Our friend Susan Schmidt celebrated her 50th birthday the other night, and many lobster-loving friends and family members showed up at a lovely restaurant in Croton whose name I forget to mark the occasion. It was a lot of fun.
Ginny and I spent Sunday in Beacon at the Dia art gallery, looking at the gigantic installations of conceptual modern art. Neither of us much liked or understood what was going on with the piles of sand or stacks of carpets or big holes in the floor, although both of us, and Ginny especially, liked …
Three cheers for my friend and former Esquire colleague Michael Gross for his new book Rogues’ Gallery, a smashing expose of all the secrets that reside behind the masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the fascinating swells Michael’s very entertaining expose brings back are General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the first director of …
The world–well, a small subset of the world–gathered in Washington Square Park yesterday for World Science Day. Actually kind of an underwhelming event, but it was nice to spend an afternoon in Greenwich Village with Ginny and the girls.
Three cheers for my pal A.J. Baime, whose new book Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans is in bookstores now. A.J. does a great job telling the story of the rivalry in the sixties between Ferrari, the dominant racing power, and the upstart Ford Motor Company, …
Here’s today’s innovative idea, from Newsweek: Hire a comedian to edit the magazine, which happens to be a Tina Brown brainstorm from 1995 (she hired Roseanne Barr to edit The New Yorker), and sell the concept with Spy magazine cover concept, fresh from 1989. (By the way, that’s the head of Scott Yates doubling for …
I had a lot of fun yesterday at the annual Marymount Manhattan Writers’ Conference. First, I participated in a panel on Humor Writing hosted by my friend and benefactor Lewis Burke Frumkes, on which I was honored (a much-abused word, but in this case, totally appropriate) to join my friend Ben Cheever; Tony Hendra, whom …
Ladies and gentlemen, your brand new traffic-less Times Square. Much less life-threatening now. One of very favorite sites from an ever-rapidly disappearing Times Square: The old I. Miller Shoe Company on the northeast corner of West 46th Street and Times Square, a great shoe-supplier to the stage during the theatrical heyday of the 1920s, when …
Visiting London last January, I met a woman named Diane Wei Liang. A former management professor, a writer of detective novels, a mother of two, Liang was someone I had seen serving as a commentator of the BBC. I thought she might add an interesting perspective to an article I was writing about the rise …
“It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day. . . ‘’ 1967 will always be remembered for Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love, but I can never come across this day on the calendar without thinking of another song from that summer, the Raymond Carver-like short story that the beautiful Bobbie …