On Friday, April 11, Rizzoli Bookstore, a small capital of civilization and culture on West 57th Street, closed its doors. A victim of rising rents and falling readership, Rizzoli was a great place to kill time; it always made one feel connected to larger, smarter, more beautiful world. Rizzoli’s owners hope to resurrect the store …
On Sunday April 6th, a rather glorious day, I drove up to Woodstock to attend the Biographers Panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival, where my friend Henry Bushkin was holding forth about his memoir Johnny Carson. The panel, which was hosted by Will Hermes, a music writer who is working on a biography of Lou …
Dave Jensen and I saw Phil Lesh and Friends at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester last night. Pretty good show, undermined by a gabby crowd that kept yakking whenever the band turned mellow, jazzy or trippy. Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead, was accompanied by John Kadlecik, Jeff Chimenti, Joe Russo, a fabulous …
I had the pleasure on Friday night to attend a lecture at Concordia College by one of my favorite authors, Nathaniel Philbrick. He was invited by the Bronxville Historical Society to deliver the 16th Annual Brendan Gill Lecture, named after the eminent New Yorker writer and ardent preservationist. Philbrick’s subjects, with the exception of his …
Yesterday, noted cineaste Rush Limbaugh offered some ex post facto commentary on the selection of 12 Years a Slave as Best Picture. “There’s no way that movie was not going to win!’’ said Limbaugh. “If it was the only thing that movie won, it was going to win Best Picture. There was no way — …
My latest piece is an exciting tale of greed and desperation. “The Lost Silver of Cabalos Bay” is about six daring and resourceful navy divers, pulled from Japanese prison camps outside Manila, who were dragooned into helping Japanese soldiers try to recover a fortune in silver coins dumped in Manila harbor by the Philippine government. …
The Oscars will be presented tomorrow night, and right now smart money for Best Picture is on Gravity, an engrossing and technically advanced film about one of the oldest plots in the book, that of the marooned person who is running out of time and resources. It’s a fine film, very well directed, featuring two …
Pete Seeger, a great American, has died. In 2006, Alec Wilkinson wrote a profile of Seeger for The New Yorker. It ended like this: Here is a story told to me lately by a man named John Cronin, who is the director of the Pace Academy for the Environment, at Pace University. Cronin has known …
My friend Dave Jensen and I went to the Capitol Theater in Port CHester last Friday night to catch the Midnight Ramble Band. The band did nothing to diappoint, and even supplied a surpise: the rpesence of Billy Payne, the keyboardist of Little Feat. Payne’s presence added a different flavor to the show, mostly through …