In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on furious rampages. Something about his rangy teen-age son particularly antagonized him—“Sam called Steve his nemesis,” Shepard’s mother wrote in her diary. “Sam, Sr. came to regard his only son as female,” … Read more
From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New Yorker noted in a review shortly after the restaurant’s opening) “hails from New Jersey but cooks more like a French countrywoman.” That may be true—the restaurant … Read more
There is a street in Naples, Via San Gregorio Armeno, where you can find shop after shop presided over by artisans whose specialty is building Nativity scenes out of papier-maché, terra-cotta, wax, and cloth. It is an art with roots in the eighteenth century, of which the Baroque crèche brought out by the Metropolitan Museum … Read more
One of my favorite jokes requires a little setup. It’s from the first “Naked Gun” movie, from 1988, starring Leslie Nielsen as the bumbling Los Angeles police detective Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley as his love interest Jane. During a fireside dinner, Drebin recounts a past heartbreak. “It’s the same old story,” he says. “Boy … Read more
My cat, Harriet, is curled up on the TV console when I walk into the living room. She blinks at me, slowly. Cats blinking at you is supposed to be a sign of affection. I blink back. “Look at you on the . . .” I trail off. What is she sitting on? A cabinet? … Read more
These days, C.K. occupies a strange place in the culture. He is in a cancellation limbo, joined by the likes of Chris Brown and Andrew Cuomo. C.K. isn’t too cancelled to perform several sold-out shows at the Beacon, but he’s cancelled enough that, if you manage to snag a ticket, you might not want to … Read more
There is something inspiring about an ugly building. I don’t mean high-concept ugly, like a brutalist tower, but rather a place that’s provisional, and purely functional, if barely—your Meadowlands, your Knights of Columbus halls, your strip malls. These are dumps, but our dumps. Among my own cherished dumps are old newsrooms. My first was the … Read more
It’s easy to think of music as ephemeral and essentially free, rather than a thing you can dotingly select, acquire, and present to your nearest and dearest. Yet music is a courageous and intimate gift. For decades, lovers—would-be; actual—have deployed painstakingly compiled mixtapes to communicate emotions that felt impossible to express otherwise. Music is a … Read more
It was somewhere on a deserted highway in Ohio at about 4 A.M., with a rain machine, while I was shooting “White Noise.” I think I felt, Oh God, I don’t know that I like doing this. That movie was just very difficult for me for several reasons. We shot during COVID, which was a … Read more
Each pot takes six to seven hours to build, with coils that she flattens into thick bands. She starts a new series by drawing the forms she has in mind, though the actual shape always emerges in the act of building; the clay is alive, she says, and it resists its maker. When she moved … Read more