Frank Kermode taught me how to read Shakespeare, so when I heard the sad news that he had died, I went back and reread his own essay on Auden teaching Shakespeare at the New School in the mid 1940s.
At one point, Kermode takes up Auden on Antony and Cleopatra and then becomes swept Read More
Maybe the only virtue of the warp speed with which information flies at us these days is that we can see, right before our eyes, how prejudice burns away the facts as it hardens into absolute conviction. The facts about the Islamic center that is slated to be constructed near ground zero were reported just Read More
On Wednesday, April 21, at a reading by Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Rosman, the Daily Transom witnessed an unorthodox exchange:
“What are you wearing?” one audience member asked the writer.
The question, a strange one to hear at a book reading, was inevitable because Read More
City Island, a comedy set in the quaint, Bronx fishing village is about a family who can’t seem to tell each other the truth. Vince Rizzo (Andy García) is a corrections officer and a father of two (three, if you count his long-lost, ex-con son, played by Steven Strait) who secretly runs off to acting Read More
For a while there, it seemed as though every time you turned on a Toyota commercial or ate vegan food downtown, you couldn’t help but hear an atmospheric synthesizer and processed vocals telling you “we rock the party” or whatever. This was thanks to Moby. Love him or hate him, the bespectacled, very bald musician Read More
Hong Kong action auteur John Woo has always made huge movies, but with his latest, the war epic Red Cliff, he managed to sink the Titanic. In 2008 it surpassed the James Cameron mega-hit, becoming the highest-grossing movie ever in China. Now, after a brief delay, it’s coming to America.
Mr. Woo is best Read More
Minimalist clothing designer Jil Sander’s +J collection for Uniqlo debuted this morning and the line stretched down Broadway from Spring to Prince Street, and stayed that way, with people waiting as much as an hour and a half to get first dibs.
“I obviously can’t afford the real Read More
“It’s like prom night didn’t happen this year,” said documentarian Aviva Kempner (Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg) on Friday, September 25, standing in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall, where the New York Film Festival was celebrating its opening night. She was disappointed at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s decision to move the party from its Read More
The last human being to wear Spider Silk, a textile stronger than steel and made from the silk of the golden orb spider, native to Madagascar, was one of Napoleon’s wives. She sported Spider Silk gloves. Two hundred years later, on the evening of September 23 at the American Museum of Natural History, socialite Tinsley Read More
It’s hard to imagine Clive Owen, Emeril Lagasse, and The RZA together in anything but a pop-culture fever dream. But there they were on an unseasonably sticky Wednesday night at the Bon Appetit Supper Club, celebrating the New York premiere of Mr. Owen’s new movie The Boys are Back. The dinner—featuring Mr. Lagasse’s wild mushroom Read More
