Based on a true story, The Black Tulip takes us to Kabul in 2001 after the Taliban has been routed, as the hope of freedom returns. Written, directed, and produced by our guest Sonia Nassery Cole, who stars as Farishta Mansouri, The Black Tulip follows Faishta and her family as they open a restaurant in Kabul in the building where her father had his bookstore, Poet’s Corner. As children, Farishta and her sister witnessed Taliban troops kidnapping her father and burning his shop. Now despite the worries of her mother, and concerns of her husband, Farishta hopes to honor his memory with poetry readings and hospitality. Poet’s Corner restaurant grows in popularity, becoming a place where both the military and those opposed to them can enjoy traditional food, music, and an open microphone.

I think we spend so much time rationalizing the bad stuff, calling anything that isn’t constant implosion boring, making the lows about the corresponding highs as if the latter justifies the former, we overlook all the ways in which love is every day.

A final hug for our dear friend

Going away to college is one the defining moments in anyone’s life, and for Scags Morgenstern, the heroine of Deborah Emin’s Scags at 18, her first semester at an elite Vermont college, where she’s a scholarship student, shifts her world.

Told in the first person as diary entries, Scags’ first semester expresses the questioning and discovery that comes with growing into adulthood.

Why should it be surprising that people who really really want to get married are crazy in love with each other?

Chocolate. Roses. Kittens. Lotz of kittehs.

Tonight’s movie, Bell, Book and Candle, based on the play by John Van Druten addresses aspects of love and power, as well as magic and romance. It’s really a tragedy rather than a comedy, as it reinforces stereotypical roles about men, women and witches.

In BB&C–which was directed by an old family friend Richard Quine, who I thought was soooo cool as I was growing up–Greenwich gallery owner/witch Gillian’s attention is drawn to new neighbor Shep Henderson (Jimmy Stewart) so her aunt, also a witch, does a spell to draw them together. The implication is that it’s lust, as opposed to falling in love–according to the plot, not real life–will cause a witch to loose her powers.

Tonight’s filmmaker Danielle Agnello comes to us with two films, her first feature Lime Salted Love, a dark surreal look at loneliness and the things we do to avoid it and the dark secrets that got us there; and her just completed short Cowboys and Indians: The Great Diversion which shows up anti-immigrationists as morans.

Lime Salted Love was written and co-directed by Danielle who also co-stars in the film. It’s tragedy of love and secrets, very different from Cowboys and Indians which shows the idiocy of Tea Party/Minutemen types with their own words.

In 2007 and 2008 Junger and his photographer Tim Hetherington spent several months living with a platoon of U.S. Army paratroopers in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. At one point during a spike in the fighting, the 30 young men of Junger’s Second Platoon — part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade based in Italy — accounted for around a third of all the combat experienced by the 160,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan. Half of the platoon fell dead or wounded. Others suffered psychological injuries.

Why are we here on earth? What the meaning of existence? What is man’s purpose? What started the Universe? Where was God during the Holocaust? What is Truth? Should people have sex before marriage? What is the best way to find happiness? Where is the afterlife? Where are the voices in my head coming from? [...]