I like Patton Oswalt. I appreciate his appreciation of things. He is a nerd; he knows how to be a fan. His standup can be biting, but is not devoid of wonder, awe, of fully investing in something. He loves good standup, he loves funny people, he loves cinema. In Silver Silver Screen Fiend, Oswalt relives the mid-90s in a memoir that ties together his early creative career and his concurrent obsession with film. He divides segments of his early years as different Night Cafes, […]
Does the author know how he feels about his subject matter?
(This post originally appeared on Persephone Magazine.) Though anything overly cliquish, with rules of operation and preconceived notions, makes me squirm, I realized that I had made assumptions of my own about the word “Twee,” and any movement that might be associated with it. So with mixed feelings did I pick up one mouthful of a title: Twee: The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film by Marc Spitz. Spitz begins by acknowledging that, for some, Twee is a pejorative term meant to […]

