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- Zach Bryan Buys the On the Road Scroll/ Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac!
- William S. Burroughs/ Nova ’78 at MoMA/ Remembering James Grauerholz
- Jacob Elordi in Wuthering Heights: Monster Mash
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
Category: Authors
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Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum was meant to be a correspondence, an exploration of words and music featuring the Kronos Quartet and the writers Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, but to most ears there was a friendly cacophony. Salman Rushdie, president of PEN introduced the much anticipated event noting that the World…
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Well, The Daily Show funnyman John Oliver did not exactly recommend stealing the six rather heavy looking, grand crystal chandeliers at the St. Regis Hotel, but he did refer to them a few times, as emblematic of the posh surroundings at the same time that he advised the gown and tuxedo clad crowd to follow…
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While Republicans evaluate the electability of Mitt Romney vs. Rick Santorum, the revival of Gore Vidal’s witty 1960 play, The Best Man, comes to Broadway. At the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre, dressed up as convention headquarters, this Cold War era take on how Americans nominate our presidential candidates, the man in gray, a mere shape behind…
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Woody Allen may have won this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his whimsical movie, Midnight in Paris, with its time tripping to the 1920’s when Gertrude Stein held court in her salon. But Paris had another literary heyday in the mid-century when another round of Americans, among them George Plimpton, James Baldwin, Peter…
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Languishing on a beach chair in my winter outpost by a turquoise sea, I have only books on my mind, for me the most portable item from before the age of kindle or even a recent dinosaur, the ipod nano. So here are a few that have pleased and provoked:
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Alan Rickman warned me about this: In his new play at the Golden Theater on Broadway, Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Sam Gold, Rickman plays a well-established teacher of a private writers’ workshop. He cajoles and humiliates his students, sleeps with them, getting his point across.
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The fans outlying MoMA for the New York premiere of The Rum Diary were quadruple deep, awaiting the arrival of the star, Johnny Depp. Too bad the Titus I screening room was three quarters filled. Apparently the star did not want a full house. Why? Let's call it the vagaries of stardom. I had met…
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In Robert Creeley's poem, I Know A Man, an unnamed narrator urges his friend John, which is not his name, to buy a goddamn big car/ “drive, he sd for christ's sake, look out where yr going,” predating the spirit of a current slick and stylish movie, Drive, directed by Copenhagen-based Nicolas Winding Refn, who…
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You could feel the weight of the occasion at the Milk Gallery in the Meatpacking on Thursday night, the site of a portrait exhibition and screening of a documentary marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Not that NYC was lacking in remembrance, but these photographs of key players in the event and after by Marco…
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The revival of Enter Laughing that opened Saturday night at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor had me howling so hard I nearly needed my own reviving. That's because Richard Kind is impossibly funny, and Josh Grisetti matches him zany move for move in the role of David Kolowitz. A cross between PeeWee Herman and…
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Bitching and moaning about the immensity of the newspaper of record, the way its cornucopia of offerings chewed into his writerly workday, the essayist Seymour Krim (who died in 1989) used to say, The New York Times made me. How would he now navigate its terrain, both in gritty print and boundless cyberspace, had he…
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When James Franco co-hosts the Oscars this weekend, it won't be as the bespectacled poet Allen Ginsberg he so lovingly portrayed in the movie Howl. Of course, Franco may win the Best Actor Oscar for his work in 127 Hours, but his Ginsberg is spot on. The multi- talented Franco has good taste in poets,…
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Is there a “celluloid ceiling?” In this take on the “glass” ceiling, women in the film and entertainment industry can only go so far. That last year's Best Director Oscar went to Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to receive it, says much. So it was with great fanfare on Thursday night in Diana Hall…
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In the midst of the Oscar season tumult, it is reassuring to think of our most poetic and prolific American playwright Tennessee Williams as the author of scripts that became celebrated films. Case in point, Baby Doll (1956), directed by Elia Kazan with gorgeous performances, controversial in their time by Caroll Baker, her brutish husband…
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On a random Friday afternoon between snowstorms, visitors to Tibor de Nagy's midtown gallery for the “Painters & Poets” exhibit marveled at the small press editions in vitrines (with work by Joe Brainard, Kenward Elmslie, Charles Henri Ford, and Allen Ginsberg) and whimsical black & white films by Rudy Burkhardt starring his artworld buddies: Larry…
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The American writer and composer Paul Bowles-born in Queens, New York– would be 100 years old tomorrow. In our age of instant fame, it is useful to think about an artist who was famous for not being in the limelight. In his time, the cult of personality was taking hold, and would worsen in the…
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A scheduling glitch created the following conundrum: Best Generation poet and Allen Ginsberg's longtime mate, Peter Orlovsky, who died in June, was remembered on Wednesday at St. Mark's Church. Meanwhile the New York premiere of “Howl,” the new movie starring James Franco with Peter (Aaron Tveit) in a small role took place a few blocks…
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The actress Blythe Danner can do anything, and in the one-woman play, My Brilliant Divorce by Geraldine Aron, she does: pirouetting, leaping, laughing, singing, sashaying across a bare stage fitted with one large stuffed chair in which she is engulfed like Eloise. Accompanied only by a stuffed dog in a wheeling cart, she recounts the…
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The actor James Franco channels poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, the part animation, part courtroom drama, part period piece about the creation of the iconic beat poem and the censorship trial for obscenity that followed its 1956 City Lights publication. Having filled the prestigious slot of opening night film at this year's Sundance Film Festival,…
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The Carrie & Co. actors of Sex and the City may have enjoyed a premiere party in Moroccan style splendor at Lincoln Center's Damroch Park, a tagine in the tent theme based on the romance of desert dunes so comically played out in their new movie, the sequel to their 2008 hit and the HBO…
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The annual PEN World Voices Festival gears up in New York, with visiting literati arriving despite volcanic ash and house arrests from repressive governments that fear how their most creative minds will represent them. A Burmese blogger will receive top honor at the gala scheduled for this coming Tuesday, at the Museum of Natural History.…
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“I will protect you,” sings Father in the opera The Lost Childhood to comfort his son Julek, the tragic irony being that shortly thereafter he, emblematic of so many Jewish fathers, will be marched out of his Lvov, Poland home and murdered by the Nazis. Last Thursday, young Julek, now Dr. Yehuda Nir, a prominent Park…
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That sexy gap-toothed self-help guru of the Middle Ages, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, in her own quest discovered that what women want most is self-rule. Now in the Age of Autonomy for women, a new book The Nine Rooms of Happiness suggests desire has shifted. As written by Self Magazine editor-in-chief Lucy Danziger informed by the clinical expertise of Dr.…
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When I was a little girl, my mother used to make my clothes; all I wanted was store-bought dresses. Today, I am convinced I can do anything, as long as I am wearing the right outfit. When my daughter was a little girl, I shopped for her at Bendel's. Today, no matter what occasion, she…
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Opening his 1955 novel Lolita, Nabokov's narrator Humbert Humbert describes himself as “a salad of racial genes.” In hindsight, and based upon Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s new PBS series, Faces in America–to air on Wednesdays, February 10 through March 3–perhaps the novelist was being less metaphoric and more real than he imagined. At…
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