Columns/Features
Purity tests are all too often the kangaroo courts of popular culture. When I was a much younger man, earnestly seeking improvement in my...
Hi, what are you looking for?
Purity tests are all too often the kangaroo courts of popular culture. When I was a much younger man, earnestly seeking improvement in my...
A few weeks back, over lunch, a pal asked me what I thought the odds were that I’d make it to eighty years of...
EVEN BEETHOVEN, BACH AND MOZART, TOOK IN THE TAPPIN’ TOES ART… I can say, unequivocally, that all the music I love and listen to...
On August 31st, 1989, I took a flight from Los Angeles to London, arriving on September 1st, 1989, which was universally celebrated as the...
I might have said it before, but it bears repeating—I am a frequent latecomer to trends as they develop, and often miss the boat...
I noted a few weeks back that I was rereading some of Calvin Trillin’s NEW YORKER material from the 1980s, and that this reading...
…AND DOWN FOR THE COUNT. A few weeks back, a short clip of Joe Rogan’s show surfaced on Facebook, in which he chatted with...
There is a longstanding cultural trope, one which I embrace wholeheartedly, that says we tend to dress in a manner and style reflecting the...
…AND THE DEVICES WERE USUALLY TELEVISION. Reading Ashley Holt’s lovely recent piece about Oscar Levant, an early role model of mine, and my own...
…YOU KNOW THE REST. Or maybe that’s just presumptuous of me, as a member of a dying cohort, a generation that is, was, generally,...
BUT NOT TO YOU. AND FORGET ABOUT IT, YOU. Nearly a decade ago, at a publisher’s presentation to the press and public of upcoming...
APOSTASY AND ME. I’ve been thinking about Merle Haggard lately. I’ve been a fan since the late 1960s, at a time when acknowledging such...
…HAS CHANGED MY PERCEPTION. Be prepared—the Lede is going be so buried, one might call it interment…but please, bear with me. My relationship with...
… Maybe Monetizing That Jewish Space Laser Bullshit Wasn’t The Best Idea I was born in 1950, five years after the world was finally...
Written and Illustrated by Mattie Lubchansky Published by Pantheon Graphic Library Mattie Lubchansky’s Simplicity is ambitious. It is variously a dystopian speculative fiction,...
I saw the revival of RAGTIME a few weeks back. This was the second revival. I’d seen the original, and liked it, although to...
Despite the casual loathing of Jews everywhere, despite the millennia old blood libel, the Third Reich was only able to make that loathing lethal...
…AND I’M GONNA SAY IT NOW. I recently hired the son of a friend to do a bit of cleanup of the mess that...
FIRST AS CAUTION, SECOND AS CALAMITY. I am an American, and to once again paraphrase and borrow from the work of another apparently difficult...
…TWO A slew, a spew, of unassailable facts, informed opinion, and the potential of wild, self-serving conjecture. As for the order in which these...
…STAYED FOR THE BULLSHIT. The Roaring Twenties. Well, no; not exactly. And now, if you’ll forgive my pedantry… …The phrase started out as Damon...
I hurt someone’s feelings on FACEBOOK, a few days ago, through the reckless expression of an opinion, based on that time honored concept, contempt...
“Don’t work blue…” – RED SKELTON “PC crap is hurting comedy.” – JERRY SEINFELD “Fuck that bullshit.” – ALI WONG To my genuine surprise,...
*Literally translated, “When the Messiah Comes.” In actual usage, a sarcastic/dismissive response, to, for example, “When can I/we_____?” or “When will you/they______?” in reply,...