I'm not a musician, but I recently composed and recorded a song. More than that, in a Paul McCartneyesque fit of post-Beatles hubris, I played all the instruments and produced and engineered the entire thing, even though I have no experience producing and engineering anything more complicated than a Bombay martini.

Composing Music Using Apple Computer's GarageBand Software

'The Unbinding,' Slate's serialized 'Net novel' being written and posted 'in real time' by Walter Kirn, raises intriguing possibilities for the future of fiction. But is it a future we really want?

Techno thriller

In a time of bold divisions between good girls and bad, Ms. Page colored outside the lines.

So does the Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Ms. Harron, whose visually adventurous new film drew praise on the festival circuit and some sharp complaints for not probing its subject's psyche more deeply. Speaking recently from the Brooklyn home she shares with the filmmaker John Walsh and their two daughters, she talked about why "The Notorious Bettie Page" bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex.

As Costume Dramas Go, Bettie Page's Is Rather Brief

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Don't worry -- they haven't gone totally soft.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Bones' Grows Strong

Can Hollywood make quality movies for both love and money?

Lawsuit Over 'Brokeback Mountain' Reveals Unease Over Pay for 'Arthouse' Films

Much of Lem’s work has roots in earlier Polish writers, now all of them in process of urgent revaluation. They include Cyprian Norwid, the 19th-century poet and thinker who anticipated most of the pressing concerns of the 20th century, and who ought to be as internationally famous as Baudelaire or Carlyle; the mystical Tadeusz Micinsky; and, above all, the incomparable “Witkacy”, Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1885-1939), author of the incomparable novel Insatiability.

It was in this extraordinary tradition that Lem wrote, for all that he chose the science-fiction form — and he was a prime examplar of it. He was a true polymath and at the same time a virtuoso storyteller. He was truly described as “one of the deep spirits of the age”.

Stanislaw Lem

What's going down inside Manhattan Trust's Wall Street branch may or may not be the usual bank robbery, but "Inside Man," the crime drama that details those nefarious doings, is careful to keep its distance from your standard heist movie.

Smartly plotted by newcomer Russell Gewirtz and smoothly directed by, of all people, Spike Lee, "Inside Man" is a deft and satisfying entertainment, an elegant, expertly acted puzzler that is just off-base and out-of-the-ordinary enough to keep us consistently involved.

Inside Man

Once, great movie houses drew us together. Now they're gone -- and the decline of the big screen diminishes us all.

Moving Away From the Movie Theater

I asked to purchase some Sadrist CDs, and Fatah took me to a shop nearby decorated with posters of the first and second martyrs, Muqtada, and Ayatollah Khomeini. One CD I bought was dedicated to Muqtada. “The candles are tall,” a man sang. “The Shias are greeting Muqtada . . . We are in your light our lord . . . All the young men are behind you . . . These are the people of the opposition.” It was sung to popular Iraqi music and contained images from Sadr’s uprisings as well as Iraqis dancing on the occasion of Muqtada’s birthday, although his age is never revealed. Voices sang “God help us win against the nation of unbelievers” as a rocket-propelled grenade hit an American tank.

On The Ground in Iraq