LATEST ADDITIONS

If something scared an audience the first time, it should work again, right? And the third, fourth, and fifth times, yes? Well, House of Wax (Warner; Movie •^½, Picture/Sound ••••, Extras ••) steals its title from a Vincent Price vehicle, but it's little more than an amateurish excuse to slice and dice attractive teens.

In a recent interview about The Aristocrats, you said, "It's the singer and not the song." I see the Aristocrats joke as having a Grateful Dead/Phish kind of vibe where people start within the same framework, but then go off in their own directions. It's very much improvisational, though it's more bebop jazz than Phish.

Perfection comes in many shapes and sizes. A snowflake, for example, is a tiny spot of elegance not much bigger than a pencil point. At the opposite end of the scale, the world's tallest building, Taipei 101, explodes into the sky as a series of cascading tiers stretching 101 stories to a spire that ends on a point not much bigger than a snowflake.