New York
Movie Review: Robot Dreams
4 stars out of 5 This film should not be confused with the 1984 flick Electric Dreams starring Virginia Madsen and Maxwell Caulfield, nor with the 1968 Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, basis for the 1982 movie Blade Runner. However, it does involve animals, robots, dreams, and the 1980s. Robot […]
Movie Review: Kim’s Video
3 stars out of 5 In the mid 90s I had an East Village girlfriend, so we spent a decent amount of time at Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s Place looking for something to rent. (It could be a frustrating search, as the movies were snobbily filed by director instead of title.) Post-relationship, Kim’s reamined […]
Hallucination #2: Improv
A series of recollected hallucinations from my early weeks of hospitalization, 2016. A nursing assistant — who I believe was an actual fellow at Hoboken University Medical Center — was placing me in some odd situations. The clearest one was an after-hours party, which seemed to be held at a motel, yet it was still […]
Album Review: &’s by Higgins
4 stars out of 5 Click to listen or purchase Allow them to reintroduce themselves, their name is H to the I to the double-G, I to the N to the S. It’s been five years since Higgins’ last release, Straight A’s. Now, the duo of Kevin P. Fish and drummer Brian Kantor has returned […]
The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Israel, Vol. 7 (May 2012)
I try to post these more often than, you know, every 11 months, but medical and then technological difficulties kept me away from my stash of electronic correspondence with Lee Israel. Since we were last here, Melissa McCarthy was spotted in New York, dressed as Lee, as filming finally began on Can You Ever Forgive […]
Goodnight P.T. Barnum
This weekend, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced that after 146 years, they’d be folding up the tents and coming to town no more. It was pretty shocking news to see. The circus just seemed like one of those forever things. But I guess forever ain’t what it used to be. When I […]
The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Israel, Vol. 4 (2010)
Having obtained a newly uncovered photo of Lee as a little girl (with her brother Edward), I thought it was high time to return to her collected e-mails. Since our last installment, we learned that the extremely funny, talented, and charming Chris O’Dowd has joined the cast with the already announced, amazingly wonderful Julianne Moore in […]
My Internet Radio Playlist, 5/26/15
EPISODE #182: NYC POPFEST PREVIEW ’15 The Who — “Happy Jack” [THEME] Men Without Hats — “Pop Goes the World” #Poundsign# — “Starry Night” Eternal Summers — “Pogo” Beverly — “Madora” Lunchbox — “Little Things” Grass Widow — “Shadow” The Loft — “Up the Hill and Down the Slope” The Darling Buds — “If I […]
The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Israel, Vol. 3 (2009)
With baseball season underway, it seems like a good time to return to the collected e-mails of Lee Israel, as this batch heavily features her interest in our national pastime. Lee routinely watched Yankees games on TV even if, as you’ll see, she wasn’t particularly root-root-rooting for the home team. The previous year, with the […]
The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Israel, Vol. 2 (2007–08)
When last we were here, in my collection of emails from Lee Israel, we learned that Lee was working on a memoir, and also that money was tight, so she was looking for copy-editing assignments. We pick things up on… 4/20/07 eager to read your piece. cannot open it. I’ll pursue later. Did you know […]
Jack Silbert, curator