American Idol had its finale last night and Steven Tyler won. The actual winner, Phil Phillips, came in a close second, dragging a tentative John Fogerty (Annie laughed and called him "John Fogey") with him.

Tyler's brief set with an ecstatically reunited Aerosmith blew all the oth… Read full post »

Walt Disney announced a $200,000,000 write down on their calamitous flop John Carter today, and all over Hollywood pundits and producers are scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened. The consensus seems to be that Andrew Stanton (Pixar golden boy director… Read full post »

I got a haircut a few days ago. I do it twice a year, whether I need to or not. I go to the most expensive barber on the island, who also happens to be the best. I’ve known him for twenty five years – I painted… Read full post »

The Crane Gallery, a pristine glass box edged with brushed steel, sat at the base of an old factory on Prince Street, long renovated into over priced loft apartments, a short walk from the Vesuvio bakery. The massive building, with its soot-grained ornamentation -- a cast… Read full post »

My Father always referred to the bulge of kids crowding out of the twin elevators in the morning and charging down the upper hallways at Dalton toward their “Houses” (home-rooms, to you) as “the thundering herd”. -- something out of a wildlife documentary. All t… Read full post »

This is the essence of the painting trade, the particular miseries of a whole way of life, reduced to thirty minutes and the mechanics of a single triple track storm window.

Storms are the bane of the pinter's life anyway, since they invariably corrode and rust out and get stuck… Read full post »

There's a lot wrong with the X-Factor, but it never inspired the gut clench of disgust and contempt I felt tonight. I always wondered about the choice of Nicole Scherzinger as the wholly unnecessary fourth wheel judge on the panel. At first glance she seemed to be… Read full post »

Ken Russell died this week, and I find it sad to think he'll be remembered as the self indulgent madman who made the film version of "Tommy" and crazy over-the-top fiascos like "The Music Lovers" and "The Devils." He did make some hysterically bad films, but early in… Read full post »

This post originally appeared in the literary e-zine "Numero Cinq"

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s new “Book of Raunch” ,as he calls it, is an impish, jaunty circus of sex,  a porn film directed by Jacques Tati, a Broadway extravaganza devised by K… Read full post »

A remarkable event occurred last night on the carefully controlled, eye-popping pop culture marketing machine called The X Factor. In a bizarrely unscripted moment, a human being acted like an actual human being. More than that, more shocking but also more touching, more honestl… Read full post »

Stephen King has made me afraid to go down a flight of basement steps in the dark. I’ll never forget the 1976 Pennsylvania power blackout that interrupted my reading  his novel Carrie aloud to my girlfriend: we screamed like children and huddled in/… Read full post »

I knew something was wrong as soon as we walked into the place. It was cool and dim after the dry-roasting glare of the street, with all the usual glass cases full of earrings and necklaces and bracelets and pins. The problem was the man behind the counter.… Read full post »

 As  the National "Write a Novel in Month" battle begins in earnest, the first in a series of dispatches  from the front lines:

The worst temptation in writing is the need to be perfect. You want a paragraph to be finished when you finish it. You’ve… Read full post »

When we were done mking love and the adrenaline subsided, Susan said, “I knew it.”

“What? What did you know? What are you talking about?”

“You’re a criminal, just like me. You were in your element back there.”

“I was scared shitless.&r… Read full post »

Here's what you need to know:

Mike Hamlin taught AP English at an elite Beverly Hills private school. He was seduced and blackmailed by a brilliant, gorgeous, sociopathic student named Susan Bishop. He found  a way to blackmail her back. The Mexican stand-off ended when she… Read full post »

I know a number of people who boldly chose second careers and made a success out of it. My father-in-law walked away from a lucrative job in advertising, put the contents of his Connecticut house up for sale as his first inventory and launched himself into the antiques… Read full post »

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we started reading the baby books.

The world seemed to be entirely populated with experts on child rearing, and the clamor of their contradictory advice left us stunned and bewildered. Breastfeeding was good; and bad. It… Read full post »

Much as I admire Paul Simon, I’m sick to death of his Greatest Hits collections. They’re relentless. Only the Mamas and the Papas (It seemed like they had one album and dozens of Greatest Hits albums) impose on our admiration and exploit our ‘completionist&r… Read full post »

When I first heard the joke ,years ago, I thought the subtext was something about American ingenuity, and the good natured P.T. Barnum con-men who gave America its lively carnival atmosphere – greed tempered with mischief and a devilish wink of the eye.

Now I know… Read full post »

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (with illustrations by Jules Feiffer). In honor of that milestone, Random House has put out a new edition, complete with essays by various notable fans on what the book meant to them,… Read full post »

The X-Factor is over-directed, over-produced, over-hyped and hyperactive. It's loud and garish and jittery. Its ADD jump-cutting is designed for a zero attention span twelve year old. It  has everything going against it, even its ostentatious $5,000,000 prize and it's ugly,… Read full post »

This happened a while ago, back in the days of answering machines with tape cassettes. I made the call and taped it, and got Bob’s permission to type it up. He didn’t care. That was typical of him. I never did anything with those pages, though.… Read full post »

Harlan Mallory had always hated hospitals. Ruth called them “Germ convention centers” and insisted on giving birth to Robert at home. “I would no more have a child in a hospital because there was a chance that something might go… Read full post »