By Seymour Krim From Shake it For the World, Smartass 1965 I met Kerouac only twice, both for brief periods of not more than 15 minutes, and communication between us was abrupt and unreal. What I wrote about the man and writer was the result of feeling, experience and...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair June 1992 New York is a city famous for its talkers, its riffers, rappers, and raconteurs. But let’s face it, a lot of them are seriously overrated—depend on canned routines and canned Attitude, self-congratulatory cynicism and stale camp...
By Richard Ben Cramer Rolling Stone March 1984 How was I out to lunch? Let me count the ways. I was new to magazines, never having written for a national publication, much less for ROLLING STONE. I was a newspaperman, just returned from the Middle East—a bit unsteady,...
By Paul Slansky The Village Voice March 1979 On February 4, 1974, Albert Brooks walked on the stage of The Tonight Show for the 22nd time. His past performances had included some of the funniest bits ever seen on the show: an impressionist whose imitation of various...
By Helen Lawrenson Show 1964 Collected in Latins Are Still Lousy Lovers It would seem that John Huston has an obsessive to make movies the hard way. He picks the most difficult, inaccessible, uncomfortable, even dangerous, locations—where almost everyone in the...
By Charles Simic Harvard Review Fall 2003 In one of Berenice Abbott’s photographs of the Lower East Side, I recall a store sign advertising Silk Underwear. Underneath, there was the additional information about “reasonable prices for peddlers.” How interesting, I...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter April 7, 2010 I met Pete Dexter last fall when he was in New York promoting his seventh novel, Spooner. Dexter was a wonderful newspaper columnist and is now one of our greatest novelists. First thing I noticed about him was that he was...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker November 17, 1986 For seven decades of romantic screwball comedies, sexy, smart, funny women have been waking up heroes who, through fear or shyness or a stuffy educational background, were denying their deepest impulses. The women...
By Charles Simic From Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell 1992 Preface I have a dream in which Joseph Cornell and I pass each other on the street. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. I walked the same New York neighborhoods that he did between 1958...
By Bill Zehme Spy April 1987 I remember Lee as he himself—were he able to remember anything now, God rest his soul—would have wanted to be remembered. Of this I am certain. Why, it was just two years ago when we huddled together in our booth at the Russian Tea Room,...
By Michael Sragow The Boston Phoenix March 5, 1985 Now that it’s arrived in its uncut, 227-minute, director-approved form, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America emerges as a pulp masterwork—at once the simplest and most indescribable of movies. In a sense, it’s...
By Seymour Krim The New York Times November 1973 Both articles are collected in Krim’s You and Me. Part One: Won’t You Come Home, Jimmy Breslin? A friend of mine who works for UPI airmailed Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight yesterday (two pesetas...
