Some of you may have seen the piece a few weeks ago in the New York Times—I know, nobody reads the Times anymore, they’re all watching Bill O’Reilly—it was about the Fine Art photographer Richard Prince.

Prince takes photographs of other people&rsqu… Read full post »

In autumn 1966, residents around Charleston and Point Pleasant, West Virginia started seeing some strange stuff. The territory took on a new meaning of “flyover country” when the Scarberry couple reported being chased, at speeds exceeding 100 mph, by a giant winged beast with glowi… Read full post »

 A WRITER whom I too often quote and whom I will therefore not now name, once dissed photography. I paraphrase: “Photography, the laziest of the arts. True, some photographs are more attractively mounted than others. But who should get the credit? The photographer? The camera… Read full post »

Everybody bitches about the Patriot Act, but nobody does anything about it.

I was never keen on the rapid fire Big Brother patter of George Dubious Bush fresh after 9/11. Just as with the current Stimulus bills (collect ‘em all), the Patriot Act and its related buffoonery were spo… Read full post »

…But of course, they already are. I know this is where most people start rolling their eyes and carping that if The Government had Its way, we’d still have blacksmith shops and affordable housing. (And actually we do—blacksmithery—horses are still shod, y… Read full post »

I wouldn’t be the first to notice that the two biggest films of 1976 were sports pictures. And oddball sports pictures at that. The bigger, of course, involved an incoherent side of beef and his “second chance/long-shot” slugfest with the Ali-esque Great Black Hype. In second/… Read full post »

I knew this day was coming.

There I was, in a not high-end clothing store, looking for a specific item. Didn’t find it—and grew frustrated. Then it hit me: the item I was looking for had been in stock about nine years ago. That’s the first real sign of age,… Read full post »

Sure, The Amityville Horror is shameless. It was shameless from the day that Ronnie DeFeo changed his plea to “musta been speerits” from “it was the mob.”

This shameless plea-whoring was followed by a shameless book, a shameless media campaign, a shameless movie.

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Paul Theroux—author of Mosquito Coast—remarks that in the fifties, it was really something to say that you wanted to be a Writer. The reason being that writers in the day were a select and rarified company, not generally seen and somewhat reserved. A class apart. “You didn’t s/… Read full post »

I won’t tell you the name of the city in which I live—not because puzzling you is the nature of my game so much as I have lived and/or traveled variously in this country—and I think it helps the general narrative not to nail it down. Let me at least… Read full post »

Merv Griffin has passed on. As a second rung (or lower) celebrity, this means the inevitable “Secret Gay Life” cover story on the Enquirer or Star. It also means the most relevant cable channel lighting a candle for you. In Merv’s case, this meant Game Show Network marathonin/… Read full post »

 Somewhere in the terminal miles of Nevada, with its spooky ultramarine lakes and bone-white deserts, I slipped in Phantom Planet’s California. The song hit the last note as we blasted by the Cali welcome sign, with cinematic precision. I’d also spun the tune in ’03, coming acr… Read full post »

Here I am, twenty years old, back from a steamy day of showing off in college. Typically, I’m stretched out on my bed with some novel or course assignment. I’m thinking great thoughts. I think at the time, I was working on a screenplay for a comedy adventure called The Tom… Read full post »