At the Salt Lake City airport Thursday, before the Sundance Film Festival officially begins, cordial, uninformed airport attendants misdirect film tourists. An apple-cheeked aspiring producer offers to share a car to Park City. “I’m here to network!” How do you network? “Oh, I was here last year, and I just met these girls, on the Read More
At the Salt Lake City airport Thursday, before the Sundance Film Festival officially begins, cordial, uninformed airport attendants misdirect film tourists. An apple-cheeked aspiring producer offers to share a car to Park City. “I’m here to network!” How do you network? “Oh, I was here last year, and I just met these girls, on the Read More
Paula Fox leaned out of her ground-floor entrance and said: “Down here. We tend not to use that entrance.” It was early afternoon on an unusually balmy winter day, and the street in front of her brownstone was empty and quiet. Much of the house was dark, but she didn’t turn on the lights.
I find animals problematic. I do not underestimate their aesthetic value, and while on occasion I have expressed enthusiasm for certain species—some equine breeds, some birds, a reptile or two—I mostly don’t experience the sort of thing people describe as a real interspecies connection. I spend a lot of time thinking about finger-sized tamarins or Read More
I hate feet. I hate them in theory and in practice. Feet get the short end of the stick in the whole anatomy draw, and they probably deserve it. Apart from having to walk everywhere, they are beset by fungi (champignon in French), verrucas, warts, corns, bunions, calluses, hammertoes and ingrown nails with the sort Read More
The Transom, in its former civilian life, once had the pleasure of accompanying a local magazine’s former party reporter, Elizabeth Spiers, to what they call a “red-carpet event.”
By now, that evening has been rendered by the haze of time into Mad Libs.
The occasion was to announce an amount of money- a largish Read More
My Friend Leonard, by James Frey. Riverhead Books, 357 pages, $24.95.
James Frey wants you to know he’s a real man. A manly man. Perhaps even a manimal. Two years ago, when A Million Little Pieces, the first installation of his unrelenting odyssey into sobriety, was thrust upon the world, James was already Read More
The Washingtonienne, by Jessica Cutler. Hyperion, 304 pages, $24.98
“Sex: in America, an obsession. In other parts of the world, a fact,” said Marlene Dietrich. And in that vein, The Washingtonienne arrives this month, to celebrate the beginning of the summer-intern season and the fact that we’ve only managed to regress further into the abyss Read More
The men’s room of the New York Hilton was thick with cheap men’s cologne. Standing at a urinal was a tiny old man in a big suit, who seemed to disappear into the depths of the porcelain, a wisp of white hair flowing off his little head. Mickey Freeman, who played Private Zimmerman on Sergeant Read More
100 Strokes of the Brush
Before Bed, by Melissa Panarello, Grove Press, 176 pages, $22.
Contrary to what you might expect, 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed has almost nothing to do with hair-maintenance. The artfully obscured young thing on the cover of this book (she’s brushing a chunk of hair across her face) Read More
