My daughter Sarah was in town to speak to students at her alma mater, the Academy at Charlemont, about her careeer in modeling and comedy and her work at the non-profit UROK. Then we went back to New York where she introduced me to soup dumplings (yum!) at the Kung […]
At a tag sale several years ago, I found three paintings by an amateur artist that I thought I might donate to the Museum of Bad Art, which was located in my hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts, and has since relocated to Somerville. Two of the paintings showed lovers lounging in […]
Just arrived in Toronto for a visit to the Yorkville neighborhood and the entertainment district courtesy of the Hazelton Hotel and the Soho Metropolitan. Flew in on Porter Airways. Yorkville is a friendly brick-lined neighborhood where high-rise buildings rub shoulders with old fashioned houses, The Hazelton Hotel fits right […]
I have a weekly Skype meeting with my friend Vince Walker in Huntington Beach (Surf City), California, but it was fun to meet in person with him and his wife Atsuko when they made a whirlwind trip to the East Coast this weekend. We had brunch at the Cushman […]
So why was the theology professor walking up and down the New York waterfront counting to ten in the language of the Mendi? The story of the slave ship Amistad is one that is often simplified to make Americans feel good about their country: a group of Africans enslaved in […]
In yet another attempt to throw some stuff out, I tackled some old magazines I’d been saving, including a pile of old New Yorkers in a box with some of my mother’s things. I started reading through them, and “Nope. Can’t toss these, Too entertaining.” Cast in point an article […]
You know how it is when you make one of those giant beach books your own. It’s a bit of a pain to lug around, but you go to it for daily sustenance month after month after month. You know, like Nicholas and Alexandra, or a Michener tome. And then […]
I’m always curious about old books I find all by themselves at tag sales held by people who are manifestly not bookish.I once found a volume of Yeats in a driveway littered with things ordered from TV ads – vegetable dicers, sandwich makers and nordic traks. It was in a […]
Driving my scooter home from my favorite pub, I saw a paperback in the road. It was a book by Judy Blume, and my daughter is a big fan of hers; and I saw from the blurb on the back that it’s set in Martha’s Vineyard, where I and my […]
I’m having a rollicking good time reading John Allen’s autobiography: Marmite Cowboy. Or perhaps I should say a bollocking good time, since John is well-known hereabouts as the founder and lead singer of the Big Bad Bollocks, a wildly popular pub rock band that toured the US and the UK […]