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Greg Tate, the prolific critic and culture chronicler, died Tuesday December 7. He happened to be a neighbor of mine. For close to 30 years we lived next door to each other in the Sugar Hill section of New York’s Washington Heights. We shared what neighbors share: a street/mecca where greats like Ellington and Strayhorn,…
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Some are born to leave their mark. Lately we’ve lost so many who have that late summer feels a touch more autumnal; now we have to get used to life without Eydie Gorme, Elmore Leonard, Dennis Farina, Emile Griffith, Walter DeMaria, Virginia E. Johnson, Esther Williams, James Gandolfini, and Michael Ansara, not to mention Helen…
Continue reading“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns…
Continue readingChoose your Hornet… Superheroes are not clowns. They don’t do pratfalls, lack technological savvy, or otherwise behave like assholes. It took a franchise like Christopher Nolan’s to usher in a new era of the comic-book-hero-made-flesh, and to give guys like us (who lapped up the TV serial-versions) grown-up editions compelling enough to rival, and surpass,…
Continue readingWhen I first moved to New York I knew a girl who fancied herself a kind of Holly Golightly. Oh, her nights! Always, she was full of stories about the latest film that mustn’t be missed, or that cool art opening she crashed the previous weekend. She represented the possibility of inclusion: one day those…
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Muse and lover of the late Allen Ginsburg, and a poet of note. Here’s something from 1957… My Bed is Covered Yellow My bed is covered yellow – Oh Sun, I sit on you Oh golden field I lay on you Oh money I dream of you More, More, cried the bed – talk to…
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sisters by Lucille Clifton me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time…
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