recent posts

about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Books

  • Why Allen Ginsberg Matters: The Essential Ginsberg

    In 1997, the last year of his life, poet Allen Ginsberg fretted that the first amendment battles won over his iconic epic Howl, would now face a reversal. Howl had been read on Pacifica radio, and censors now wanted to confine those readings till late night, lest innocent ears be compromised. Backtrack to 1955, the…

  • Alicia Vikander: Testament of Youth Premieres

    Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, the famed memoir of the author’s time as a nurse during World War I, is now a major motion picture perfectly poised for summer. Leave it to David Heyman, the producer of the Harry Potter films, to put this book on screen. Heyman seems to specialize in coming of age…

  • At Lunch with Melissa Rivers: “This Too Shall Pass”

    Melissa Rivers was a perfect fit as honored guest at the annual Mamarazzi luncheon, hosted by The MOMS, Denise Albert and Melissa Musen Gerstein’s mother advocacy lifestyle brand. Not only one of the most famous of daughters, a mom herself, Melissa Rivers has a book out, The Book of Joan: Tales of Mirth, Mischief, and…

  • Adapting Wolf Hall: Mike Poulton Talks at the Morgan Library/ Contretemps at the PEN Gala

    Playwright Mike Poulton spoke to a British contingent at the Morgan Library last week about adapting Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall, for the stage. Tony-nominated Wolf Hall, parts I and II, about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, his wives and politics, is now wowing audiences at the Winter Garden Theater. Poulton said he…

  • Robert Redford Honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center: “Hello, Gorgeous”

    Barbra Streisand, presenting the 42nd Chaplin Award to Robert Redford, her co-star in The Way We Were, recounted a story about a fan screaming “Hello, Gorgeous.” She thought it was for her, for Funny Girl. But no, the “gorgeous” was for Robert Redford. Indeed, there was no elephant-in-the-room in the spacious Alice Tully Hall: every…

  • Doctor Zhivago’s Sound

    The musical based on that Russian classic Doctor Zhivago inevitably evokes comparisons with the Omar Shariff-Julie Christie, David Lean 1965 movie, from Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel. A Broadway show with name recognition, Doctor Zhivago has played in Australia and South Korea—in Korean—and was much loved. Given its politics, that’s a coup. Les Miserables Russian style,…

  • At Lunch With Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts

    La Grenouille experienced a British invasion yesterday for a lunch celebrating the film Far From the Madding Crowd, based on Thomas Hardy’s beloved 19th century novel. Carey Mulligan, currently starring in Skylight on Broadway, plays Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed and occasionally wrong-headed heroine, a pre-feminist, you could call her. Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts portrays Gabriel…

  • RIP Albert Maysles, Pioneer Documentarian Dead at 88

    This is a boom time for Albert Maysles: his iconic Grey Gardens (1975) in a restored print is screening at Film Forum, and available from Criterion. A new documentary, Iris, about style legend Iris Apfel, a hit at the 2014 New York Film Festival will be released in late April. But then again, in the…

  • Atwitter with Dan Stevens: House of SpeakEasy

    “Are there any thespians in the house?” asked Simon Doonan at City Winery for the 2nd annual House of SpeakEasy gala on Wednesday night, looking for sympathy. The writer and window dresser long associated with Barney’s (he’s now the store’s creative ambassador at large), had launched into his story about having been tapped for the…

  • Garrett Hedlund in Unbroken: Neal Cassady’s Letter to Jack Kerouac

    You may remember Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty in Walter Salles’ On the Road. The Minnesota-born actor played the character inspired by the famed fast talking fast driving, Neal Cassady, son of a Denver wino in the movie based on Jack Kerouac’s iconic novel. During his time in New York doing publicity for Salles’ 2012…

  • Regarding Susan Sontag on HBO

    Back in the day, Susan Sontag was the big anxiety of influence. Public intellectual, essayist, activist, provocateur, critic, and novelist, she was the giant thinker to topple for any woman. Few could claim her intellectual maternity. “I feel sorry for you,” said one male professor to the women in his class, as if we were…

  • Thanks For the Memories: An Interview with Richard Zoglin on Bob Hope

    In his long dynamic career, Bob Hope’s story resonates as a cultural history of the last decade: a rags-to-riches immigrant, he was a pioneer in vaudeville, inventing stand up as we know it: he worked in movies and on television, and entertained the troops abroad. Not only was his profile, a ski slope nose, a…

  • Doctor’s Dilemma: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole

    Famed and multi-awarded neurologist Dr. Allan Ropper, author of the definitive textbook on clinical neurology, with the help of Brian David Burrell, has turned his prodigious medical knowledge to us, the people, with an entertaining and eminently readable book, Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole. Demystifying the art and practice of healing neurological disorders, he turns…

  • Burroughs: The Movie Returns to The New York Film Festival

    Burroughs: The Movie opens with a clip from Saturday Night Live. The actress/ model Lauren Hutton introduces William S. Burroughs, proclaiming him the greatest living American writer, in her view. That last qualifier had to be included so that it would not look like a hoax, SNL’s music director Hal Willner told me last night…

  • The Green Prince: Is Peace in the Middle East a Possibility?

