Books
Charlotte Pomerantz, Inventive Children’s Book Author, Dies at 92

Published
1 year agoon
By
Press Room
Her first children’s book, “The Bear Who Couldn’t Sleep,” was published in 1965.
“I started writing because it was the only thing I was ever good at,” Ms. Pomerantz said in the Alchetron interview.
Her books reflected all sorts of influences, including James Joyce: One book, “Here Comes Henny” (1994, illustrated by Nancy Winslow Parker), was inspired by a passage in “Finnegans Wake,” her daughter, Dr. Marzani, said. Ms. Pomerantz’s son, Daniel, had asthma problems as a child that led the family to spend winters in Puerto Rico, and some of her stories were set there or incorporated Spanish.
Dr. Marzani said that her mother had also once written a play, “Jonah and the Humpback Whale,” and that she had recently been arranging a performance of it in her apartment building in Charlottesville — to be held at high tea on her birthday
“The group had been practicing for months,” she said, “meeting weekly, with Mom directing from her wheelchair.”
Her mother, she said, had lapsed into unconsciousness in the days before her death, but the group performed the piece for her at her bedside anyway the day before her death. She died a few minutes after midnight on her birthday, but the group also carried out her wish and performed it again later that day at high tea.
Carl Marzani died in 1994. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Pomerantz is survived by her son, Daniel Marzani; her domestic partner, Robert Murtha; a stepson, Anthony Marzani; Jason Olivencia, a longtime member of the family whom she considered a son and who aided in her end-of-life care; a grandson; and two step-grandchildren.
You may like
-
This Couple Has Unbelievably Strict Rules For Their Wedding And It’s Causing Major Drama
-
Shed Seven share new single featuring Rowetta and talk guest-heavy album ‘A Matter Of Time’
-
An American Life in a Million Glances
-
Best Collagen Supplements for Women: 5 Products for Skin Health – Us Weekly
-
Jeezy and Jeannie Mai Still Living Together Amid Divorce, Uncomfortable Situation
-
Meet Golden Bachelor Gerry’s First Impression Rose Winner
Books
An American Life in a Million Glances

Published
21 mins agoon
September 29, 2023By
Press Room
In COMING AND GOING (Mack Books, paperback, $85), the Connecticut-born photographer Jim Goldberg pieces together the chapters of his life in a million glances. In 1985, Goldberg published “Rich and Poor,” capturing in words and images both sides of the economic divide in pre-internet San Francisco. A decade later he released “Raised by Wolves,” which documented runaway teenagers across California, again alongside their own handwritten commentary.
Here Goldberg turns the lens onto himself, showing us fragments of his own life from 1980 on in collages of photos overlaid with other ephemera: a typed letter he wrote to his dad, locks of hair, his daughter’s toothbrushes, unidentified photo cutouts and his own contact sheets.
Together these form a deeply personal visual memoir: the orange tree his dad planted in Florida in 1980; and that same tree years later, now just a broken stump standing behind his older parents in a photo framed by so many others of the couple throughout their life together. Goldberg shows us his own marriage too: a Polaroid of a young woman in a black bathing suit on which he’s written, “THIS IS THE MOMENT I FELL IN LOVE”; the birth of his daughter; her first days at school. We watch the generations age over the course of the book; we see the heartbreak of his divorce and the grief over his mother’s cancer diagnosis and death. In the images he’s amassed over a lifetime, Goldberg shows the beauty and sorrow of everyday existence.
Books
Whatever Happened to Local Comedy Scenes?

