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A World of Music
•A few weeks ago, the Paris-based world music ensemble Les Yeux Noirs performed at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live. Led by brothers Olivier and Eric Slabiak, violin virtuosos who are the Paris-born grandchildren of Polish Jewish immigrants, Les Yeux Noirs played improvisations on Russian, Yiddish, Romanian and Roma… -
The Sayings of Chairman Levine
•"When is a dirty bathroom a broken window?" This is the question that opens Michael Levine's recently published business tome, "Broken Windows, Broken Business" (Warner Business Books). Levine is a successful Hollywood publicist. I am indebted to him forever for one of my most memorable Tommywood moments -- a séance… -
COMEDY MATTERS (Albert Brooks)
•"After 9/11, all I did was sit around and be scared," Albert Brooks told me recently. "After a year and a half," Brooks now says, "I just got tired of it." He wondered, "Why isn't this being processed? Do we never mention it?" Looking at what Hollywood was releasing to… -
Fight of the Century
•Joe Louis' boxing match against Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 1938 remains one of the great sporting events of the 20th century -- even though the fight in front of nearly 70,000 spectators lasted all of two minutes and four seconds. Some 67 years after that fateful night of… -
Larry David Died for our Sinsw
•Larry David, the producer-writer-star of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has just finished airing the fifth season of his HBO program. Many people find him hilarious. Others find him annoying in the extreme. Both are right, of course, and David builds his humor out of this particular intersection of pain and pleasure.… -
Crystal Clear (700 Sundays)
•Billy Crystal has something he wants to share with you. Crystal has had a diverse and varied career, with plenty of ups and downs, as a stand-up comic, a TV performer and a movie actor. On the one hand, he starred in "When Harry Met Sally," a movie that convinced… -
The Painted Bird - Revisited
•Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published "The Painted Bird" by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty. In the years leading up to and following Kosinski's 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a… -
The Great Question (Who We Are)
•THIS WEEK'S COLUMN WAS A COVER STORY IN THE JEWISH JOURNAL OF LOS ANGELES (and a pretty funny cover -- so I thought I'd share it with you). We're almost halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. Not a bad time to assess "Who We Are." "Who We… -
In Search of Himself (Bruce Goldsmith's "When It Comes to Women")
•The High Holidays are always a good time to reflect, and this year, as I was serially sermonized in ways both inspirational and depressing, I was asked to consider that we can always start anew — that, as the dorm posters used to say, “Today is the first day of… -
Who's Your Mummy?
•On a day when a hot desert wind whipped through town, I found myself in a darkened chamber contemplating death and the afterlife — not my own, for a change, but rather that of the ancient Egyptians. Currently the L.A. area is hosting two world-class exhibitions of ancient Egyptian artifacts:… -
Wiesenthal The Collector
•Simon Wiesenthal died last month at 96 in his sleep at his home in Vienna. This seems particularly fitting, since Wiesenthal spent the last 60 years troubling the sleep of Nazi war criminals, their henchmen, collaborators and supporters. During the Holocaust, 89 members of Wiesenthal’s extended family were murdered, including…