Memoirous

There is not much I have. In fact most of the time I feel pretty powerless. I'm in the arts. Let's leave it at that. Thus, I have no real health or dental insurance. But I am smart--or so I thought. I had been actively looking for Groupon or other such deals for basic teeth cleaning. I've seen them pop up over time and waited until one came along on Living Social. For $69 I was promised a basic teeth cleaning, x-rays, and exam. Wow! The deal was on! I made an appt earlier this week at the Art of Modern Dentistry on Southport and went in this morning REALLY looking forward to coming out with that clean teeth feeling--you know where your tongue can find the cracks between your teeth, where if you inhale suddenly you can hear the air whistle in between. What I ended up with was humiliation. After spending at least an hour x-raying my teeth I was presented with a bill for $492. Ha! Really, I laughed. They said because of some hygienic law they couldn't do the basic ...

clip from a review posted at Salon.com by  Andrew O'Hehir "I am Number Four" -- and I am awful A tasty young couple and some sneering black-clad aliens can't rescue James Frey's "Twilight" rip-off By Andrew O'Hehir Alex Pettyfer and Teresa Palmer in "I Am Number Four" If you feel like a substandard knockoff "Twilight" movie is far better than no "Twilight" movie at all -- well, first of all, there is no mockery or judgment here. This is a safe space. You can share with us. The disease is much, much bigger than you are. We get it. Yes, I think a Higher Power could help you, but that choice is yours. You understand, or at least your rational mind does, that "I Am Number Four" is an ultra-expedited movie-type product adapted from the first volume of "Lorien Legacies," the utterly cynical young-adult alien franchise created by James Frey, he of the not-entirely-truthful memoir. The distance betwe...

I’ve been afraid of jumping into the fray or rather Frey. Mostly because I don’t want to give the bum any more media attention. But then I realized the kind of attention I might afford James Frey would be minimal compared to the hell the NY Times gave him. http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/ Okay we already know he is a liar, but it seems as if the “author” of A Million Little Pieces is now a crook and a liar—and he’s not even a politician (at least not yet). I use the term author loosely. I guess he is an author, he wrote the above mentioned book and now a few others—but it’s how he got published and rose to fame that is the most galling. He lied. First he tried to publish his ms as fiction and when that didn’t work he merely tried to pass it off as memoir. And OMG it worked! He got picked up by Nan Talese who sold him and got big bucks and Oprah and more big bucks and visibility (something by the way that big bucks can’t always get you). I saw people on the train reading hi...