Author Archives: Victor Zapana

WEEKEND needed an extra view to fill this page, so its editors called me to write about something. I have no topics to discuss, because I’m not that interesting a human being. So let me talk about someone I find considerably more interesting: Pato. Apparently, Pato is a wannabe rapper. Pato is a blend of »

I’m surprised I’m not sick yet. Every October since the seventh grade, I have caught some sort of illness: a cold, a flu, Streptococcus pneumoniae. At first, I didn’t mind; I thought that, like chicken pox, diseases need to spread and run their course. But in high school, someone with mononucleosis drank out of my »

There are Oscars for animated film shorts? Surprised I was to find this out so I Googled them shits and spent 40 minutes watching all five nominations and questioning why the bathroom lady in “Lavatory — Lovestory” sexually assaults a man in a bathroom stall in the name of love (I promise the short is »

Survival of the fittest. We hear the phrase, and something about evolution pops into our heads. Maybe it’ll be natural selection, as described by revolutionary naturalist Charles Darwin, maybe it’ll be social evolution. Like when the fat kid (me) was forced to the bottom of the food chain to barely survive middle school while the »

Scarlett Johanson’s hot. Like really hot. It really doesn’t matter if her name is never said in little-boy-in-a-51-year-old-man Frank Miller’s newest epic, “The Spirit.” (I had to check on IMDB to learn that her name is Silken Floss.) A brilliant neurosurgeon, she wore a nurse’s hat and busty cleavage. She’s a distracting character. To be »

“It has its faults. But it’s the best system there is …” “… And it makes Yale what it is today.” This is how savvy sophomore Hugh Le Baron explains the world of Yale to freshman Dink Stover his first night on campus in 1900 in Owen Johnson’s 1911-12 serial novel “Stover at Yale.” For »

Invigorating. There are few motion pictures as stimulating as “Starship Troopers,” an epic romance fueled by gut-wrenching drama, adrenaline-filled battles and thought-provoking news broadcasts. And today, the film — directed by action erudite Paul Verhoeven — will be screened at the Cinema at the Whitney. Wonderful. I argue there are few things that can genuinely »

Listening to “Blue Bicycle,” the first song on Hauschka’s fourth album “Ferndorf,” is like jogging through the woods. Grazing elk. Towering trees. Amorphous shadows on a dirt path. A brook that cannot be forded: Water sloshing, fish jumping. Staccato played on the piano. Alternatively, listening to “Blue Bicycle” is like dreaming before waking up to »