was once featured in a Bravo “reality show” Tabloid Wars that I loved but that was sadly cancelled). Burke says, “I’m not a very nice person. I’m not from a nice place. At the same time, I love these people. These are my people.”
On the Crime Beat
Year in Viewing
Anthony Lane (New Yorker film critic, personal hero) lists ten films he liked in 2010.
Joe Kubert Dies at 85
Joe Kubert died this week at the age of 85. Perhaps best known as the DC comics legend responsible for such characters as Sgt. Rock, Hawkman, Enemy Ace, and Tor, Kubert was also the founder of The Kubert School, the only accredited trade school for comic book artists in the country. You can check out a video of Kubert talking about digital comics over here.
Yuks of the North
“A Canadian author, a farmer, and a First Nations teenager went fishing. The farmer mostly sat there quietly while the author and the teenager tried to find common ground, even though the gulf between them felt massive.” A Canadian literary scene joke book.
Broken Embraces
Catch it while you can: Charlie Rose‘s hour-long interview with Pedro Almodóvar and his muse, Penélope Cruz, touches on character, confidence, and control, and is currently available online. Almodóvar’s latest film, Broken Embraces, which I saw last summer in Madrid sans subtitles, was so visually stunning and well-acted that despite my meager translation the film enthralled. With a proper translation, it should be ravishing.
A Tale of Two Daredevils
In The Guardian, our own Mark O’Connell reviews TransAtlantic, the new novel by Year in Reading alum Colum McCann. If you’ll recall, we featured the book in our Great 2013 Book Preview.