My best wishes to you for a joyful 2010. I’m going to take a short break for the holidays; posting will resume in the new year.

posted 25 December 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

In case you hadn’t heard, a grassroots movement put Rage Against the Machine on top of the British charts this week (over Joe McElderry from Simon Cowell’s X Factor talent show). This tickles me on numerous levels–but it’s hard for most Americans to understand how attentive Brits are to the question of who’s got the […]

posted 23 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments

Director James Cameron is the third subject in my irregular series of “Icon” interviews for Maxim–my Q&A with him is in the new issue, cover-dated January 2010, with Olivia Munn on the cover. Or you can read it online here. It’s worth a click; Cameron’s a very sharp guy and this is my favorite of […]

posted 21 December 2009 in Articles, Outside. no comments yet

  Merry Christmas to all and best wishes of the season–I’m thankful for the whole Rule Forty-Two community of readers and commenters, and wish you all the best for 2010. But that’s not why I posted this screen-capture from the Rudolph TV special. My question, which I ask myself every time I see the show, […]

posted 18 December 2009 in Photos. 1 comment

We come back from the commercial break to Kevin Seal, thrusting his pelvis to the rhythm of Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll.” “Oh, boy,” he says, “the top 100 videos of 1988. In case you’re just getting out of prison–1988.” Seal, apparently, is eager to be done with his work day. The camera’s somewhat closer on Seal […]

posted 17 December 2009 in 1988. 7 comments

HBO’s Rome only lasted two seasons–around now, with the schedule relatively bare, I bet the network regrets they canceled it. But before the second season started, I got the show’s historical consultant, Jonathan Stamp, on the phone so we could discuss the show’s more prurient aspects and how they gibed with reality. It proved to […]

posted 15 December 2009 in Archives. no comments yet

From the Andy Warhol Diaries, an account of an evening spent with Julia Scorsese (who was then married to Martin Scorsese–they split later the same year). By the time it opened on Broadway, Shine It On had been renamed The Act. Barbara Feldon was best known for playing Agent 99 on Get Smart. Sunday, July […]

posted 10 December 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet

1. “Meeting Across the River” 2. “Nebraska” 3. “Seeds” 4. “Cautious Man” 5. “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” More than I expected, but I’m sure there’s others I didn’t think of. Some of them would work better as talking blues than others. “Seeds” seems the most anomalous, by virtue of being an uptempo rocker.

posted 7 December 2009 in Tasty Bits. 1 comment

I didn’t start the flipwalk project until almost three years had passed after the attacks of 9/11. The random walks around lower Manhattan lasted just about exactly a year, but it’s taken me over four years to finish writing them up. I’m sure there’s some equation that expresses the finely calibrated mix of having a […]

posted 4 December 2009 in Photos. no comments yet

(New to the countdown? Catch up here.) We head to a commercial break with a fifteen-second MTV bumper: lots of revved-up stock footage from the early twentieth century, superimposed over what appears to be flickering pages from textbooks. There’s a director with a megaphone, an old gramophone, men in hats operating film cameras, an orchestra […]

posted 2 December 2009 in 1988. no comments yet