June 27, 2006

The subject came up before dinner as several sporting writers bragged, over glasses of Scotch, about their expensive gun vaults and the loaded pistols they keep bedside for “home defense.” When everyone had spoken but me, I said: “I keep all my guns in a locked safe to ensure that I cannot reach them quickly enough to hurt my enemies.”

Deep furrows appeared in their foreheads as they processed the words and came, one by one, to speechless recognition that I had, in fact, said what they thought I had said. Then someone changed the subject.

Desmond Tutu makes headlines, and often changes hearts and minds. In the fall of 2005, the headlines were made in Belfast, where Tutu, former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, was filming Facing the Truth, three programs for the Northern Irish BBC that aired in Britain on three consecutive days in March of this year.

The satirical comedy Art School Confidential features Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) as a student at a prestigious Manhattan art college who discovers that it’s not the paradise he dreamed it would be. His classmates lack taste and imagination, his instructors are competitive and self-involved, and everyone is focused on the promise of a glitzy career rather than on education. Jerome himself gets caught up in these misplaced priorities.