Wednesday, January 4 2012
My Own Private Amazon
You’re a clever Casanova, Amazon. You knew if you could win my love with books, there’d be no stopping us.
Thursday, October 20 2011
Geniuses Are People, Too
Creative geniuses don’t succeed despite their flaws, they succeed because they are flawed.
Tuesday, September 27 2011
Just Another Pretty Woman: The Who’s Who of Hookers in Film
How did playing a prostitute or stripper become de rigeur for Hollywood actresses?
Tuesday, August 30 2011
Your Brain in the Voting Booth
President Obama may not be everything people’s brains deceived them into thinking he was, but he’s who he said he would be all along.
Tuesday, July 19 2011
Talking About My Generation, ‘Mad Men’ Style
Getting older during the '60s was a cruel fate: it was unfair; it was depressing. But, in some respects, it was a party compared to getting older these days.
Monday, June 20 2011
Where’s Woody?
What does an artist the caliber of Woody Allen do when he’s reached the pinnacle of his artistic accomplishment -- while only in his early 40s?
Wednesday, May 25 2011
Oprah May Say Goodbye, But I Say Hello
Not since the Beatles broke up has there been such a communal feeling of abandonment as there is with Oprah's final airing of The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Monday, March 21 2011
When Did Trying to Be Good Start Feeling So Bad?
Now don’t get me wrong—of course I believe in saving the planet (at least until scientists determine if there are other inhabitable planets with better mobile phone service), but there's gotta be a limit.
Wednesday, February 23 2011
In the Oft-Reviled Genre of Memoirs, Here are Some Memoirs to Love
A subgenre has emerged that should placate memoirphobes and please memoirfiles: the artist-teacher memoir.
Friday, January 14 2011
Gotta Be ‘In Treatment’
Loss is a necessary part of life, sure, but must it be a necessary part of TV?
Monday, November 1 2010
You’ve Got a Long Way to Go, Baby
Has this 2010 US campaign season turned into a referendum on women?
Tuesday, September 7 2010
Life in the Age of Authentic Artifice
We're mastering the art of presenting a persona rather than a person -- each becoming a distorted version of ourselves, further and further removed from the real thing.
Friday, July 9 2010
Brava, Bravo!
Those Bravo executives are tricksters, fooling me into believing familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt. I'm totally hooked.
Thursday, June 10 2010
When Did Quitting Become the New “Staying the Course”?
Simon Cowell, like Sarah Palin, did the honorable thing and quit for the sake of the people. Really?!
Tuesday, March 30 2010
Bad, Bad Girls
Sexual stereotyping reached a fever pitch this month; call it March Madness.
Friday, January 22 2010
Curse Ye, Orwell!
Orwell declared that there are “four great motives” for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. As for the rest of us...
Wednesday, January 13 2010
Portrait of the Artist…and Their Family
I’d rather hear superstars admit to egos gone wild than insist they uphold “family first” values if family first is not a reality for them.
Monday, December 14 2009
Kathy ‘Oprah’ Griffin?
We don’t need Oprah Lite or Oprah 2.0, we need someone who’s a true Oprah-in-Training. And the only person who can claim that title is... Kathy Griffin.
Monday, October 26 2009
Health Care in America has Gone to the Dogs
Compared to the modern-day American, their dogs have the best of everything: questionable intelligence (i.e., happiness), poor memories (i.e., forgiveness), and low expectations (i.e., contentment).
Thursday, September 10 2009
Jewish is Coolish…At Last!
My people can finally emerge from behind their nebbishy personas to assume their proper place in the coolness pantheon.
Wednesday, August 12 2009
The ‘Michael Jacksons’ and All Their Infuriating Complexity
Maybe it’s more fun to idolize or demonize public figures than to have more complex, mixed feelings about them.
Monday, July 6 2009
Expire, Please. Go Kaput. Die, Already.
It’s not a film, it’s a movie. It’s not a vinyl, it’s a record – and other trendy things that need to go forever bye-bye.
Wednesday, May 27 2009
In Treatment: Fantasy Therapy for All
Explorations of the outer limits of the patient/ therapist relationship titillate viewers with the possibilities of what could happen.
Thursday, May 7 2009
A Lament on the Deafening Silence of iPods
I miss your impulse to play your music LOUD, to draw me in, to irritate and offend me – and I miss my impulse to do the same to you.
Tuesday, March 17 2009
I Can Almost Taste It
For someone who wouldn’t know my mortars from my pestles, I seem to spend an awful lot of time observing chefs in action.
Tuesday, February 10 2009
Genius Persona(lities)
The mark of true genius is the effortless creation of something wholly new that, once seen, becomes self-evident.
