It was January&he thought the trees looked strange, like a cross between trees&giant shrubs.
But these go far beyond nostalgia: touchable, permanent objects tell the story better, and have the added effect of placing the narrative in an era when it was cool to mope and when being strange was a cross to bear.
The result looks like a strange cross between a natural disaster and a contemporary art installation, with cement, now dry, two-thirds of the way up the walls, the detritus of everyday life poking out of the surface.
A series of small canvases from 1996 have their comic moments, the best being a strange cross between an eye and an explosion.
"He [Curtis] wrote on the script that one of the reasons it didn't get used was because it was a strange cross between Fawlty Towers and Life of Brian".
In a review of Honeymoon, the English translation of Modiano's Voyage de noces (1990), one reviewer wrote, "At times he reads like a strange cross between Anita Brookner and the Ancient Mariner, forever buttonholing the reader with his own brand of exquisite angst".
Even her 1996 memoir, "She Made Friends and Kept Them," is organized by group (show business, royalty, heads of state) and reads as a chronicle of her encounters with the famous, the author popping into the frame like a strange cross between Forrest Gump and Diana Vreeland.
Eventually he started listening more carefully to the stories of his fellow travelers, spending much of the last 10 years on the road for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker, absorbing himself in the lives of a strange cross section of America: con men and fugitives, radicals and rap stars, addicts and politicians.
The actor came across as a regular guy — thoughtful, caring, self-deprecating — who happens to be amazingly funny; he showed a droll clip from his forthcoming comedy "Role Models," which nonetheless made a strange thought cross my mind.
More disturbingly, back in 2009, toward the end of the first week of July when my team was told to stop looking for Bergdahl, a strange of cross section of contractors, misfits, and pariahs entered the search for him.
It's a strange image — walking up to where a cross had been and finding an empty place.
