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Dave Matthews (didn’t speak but stood near him at Borders) Jon Stewart (chatted him up at airport) David Sedaris (reading) Dennis Farina (didn’t speak but acknowledged each other at film festival.) Michael Jordan (autograph line) Assorted White Sox players (autograph line)

Some theater folk hold that 90% of the work of a really good director is casting the show. Certainly, there are times when the quality of the talent on stage is such that a gifted director simply gets out of the way and makes him/herself invisible. But not always.

Well, after 10 months of dickering the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) finally has a budget for Fiscal 2012, which began quite some time ago.

Don't look back.Maybe that's one lesson to be drawn from TV in the year past. At least, nostalgia didn't exactly pay off for the networks.

"Once upon a time there were two brothers. One of them went to sea, and the other became Vice President of the United States. Neither of them was ever heard of again."That's an old vaudeville joke, and it always got a laugh. It was true enough.

Feeling a little sinister? Wondering if a Russian spy is sitting in the next cube? The days of spy versus spy, Cold War-style may be over but filmmaker Tomas Alfredson brings them back to life in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

I caught Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy this week – it’s one of the movies we talked about on 848 today.The film is based on a John Le Carré spy novel so of course the plot involves lots of duplicity, doubt and double upon triple crosses.  Every one of the characters just might be a Russian mole ope