Published
18 hours agoon
September 28, 2023By
Press Room
Paris in the 1920s. Hollywood in the ’70s. Chicago in the ’90s?
It’s long been my after-midnight-at-the-bar theory that when it comes to urban cultural vanguards, the Michael Jordan era belongs in the pantheon. Full disclosure: I was there and missed it all.
Despite living in Chicago when young improvisers like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and Adam McKay were killing in front of live crowds, I never saw any perform. I don’t have a story of bumping into the legendary comedy teacher Del Close or catching Kanye West’s original rap group. I missed Liz Phair as well as the indie-rock renaissance pushed by labels like Drag City and Touch and Go Records.
Just when I thought the cultural obliviousness of my college years couldn’t be greater, a new book, “The Perfect Amount of Wrong: The Rise of Alt Comedy on Chicago’s North Side,” opens another avenue of regret. Its author, the comic Mike Bridenstine, makes a persuasive case that Chicago in the late ’90s and aughts was one of the great incubators of modern stand-up. Bridenstine was part of it, but his account, catnip for comedy nerds, benefits from detailed reporting, tracking the careers of, among others, Kumail Nanjiani, Kyle Kinane, Pete Holmes, Hannibal Buress, Beth Stelling and Cameron Esposito.
Packed with fabled stand-ups who never made it big and their intimate shows, his punchy chapters are perfect for those who argue about comedy the way Stephen A. Smith does about sports. Was the Lyon’s Den (where Holmes and Nanjiani started the same week) the greatest comedy open mic in history? Did T.J. Miller revolutionize crowd work? Does Matt Braunger deserve to be compared to Robin Williams and Will Ferrell? This book should start some fights.
But there’s also a challenging broader argument buried here, about the conditions that make for great art, one that hints at a pessimistic outlook about local scenes in the age of social media.
Chicago has long been known as a place for artists to get good, not famous. It’s far enough from the coasts to keep industry executives at bay. This has produced many eccentric artists and chips on shoulders. For stand-ups, the fact that it was renowned as an improv town was one chip; the second was that the only major club, Zanies, did not book many local acts.
“The best thing that ever happened to comedy in Chicago was Zanies saying you can’t perform here,” Bridenstine, 44, told me in a recent phone interview. Rejection fueled comics to start their own shows, presenting bills in restaurant back rooms, bars and scrappy festivals. The isolation of these shows, their lack of publicity, meant that crowds were locals not tourists, die-hards not casual fans. Originality mattered as much as killing. “There was pressure, in a really good way, to be different and weird,” the comic Brooke Van Poppelen says in the book.
This resulted in comics like the wry political observer Dwayne Kennedy, who inspired considerable awe and gushing among peers. “The fact Dwayne Kennedy is not a household name is insanity,” Sarah Silverman has said. One possible explanation might be found from a producer, who says that to book him, you needed to fax his dad.
An early provocateur, Bill O’Donnell was famous for incorporating vomiting into his act. There were guys with nicknames like Tommy Mayo, and others like Nick Vatterott, who refused to do the same joke twice in a week and performed a bit as a ventriloquist’s dummy that required him to sit inside a box for two hours. He delivered a hilarious set on “The Tonight Show” years ago that hinged on him pretending to forget a joke. “Nick Vatterott is my evidence that comedy is not a meritocracy,” Bridenstine said. “I don’t know anybody funnier than him. And I know a lot of people more famous and successful.”
Along with stories of the famous and forgotten, the book leans on the journalism of Allan Johnson, a critic for The Chicago Tribune who died at 46 in 2006. He was an early champion of Bernie Mac, probably the greatest comic to emerge from Chicago that decade and the book’s most glaring omission. (In the 1990s, comedy was more segregated than today, and there is scant coverage here of predominantly Black rooms.) The attention Johnson lavished on local shows, in praise and criticism, was an important spotlight, drawing audiences and creating conversation. His coverage is also an integral source for this book. Considering the depleted state of newspapers, in Chicago and elsewhere, one wonders about the local comedy coverage future authors will draw upon.
The more significant contrast with comedy today is the minor role of the internet. It’s not merely that there wasn’t the push to turn your jokes into videos. Comics were less aware of their peers in other cities in the 1990s, and thus there wasn’t the same anxiety of influence. One Chicago comic, John Roy, describes the sense of wanting to embrace alt comedy on the coasts, but only vaguely knowing about it from reading about Patton Oswalt or seeing Janeane Garofalo on HBO. “We’re trying to reverse engineer this idea of alternative comedy from a couple articles in Rolling Stone and a special,” Roy says in the book. “You don’t really know what it is. But you subsequently get a lot of creativity because people start going: ‘Well, I got to be weird.’”
The internet — with social media and sites like YouTube — diminished the distance between scenes and put all comics in the same digital room. This has advantages. Comedy is bigger than ever, and it’s easier to find quality jokes. Bridenstine argued that while there are more good stand-up shows in Chicago today, the scene isn’t producing “Kinanes, Kumails, Beths or Hannibals.”
Is this merely nostalgia? Perhaps a bit, but it’s fair to ask a troubling question: Is the internet killing off distinct local comedy scenes?
There is a long history of cities producing their own comedic aesthetics. Boston is blustery and blue collar (think Bill Burr), while San Francisco is wild and experimental (see Robin Williams). Washington, D.C., and Portland, Ore., have their own styles, too. These are all simplifications, but they matter. When everyone can see everyone else online, parallel thinking in jokes increases, and comics move to New York and Los Angeles quickly after viral fame, making coherent local identities harder to maintain.
Who you are around as a young artist is tremendously important. Now we are all, to some degree, around the same people. To be sure, “you had to be there” is a real thing, especially with live comedy, and the internet is full of niches where subcultures can flourish, but whether they will be closely associated with cities is an open question.
Bridenstine sounded skeptical. “City scenes don’t exist in isolation like they used to,” he said, adding a note of optimism while tossing one more chip on his shoulder. “I think new styles will evolve and people will decide to be new and different whenever this current way of arena rock comedy gets old.”
Books
The Most Novelistic Part That Patrick Stewart Ever Played