    Mosab Hassan Yousef fixes you with his intense, messianic gaze, hardly seeming to blink. The son of a Hamas founder, dubbed “the green prince,” he gave intelligence to the Israeli Shin Bet, went into exile, and wrote a book about his experience, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable…

  • Hamptons Journal: Buddha Rules on Guild Hall’s Garden Tour

    What is grass? This is a question posed by Walt Whitman in his epic poem Leaves of Grass, offering an image of the most democratic of God’s greens, plentifully available to everyone from paupers to princes. The same question posed at Guild Hall’s August 23 panel, moderated by Edwina von Gal, made grass an image…

  • Hamptons Journal: Anthony Bourdain and Masters of Sex on Authors’ Night

    At Guild Hall, when Florence Fabricant asked CNN’s Anthony Bourdain at a recent Q&A, which country was most surprising, he quickly answered Iran. Most Americans have not been there, and I seized a moment of opportunity. Now, he said ruefully, would not be the time. This celebrity food maven sniffs out countries of smelly dysfunction…

  • LeRoi Jones’ Dutchman at The Classical Theater of Harlem

    The subway may be an edgy experience on a good day, but the 1964 encounter between a black man and a swivel hipped white woman, at the center of LeRoi Jones’ allegory, Dutchman, may terrify today’s rush hour straphanger. As mounted by the consistently wonderful Classical Theater of Harlem in tandem with National Black Theater, this 50th anniversary production of…

  • Jim Jarmusch Turns the Vampire Myth: Only Lovers Left Alive

    Jim Jarmusch, the celebrated indie filmmaker gives the vampire genre a clever tweak in his new movie, Only Lovers Left Alive. If you’ve been around sucking blood for centuries, you’ve probably met history’s most famous characters, Byron, Schubert, to mention a few. The movie pushes this conceit, name dropping with aplomb, or just cracking wise…

  • Oscars Afterglow: Anne Thompson’s Book “The $11 Billion Year”

    As last week’s Oscar ceremony fades from memory, it is useful to consider, as Marlon Brando’s character in Last Tango in Paris says, when it’s over it begins again. The “it” here is the Hollywood cycle from Sundance to the Oscar red carpet, awards, and after parties, the subject of a new book, “The $11…

  • The Bridges of Madison County: Sex in Iowa

    This is a great American myth: a mysterious stranger comes to town, briefly, and changes everything. Reference: Mark Twain. As the Italian-born homemaker Francesca (Kelli O’Hara) falls in love with Robert (Steven Pasquale), the young hunk who breezes through her Iowa town for a photo shoot, she thinks The Patron Saint of Housewives shined his…

  • William S. Burroughs’ Centennial Year in American Cities, and One Serendipitous Photo at the Morgan Library

    When William S. Burroughs died in August 1997 at age 83, he was the last of the seminal beat writers to go. Jack Kerouac died in 1969, and Allen Ginsberg in 1997. Some argue that Gregory Corso who died in 2001, should have enjoyed that status too. Despite Burroughs’ known heroin use over many years,…

  • Uma Thurman Reads from Moby Dick and Salman Rushdie Wins a Prize at House of Speakeasy

    Good news: the written word thrives downtown. The brainchild of Doctor Amanda Foreman, the author of historical works like Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, “House of Speakeasy” was founded to keep writers visible, engaged with audiences, and earning money for their craft. At a sold-out salon at City Winery on Monday night, the first of a series, some writers…

  • Salinger: The Documentary on PBS

    It’s fitting that the 200th episode of American Masters on PBS features writer J. D. Salinger, an author so influential it is hard to imagine the course of 20th century American literature without his imprint of lost innocence in the novel The Catcher in the Rye. Not only are at least three assassination attempts attributed to this…

  • How Jewish Is It? Art Spiegelman at the Jewish Museum and Lost Childhood opera in Bethesda

    Puffing vigorously on a cigarette substitute, Art Spiegelman addressed journalists at the Jewish Museum at a recent opening of an exhibition “Co-mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.” Referring to his most potent inspiration for subversive art, “Mad Magazine,” he jokes, he’s convinced, the Viet Nam War protests would not have happened had it…