I have always had a soft spot for Brazil. I spent the summer after high school graduation there, and my wife and I spent our honeymoon there. I love the people, the music, the food and the spirit that Brazilians carry with them as effortlessly as they dance the samba. But I never imagined my […]
One night many, many years ago, I was at The Comedy Store on amateur night when Robin Williams walked in off the street and jumped onto the stage. For the next 45 minutes, the air inside the club turned into nitrous oxide as Williams made us all feel a bit brighter, a bit wittier, a […]
Several months after my mother died, I had to clean out her apartment in New York. The apartment had sold, the co-op board had approved the new buyers, the closing was imminent. The apartment had to be delivered empty. This was the apartment I had grown up in, where my parents had lived, where my […]
“See Jane shlep, Shlep, Jane shlep, Shlep, shlep, shlep.” This is not your parent’s primer. This is “Yiddish With Dick and Jane,” a new parody by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, who will be reading their work this Sunday, Sept. 19 at the Skirball Cultural Center. The story of how Dick and Jane came to […]
One hundred years ago, Einstein was a Zurich Polytechnic teaching graduate who couldn’t land a job in academe. Instead, he got a position as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. Not the most challenging job, but it gave him time to think. Einstein liked to conduct what he called “thought experiments,” one of which asked: […]
Reading “The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel” (W. Norton & Co., 2002) in paperback, edited by Babel’s daughter, Nathalie, got me thinking about Jewish gangsters and tough guys. Babel was born in Odessa in 1894. He wrote of Odessa’s Jewish underworld and its gangsters in sparkling prose. Fifty years before Mario Puzo gave us “The […]
Put down your “Da Vinci Code.” Set aside your “South Beach Diet.” Let your kaballah red string drop off your wrist. I’m here to alert you to the next pop cultural phenom: a 12th-century philosopher popularly known as the Rambam. Just a few weeks ago, I attended the “Aloud” reading series at the Los Angeles […]
Read More… from Rambamalama (The Rambam, Rabbi Leder and Julie Salamon)
Tommywood was expecting a Hollywood moment. Publicity guru extraordinaire Michael Levine had arranged for me to meet legendary Producer Robert Evans at his longtime lair, Woodland, the former home of Greta Garbo. I turned north of Sunset Boulevard and, like William Holden, wondered what I was getting myself into. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate […]
Read More… from The Kid Still Stays in the Picture (Robert Evans)
It’s Sunday night and a half-dozen people are onstage at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica. Jumpin’ Jim Beloff and his wife, Leapin’ Liz, are leading the sold-out crowd as they strum their ukuleles and sing “Farewell.” This is the climax to Uketopia, Beloff’s annual celebration of that four-stringed wonder: the ukulele. It is an […]
Read More… from Playing in Uketopia (Jim Beloff and the ukelele)
Among the allergens being released this June is a remake of “Around the World in 80 Days,” the Jules Verne novel that launched a thousand travel articles. Perhaps Jackie Chan will inhabit the role of Passepartout in a fashion that surpasses the achievements of Cantinflas, “the world’s greatest comedian,” according to Charlie Chaplin, a person […]
Earlier this month I attended the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation research benefit for stem-cell research. Although James Taylor’s five-song set and Nancy Reagan’s acceptance speech were each memorable and moving, what I found myself thinking about most that evening was Eric Lax’s new book “The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat” (Henry Holt & Company, $25), […]
Read More… from Breaking the Mold (Eric Lax’s book on the discovery of penicillin)
The last episode of “Friends” airs May 6, and while we may all express a collective sigh of relief at the end of more than a year of shameless hype and exploitation, it doesn’t mean that we can’t stop to reflect on this moment in American cultural history. Or that we don’t care about whether […]