When I heard that A. had changed his name, I wasn’t a bit surprised. With its faint whiff of geriatric mitteleuropa, it had marked him as the child of survivors: the green shoot risen from the ashes of the camps. We were all Jewish, the majority of us children of immigrants, but the differences that ...

The Strand Bag-oisie has come out in full force for the finale. Time was when I could abjure membership as one of them, but in the past three weeks I have developed my own fanatical and proprietary devotion. The night before last, because I can now officially not get enough of him, I watched Woody ...

Life folded in on itself like a collapsed star last night. Walking into the lobby of an apartment building on the Upper East Side to attend a friend’s book party, who should be leaving at exactly the same moment but Woody and Soon Yi themselves. I was briefly overcome by a moment of disorientation at ...

The sound is the protest of live flesh being stripped from bone; a violent ripping as the electrical tape is pulled from its roll. Against the Envelope White windowsills and Mushroom colored doorframes, its aggressively black presence is an affront. Once it is smoothed tightly along the seams of the room, the knobs on the ...

This will be short. Manhattan should really have been it for me. I feel like I shot my wad on that post. I walked out of Film Forum on air after that screening, and I walked back yesterday as though I was wearing a lead hat. I hadn’t seen either of the films on the ...

There is a Japanese word for it, I am sure. A word I probably even knew at one time (now there’s money well-spent on my East Asian Studies major). It had to do with poetry and a kind of punning resonance, a use of certain characters or phrases that made reference to ancient and classic ...

Am I so far down the rabbit of Woody-love that my critical faculties have taken a powder? Or have recent personal upsets so thinned my skin to the point where anything resembling a complex human emotion or an insight into relationships is enough to evoke tender feelings in me? What next? Will I be seen ...

Time to make the angst-y, Jewish donuts. It’s already half-past-eight in the evening and I haven’t yet written up today’s post, and with each passing minute that I waste, say, eating supper or paying bills or returning the calls of people who tried to reach me while I was spending five hours at the movies, ...

The holiday season is over and the New Year under way. The only ones who can now come to a movie in the middle of the day are officially those firmly in my cohort: the old, the halt, the lonely. Two eighty-plus-year-old men in front of me—still in their anoraks despite the fifty degree weather—talk ...

It’s a good deal more crowded here on New Year’s Eve Day, with a heretofore unprecedented number of kids in the audience as well. I haven’t seen Bananas since it came out, when I was approximately six years old. It has a cold opening, the ABC Wide World of Sports coverage of a Latin American ...