Eccentricity

Mitchell can't stop washing his hands. Philip has trouble keeping his clothes on--even in cold weather. And Luke goes everywhere with a pair of men's bikini underpants around his neck. Bizarre behavior? Maybe by adult standards, but not for little kids. For 4-year-old Philip, 2-year-old Luke and 3-year-old Mitchell, it's just a part of growing up. Parents may be worried when children's habits mimic frightening adult disorders, but the experts say: Relax.

What to make of "Silver Circle," with its low-rent animation, blunt antigovernment jabs and robotic dialogue? Directed by Pasha Roberts from a script by Steven Schwartz, this eccentric diatribe set in a dystopic near-future has a lot on its Ron Paul-esque mind but lacks the means or finesse to present an even remotely persuasive case. Call it echo chamber filmmaking. It's 2019 in Washington, D.C., and the Federal Reserve ("the ultimate secret society!") is running the show. There's explosive inflation (a beer costs $110)

When his hot-air balloon with "God Is Love" emblazoned on the side succumbed to desert rot, Leonard Knight knew he needed a better way to spread the good news. So he decided to paint a few biblical phrases on a hilly mound near the broken truck he calls home in a gravelly and desolate Imperial County squatters' encampment known as Slab City. That was seven years ago. Knight, 62, has been painting brightly colored religious messages and soothing pastoral scenes ever since.

Llyn Foulkes is a crank. That's a good thing, because we need cranks. I might not want to sit next to one on the subway or listen to one give a floor-speech in Congress. But popular culture and institutional art have a way of smoothing out or even debasing life's often painful rawness. Works of art offer contemplative distance, which can make zealous eccentricity especially riveting. Take "The Corporate Kiss" (2001), a bracing bit of strangeness that is on view in the sprawling, 50-year retrospective exhibition of Foulkes' art newly opened at the UCLA Hammer Museum.

Gordon Elwood of Medford, Ore., kept his pants up with a bungee cord, accepted handouts from a food bank and refused to have a phone installed in his home because of the cost. When he died in October at age 79, he left a $10-million fortune. Elwood was among a small fraternity of America's upper class: the penny-pinching, often shabbily dressed wealthy who are almost as much a mystery to the people who know them as to the millions of strangers who read their stories and wonder, "Why?"

L. Ron Hubbard enjoyed being pampered. He surrounded himself with teen-age followers, whom he indoctrinated, treated like servants and cherished as though they were his own children. He called them the "Commodore's messengers." " 'Messenger!' " he would boom in the morning. "And we'd pull him out of bed," one recalled. The youngsters, whose parents belonged to Hubbard's Church of Scientology, would lay out his clothes, run his shower and help him dress.

If it had still been raining Monday, lightning might have struck the roof of an Anaheim hotel when Doug Rader told a table of sportswriters that he is not now, and has never been, a flake, baseball jargon for weird, eccentric or, as a Times headline once described the man who claims he has never been a flake: "King of the Cuckoos." The Angels had just announced that Rader would be their 13th manager in 29 years.

In a conference call last November, USA Wrestling's athletes advisory council debated whether to ask the sport's national governing body to end its association with John E. du Pont. Amateur wrestling's most generous benefactor for almost a decade, Du Pont had been accused of racism after dismissing two African American wrestlers from the state-of-the-art training center on his 800-acre Foxcatcher Farms estate in the rolling hills near Philadelphia.

A Manhattan Beach doctor arrested this week on charges that he filed $4.5 million in false medical claims had an eccentric lifestyle, often rummaging through garbage bins for salvage although he lived in an oceanfront home and owned several planes and cars, according to his neighbors. Dr. Stanley Furmanski, 54, a diagnostic neuroradiologist, remains in federal custody and is scheduled to be arraigned in U.S. District Court next week on 13 counts of mail fraud.

On a dark ledge under the Grand Central Station Terminal, just five feet directly above the IRT train's deadly electrified third rail, a fine stream of sunlight filters down through 20 feet of stagnant air onto a makeshift table. It illuminates a bouquet of flowers and a book by W. H. Auden. The only other intrusion into the 9-by-9-foot compartment recessed in the tunnel wall is the thunderous quake of passing trains.

"Silver Linings Playbook" is rich in life's complications. It will make you laugh, but don't expect it to fit in any snug genre pigeonhole. Dramatic, emotional, even heartbreaking, as well as wickedly funny, it has the gift of going its own way, a complete success from a singular talent. That would be the gifted writer-director David O. Russell, whose triumph with "The Fighter" two years ago marked a return to form after a spate of lean years. Russell, whose early successes include "Three Kings" and "Flirting With Disaster," always brings intensity and passion to the proceedings: We aren't coolly observing life in his films, we are compelled to live it full-bore along with his characters.

