Best of 3am
Will Gardner
Posted inFeature
LOMBARD & INTERSTATE
Tiny Bubbles and Janie’s Gun
Bar Crawl: The Mercury’s Drinking Issue
Posted inBooks
Thy Kingdom Come
The subtitle of Randall Balmer’s new book, Thy Kingdome Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, clues readers into the gist of his thesis. As used to Al Franken-esque political tomes as we are nowadays, though, Balmer’s tone is neither smarmy nor vitriolic. He’s like a fellow partygoer warning you against […]
Posted inNews
My Nude Awakening
The Mercury‘s Will Gardner Takes a Walk on the Nude Side—at a Local Nudist Resort
The turning point occurred during a game of naked horseshoes. Prior to this crucial match, my experience at this resort for nudists had been a solitary one—just me in flip flops and sunblock. Not that any of the hosts or fellow guests had been rude, but until that point I had kept to myself, content […]
Posted inMovies & TV
I’m Staying Home
Bisexuals are people too
Bisexuality enjoyed its heyday immediately after the arrival of Basic Instinct in 1992. And up through the release of Basic Instinct 2 (at which time bisexuality was confirmed to be a myth), Hollywood released many a film exploring the prurient impulses of many a character—but almost always, these bisexuals were chicks, as the female bisexual […]
Posted inQueer
We Could Be Somewhere Worse
My Old Kentucky Homo… Errr, Home
“Where are we?” The Mercury’s Queer Issue
Posted inMusic
No More Mustache Rides?!
Say it isn’t so, John Oates!
THEY’RE MORE THAN just the heterosexual answer to George Michael’s Wham!—when it comes to gold records, the sweet “Philly-stylin” Daryl Hall and John Oates are the most successful duo in pop music. Much of their “crossover appeal” was a consequence of their sleek “white soul” that featured them in as many jukeboxes in Detroit as […]
Posted inFeature
Making the Grade
The Mercury Food Issue Checks In with Old Standbys
Making the Grade
Posted inBooks
Take a Look, It’s in a Book
Wordstock—Like Reading Rainbow… for Adults
Screw LeVar Burton. We don’t need that proto-Urkel anymore. We’ve got Wordstock now. Now in its second year, the first-class lit fest has slimmed down to a svelte three days of writerly awesomeness. This year’s event has more authors than we could possibly list here (for instance: Charles D’Ambrosio, Christopher Moore, Donald Hall, Ariel Gore, […]
Posted inTheater & Performance
Nixon in China
Contemporary operatic composer John Adams claims that during the two years it took to finish Nixon in China (completed in 1987), one of the more difficult tasks was to overcome his personal animosity toward his title character. Another obstacle (like any modern composer, I imagine) was to present a relevant work that traditionalist operagoers would […]
Posted inBooks
Company
With its skewering of corporate policy and lampooning of the useless “busy work” mentality of “real world” office jobs, Max Barry’s new novel, Company, will endure inevitable comparisons to TV’s The Office and filmdom’s Office Space. Company goes one step further by tendering a more inspired and involved plot—but it’s no less hilarious. Rookie Stephen […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Cutting Your Dick Off for Jesus
Transamerica: A Movie Without Balls
Transamerica—despite the buzz surrounding it—isn’t so much a “transsexual movie” as it is something far less innovative: a road movie. It’s simply more devoted to the road movie formula—that of two misfits squabbling in a jalopy at the onset of a cross-country trip, who come to love one another somewhere close to the destination—than to […]