Our country is in the throes of an undeclared civil war, and in the wake of the Orlando murders I find myself with little to say except in urgent letters to political representatives. I look to the elders–to James Baldwin and especially to Audre Lorde–for a path with heart because all around me is broken, bleeding. Lost.
On the subway home last night, surrounded by the beautiful purple and green and pink and black and brown and yellow and blue and red misses and misters and mizzers of my city–variously tired, wired, sober, drunk, happy, sad; variously queer, too–I felt this powerful tenderness for every person in their precious, precarious trajectory. I wanted to strap on an arrow and bow like an Amazon, like Artemis, like Eros himself, and protect them all. We each have a right to be cranky, undefended, soft around each other–to sit shoulder to shoulder without fear or judgment. We are getting closer to that state. We are moving further away. Continue Reading →
Calling your film “Genius” is asking for it, since almost nothing is. But this literary bromance adapted from A. Scott Berg’s book about author Thomas Wolfe and editor Max Perkins is not bad, which is a feat unto itself given that the only thing more boring than watching someone write in a movie may be watching someone edit. 
Gimlet-eyed and grim, Richard Price writes about America’s underbelly with a panache that makes even the bitterest of truths easier to swallow. As fluent in the medium of cinema and television as he is in literature, the sixty-six-year-old native New Yorker seemingly has had his hands in all the best fictional explorations of class, race, urban life, and, yep, crime for five decades now. His influence is so vast that its scope is sometimes overlooked. To amend that, I’ve worked out a few handy honorariums should there ever be a Price-only awards ceremony. (There should be.)