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about: Regina Weinreich

Category: Literature

  • Charlie Mackesy’s Journey: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse

    Jet-lagged as you might expect for a British writer/illustrator just arriving from L.A., having promoted his film, and looking as you might imagine a mad scientist crossed with Gene Wilder, Charlie Mackesy held forth at a luncheon at the Whitby Hotel, signing cupcake boxes, posters, copies of his book, and telling a story about how…

  • Remembering Aline Kominsky-Crumb

    The Crumb documentary is ruining my life, complained Aline Kominsky-Crumb in 1993, as Terry Zwigoff’s biopic about Robert Crumb, her husband, gained acclaim, becoming a darling on the festival circuit. “Next thing you know, we’ll be invited to the Jerusalem Film Festival.” All of this drama was played out in a comic strip that appeared…

  • White Noise Opens the New York Film Festival with a Bang

    The 60th New York Film Festival opens with a lot of noise, White Noise, that is. Noah Baumbach’s movie, adapted from Don DeLillo’s classic American 1985 novel, features the kind of ambient sound that barely registers, punctuated by the boom of train/freighter collisions in combustible flames exuding plumes of smoke. It’s a canvas of the…

  • Salman Rushdie in Public

    In one of the great Curb Your Enthusiasm vignettes, Larry David wanted to make a musical called “Fatwa,” the word itself giggle-worthy. But the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was no joke. Last week a lone, determined man got past light security at Chautauqua, a famous writers conference and knifed the author of Midnight’s Children and…

  • Stirring the Pot: Mixing It Up for 2022

      Not so long ago from a kitchen set made on the stage of the John Drew Theater, New York Times food writer Florence Fabricant asked chef Anthony Bourdain what he likes to cook most at leisure with family and friends. “Flipping burgers in my backyard,” he replied, a good answer in a room full…

  • Anna in the Tropics at Bay Street Theater: On the Virtues of Adultery 

    Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy knew something about women’s discontent in marriage. One of his greatest creations, the character Anna Karenina in his classic novel of that name, fuels the animus felt in the family in Nilo Cruz’s 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Anna in the Tropics, now in production at Bay Street Theater. Set in…

  • James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: Lesson in Survival: 1971 at the Vineyard Theater

    A young poet, Nikki Giovanni interviewed an elder statesman of letters, James Baldwin, on television in 1971. Enacted, voiced onstage at the Vineyard Theater, Lessons in Survival: 1971, joins a series of plays produced at this downtown venue that makes use of actual words uttered in real life situations to create a theatrical experience: Tina…

  • Lost Illusions: A Classy Take on a French Classic

    The French can be vicious, bringing backstabbing to a fine art. Just look at les Liaisons Dangereuses. This year’s winner of seven Cesars, including Best Film, went to Xavier Giannoli’s adaptation of Honore Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a splendidly captivating romp through 19th century Paris via the extravagant “illusions” of a young, determined, and talented poet,…

  • Ben Foster in The Survivor: The Camps Never Leave You

    HBO launches its movie, The Survivor, with a lavish premiere just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day. Barry Levinson’s latest stars Ben Foster as boxer Harry Haft, Auschwitz survivor and refugee.  As Auschwitz stories go, Harry Haft’s exceeds the norm. Grasping his world in the camps and beyond in Brooklyn, Ben Foster, in the performance…

  • Hamptons Journal: Authors Night: One Cocktail Party Plus a Four Day Festival of Books

    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…

  • Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation: Genius Never Gets Old

    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…

  • Martha Stewart Brings Her Flair for Perfection to Southampton

    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…

  • Christmas at Moran Studio: Peaceful Holiday Cheer

    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…

  • DOC NYC 2020: In THE MEANING OF HITLER, Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker Explore the Cult of Personality

    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…

  • Ric Burns on Making Oliver Sacks: His Own Life: Narrative is Therapy

    Waxing euphoric, documentarian Ric Burns, exclaimed, “The story in 14,233 lines was an attempt to get to the bottom, to heal the world.” He was not speaking of Doctor Oliver Sacks and his biopic, Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, of the noted neurologist and writer of Awakenings (1972) and The Man Who Mistook his Wife…

  • Dr. Ruth Westheimer on Author’s Night: Sex Talk in Brief

    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…

  • Remembering Photographer Elsa Dorfman

    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.…

  • John Waters Cajoles Graduates at SVA Commencement: Become Covid-19 Commandoes!

    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…

  • Remembering Michael McClure

    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…

  • Apropos of Nothing: Woody Allen’s View from the Top

    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…

  • Remembering Andreas Brown at the Gotham Book Mart

    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…

  • Tom Hiddleston in Betrayal: Star Power on 45th Street

    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…

  • Jules Feiffer at 90: Guild Hall Celebrates with an All-Star Reading of A Bad Friend

    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…

  • Elvis in Vegas: The King Graces a Surreal City in the Sixties

    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…

  • Rolling Thunder Revue on Netflix, and More: Allen Ginsberg Never Gets Old

    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.…