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- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
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- Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Film at the 91st NYFCC at TAO Downtown
- Mariska Hargitay, Ken Burns, Alan Berliner: Non-Fiction Filmmakers Award Season
- David Amram: The First 95 Years at Dizzy’s Club
Category: Books
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As a tragic hero, a deeply flawed man, Denzel Washington was perfect for the role of Macbeth. He’d done downcast/larger-than-life before, say, in August Wilson’s Fences, and now in Joel Coen’s new film that opened the new season’s New York Film Festival, his Macbeth oozes Shakespeare’s eternal wisdom: It’s not that good to be king.…
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Weary of pandemic year lockdown, I was pleased to attend Authors Night 2021 in person under a tent on the East Hampton Library grounds, a scaled back celebration of books and the people who write them. Gone (temporarily) is the voluminous tent in a large field that could hold150 authors. Twenty sat at a long…
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T Literary titans Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, both Southerners and gay, travelled in the same artistic circles. Friends with Paul and Jane Bowles, Donald Windham, and Gore Vidal, they were also friends/rivals; each called the other “genius.” The documentary Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation puts them in dialogue using evocative archival footage. The…
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Patrick McMullan Without even saying “It’s a good thing,” Martha Stewart’s reassuring presence sanctions any project. This past weekend, the occasion was a swank party in Southampton attended by a who’s who of who’s out east: from Brooke Shields to Chuck Scarborough to Alina Cho. The event was designed by Bronson Van Wyck and photographed…
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When he wasn’t in a brownstone in Chelsea, the painter Thomas Moran occupied a studio on Main Street in East Hampton. “A shingled two-story boardinghouse with a smoking chimney” facing the pond, described the late Robert Long in his 2005 book, De Kooning’s Bicycle. In the late 1870’s, “Moran thought that this could be his…
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Of the extraordinarily fine offerings at this year’s DOCNYC 2020, The Meaning of Hitler, from directors Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker stands out in illuminating the continued fascination with dictatorial psychopaths epitomized by Adolf Hitler and extending to the Nazis of World War II. Leading off on the topic, novelist Martin Amis,who has grappled with…
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For Charles Bukowski’s 100th birthday, coronavirus or not, attention must be paid. Famous in movies portrayed by Mickey Rourke (Barfly) and Matt Dillon (Factotum), the subject of a 1973 documentary by Taylor Hackford, Bukowski was a one-of-a-kind, sexy despite huge facial crevices left by acne, crude: he once described writing a poem was like taking…
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Dr. Ruth Westheimer, now 92, gets hot and heavy talking about sex. This year’s Author’s Night being different from all others, her talk was on Zoom, no touching allowed. Which does not mean it was phone sex, or phoned in. One of the joys of listening to the pint-sized therapist who loves to boast that…
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Abel Ferrara makes movies the way Jack Kerouac writes fiction, in controlled spontaneity. The idea for Tommaso, about a filmmaker living in Rome, came to Ferrara as he was making another film, Siberia, a more challenging work demanding a greater budget for mountaintop scenes in five feet of snow, and forest exteriors. Tommaso is shot…
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A longtime collaborator with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and other literary figures, photographer Elsa Dorfman was a true American original. A portrait artist often associated with her main instrument, the large format 20" x 24" inch Polaroid camera, Dorfman, an influence to poets, and, from all reports, a great friend, died this week at 83.…
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Superstars Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey may be grabbing headlines offering online encouragement to college graduates this season, but John Waters did the job this week, dispensing discordant wisdom to designers and other artists graduating from The School of Visual Arts. The ceremony, usually held at Radio City Music Hall, featured far flung speakers, Waters…
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A West Coast beat, Michael McClure was less of a presence in New York than the seminal figures: Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, but he was no less of a master poet, combining his love of nature with traditional forms such as villanelles, sonnets and sestinas. One of the last beat poets, Michael McClure (87) died this…
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The story of Peter Beard has a grim end: some 19 days after he disappeared, after search parties including helicopters had given up their trawling the rocky coast, the erstwhile adventurer has just turned up. Some thought he went into the sea, lunch meat for sharks, if there are such fish at these shores, but…
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Back in the early 1980’s, Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs grinned across the screen on Saturday Night Live, having just been introduced as the greatest living writer in America by supermodel Lauren Hutton. Usually writers don’t read from their work on television, but behind the scenes, Hal Willner made it happen. Willner, beloved music…
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Back in the day, I knew a journalist who had a crush on Woody Allen, and joined a club with others similarly besotted. Witty and smart, this bespectacled nerd made them laugh, and that was sexy. Cut to Woody Allen today, a man in his ‘80’s trying to clear his name. His new book, Apropos…
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On December 27, 2016, I posted a story about returning to the Gotham Book Mart site, reconfigured after the legendary literary hangout lost its lease. Its proprietor, Andreas Brown, a man wise to books, theater, and the theater of books, died this week at age 86. Among many discoveries, he was onto Jimmy Kimmel, telling…
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Even against a gloomy sky, The Rainbow Room with its magnificent city views defied yesterday’s weather, an impending pandemic, democrats duking it out. At Guild Hall’s most festive winter celebration, honoring achievement in the arts and philanthropy, serenity reigned, although most honorees greeted guests and neighbors with fist bumps and elbows over the usual bear…
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Photo: Regina Weinreich Introducing this evening, Bernadette Peters cautioned the audience at Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall, "Sweeney Todd"'s Mrs. Lovett will not be singing about baking shepherd pies with real shepherds a featured ingredient. Not that it mattered. This would be Stephen Sondheim composer, and except for two numbers from Follies with the outstanding Katrina…
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A bookish night at the New York Public Library, the Literary Lions gala celebrates writers. Charlie Rose attended, and was ensconced in conversation as pigs in blankets were passed. Jean Doumanian confessed to hating long cocktail hours, but the gabfest went on for a while. Writers do have stories. Julie Taymor is finishing her film…
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Marital infidelity is that slippery slope, just ask the characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in a superb revival at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. Coming from a fictional literary elite, meaning they are also verbally gifted, and would have to be for Pinter’s poetry, Jerry (Charlie Cox) and Emma (Zawe Ashton) think they’ve gotten away…
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Starring Oscar awarded F. Murray Abraham and Mercedes Ruehl, the reading of Jules Feiffer’s 2003 play A Bad Friend at Guild Hall, could not have featured more good friends. Under the expert direction of Harris Yulin who also read, along with the outstanding Tedra Millan, Dave Quay, and Josh Gladstone, one of the East End’s…
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Photo: Roger Friedman Rob Reiner was the surprise guest at Guild Hall for Celebrity Autobiography, a riotous show based on a single conceit. It’s not that the lives of celebrities are merely a hoot, but that read aloud, the unintentional humor is mind-blowing. Case in point, Tiger Woods’ sexual innuendo describing his golf strategies in…
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Come out of the dark: Ugo Rondinone’s work at Guild Hall lifts us in radiant shots of sunlight. In the two large gallery spaces the walls are bare, lit by fluorescen fixtures. You might be mistaken to think you are in Walmart under this austere light, but the effect on the art is, well, looking…
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In Sagaponack, the house Richard Zoglin shared with his late wife Charla Krupp sits nestled on wooded grounds: immaculate, swimming pool, antique adorned, just the way she, a style editor for Glamour and In Style Magazine, left it. By contrast, the subject of Zoglin’s new book, Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las…
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Just before his death in 1997, Allen Ginsberg wrote to President Bill Clinton advising him that just in case he was going to name an American poet laureate, this would be a good time to honor him. As we know, that never happened. But look around: Allen, over 20 years after his death, is everywhere.…
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