Few people play the zipper quite like Ken Butler. Tucking a microphone down his pants, the Brooklyn-based musician counter- rhythmically zips and unzips his fly to a soundtrack of pre-recorded beats. He plays other instruments: His head doubles as a bongo drum, and he “scratches” a toothbrush across his teeth as adeptly as a D.J. Read More
Trash Talk
New York politicians have been talking about the city’s garbage crisis since the Koch administration. Many fine-sounding solutions have been put forward over the years, but the long-term problem hasn’t changed much. In fact, if anything, the crisis has gotten worse.
New York has lots of garbage and no place to Read More
Roger Lowenstein is a rare commodity: a financial journalist with no apparent ax to grind, who seems to understand the people and institutions he covers, and is more often right than wrong on the big issues that matter. While most of us were trying to figure out how mere mortals could participate in the latest Read More
On April 18, The Village Voice’s music editor Chuck Eddy was fired by Village Voice Media. Mr. Eddy is the 17th employee to leave the paper, either by resignation or termination, since Village Voice Media—then called New Times—assumed control in November. The paper lists 60 editorial positions on its masthead.
Last week, on the April Read More
By the jaded standards of the publishing trade, it shouldn’t have been disturbing to learn that author James Frey may have fudged the truth in his best-selling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
“For someone to style a book as a memoir and take liberties with strict factual accuracy of the account is not unusual,” Read More
In the hothouse world of New York’s private schools, where students are treated like rare and fragile flowers, the mere scent of a scandal is often enough to send a school into damage-control mode. Meetings are held, mediators are called, rumors are quashed like pesky little bugs.
So it was something of a surprise last Read More
Much has recently been made of the complaisance of boards of directors with respect to outrageous goings-on within the enterprises they’re supposed to watch over on behalf of the stockholders: fun and games encompassing everything from looting and fraud to weight-in-gold pay packages that the late Aga Khan would have considered excessive.
We all know Read More
Josh Sternfeld’s Winter Solstice, from his own screenplay, has been generally demeaned for its overabundance of usually praiseworthy qualities like subtlety, restraint and understatement. Still, for a first-time writer-director, Mr. Sternfeld is remarkably sure-footed as he tracks the travails of widower Jim Winters (Anthony LaPaglia) and his two rebellious teenage sons, high-school graduate Gabe (Aaron Read More
Wednesday 20th
Sunny D! Sunshine has given our city a tongue bath, transforming the gray, sodden streets into a blossomy (and pollen-infused) Brigadoon … but we say: Stand up for your right to be depressed anyway and lie on the couch watching celebrity poker! If you do venture out (or ” oot,” as our Canadian Read More
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, by Kurt Eichenwald. Broadway Books, 742 pages, $26.
The spectacular disintegration of Enron in 2001 left many shattered lives in its wake, both low-level workers whose pensions became worthless, and-at the other end of the culpability spectrum-executives, bankers and accountants who are now awaiting trial, sentencing or Read More