Twelve years after his death on tax day 2000, Edward Gorey - writer, illustrator, Victorian aesthete born half a century too late - has earned an adjective all his own: "Goreyesque. " The word is used, increasingly, to refer to anything that manages to be amusingly lugubrious, in an arch sort of way. In recent years, Gorey's eccentric shadow has only lengthened across pop culture, his influence apparent in Tim Burton's gothic whimsies; the Lemony Snicket books by Daniel Handler; the emergence of the Gorey tattoo as a hipster fad; crowds thronging to the traveling exhibition of his work, "Elegant Enigmas"; and the resurrection of out-of-print Gorey tales Three Gorey titles have just landed on bookstore shelves.

Panorama City A Novel Antoine Wilson Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 292 pp., $24 In fiction, when country naifs ship off to the big city to reinvent themselves, they go to New York or Paris. On the off chance they end up in Los Angeles, they usually skulk around muggy corners in Hollywood hawking scripts. They do not often go to the outer San Fernando Valley, unless they are perhaps looking for employment in the field of cinematic sexual stamina. That's where Oppen Porter, the 28-year-old narrator of Antoine Wilson's second novel, "Panorama City," winds up on a quest to become a "man of the world.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown had been plowing through the hundreds of bills on his desk, many involving what he calls the "vast tracts of unknown" in state bureaucracy, when one caught his eye. It was the "Google Car" bill to regulate driverless vehicles. "I said, 'Wow. This sounds kind of Moonbeam," Brown recalled. "I want to look at this a little more carefully.'" These days, the man tagged "Gov. Moonbeam" nearly four decades ago for his plan to launch state satellites doesn't have the luxury of playing the wide-eyed futurist.

Olympic opening ceremonies tend to be orgies of nationalistic sentiment, choreographed with the propagandizing artistry of a Las Vegas-styled Leni Riefenstahl.    “Marvel at our unparalleled history,” said the Greeks at the 2004 games in Athens. “Stand in awe of our multitudinous might,” said the Chinese at the 2008 competition in Beijing.   The British pageant had to tread more carefully given the country's imperial history and modern self-consciousness. Too much muscle-flexing in this post-colonial era wouldn't have advanced Britain's 21st century image as a deluxe global marketplace, welcoming to all who have the financial wherewithal to get past security.

All the best stories are told in the kitchen - even the darkest ones. Think of Hélène Cixous' “Oy!,” now at the Actors' Gang, as the rise and fall of the Third Reich as told by your eccentric aunts, who happen to be whipping up liver pâté and a little gossip. Octogenarian sisters Selma (Mary Eileen O'Donnell) and Jenny (Jeanette Horn) have just returned from their hometown in Germany, where they were asked to speak about the Nazi era. Cooking up some nosh, they admit to each other that they didn't exactly tell the whole truth in public.

In December, 1942, 27-year-old Frank Sinatra stood on stage at New York's Paramount Theater, embraced his microphone, fixed his blue eyes on the bobby-soxers in the front row and crooned, sending his audience of teen-age girls into a shrieking, hair-tearing swoon. That was the birth of a superstar. And as Gavin de Becker sees it, it was the advent of the age of celebrities as targets. Targets of lovesick men and women. Targets of fans with benign, mildly amusing delusions.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard often said that man's most basic drive is that of survival. And when it came to his own, he used whatever was necessary -- false identities, cover stories, deception. There is no better illustration of this than the way he secretly controlled the Church of Scientology while hiding from a world he viewed as increasingly hostile.

"The Matchmaker" is a surprise. It sounds like a throwback to an earlier, more traditional style of Israeli filmmaking but it instead provides a view of that country that's as satisfyingly eccentric and unexpected as anything we've seen. Written and directed by the veteran Avi Nesher, nominated for seven Israeli academy awards and winner of the lead actor and actress prize, "The Matchmaker" is set largely in 1968 and presents itself as the familiar coming-of-age story of a 16-year-old boy. But, as it turns out, the boy's story is only a part of a larger, more compelling dramatic mosaic and what he learns about the vagaries and perplexities of the human heart is only interesting because of the complex, unusual adults he learns it from.

It is one of the great classified ads of our time, and it leads to an unexpected and endearing film that is as deliciously off-center as the words that ignite it: "WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before. " The film is"Safety Not Guaranteed,"and its success is both delightful and unlikely. As sweet as it is eccentric - and it is wildly eccentric - this is a warm movie in cynical disguise, a story that takes a handful of thoroughly modern characters, places them in a classic screwball comedy plot, and lets nature take its course.