Walt Disney announced a $200,000,000 write down on their calamitous flop John Carter today, and all over Hollywood pundits and producers are scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened. The consensus seems to be that Andrew Stanton (Pixar golden boy director… Read full post »

A remarkable event occurred last night on the carefully controlled, eye-popping pop culture marketing machine called The X Factor. In a bizarrely unscripted moment, a human being acted like an actual human being. More than that, more shocking but also more touching, more honestl… Read full post »

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we started reading the baby books.

The world seemed to be entirely populated with experts on child rearing, and the clamor of their contradictory advice left us stunned and bewildered. Breastfeeding was good; and bad. It… Read full post »

Much as I admire Paul Simon, I’m sick to death of his Greatest Hits collections. They’re relentless. Only the Mamas and the Papas (It seemed like they had one album and dozens of Greatest Hits albums) impose on our admiration and exploit our ‘completionist&r… Read full post »

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (with illustrations by Jules Feiffer). In honor of that milestone, Random House has put out a new edition, complete with essays by various notable fans on what the book meant to them,… Read full post »

This happened a while ago, back in the days of answering machines with tape cassettes. I made the call and taped it, and got Bob’s permission to type it up. He didn’t care. That was typical of him. I never did anything with those pages, though.… Read full post »

The gardeners are back today.

Collectively, working at different times at all the houses in the wealthy neighborhood where I rent a small house, the noise level they create renders this particular patch of luxury real estate almost uninhabitable throughout the s… Read full post »

     My Mom & her Mom, circa 1925

My Mother called me from inside her dream last night.

It wasn’t a psychic experience; she used her cell phone.

My own phone started ringing in the middle of the night. I lurched out of bed,… Read full post »

If things get bad enough, they can turn out pretty well.

That’s the lesson my friend Dave learned recently. A year ago he was in deep trouble, struggling to pay a three thousand dollar a month mortgage, one late payment away from foreclosure, his interest rate steadily… Read full post »

The film version of Thor was a smash hit a few weeks ago, the Captain America movie looks to surpass it at the box office this weekend, on the heels of The  two Fantastic Four films, two more featuring the Incredible Hulk,  and an entire franchise built around… Read full post »

The final episode of Friday Night Lights airs tonight, ending a scrappy five season run. It took  the DirecTV satellite network co-financing the show to keep it on the air, in a unique deal that allowed them to air Friday Night Lights before NBC. So for Sa/… Read full post »

It’s a common story: lovely small town or coastal community (Nantucket is both), languishes for years as the slightly seedy refuge for old money and new hippies, until the new rich people discover it, and start turning it into a warped version of their own gated communities… Read full post »

 So Peter Falk died last week, and someone posted the 41-year old video of his appearance on the Dick Cavett Show  with John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara. It was exhilarating to watch, but also sad and profoundly disturbing -- a time-capsule message from another era, or p… Read full post »

The critical consensus on the Todd Haynes Mildred Pierce HBO miniseries that began on Sunday night (and continues for the next two weeks) is that it’s slow and plodding and unimaginatively faithful to a corny and old fashioned book. The critics unanimously prefer the 1945… Read full post »

It was a long slog tonight on the 'big stage', with good singers choosing bad songs and bad singers making random noise that involved dramatic runs, emotive squinting and trite gestures. The gap is widening between the talented singers and the stage weight.

The nadir of the… Read full post »

It seems like a trivial matter, but the Weather Channel has changed it’s format: “Local on the Eights”, at least in my locality, has become “National on the Eights” with high tech graphics, glittery rhomboid flip screens, statistics about every cit… Read full post »

It’s great for  Robbie Rosen and Thia Megia and Stefano Langone and most of the other top 24 contestants on American Idol this season that the judges are so cuddly and generous and nice. It’s good for their parents, who must be so proud! It’s good for their home… Read full post »

I dreamed I was reading a book last night.

I mean, an actual book, with creamy linen pages and some gorgeous type-face (not a font!) -- Century Schoolbook? Garamond? -- inked deeply into the grain. The cracked leather cover and the silk endpapers made me think of… Read full post »

This autobiographical slide show first appeared on Douglas Glover's website Numero Cinq

Dog Days

For years I wanted a dog desperately. Wandering the stacks of the New York Society Library on 79^th street, I discovered the works of Albert Payson Terhune, and with… Read full post »

Dennis LeHane has finally published what will almost certainly be the last of his beloved Kenzie-Gennaro detective novels. In honor of the occasion (and to test drive my new Kindle) I downloaded all six, and read them in order, from A Drink Before the War, Darkness Take My Hand… Read full post »

The internet as we know it is officially doomed, as of today, and I’m already feeling nostalgic. Funny that a technology could move so fast across the landscape of my life – from a geeks-only fluke to a curiosity, to a useful tool, to a powerful engine of… Read full post »

I find it bizarrely ironic that Steve Martin’s recent interview at the 92^nd Street Y in Manhattan ended so badly. E-mailers from all across the country (the interview was shown to subscribers on closed-circuit TV) were invited to comment and they did, demanding les… Read full post »

Film director Irvin Kershner died today, at his home in Paris. He was 87 years old.  I hadn’t seen him since an extraordinary pair of meetings twenty-eight years ago, but he remains one of the most vivid figures I ever encountered in Hollywood.

I… Read full post »

Hawaii 5-0 (10:00, Mndays, CBS)is the most surprising new show on television. I dimly remember the original – a blunt and uninspiring police procedural with a palm tree background, shot mostly on sound stages, with its tough guy cop and ho-hum sidekick (“Book &lsquo/… Read full post »