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Spies, Celebs, Classics and More — Good Reads are Coming Up
•Among the most daunting questions I’m often confronted with is: “What should I read next?†Recently, I traveled to the depths of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York for BookExpo 2009, the annual American Bookseller’s gathering, where I crisscrossed the convention floor, Indiana Jones-like, to gather publishers’… -
Design with a "Z" (Lajos Kozma and Szalon)
•Lajos Kozma. Photo courtesy Szalon Can a piece of furniture convey the story of Hungarian Jewry or reveal the genius of a little-known master? The story of a career undercut by anti-Semitism and cut short by death? This weekend's "Legends of La Cienega Design Walk" (May 7-9) offers a celebration… -
JEWBALL: From First NBA Basket to Major League Umping
•Who knew? Who knew that basketball has a storied Jewish past, or that a non-sports guy like me would ever read, no less enjoy, a book about baseball umpires, Bruce Weber's "As They See 'Em" (Scribner, 2009)? Maybe it's because Passover is a time of miracles - or is that… -
City of Images
•Los Angeles has long held a fascination with the visual; beholden to looks, surfaces and images, it is a city where even the buildings seem to strike a pose. So it might seem surprising that until now, there's never been an institution here devoted to photography. But that all changes… -
Laud the Life of Sid Grauman, Hollywood's Gold Standard
•Ever wonder how the movie industry went from five-cent nickelodeons in New York to the glamour of Hollywood with red carpet premieres and the highest of artistic aspirations? Or why a certain pagoda-like Hollywood movie theater in whose courtyard rest footprints of actors is one of the most beloved and… -
Zap! Pow! Bam!
• •Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's two Jewish kids from Cleveland! The fact that Superman, the defender of truth, justice and the American way, as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, was not so much from Krypton as, in the words of cartoon… -
Holocaust Movies: Winners & Losers
• •"The Reader" Are Holocaust movies good for the Jews? Or even, for that matter, for society at large? This year's offerings include "Defiance," a story of a group of Jews who were heroic resistance fighters; "The Reader," a story of post-war revelation about a Nazi woman who beds down with… -
Tom is.... (facebook and my generation)
• •Tommywood is ... Tom is ... on Facebook. Aren't you? If you read this column online and are not on Facebook, you will soon be. The Facebook wave has now washed over my generation, the "late baby boomers." In the last two months, the number of people in my crowd… -
"Breakdowns" & The "Maus" that roared (or Art Spiegelman through the looking glass)
• •Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist whose graphic memoir, "Maus," won a Pulitzer Prize, was in town recently to promote a reissue of "Breakdowns," a collection of his underground comics work first published in 1978. As Spiegelman pointed out to me, his name in German means "Mirror Man" (mine means "Pond-wood") --… -
The Grammy Museum: The Culture We Keep
• •The Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, the Venus de Milo, Van Gogh's "Starry Night," Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," Pete Seeger's banjo, the handwritten lyrics to Grandmaster Flash's "The Message." You might wonder what all these cultural artifacts have in common. But as of Dec. 6, they can all be seen… -
"Doc" The Life and Fictions of Harold Humes
• •Watching wasted genius, a life gone wrong, is compelling and poignant, but with "Doc" airing December 9, at 10PM on PBS' Independent Lens (Check your local listings for actual times), we feel much more like guests doing a post-mortem on a private party where the drinks may have been dosed.… -
Wild about Diamond
•David Wild wants you to know that he is an unabashed Neil Diamond fan. So much so that he has written a book titled, "He Is ... I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond" (Da Capo Press) that is less biography, according to Wild, than…