Leave it to a group of outsiders to present the most amazing performance art piece ever staged in New York City. No invitations, no advertising, yet they had the largest audience ever assembled. The reviews have been astounding! My day started as usual, making pancakes for my daughter while she watched cartoons. She came into […]
Michael Hornburg
Posted inMovies & TV
Requiem Revisited
An Interview with Hubert Selby Jr.
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, a film by Darren Aronofsky, is one of the bleakest, most disturbing, and mesmerizing films of the year. Based on the 1978 novel by Hubert Selby, Jr., it’s a story about chasing the American dream down the narrowest of alleys. The novel was unremittingly grim, but the film is even a […]
Posted inBooks
Book Review
The Royal Family by William T. Vollmann (Viking Press) In his new novel, The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann has created a bible of the dark side, unseen in American literature since Nelson Algren’s The Man With a Golden Arm. No one since Kerouac has rendered San Francisco’s underground so vibrantly. This novel may be […]
Posted inBooks
Never Mind Nirvana
Book Review
Never Mind Nirvana by Mark Lindquist (Villard) An invitation arrived in the mail from Bret Easton Ellis for a party on 75th and Park Avenue, and of course I go, because I’ll go anywhere for a free beer. The party was for some guy from Seattle named Mark Lindquist who just published a novel called […]
Posted inBooks
Book Review
The Sleep-Over Artist by Thomas Beller (W.W. Norton & Company) When you think of rock n’ roll tours you think of excess–an entourage, groupies, drugs, late night parties–but when it comes to writer’s tours it’s a different story. An author more likely resembles a traveling salesman shuffling town to town, hoping somebody will show up […]
Posted inBooks
LIGHTNING ON THE SUN
Review
LIGHTNING ON THE SUN by Robert Bingham (Doubleday) “Asher waited for the bats. ‘The little rats,’ he thought. ‘Where the hell are they?’ The bats were late and to be late on this particular night was unsettling. Asher never takes a drink until the bats come out of their cave and fill the sky with […]