user: Q: Can movies make us better people?

The weekâs best arts and culture reads â including John Le CarrÃ© on Philip Seymour Hoffmann, why Weird Al Yankovic endures and how films can cure the ills of modern life.

Weird Al endures Ian Crouch | New Yorker | 24 July 2014 Weird Al Yankovic had his biggest moment in 1984 with a middling success for his Michael Jackson parody, Eat It. But “the world turns over a new batch of dorky teens” every generation, and Al has outlasted the artists he parodies. “We get older but he stays the same age — goofy, juvenile, exuberant, and proudly uncool, a gawky guy with a perm and a nasally, insistent voice, whose tastes run toward geek humor and polka”.

The cinema of the future Alain de Botton | School Of Life | 23 July 2014 Film is for us what theatre was in the age of Shakespeare or painting was in the days of Leonardo da Vinci: the art form with the biggest impact, the largest budgets, the most ingenious minds at work. And yet films have little social purpose. They entertain, they make money. We should demand more of them. Films should be engineered to make us happier, to show how problems can be solved, to teach us virtues.

The demented kingdom of William T Vollmann Tom Bissell | The New Republic | 22 July 2014 Vollmann’s latest book, Last Stories and Other Stories, his twenty-second since 1987, is a “680-page short-story collection about death, putrefaction, ghosts, and cancer”. He works 16 hours a day with no internet, and inhabits the persona of Dolores, a transgender woman. He could probably use an editor. At 55 he has “mellowed as a man”, but “his subject matter has, if anything, grown even more confrontational.”

Raise your hand if you’ve read Knausgaard Tim Parks | New York Review of Books | 19 July 2014 Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sequence of autobiographical novels, My Struggle is getting huge press attention and fabulous reviews. You might assume the author to be enjoying an international success matching his triumph at home in Norway. The numbers suggest otherwise. Total American sales of the three volumes so far published in English amount to 32,000 copies – respectable, but hardly remarkable.

Shivering in Tolkien’s shadow Josephine Livingstone | Prospect | 17 July 2014 JRR Tolkien’s completed his prose translation of Beowulf in 1926 at the start of his writing career. He declined to publish it during his lifetime, perhaps fearing for its quality. He need not have worried. It is "a great work of translation", faithful and deft. "The force of Tolkien’s passion for medieval art occasionally overwhelmed his scholarship, but its sheer strength also explains the lasting power of his work".

Staring at the flame John Le Carré | New York Times | 17 July 2014 Appreciation of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who stars in the film adaptation of Le Carré’s novel A Most Wanted Man. “He made his voice the only authentic one, the lonely one, the odd one out, the one you depended on amid all the others. And every time it left the stage, like the great man himself, you waited for its return with impatience and mounting unease”.

Young adult cancer story Briallen Hopper | LA Review Of Books | 16 July 2014 An adult reflects on The Fault in our Stars while helping care for a friend who, like Fault’s central character, has incurable Stage 4 cancer. “This is what three-Kleenex films can do at their best, and what Young Adult fiction can do when it works: open your veins or your tear ducts, and then staunch the flow with something in between what you want and what you have — more drama but no answers; more love but no miracles”.

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What are the most important parts of this text?

A: The weekâs best arts and culture reads â including John Le CarrÃ© on Philip Seymour Hoffmann, why Weird Al Yankovich endures and how films can improve our lives.


Q: One-room tiny home in Bethesda lists for $475,000

By Michele Lerner March 2 at 9:00 AM

The tiny house trend, in which homeowners learn to live in a streamlined space with minimal possessions, has been alive and well near Friendship Heights for decades.

A 315-square-foot brick single-family home at 4905 River Rd. in Bethesda started life as a Pepco substation but has been a private residence since 1980. Today, the one-room home is listed for sale at $475,000.

The home, which rests on a 1,848-square-foot lot, could be ideal for anyone fascinated with the idea of living in a former Pepco substation with super-thick walls and floors or a streamlined lifestyle.

[In Northeast D.C., Brian Levy seeks to spark a revolution with his innovative micro-house]

The brick home has 16-inch concrete slab steel girders supporting 22-inch-thick brick walls and a slate roof. The structure was built to keep people away from the electrical transformers inside then sold as a home when Pepco needed a larger space. A chain-link fence still surrounds the home, which has a gravel driveway and space for parking.

The home on the corner of River Road and Willard Avenue is less than one mile from the Friendship Heights Metro station and dozens of shops and restaurants. The kitchen has a stove, a refrigerator, a sink and a stacked washer-and-dryer, plus cabinets for storage. The main room combines a living area and office space and has a full bath. Steps lead up to a loft bedroom and closet.

For more information, contact real estate agents Rita Liptz and Kathy Georganas with WC & AN Miller Realtors, a Long & Foster company, at 240-305-6496.

To pass on a tip or news item, contact us at realestate@washpost.com and put “Town Square” in the subject line.
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A:

assistant: TOWN SQUARE | The 315-square-foot brick single-family home started life as a Pepco substation.