My Blue Period

I was temping at a law firm, stocking the goodies that helped lawyers get through their miserably long days. My supervisor told me to be peppy when I brought them their Diet Cokes and cappuccinos, their Toblerones, Mrs. Field’s and macadamia nuts. But peppiness not being my forte, I performed my duties sullenly, and often [...]

The I of the Tiger

    Tyger, tyger, burning bright,     In the forests of the night:     What immortal hand or eye,                 Could frame thy fearful symmetry?                              –William Blake For years he sailed around the city, his effigy an urban fixture beaming from the side of a bus, the prototypical comic book superhero, blond, blue-eyed and [...]

Rules of Genius

In the hiatus between semesters during my years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, I often decamped to New York City, ostensibly to find a job during the break, but really an inducement to be somewhere—anywhere—else. One hot summer day while plodding along the sidewalk of MacDougal Street south of Bleecker, I [...]

Elliott Gould and The Men In the Truck

The American Theatre of Actors is located at 314 West 54th Street. The same building as Midtown Community Court. During the day, you have to pass through a metal detector to enter, emptying your pockets into a plastic tray and running your bag through an x-ray machine, under the supervision of NYPD. Fortunately, when court [...]

The Opening

In the gallery, I saw a woman on video shave her pubic hair and later, walk naked through Venice, but it turns out that I missed the best part of another performance piece in which an artist slowly releases a raw egg from her vagina, throws it at the screen where it smashes–as though in [...]

The Playwright Takes Tickets

The lobby of The American Theatre of Actors has the dimensions of a good-sized loft. The walls are lined with rows of old theater seating, about half the seats functional, others semi-functional, propped up with wood, or hanging low. Several are covered, permanently out of commission. There’s the box-office. Double doors open on the theater. [...]

Robert Longo On Shooting And Movies

Robert Longo–the conceptual painter, the avante guard Hollywood director, the expatriate New Yorker–is in the habit of referring to himself as “Longo,” just one simple all purpose word, like Sinbad, or, perhaps more relevantly, Bono, the lead singer of U2. When he left a message on our answering machine he said, “This is Longo,” and [...]

Bad Public Art

Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould’s Secret

Joseph Mitchell is famous for inventing, to a large degree, the tone and style of the New Yorker long profile, of which he is perhaps the unrivaled master (Calvin Trillin has said as much). He is equally (and perhaps a bit more) famous for enduring one of the most grueling and peculiar writer’s blocks on [...]

Gold Rings With Missing Jewels

I live where the wide expanse of Houston Street, in crossing 6th Avenue, suddenly dwarfs down to the little tributary of Bedford Street. It’s an old Mafia neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop for hours. I’ve lived here 12 years, long enough so my neighbors and I know each other, or so I thought. [...]

The Eyes Wide Shut Party

Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: a masterpiece or utter crap? My own impression was that it was utter crap when I saw it a little over a year ago, though I did enjoy the movie in certain ways, none of them, I felt at the time, intended. Since then I watched [...]

Chaplin on Broadway

Standing in their midst, though, one is likely to feel a sense of camaraderie. Everyone is sharing in the plain good luck of having found something interesting, and then there is the vague sense of relief that the occasion for gathering isn’t anger or indignation or a chance to rubberneck at some disaster, but simply [...]