Central Park Lite

… amusing the young, she would give us loaves of stale bread, saved for just such an emergency, and send us across the street into the park to feed the sheep.
At that time Central Park had a flock of 300 sheep that grazed on the vast Sheep Meadow, as it’s still called today, and …

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Once Around the Sun

… Martin,” based on an evening in a New York auditorium when Martin was ordered to stop talking about art, his advertised subject. Listeners on a closed-circuit feed emailed the management that they wanted to hear about his life as a movie star. Even more shockingly, Martin complied.
It was my favorite column because it …

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The View from 90

… these snapshots, to those invariably happy faces on apparently happy family occasions and at beautiful places. They remember these pictured celebratory victorious teams, the blissful vacationing couples feeding the pigeons in a sun-filled Roman square, the joyful graduating classes, the triumphant, straw-hatted fishermen holding aloft their catch for the benefit of the Brownie …

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No Second Act

… Italian tolerance. Moe is the compassionate Jew, Maria the demure prostitute, Chaplain Bascom the hard-line Baptist.
The Americans were rich and the Italians were starving–that was the central degradation of the city. But who was more degraded: the Italians hustling to feed their families, or the GIs selling their cheaply bought PX …

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The Faux Arts

… to embellish the Scottish past. The romantic taste for woodnotes wild is fertile ground for such deceptions. The far more consequential Donation of Constantine, however, helped to feed a violent, often bloody, struggle for political supremacy in the Italian peninsula for half a millennium, and on that account it fully justifies Dante’s condemnation.
That …

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Unauthorized, But Not Untrue

… life story is from the outside looking in, and so I choose to write with my nose pressed against the window rather than kneel inside for spoon-feedings. Most of the great biographies are written about people who are dead, and thus the biographies are unauthorized. Championing the independent or unauthorized biography might sound like …

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Boy

… the tow-headed boy whipped you?; mow the yard in the morning and water at night; when a dog is dying, don’t hassle with the vet; feed him fried hamburger until he stops eating, then carry him into the cotton field; this is how you load a pistol; this is how you fire a …

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Rock of Ages

… prime of two artists who’d only recently figured out that they could do it their way. Hendrix tears up the Troggs’ “Wild Thing,” layering it with feedback and distortion, tossing in a riff from Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” snapping his chewing gum all the while. At the climax, he straddles his guitar …

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We’ll Always Have McSorley’s

… on the table; “McSorley’s at Home,” which shows a group of argumentative old-timers around the stove; “McSorley’s Cats,” in which Bill is preparing to feed his drove of cats; and “McSorley’s, Saturday Night,” which was painted during prohibition and shows Bill passing out mugs to a crowd of rollicking customers. Every …

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Profit

… of devils.
—John Updike, Bech Is Back, 1982

The figures of the balance show
Rich deposits, swollen greed
While the hours are nosing paint
Silently as fungi feed.
—Adrian Stokes, With All the Views, 1981

Would you be rich? Do you think that the single point worth sacrificing everything else to? You may then be …

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