I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

Richard Curtis, the writer and director of Love Actually, is brilliant at many things, but his genius, I submit, is for thrusting characters into situations in which they feel driven to humiliate themselves. Which is why we love them, especially when it's all in the name of love. He is the Bard of Embarrassment.

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.

The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.

Let me tell you, if your marriage is in trouble, skip the therapist and find a psycho. Nothing brings people together faster.

Still, you can't complain about the number of movies being made. Never have the means of making movies been so accessible to so many. The problem is getting bodies into seats.

Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

Cillian Murphy is the guy who battled viral zombies in '28 Days Later' and put a gas-spewing bag over his head in 'Batman Begins'. With his pallor, cut-glass cheekbones and glazed blue eyes, he's right on the border between dreamboat and spooky freak.

My reaction to 'Sin City' is easily stated. I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it. A tad hypocritical? Yes. But sometimes you think, Well, I'll just go to hell.

Ever since the Tim Burton Batman of 1989, it has been de rigueur in movies to focus on the freaky alienation aspect of the superhero's life: This is how talented people make movies for 14-year-olds while retaining their self-respect.

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.

I fell in love with Twitter. Fathers, lock up your deadlines.

I'd put the most money on Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson - and not just because we'll probably still be waiting for the final volume in 2017.