Entertainment tips for multiple personalities.

Alison Bechdel's elegiac memoir, Fun Home, exploded the idea of what graphic novels can do. (One of our top-ten books of 2006, it’s now out in paperback.) The story of her coming out and her father's closeted life made room for the Icarus myth, isolation of rural Pennsylvania, and smells of New York. Bechdel, a charming and eloquent speaker, will soon appear elsewhere, but tonight is her big solo reading — one that promises to feel like a community event. [More]

“As a film, the 1980 Olivia Newton-John roller-disco fable Xanadu was the epic failure to end all epic failures — until Ishtar.” That’s Michael Martin, kicking off this week’s epic look at Xanadu’s birth as a Broadway production. The movie was the movie — this, friends, is the musical: Scaled down, honed to perfect camp with broad jukebox appeal, the show (just out of previews) boasts a “relentlessly, hysterically funny” script and songs imbued with “100 percent emotional sincerity.” [More]

Alarmed by the obsolescence of celluloid film, Hugo Boss prizewinner Tacita Dean visited a Kodak factory in France on the eve of its closing. Kodak, her 45-minute film, lovingly documents the miles of machinery cranking out luminous sheets of her chosen medium. But it’s the watery four-minute loop of Noir et Blanc, shot on her precious remaining five rolls of 16mm black and white, that’s the most moving elegy; it transmits a preternatural sense of loss. [More]

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