My friend Martin Charnin, the versatile, venerable showman, most famously as the lyricist and director of the Broadway show Annie, died last week. I met him circa 1991. One day out of the blue a man called me. He had read an article I had written for Spy called “When Disney Ruled America,” a speculative …
With co-producers Rick Newman and Peter Martin, and director Greg Mosher, Kurt Andersen and Lisa Birnbach and I are aiming to bring back Loose Lips, our Off-Broadway reality play. We had a reading last week, and another coming Tuesday. Let’s hope for the best. Above, our sharp cast, with Bill McCuddy at the center..
There is in publishing the fine old tradition of blurbing, in which the author of a book, and/or his agent and/or his editor, contact certain friends and associates who might be predisposed to like a new book, and to ask them to read the book and, if they like it, to write a short statement …
Complimentary words from Matthew J.X. Malady in Slate: “A few weeks ago, Kurt Andersen tweeted the following: “Google’s digitized every issue of Spy magazine. Half up now, the rest soon. (The internet has justified itself).” Media nerds and pop culture junkies rejoiced. Spy, which Andersen co-founded in the mid-1980s with current Vanity Fair editor Graydon …
Thanks primarily to the efforts of Kurt Andersen, all of the back issues of SPY are becoming available on Google. About half are up now, and the rest will be rolled out soon. As Google says: Smart. Funny. Fearless.”It’s pretty safe to say that Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might …
Thank goodness for whatever inspired Kurt Andersen to collect all of the covers of the issues of Spy which he edited, and to put them on his website, and to share them with his former colleagues–because now I can share them with you. Here they are, as Tad Friend dubbed them, “the 71 horses of …
Yesterday in The New York Times Book Review, Slate‘s Internal Affairs Correspondent Jack Shafer favorably reviewed A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America, by Peter Richardson. “Ramparts stands with a handful of 20th-century American magazines–Playboy, the Harold Hayes-era Esquire, Rolling Stone, Spy and Wired–whose glory days continue …
Tad Friend, once upon a time my colleague at Spy, has written a family memoir called Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor. It’s elegantly written, with many beautiful and touching passages, and the affection for his family really shows through. One very personal reaction it engendered from me was …
Trawling through photo albums last week, I found these wonderful pictures. Left, Kurt and Kate Andersen; above, George Kalogerakis, Rachel Urquhart, Spike and Graydon Carter. Below left, Molly Malanowski and me. These three photos were taken in 1989 at Kurt’s place in Putnam County. Below right, Molly, earlier that same year, in our apartment in …
. . .on the roof of the famous Puck Building, much of the staff of Spy assembled. These were friends of mine. Photos by Julie Mihaly, courtesy Natasha Lessink. In the top picture, Constance Drayton, Cindy Arlinsky, John Brodie, Ben Svetkey, Rachel Urquhart, George Kalagerakis, Elissa Schappell, Kurt Andersen, Cynthia Cotts, Joe Mastrianni, Graydon Carter, …