A performer has obligations to her audience, of course, but jazz singer Tierney Sutton believes that the audience also has obligations to the performer: to be alert, to be present, to listen acutely. “And if I can’t be in that state,” she says, “I don’t go.” For her, music is a spiritual act, an …
It is generally disappointing to meet someone whose work you admire. Or is it? Chris Benz, design chief at Bill Blass, tested this precept when fate put him in a voice-over studio with film-maker Wes Anderson. Benz’s conclusion: Project Runway was a force for good. No, wait: he does make this curiously persuasive assertion, …
Blue Angel? Household Saints? Mister Monkey? How to pick a favorite Francine Prose novel? I’m just glad to live in a country where we can have them all. For now. (Cue sinister music.) And for the foreseeable future. (Cue reassuring music.) Great writer, great talker, great afternoon. Plus non-sinister music from Aquiles Navarro and … Continue reading »
Is there a Henry Higgins of movement? We can often tell where people are from by the way they talk, but can we do that from the way they walk? Choreographer Yvonne Rainer says no. Dance writer Wendy Perron says yes. A conversation about the dance world of the sixties, with some amiable disagreement. … Continue reading »
He’s framed a ticket to the World Series game Sandy Koufax did not pitch and a sheet of Freud’s stationery on which the great man did not write. In the second of a two-part episode recorded at JCC Manhattan, Jonathan Safran Foer describes the pleasures of the non-event and the joys of possessing archaeological … Continue reading »
By letting us not only understand but inhabit its characters, does a novel reveal the commonality of human experience or demonstrate our differences? Both, of course, but Jonathan Safran Foer is particularly sympathetic to the former. In the first of a two-part episode recorded at JCC Manhattan, we discuss the joys of intimacy and … Continue reading »
Iceland is a paradise for writers, with its highly literate population, generous government grants and total absence of cockroaches. Unfortunately there are only 330,000 Icelanders, so even if they all buy your book your horizons are limited. Fortunately that’s why the novelist (and print-maker, and translator and more) Hallgrímur Helgason visited America. A conversation at the … Continue reading »
For 33 years, he was David Letterman’s music director and comic sideman, a career that began in Canada with the Toronto production of Godspell, as did those of Gilda Radner, Martin Short, and Andrea Martin. Some production! Some careers! And now what? What do you do when your job ends after three decades? Savvy … Continue reading »
If you want to write about the Arctic, must you visit the Arctic? The splendid writers Jim Shepard and Joshua Ferris think not. Are they asserting: write about what you don’t know? It’s complicated. And delightfully so. A conversation about actual landscapes and landscapes of the imagination, at the Center for Fiction, with music … Continue reading »
As a New Yorker, you “spend a very significant amount of time in public,” notes Justin Davidson, architecture and music critic for New York magazine, “encountering other people who behave and dress and think differently from you.” I say that this makes us morally superior to the car-bound denizens of Houston. He demurs: “I don’t … Continue reading »
Diane Arbus’s old contact sheets include images she never meant us to see, so would perusing them violate her rights as an artist? Photographer Benjamin Swett says he’d look at them with pleasure, and he makes a persuasive case that he’s not going to hell. Plus, the invention of the circular saw and celibacy reconsidered: surprisingly … Continue reading »
Nachshon was the first Israelite into the Red Sea – before God parted the waters. So, commited activist or blind follower? Much has been said about leaders, less about what we value in the rank and file. Ruth Messenger has thought about both, as a city council member, as Manhattan borough president, in her … Continue reading »
DJ Alan Freed, who might have coined the term “rock’n’roll,” was destroyed in the payola scandals of the fifties, but he was no more corrupt than his colleagues, says Kenny Vance. And Freed staged some of the first integrated rock shows. Does this mitigate his conduct? Sharp ideas about radio, rock, and the invention … Continue reading »
Some people who’ve profoundly affected our cultural life are esteemed by their colleagues but little known to us civilians. Actor Michael Urie, admired by both groups, reflects on one such person, James Houghton, founder of the Signature Theater. Plus transit tips and gift advice. With music from Patrick Farrell. A conversation in conjunction with the … Continue reading »