Friday, December 18, 2009

Curiouser & Curiouser for the Holidays

All hail David Hoey, director of visual presentation at Bergdoff’s. His windows are stunning all year round, and the Christmas ones the most stunning. Last year the theme was Dickens, and they were chic beyond belief. This year it is Alice in Wonderland. I have never read the work, Alice’s Adventures...
              

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

In Praise of Southern Women Characters (and an Uncanny Playwright)

This festive season is seeing an odd confluence of great Southern women characters. Today is the anniversary of the 70th premiere of the film Gone with the Wind. As I have written before, I am a huge fan of the film and the novel. Scarlett O’Hara is a woman of immense imagination and will, undone...
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Friday, December 11, 2009

2 Little Tidbits

Two 2 simple things made me smile this week.In the blur of reading the last few days (the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the usual) I had come across the words “carapace” and “anhedonia” in the same piece. It was as if the Ghost of William F. Buckley, Jr., had made a visit. I’ll admit...
              

Friday, December 4, 2009

Tears and Tweets for Adrian

Here’s what happened: A beloved cable tv show decided to call it quits after 8 seasons, and went about writing a grand last season, and a very special grand finale.SPOILERSThere was a bit of a fake out. TPTB ran a “Trudy Marathon” on the last day, suggesting that you could piece together clues and...
              

Friday, November 27, 2009

TV Tidbits: House, Curb, and Monk

Catching up on some tv viewing. House, the recent episode called “Ignorance is bliss.” House says the line during the episode, in the general sense of “not knowing is good.”It’s one of the great literary misnomers (if a phrase can be considered as a single word.) “Ignorance is bliss” is a phrase wildly...
              

Thursday, November 26, 2009

"I’ve Got Plenty to be Thankful For”

Leave it to the uber immigrant turned voice-of-the-century composer Irving Berlin to have written a song for Thanksgiving. It’s in Holiday Inn. It never made it into the mainstream, not like the defacto T-Day “Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go,” nor the one hymn deemed...
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Friday, November 20, 2009

“Le Beaujolais est arrive"

I love the tradition of the Beaujolais Nouveau. It was released yesterday, the third Thursday in November, like it has been for decades.Some look down on it as nothing but a over-active marketing campaign for vin ordinaire. And it is that. I don’t drink vin ordinaire as a matter of course, except when...
              

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Spike and Sergei

It’s been a weekend incarnate of culture, high and low: live tweeting a panel on vampires at the day job at the Paley Center literally in between two performances of the Rachmaninoff Vespers with The Gotham Scholars, (one in Connecticut last night, and on the Upper West Side tonight). An appetizing,...
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Thursday, November 12, 2009

War and Rembrance

Yesterday was Veterans Day, the US modern incarnation of Armistice Day, which ended World War 1. “I always thought we should have kept the name Armistice Day. The implications were somehow a little more profound, a little more hopeful.” - Walt Kelly (Pogo cartoonist)Europe is still observing the Armistice....
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Monday, November 9, 2009

Madness Concludes: "Don’t Act Like a Stranger, We Have Tea”

Man, these Mad Men seasons are going by in the blink of an eye. Here we are already at the end of season 3. I have enjoyed it much more than the previous 2 because the storytelling pace is tighter and more things are happening. The minutiae of details finally feel in service to a narrative, rather...
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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Celebrating the Day the Wall Came Down

I was surprised to see a prominent feature on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down on the homepage of the NY Times.com for a while on Saturday. Besides the fact that the tragedy at Fort Hood and the House debate on health care are two important stories for the prime space, world events...
              

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man: Taking a Page from Winslow Homer

I saw A Serious Man in a serious city, New Haven, CT, surrounded by a sober audience of middle-aged and older, white men and women, many of the Jewish persuasion, who laughed loudly and often. I laughed a lot too, at the wit and wisdom of this cinematic middle-class Jewish community in suburban Minnesota,...
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Saturday, October 31, 2009

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Reformation Sunday—From Both Sides Now

Religion seems to be on many minds recently. Lots of punditry about the Pope beckoning to disgruntled Anglicans to “come on over, it’s easy,” the best of which is A. N. Wilson in the NY Times. Maureen Dowd has written another one of her “gotcha” columns about the Catholic Church, which isn’t very hard...
              

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

More Birthdays--the Guggenheim, Mr. Monk, Tony Shalhoub, and Me

I’ve always liked the date of my birthday, October 21: 21 has often been a lucky number for me, and October is the best of the autumn months. But I did not know that I share this date with the actual opening date of the New York Guggenheim Museum on 5th and 89, until I did this Sunday’s NY Times crossword...
         

Sunday, October 18, 2009

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