And away from the modern developments, ancient houses - most of them ripe for renovation - give the place a time-warped character.
As it is, I can see him doing beautifully by the splenetic, screed-spouting shock jock of Eric Bogosian's "Talk Radio," a fame-warped character who is described as having looked in the mirror and seen the face of God.
The now ardent youth would jump back in horror if he were shown his own portrait in old age. Louis C.K.'s comic universe is populated by many such warped loners: characters who cling to their positions in the world by the flimsiest of threads and whose morality tales seem designed specially to horrify the ardent youth in all of us.
Patricia Highsmith also loved to write about warped, amoral characters but also managed to get the reader to go along with them, which I always found fascinating. .
The vision of Fastow — a necktie wrapped around his head — and his raptors in his inner sanctum, just before Enron goes boom, brings to mind a war-warped, jungle-fevered character out of "Apocalypse Now" or "The Deer Hunter".
It's why Chris Morris was so polarizing with Jam you utterly believed his warped, frighteningly reprehensible characters were real, such was the deftness with which he and his cast played them (see: "Disinterested Parents of Missing Child"). .
Mr. Baitz himself, after all, created some pretty warped (and warping) parental types in earlier works, characters who testified to the juiciness of such roles for the right actors: the splenetic father played by Ron Rifkin in "The Substance of Fire," the fire-breathing mother embodied by Judith Ivey in "A Fair Country," the monumentally selfish artist of Donald Sutherland in "Ten Unknowns".
In doing so, however, Mr. Updike gives the reader a decidedly warped reading of the characters in Shakespeare's play.
Including how warped and warping gender roles can be still.
Each character has a warped ideal of love and goes his or her own way to acquire that affection.
Having nothing to do with terrorism or politics, the limited-run collection of illustrations includes hundreds of images of warped human faces, demon-ish characters, and lo-res collages that feature appropriated images from tabloids and hip-hop culture.
