Sisyphus

I decided to tackle graffiti because I don't like to see it. My gut reaction is that it looks ugly and my second reaction is that it's a disrespectful thing to do to the community. It's one group of people that are flouting their existence over other people's. I don't want gangs to assume that they can divide the community to their liking. Painting out is really a cat-and-mouse game. They go out at night; we go out early in the morning. They go out the next night; we go out the next morning.

In "Woman in the Dunes," director Hiroshi Teshigahara creates an eerily sensuous world, a stifling but beautiful environment where sand threatens to engulf everything. His cinematographer, Hiroshi Segawa, gave this 1964 Japanese classic a poetic look based on surreal close-ups and romanticized sweeps over a dramatic landscape.

Gil Pender, the tousle-haired, khaki-clad hero of Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," is a writer struggling to finish a novel about a man who works in a "nostalgia shop. " That's another way of saying that both Pender, played by Owen Wilson, and his protagonist have something in common with Allen, whose antiquarian tastes are well known. And something in common, for that matter, with Terrence Malick, who structured his newest film, the ponderous, gorgeous "The Tree of Life," in large part to test similar ideas about the pull and power of the past.

Hiroshi Teshigahara's highly acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 1964 "Woman in the Dunes" remains a masterpiece, a timeless contemplation of life's essential mystery and a triumph of bold, innovative style. In adapting his own novel for the screen, the late Kobo Abe provided Teshigahara with a metaphor for the human condition endlessly rich in implications. In the film's first few moments, the camera picks up a handsome man, Jumpei Niki (the late Eiji Okada), in his late 30s.

Ritual and tribute are hardly new to the theater. It is natural that they would often surface as concomitants to mourning the loss or honoring the existence of a parent. Not many years ago, actor Mark Harelik wrote a valentine to his grandfather called "The Immigrant." Not many months ago, performer Jan Munroe paid homage to his departed father in a stirring show improbably called "Nothing Human Disgusts Me."

The secret of success? Spot a need and fill it. So say the purveyors of success formulae. Enter Dennis Deal. "Nostalgia works in 30-year cycles," says Deal. "In the '50s it was the Flappers. In the '60s it was Busby Berkeley. In the '70s it was the Andrews Sisters." So what is it now? You guessed it--back to the '50s.

The date is June 28, 1969: the launching of New York City's infamous Stonewall riots--and, as is generally regarded, the birth of the gay liberation movement. "I was an inadvertent participant--I was just walking by and got involved," said playwright Doric Wilson, whose theatrical telling of the event, "Street Theater," opens Sept. 14 at the West Coast Ensemble in Hollywood.

"Rosemary! How many calories in a pear?" Allen Green is proud of his wife who, like a carny, can guess your weight. But she goes one better: She can tell you exactly how many accursed calories you are about to drop into your sinful maw. "How many ounces in the pear?" Rosemary Green shoots back, illustrating the attention to detail--no, make that crazed obsession--that is behind her new book, "Diary of a Fat Housewife" (Warner Books). Rosemary Green weighs 135 pounds.

For a generation of young intellectuals, Albert Camus was a uniquely personal hero. He was more than a novelist, essayist and playwright, and he was more than his characters and his prose, although this quality of transcendence necessarily came from his work. Rather than offer historical explanations or a philosophical system, Camus only bore witness and described the modern world, the world he called the Absurd, in such terms that it was intimately recognizable.

The bilingual approach is only one of several alternatives to the integration of large numbers of non-English speakers into American society. The editorial employed catchy terminology and assumptions cloaked as pure truths. The editorial called the results of the Los Angeles teachers' poll "distorted," yet you didn't explain why you said the results "can safety be ignored." That is like saying an opinion which differs from mine is not valid. The editorial said "the bilingual approach has proven itself over the past 10 years."