The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst. Bloomsbury, 438 pages, $24.95.
The title of Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Line of Beauty, refers to, amongst other things: Hogarth’s theory of pictorial composition; the line of cocaine snorted by the book’s hero, Nick, from the back of a Henry James novel; and the snaking line Read More
When Kurt Andersen wandered into the living room at a recent Manhattan dinner party and noticed a stack of firehouse-red Netflix DVD envelopes sitting on the coffee table, he felt an instant sense of belonging. “It’s become this tiny badge of cultural brotherhood,” said Mr. Andersen, who’s been making his way through Netflix’s vast catalog Read More
Blaming Bad Lot in Life,
Man Helps Self to DVD’s
Stores are getting shrewder when it comes to combating shoplifters. But then again, shoplifters seem to be getting a bit shrewder themselves. On July 23, an employee of the Blockbuster at 1251 Lexington Avenue approached a man after spotting him pocketing numerous DVD’s.
What a difference a month makes. From mid-January through mid-February, the Danese Gallery mounted an overview of contemporary abstract painting and sculpture titled Abstract Redux . On the evening of Valentine’s Day, Danese opened its current exhibition. Titled Fei Fei Drawings , it features the recent works on paper of Bill Jensen, the American abstract Read More
A few weeks ago, I
got a lesson in courtship from my father. It started when I told him that I’d
been dating a man who said he liked my apartment, with its Moroccan
painted-wood pieces and flea-market finds.
“That’s terrific,” my father said. “That means he’s interested .”
“Because he said he Read More
Tweak This
Hey, editor–don’t tweak my copy! Don’t massage it or rejigger it or anything! Watch out!
After the cute introductory remarks of the lede, it’s time for the “nut ‘graph”–the paragraph that tells you what’s really going on. So what is going on? Editors use their own cheap jargon, even though they’re big Read More
It didn’t seem like a good omen at first, what the video store clerk said. I’d gone to my local Blockbuster to rent a copy of Badlands , the legendary Terrence Malick debut, because I’d been whipped into a frenzy of nostalgia and curiosity about the classics of 70′s cinema by Peter Biskind’s forthcoming book Read More
