The summer 2005 hits The Wedding Crashers and The Aristocrats have reinvigorated fans of brainy comedy. Back in the summer of 1998, one of the genre’s true geniuses, director and writer Harold Ramis, was filming Analyze This with Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro.
Harold Ramis, director of the movies you know cold, has a Read More
Seely, an unusual band out of Atlanta, has issued a very strong new album called Winter Birds . If this were the VH1 special, Winter Birds would have the band on the way up, about to hit it big, before the addictions and recriminations.
It’s hard to say just what kind of music Seely plays. Read More
Aimee Mann, a pop singer-songwriter whose career has been bedeviled by record company troubles, has released the catchiest, most straightforward songs of her career as part of the Magnolia soundtrack.
Ms. Mann scored her biggest hit in the mid-80′s, as frontwoman for the band ‘Til Tuesday, with “Voices Carry,” an angry anthem against a controlling Read More
IN NOVEMBER 1998, John Updike oh so quietly killed A Man in Full .
It was a clean kill. Issued from Mr. Updike’s New Yorker pulpit, the review of the big Tom Wolfe novel seemed mild, gentle and fair: ” A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest Read More
At the age of 43, Afel Bocoum, a singer, guitarist, songwriter and farmer, has made his debut album, Alkibar (“Messenger of the Great River”), and it’s a wonder.
This isn’t good-time music. It comes from Mali, a landlocked, drought-stricken country in West Africa. Played with acoustic instruments and gentle percussion, Alkibar has a modest sound, Read More
Ernest Hemingway was stupid. Haven’t you heard? It’s right there, in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine .
Hemingway has been called a lot of things over the years–vain, anti-Semitic, sexist–and now this.
This ultimate insult comes as an aside in an article on the supposed resurgence of American short fiction in the 90′s. Read More
It’s a … magazine.
Part Life , part Sunday newspaper silky, part Disney-Miramax house organ, part Stern , the first issue of Talk is sometimes dull, sometimes even laughable, but it has a pulse. With it, Tina Brown, who rescued Vanity Fair and razed The New Yorker , is making one last great argument for Read More
New York Feminists Stand By Their Bill, Not By Broaddrick
Needless to say, Hillary Rodham Clinton was a hit.
Even before midday on Wednesday, March 3, when the incredible beatifying First Lady was due to dazzle the sisters who lunch at the Women’s Leadership Forum, a component of the Democratic National Committee, she Read More
Kids on Clinton
Ever since the Presidential sex scandal became an unavoidable fact of life, some people have wondered if it has had a corrupting influence on children. To find out, the New York World interviewed kids in Central Park, Stuyvesant Square and Battery Park City, all with the permission of their parents. Judging by Read More
Harold Ramis, director of the movies you know cold, has a comedy problem. No, it isn’t quite enough for him that he has directed or written most of the top-grossing comedies of his generation–from the hellacious Animal House (1978), which he wrote with National Lampoon founder Doug Kenney and Lampoon writer Chris Miller; to the Read More
