My back pages

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Film, My back pages, Short Cuts

Funny Boy

July 9, 2011

Cancer bulletin: nothing relives the doldrums of my birth month like a good laugh. Good luck finding anything resembling that at the movies; sure, it’s air-conditioned but “rom com” beware. The term alone guarantees the absence of wit, or for that matter, anything resembling human behavior. Which means us humor-mongers must reach back to the…

Art, Current Affairs, Gay, My back pages, Politics, Travel, Writing

Another Page

July 2, 2011

Live from New York: this morning as a family of starlings chirped me into cognizance, I thought, the past is present again. Funny—it remembered the first day of my Woodstock residency almost a month ago, less evocative of home than a clue to the sheer volume and diversity of bird stock in that neck of…

Art, My back pages, Writing

Retrieving My Enthusiasms

June 7, 2011

It’s a chipmunk world, and I’m just living in it. At the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock where I’m doing a month-long residency, the animals have it: with their rust-colored coats, those cute chipmunks ripple through the grass like glints of bright copper; cats (domestics named Celeste and Bob) strut across the lawn at night, their…

Art, Current Affairs, Museums/Galleries, My back pages, Photography, Short Cuts

Regular People Picking Pictures

May 21, 2011

The leaving is the hardest part. Call me complacent, or merely a homebody—whether departing for Rome, Beijing or even upstate New York, a mourning state comes over me whenever I must leave Manhattan. Maybe it’s always hard because I can’t forget that this was where my life truly began, which means that all its signposts—its…

Music, My back pages

Lady Sang the Blues…Phoebe Snow 1950-2011

April 27, 2011

Were any of us prepared for the phenomenon that was Phoebe Snow? In 1974 I was a senior in high school; along came Phoebe with her magnificent debut, a bouquet of tunes (Poetry Man, Harpo’s Blues, Either or Both, I Don’t Want the Night to End, Take Your Children Home, It Must be Sunday, No…

Music, My back pages

Thibaudet Among the Philistines

February 5, 2011

Was looking forward to my first Jean-Yves Thibaudet last Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, but things got off to an unpromising start. A man who’d bought the orchestra seat next to mine arrived and barked, “Get that bag out of the way,” as if my briefcase and I had plotted some inconvenient coup. I take rudeness…

Current Affairs, Dance, Music, My back pages

Gladys Horton, lead singer of the Marvelettes, 1945-2011

January 30, 2011

Link: See them sing “Don’t Mess with Bill.” the-marvelettes-don-mess-with-1vwvs_2ey2h_.html They-Were-Great-Once Dept: the day Gladys Horton cajoled a few girlfriends into starting a singing group ultimately called the Marvelettes, they couldn’t have foreseen how happy they’d make a bunch of black kids growing up in Ohio. Their snappy, sexy melodies propelled a street-corner symphony heard around the…

Film, My back pages, Television

Anne Francis 1930-2011

January 5, 2011

I loved this show as a kid (heck, anything with superheroes, spies, fancy guys or girls did it for me), Anne Francis was a cool chick who, when she wasn’t petting her ocelot, karate-chopped her way through the single season of this 60s TV series. But I always look forward to her first scene in…

Current Affairs, My back pages

Let nothing you dismay

December 18, 2010

I knew the dark days were here when I snapped at a woman over wrapping paper yesterday. I was minding my own business at Jack’s when she appeared, musing out over whether to buy this gift paper or that. Slowly it dawned that her loud utterances were an attempt to suck me into her indecision…

Art, Books, Film, Food and Drink, My back pages

Ancient Evenings

December 5, 2010

When 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…