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“Is the theater really dead?” asked Simon & Garfunkel once upon a time. Forty-five years later, and at the height of the movies’ annual silly season, one might well ask the same of the cinema. Whither the great American movie? Whither directors of integrity and vision? Whither criticism? These are the questions David Denby poses […]
Read MorePrefatory note: strongly recommend you watch Boyhood without seeing the trailer or doing a Google Image search or anything like that. Probably don’t read this yet either. But the bottom line is, do see it. Blue sky, white clouds, the opening chords of Coldplay’s “Yellow”, the handwritten title (in black): Boyhood. Reverse shot: Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), […]
Read MoreConstitutional law has always been a game of semantics. So it’s a pleasure to discover that former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (Little, Brown, 2014), is so clear in expression and purpose. For many, in these ultra-partisan times, this slight yet impressive book […]
Read MoreThe curtain rose on a raucous final edition of the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural “Seriously Entertaining” series last Monday at City Winery NYC. There were cartoons and Muppets, breast pumps and seaside sex scenes, moonlight and music and love and romance. Our guests — seven of them; our biggest line-up yet — made us swoon, […]
Read MoreHow far we’ve come. The House of SpeakEasy opened its doors on a snowy January night with a guest list including Uma Thurman, Andy Borowitz and Susan Orlean. Since then, we’ve featured some thirty of the best and brightest writers in the literary firmament. Tonight, two days after the summer solstice, and with temperatures firmly […]
Read MoreDo you watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart? We watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Do you know who Elliott Kalan is? If not, listen up, hotshot, because Elliott is the head writer on The Daily Show! Jealous? Well, as he told Splitsider.com, “to be completely clear, objectively nothing is cooler than what I’m doing […]
Read MoreIn the last twenty years Jeffrey McDaniel has published five collections of poetry: The Endarkenment, The Splinter Factory, The Forgiveness Parade, Alibi School, and his most recent, Chapel of Inadvertent Joy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). This latest is a rich, fast-paced, helter-skelter set of licks on subjects including ageing, infidelity and Winona Ryder’s eyebrows (“safety pins / holding […]
Read MoreInstead of seizing upon the liberation that had been handed to us, we twisted it somehow into a charge: because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything. And by following unwittingly along this path, we have condemned ourselves, if not to failure, then at least to the constantly nagging sense that […]
Read MoreAdam Rapp is one of those polymaths you read about. A playwright, novelist, musician, screenwriter, director, basketball player… He’s written a couple dozen plays, including Pulitzer Prize finalist Red Light Winter (2006); The Metal Children (2010), which starred Billy Crudup in its New York premiere; and Nocturne (2001), an icy portrait of grief which prompted […]
Read MoreWhen I was seventeen I went through a massive Doors phase. I loved the music, of course. But no doubt it was also partly an attraction to the grotesque, doomy romanticism of Jim Morrison, “his ideal of following in the footsteps of Rimbaud replaced by an image of Marat dead in his bathtub”. About a year […]
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