Art
Seymour Krim to William Saroyan: A Letter
You're surrounded by jerks, ass-kissers, sycophants.
Aram Saroyan
Books
Crowded by Beauty: A Biography of Philip Whalen
Identified as a member of both the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the mid-1950s, Philip Whalen (1923-2002) wrote poems and two novels marked by a sensibility that was his alone.
Art
Madness in My Family
When Saroyan, a biography of my father William Saroyan by Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford, was published in 1986, I was coming off a five-year run during which I wrote three books about my family and couldn’t handle sitting down to read another word about them.
Art
The Elephant in Our Room
LOS ANGELES — A central insight of James Baldwin’s writing had to do with the way racism diminished the racist as much or more than his victim.
Art
Making the Cut: Remembering Warren Lyons
LOS ANGELES — In the late fifties and early-to-mid-1960s, when my father came to New York and checked into the Royalton for stays that varied in length from a few days to several weeks, he would run into his friend Leonard Lyons, the New York Post gossip columnist, who invariably wrote an item or tw
Art
The Jewish Blues
LOS ANGELES — I first saw Saul Bellow in the early 1960s at a reading he gave one afternoon of his play “The Last Analysis.” The reading took place in a large, light-filled studio on the Upper West Side in New York, for an audience of invited guests.
Art
Kay Parker, Taboo, and the Golden Age of Porn #NSFW
Given the vantage point of the digital era, the 1970s to the mid-1980s can now be reckoned the porn era’s golden age, such as it is. Those were years when feature-length pornographic films were shown at movie houses all over America.