Wednesday, January 14 2009
TV Egos Unbound
The small screen is no longer for small personalities or those without ambition or washed up has-beens.
Tuesday, November 11 2008
You’re Gonna Get a Lot More Girl Talk
Even though the presidential and vice-presidential candidates didn't win the posts they were gunning for, Americans have a lot of women winners, this election.
Thursday, October 16 2008
Hypocritic Oaths
The source of most hypocrisy in American politics is a moral certitude that is so unyielding, it’s almost bound to trip up the person espousing it.
Monday, September 8 2008
I Miss When Artists Were Artists Instead of Marketing Machines
Art has always had an uneasy relationship with commercialism. But that’s the point: it’s supposed to be uneasy.
Wednesday, June 18 2008
Anywhere, USA
It seems to me that people in the US are actually craving not change, as we're hearing in current campaign rhetoric, but rather sameness -- and more than ever.
Tuesday, April 29 2008
Broads Don’t Blog, Especially in Haiku
Broads can only thrive under certain social conditions, and those conditions, alas, no longer exist. But a new species has emerged...
Wednesday, April 2 2008
Obama, Clinton, and Cantaloupes
The media will keep playing YouTube videos and speculating about politicians’ intentions rather than doing the hard investigative work -- simply because they can.
Wednesday, March 12 2008
A Return to Rhetoric
Long past the days of the eloquent Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or John F. Kennedy, Americans have rediscovered the desire to be absorbed by words, stirred by words, even awed by words, again.
Monday, February 4 2008
A How-to for Hillary
How we want Hillary to appear before us says a whole lot more about us than it does about her.
Monday, December 10 2007
Trouble in Shopaholicstan
If those slim hipped, cigarette smoking, small-portion eating, fast-walking chic Parisians are going to flaunt their fashion sense in Jersey while taking advantage of the weak dollar, then we really must seal our borders.
Thursday, November 8 2007
Talk About G-generations
Members of the 'Generation After' are the ones who grew up in the shadows because the previous generation was blocking the sun.
Monday, October 1 2007
Can’t You Read the Signs?
Cars, guns, values, the US Constitution... like a yellow traffic light, their meaning and importance, relative to oneself, is open to interpretation.
Tuesday, September 4 2007
You Are Who You Know
If I want reading recommendations, Amazon, I’ll turn to people who really do know me. They’re called friends.
Monday, August 13 2007
The Lost in Translation Generation
Americans Need to Learn English…British English, that is!
Wednesday, July 11 2007
Vexed by Beauty
Whom next to blame for society’s infatuation with beguiling young women?
Monday, June 18 2007
Surrender Yourself to the Attack of the Comedians
The truth hurts, but in the wake of our welts and bruises, if we've been properly assaulted, we're still laughing.
Wednesday, April 11 2007
Please Do Not Remain Seated
Sometimes small gestures contain larger meanings. For me, the decision to sit rather than stand at a concert is a sign of giving up on the youthful exuberance that defines the rock concert experience.
Wednesday, March 14 2007
Gender Divides
Are celebrity “girls” really the only gender that’s “gone wild”? Or has the media gone mad -- and misogynistic?
Monday, February 12 2007
People Substitutes
Contrary to what Babs sang, people who need people might not be the luckiest people in the world, after all.
Tuesday, January 16 2007
Death Watch
Guessing whether a celebrity is dead or alive has become something of a modern-day parlor game.
Tuesday, December 12 2006
No! No! No!
Finally, a stand-up, face-off, clenched fists, chin in the air challenge to America's bullies.
Sunday, November 12 2006
Feel Better than You’ve Ever Looked Before
There's a quiet revolution happening in self-improvement: rather than addressing our lives from the inside-out, we're now addressing them from the outside-in.
Thursday, October 19 2006
Gay TV: Making Same-Sex Marriage Safe for America
At the same time that gay TV is shaping the culture, the culture is also shaping gay TV, containing it and restricting it from going "too far".
Tuesday, September 12 2006
A Need for Nerds
Now more than ever, as we stumble along the dark, uncertain path of These Troubled Times, we need our brainiacs to help illuminate the way.
Monday, August 14 2006
About Those People
People magazine is more than just a gossip rag or a teller of heartwarming tales: it's a secretly subversive publication, bent on reshaping society's attitudes about beauty and sexual desire.
Friday, July 21 2006
When Harry Met Sally It Was Soooo Sweet!
Call me crazy but I prefer to see movies about a relationship between two living, breathing (without assistance), fully functioning (but preferably super-neurotic) humans -- not a person and a ghost or a person and a spirit or a person and a coma victim who's teetering on the brink of life and death.
