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“It isn’t fashion until somebody wears it…”
When casting about helplessly on my own articles (or just putting off the inevitable), I like to randomly, briefly cruise through The Post archives and see what was up 10, 20, 45 years ago in the paper. Just now I came across this appreciation that Jura Koncius and Martha Sherrill wrote when Nina Hyde, the…
Read MoreQuirky is not what you think it is
People who know me best know about my New Mexico thing, which, unlike those people who occasionally go woo-woo and come back from vacation with a newfound Santa Fe jones, is legit and deep. My parents moved to New Mexico in the 1950s (Cold War, dad was an engineer) and stayed for a decade before…
Read MoreSNL Homowatch continues (4/17: Ryan Phillippe AND 4/24: Gabourey Sidibe)
This little effort has been instructive. After years of feeling like Saturday Night Live had “issues” (which were consequently resulting in gay-themed sketches and characters that weren’t as sharp or funny as the could be, needed to be), I started SNL Homowatch in March. Almost immediately, I noticed a decline in the very sort of…
Read MoreSpoon Fed WINNERS!
Raving about Kim Severson’s delish new memoir, Spoon Fed, last week, I offered a free copy to a lucky person who would write me an e-mail and explain why they wanted to read it. I got a lot of responses but had to pick one. Couldn’t pick just one, so I’m picking two: • Alan…
Read MoreI like Kim Severson’s SPOON FED so much I bought an extra copy and will give it to you, FREE, if you read this blog item
Kim Severson, one of the New York Times’ best feature writers (I hope you’ve been reading all her great stuff, not only in the Dining In/Dining Out section but also on the front page once in a while), has a new food memoir out, called Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life. I got…
Read MoreOh, to be able to sing like John Grant
The other night I went to the Black Cat to hear John Grant, who was the opening act for Midlake. Grant is a singer-songwriter who used to be in one of my favorite bands, the Czars. (I still recommend the Czars’ The Ugly People vs. the Beautiful People to anyone who ever asks what I…
Read MoreFreaky Friday
After the photo of the president’s line-editing style, now we get to go with him to Prairie Lights, the awesome bookstore next to the University of Iowa. This photo was on the front of the NYT today. This is what I like to do in bookstores, too: make fun of books that I think look…
Read MoreEditor in Chief
I was struck by this picture I saw on the New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, which they found on the White House’s Flickr photo account. Those are the president’s hands. That’s his health-care bill signing speech. [UPDATE: A couple of commenters here have said it isn’t Tuesday’s speech; I was going by some of the…
Read MoreOne-Man Book Club: The Room, the Chair, the Gadgets, the Bankers, and Bruddah Dan Kois takes us over Iz’s rainbow
Where were we? The one-man book club (which shall now be written as One-Man Book Club, after a unanimously ratified amendment to the One-Man Stylebook) is adrift. Members keep offering excuses: “I have too many TV reviews to write.” “I’m too goddamn tired.” “I feel too fat to blog.” “I would rather drink a little…
Read MoreTuxedo pants
It’s Oscar night again. For the first time in a long time, I’m not in Hollywood, sweating east-coast newspaper deadlines on a west-coast story and then medicating the adrenalin crash with alcohol once I stagger into the afterparties. (See above, courtesy vanityfair.com.) Right about now (11:30 a.m. PST), I’d be putting on my tuxedo for…
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