about: August 2003 Archives

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said: "Man is the only animal clever enough to build the Empire State Building and stupid enough to jump off it."

(Latest Wikileaks news in real-time updates.)

I'm the author of "A Talent for Trouble," the biography of Hollywood director William Wyler. Putnam published it in hardcover.

It is now in paperback (Da Capo Press).

I've also co-written "Cut Up or Shut Up," experimental fiction, with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog (with a "tickertape" intro by William S. Burroughs).

Books I've edited include "Brion Gysin Let the Mice In," co-written by Gysin, Burroughs and Ian Sommerville (Something Else Press),

and "The Something Else Yearbook," an anthology of the arts.

I've been the senior editor/producer for Entertainment & Arts at MSNBC.com, a staff writer covering arts and culture at the Los Angeles Times, a reporter and movie reviewer at The Daily News in New York, a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, and a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.