In the midst of a brutally chaotic and violent week, we lost one of our fiercest and funniest voices with the death of Kathy Shaidle in Ontario on January 9. Kathy Shaidle was an opinion writer, poet, film, and cultural critic and unrelenting defender of free speech. She was a conservative Catholic who made enemies… Read more »
Happy New Year from New York City, where neither the Coronavirus, incompetent leadership, nor burgeoning crime can kill us. We have been through a lot over the past year and will go through much more before our current pandemic is over. Things may never return to pre-pandemic “normal” again and that’s not all bad. We… Read more »
Thanksgiving came and went with still much to be thankful for in New York, at least for my family. While a second or third Coronavirus raged through the city, our immediate family remains healthy and those in our larger family circle that have been ill have recovered. Everyone in our family has food in their… Read more »
There are some places wherever you live that you take to represent an important part of your life. Maybe a restaurant where you always go or a movie theater where you saw your favorite movie for the first time. Whatever the reason, these are places that you sentimentalize, maybe sometimes to a fault, because you… Read more »
New York City’s obituary has been written many times. The latest declarations of Gotham’s demise harp on the current crop of problems but ignore New York’s ability to survive even the worst the world has to offer. The current issues confronting NYC are for certain no joke. Our city was the epicenter of the global… Read more »
Years ago, when I lived in Inwood, I walked to the public pier at Dyckman Street on the Hudson River to see fireworks on the Fourth of July. The sightings were disappointing. Through clouds in the distance I could see the faint glow of a few shows over New Jersey and could see none of… Read more »
In John Carpenter’s 1984 film “Starman,” Jeff Bridges stars as an alien who is stranded on Earth, and goes on the run from U.S. government agents with the widow of a deceased housepainter, whose body he has cloned as a disguise. They have misadventures while eluding the authorities and the widow (Karen Allen) falls in… Read more »
A few years ago, I was crossing Madison Avenue at 23rd Street in Manhattan and had the ‘Walk’ signal. A car made an illegal left turn from 23rd Street onto Madison, coming inches from people who had the right of way in the crosswalk, and the driver had the chutzpah to honk his horn at… Read more »
A Song for the Silent StreetsJust the other day it all seemed the sameas we followed the routines of our livesbut now everything has suddenly changedand we’re all locked up together inside. Makes me think how a month agoI was carefree in a crowd at the parkor at the theater for a new show,sometimes we’re… Read more »
In New York City, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., life is slowly adjusting to a new, temporary normal that is at once both dreadful and mundane. What is cruelest about this epidemic is that it keeps us from one another in times of great need and hardship, when the embrace of… Read more »