Published
19 hours agoon
September 28, 2023By
Press Room
“I acted Macbeth for exactly 365 days,” says the actor, whose new memoir is “Making It So.” “The role got into me so deeply it dominated my life at the time and caused me to drink too much alcohol after the performance was over. No other role I have played has affected me so profoundly.”


This Couple Has Unbelievably Strict Rules For Their Wedding And It’s Causing Major Drama

Shed Seven share new single featuring Rowetta and talk guest-heavy album ‘A Matter Of Time’

An American Life in a Million Glances

Best Collagen Supplements for Women: 5 Products for Skin Health – Us Weekly

Jeezy and Jeannie Mai Still Living Together Amid Divorce, Uncomfortable Situation

24 of Country Music’s Cutest Couples That Are Ultimate Goals

Modern Masculinity Is Broken. She Knows How to Fix It.

People Revealed What It’s Like Being In Relationships With Huge Age Gaps, And It’s Eye-Opening

Hulk Hogan Marries Sky Daily in Intimate Florida Wedding Ceremony

Airbnb Features Shrek’s Swamp, Complete With Outhouse

Best Collagen Supplements for Women: 5 Products for Skin Health – Us Weekly

Jeezy and Jeannie Mai Still Living Together Amid Divorce, Uncomfortable Situation

Taylor Swift Wouldn’t Allow Fox to Play Her Music at Travis Kelce’s Game

Missing Carnival Cruise Passenger On Probation When He Vanished, Officials Skeptical

Southern Charm’s Craig Conover Claims Austen Kroll Slept With His Exes
Trending
-
Celebrity5 days ago
24 of Country Music’s Cutest Couples That Are Ultimate Goals
-
Books5 days ago
Modern Masculinity Is Broken. She Knows How to Fix It.
-
Trending1 week ago
People Revealed What It’s Like Being In Relationships With Huge Age Gaps, And It’s Eye-Opening
-
TV & Movies5 days ago
Hulk Hogan Marries Sky Daily in Intimate Florida Wedding Ceremony
-
News3 days ago
Airbnb Features Shrek’s Swamp, Complete With Outhouse
-
Books5 days ago
Kerry Washington Goes Deep
-
Music5 days ago
Keith Richards says John Lennon and George Harrison would have fitted into The Rolling Stones
-
Music1 week ago
Lana Del Rey explains viral Waffle House shift photos