Kinetic Loop

Esteemed screenwriting sage and Fulbright Scholar Robert McKee has grown weary of pacing chilly theaters and yearns to feel the wind through his eyebrows. He is now offering* the following vacation packages, all of which include Mr. McKee’s in-demand, three-day Story Seminar.

Relive the Cuban Missile Crisis with Robert McKee
Backstage at Ringling Bros. with Robert McKee
Tour the Duke Primate Center with Robert McKee
Fish for sea cucumbers in the Mergui Archipelago with Robert McKee
Experience transcendentalism in the Catskills with Robert McKee
Explore Pennsylvania in an Airstream with Robert McKee
Hike ancient Anasazi trails in Utah with Robert McKee
Trail riding in Spain with Robert McKee
Fly-fish for cutthroat in Colorado with Robert McKee
Camp in the Badlands with Robert McKee
Climb Mount Jefferson with Robert McKee
Raft the Mekong with Robert McKee
Track the snow leopard in Hemis National Park with Robert McKee
Canoe the Darién Gap with Robert McKee
Ride elephants into the Okavanga Delta floodplains with Robert McKee
Sword-fight along the Khyber Pass with Robert McKee

*Actually, no, he’s not, but he should.

Hot Diggity Dogs is closed on Sunday. Maybe the father is offering to buy the parking lot it sits on or to pick the lock and throw a dog together on the grill while his son plays the Ms. Pac-Man.

Michel Gondry wants a nice girlfriend. And explains “Sweding.”

Fit, oatmeal-eating (not oatmeal reading) Jimmy Breslin “remains quite busy — as a crank, a scold, a public nuisance, a curmudgeon of the foulmouthed Irish mold, who has made a cottage industry out of keeping alive the grit, vitality and maverick spirit of New York’s phone-booth-and-fedora days.”

Isabella Rossellini lights her ass up at night for the third screen. I’ve read this piece about four times now. Just can’t get enough of it.

Sci-fi DVDs — classics, the Alien Quadrilogy — are on sale at Amazon.

In Chicago….

Doug Funke (is he a “never-nude”?) and childhood friend Jae Lee open a new Korean fried chicken joint in Lakeview.

A Scottish headshrinker with a sleeping muskrat on his head revels in the Chicago winter.

And another squirrel, because.

A NYTimes Travel article, Winter Day Out in Chicago, gives suggestions for an ideal winter day here that involves, I infer, copious amounts of espresso, along with extreme time dilation, in order to do all the things the writer recommends in the course of one day.

Lauren Greenfield is at the Art Institute on January 31 at 6pm to talk about her work, currently exhibited in Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence. I was disappointed by Girls on the Verge, but that’s not Greenfield’s fault.

Jazz Fair 2008 is at the Cultural Center on January 25th, from 7-midnight. Note the Chuck Hedges Swingtet performance from 7:00-8:30pm in the Claudia Cassidy Theater.

Simon Roberts and Bryan Zanisnik, whose works are on view in This Land is Your Land (Feb 1 to Mar 22), discuss their work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography on Friday, February 1 at 3pm.