The Nutcracker is a holiday ritual as familiar and comforting as the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, the Andy Williams Christmas Special, eggnog with Grandpa, and Bill O’Reilly’s feigned indignation over what he’d have us believe is a secular war to do away with Christmas. You want a war, O’Reilly?…

What was Christ if not radically egalitarian? He ate with lepers and fallen women and routinely thumbed his nose at The Man. The holiday bearing his name should have multicultural celebrations, no? The Chocolate Nutcracker is just that. This modern twist on the old classic goes up tempo, as the…

It must be exceedingly hard for teens to grasp Bob Dylan. Problem is, if you haven’t followed his Proustian output since those early ´60s proto-hippie days, where do you start? Complicating matters is that Dylan, now 66, has never rested on his laurels. Dylan has gone through numerous incarnations in…

Boris the spider. Charlotte. Peter Parker/Spiderman. Ziggy and the spiders from Mars… There’s something elemental about the eight-legged, web-weaving arachnid that gives it a foothold in mass culture. Consider: Why hasn’t anyone ever written a song about an itsy-bitsy dung beetle going up the water spout? Explore the spider’s eternal…