By Mark Jacobson New West August 30, 1976 The zooty mobiles are rolling slow and sweet up the Strip. In front of the Roxy there’s style a block long. Hats, satin, dudes with their names rhinestoned on their eyeglass lenses, jumpsuits emblazoned with the word “coke,”...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice Late ’80s [Date Unknown] Collected in No Success Like Failure On the third step of the entrance to the Palace Hotel on the Bowery and Third Street I catch an unmistakable whiff of aging vomit; halfway up the steep concrete stairs I...
By John Schulian Bronx Banter April 19, 2012 As soon as they heard Levon Helm was coming, the guys in the band began to imagine him sitting in with them, playing the drums, maybe even singing “The Weight.” It was one of the songs they did when they got together on...
By Dick Schaap Playboy January 1967 Lenny Bruce fell off a toilet seat with a needle in his arm and he crashed to a tiled floor and died. And the police came and harassed him in death as in life. Two at a time, they let photographers from newspapers, magazines and TV...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker June 29, 1987 Chicago circa 1930—AI Capone’s capital of crime—looks so much better than New York City looks right now that local audiences for The Untouchables may feel somewhat chagrined. Chicago still has solid traces of Louis Sullivan...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter May 23, 2003 The Fan Who Wasn’t There I worked for Joel and Ethan Coen for roughly one year, between the late summer of 1996 through the fall of 1997. I had been working as an apprentice film editor when I went to work for the guys, first as...
By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 (Collected in Splendor in the Short Grass) There are sixteen seats in the first-class compartment of the Continental 747 flight from L.A. to El Paso, and the tushy blonde stewardess greeting the boarding passengers beams the usual...
By Paul Hemphill Southern Voices Magazine 1970s (Collected in Too Old to Cry) On the Kansas City Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and will help him if he gets...
By Eve Babitz American Film 1987 Whenever I think about James Woods, it is either as the affront he was in Split Image, where he plays the cure almost worse than the disease for a family who wants to have their kid deprogrammed from some Moonie-type cult, or else—and...
By Hilton Kramer The New York Times 1964 Edward Hopper has long been a living classic of American art. This is not always the happiest fate for an American artist. Often it means only that a lucky formula was hit upon early in a career that was thereafter sustained by...
By Ross Macdonald Show January 1965 A producer who last year was toying with the idea of making a television series featuring my private detective Lew Archer asked me over lunch at Perino’s if Archer was based on any actual person. “Yes,” I said. “Myself.” He gave me...
By Pat Jordan Inside Sports 1980 This is a story about Southern California, and baseball, and sex, and fame, and wealth, and beauty, and the American Dream. It is a story about a famous athlete and his beautiful wife and the life they live in that rarefied atmosphere...
