“I’ve not left Manhattan in two and a half years,” Marc Spitz told The Observer over breakfast in a chic West Village café last week. “When I turned forty, I was just like, buckle down, do good work, do whatever it takes.”
He paused and rubbed his forehead, “Don’t drink with actors.”
The 41 year-old music journalist-cum-biographer-cum-novelist-cum-playwright laughed from behind his tortoise-shell sunglasses which were concealing a hangover. Read More
Wednesday night, as The Observer crossed the West Side Highway at Bank Street and walked over to Pier 49, the pink-orange sun was reflecting onto the Hudson River, and people had filled the surrounding patches of grass, waiting for the official unveiling of a new public artwork by artist Jon Morris called Reflecting the Stars, Read More
“You see, everyone thinks they’ve got it,” said Arne Gundersen.
The president of the Actor’s Equity Foundation and a judge of Broadway.tv’s new competition Next Broadway Star and I were standing by the side of the still empty red carpet for the competition’s first of four rounds on Monday, at the unlikely venue of McDonalds Read More
Broadway box offices took a major blow due to Hurricane Irene last week, with total grosses dropping 39 percent from the $20-million figure that shows earned the previous week, according to statistics provided by the Broadway League.
The sizeable drop is the result of Broadway shows being shuttered on their two most profitable days, Saturday Read More
After a two-day hurricane delay, the Metropolitan Opera’s third annual Summer HD Festival, which presents previously recorded Met performances in glorious high-definition video in Lincoln Center Plaza, will begin tonight.
The canceled screenings, of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (1843) and Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra (1857), which were scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, respectively, will not be rescheduled, Read More
Geometry is destiny, at least in the work of Peter Halley, whose Day-Glo prisons, cells and conduits have been familiar icons since the mid-’80s. Mr. Halley has proved to be reliably consistent, from his choice of acid-hued paints to his use of Roll-A-Tex, a gritty product that lends his work an architectural edge. At first glance, the artist’s airy studio at 526 West 26th Street, filled with rows of colorful paint containers surrounded by canvases in various stages (and dominated by a huge classical cast of Poseidon that Mr. Halley acquired from the Athens Museum), could be a day-care center for child prodigies. But Mr. Halley, 57, who recently stepped down as director of Graduate Studies in Painting at Yale, has an enviably stable midlife career. Read More
Michelangelo da Caravaggio was not, technically, a Renaissance man—that era was over by the time he was born, in 1571—but he was, by all accounts, a versatile pain in the ass. The painter was a punk. He bragged. He went for broke. He beat people up, and people beat him up. To the same acute degree that he lacked a neighborly disposition, Caravaggio also lacked a fine business sense, a noble decency, a funnybone, and an inclination to pick up the tab. He welshed on everyone. When his Roman landlady seized his effects for nonpayment of rent, in 1605, “the said Michelangelo came and threw so many stones at the shutters of my windows that he broke them all down one side,” as she claimed in court. But he was too precious for his patrons to part with; the said Michelangelo was rescued from his snafu. Such snafus seem to have been the status quo. We do not know exactly how Caravaggio died; we do know that “fucked-over cuckold” was an epithet he used “fairly frequently.” Read More
This morning it was revealed that Larry Gagosian got maybe the deal of this young decade, paying $36.5 million for the Harkness Mansion. Five years ago, it sold for a record-setting $53 million, and it has quietly been sitting on the market for a good bit less than that.
Broker Sami Hassoumi told Read More
Home to Walt Whitman, the father of American poetry, Brooklyn has raised Henry Miller and inspired Hart Crane and Truman Capote, among many others. And in today’s Brooklyn, of course, the literati teem through the streets – it’s difficult to buy a coffee these days without tripping over Jonathan Safran Foer or Jhumpa Lahiri en Read More
The people gathered at the downstairs floor of McNally Jackson books last week were excited. Or, more specifically, the mostly young, mostly female audience eagerly awaiting the arrival of David Nicholls, the British author of One Day, was excited.
“I just want to thank you for writing One Day,” one voice piped up, as Mr. Read More
