There’s nothing to add about the clowns in Brussels and Athens but a Yogi Berra pearl, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” The Greek drama will go on and on until the brinkmanship is exhausted. My guess is the EU will blink, and I write this early, a day before the “final” decision is taken in Brussels on Friday, June 5. Although Greek accounting arabesques have been known to shame the Bolshoi—Goldman Sachs taught ...
The last week in Gotham was exceptional fun. A Broadway play—compliments of the producer, my NBF Harvey Weinstein—Finding Neverland, had me clapping with one hand due to the operation and standing with the packed theatre for the ovation. Shows how much the critics know, who panned it. The audience loved it, as did I. It’s an uplifting, wonderful play about J.M. Barrie and the children. Then there was the blind black guy ...
It was, using Edward De Vere's words, much ado about nothing. The media didn"t think so, called it "Deflategate," and one of America's great sporting heroes, Tom Brady, was pilloried as if he had inflated the beautiful model Gisele Bundchen, his wife, against her wishes. If any of you Takimag readers missed it while on holiday in Albania, Brady and the New England Patriots supposedly deflated the footballs used in ...
An operation on my hand after a karate injury has me reading more than usual, and even attempting Don DeLillo’s Underworld, but I soon give it up. Truman Capote famously said that On The Road was typing, not writing, but old Jack Kerouac was Jane Austen compared to some of the novelists of today. Making it sound easy is the hardest thing in writing, and I grant you that today’s modernists sure make it look easier than easy. ...
It’s as good as it gets; a light rain is falling on a soft May evening and I’m walking north on a silent Park Avenue hoping to get into trouble. 14,000 yellow taxis have turned Manhattan into a Bengal hellhole, blasting their horns non-stop, picking up or disgorging passengers in the middle of traffic clogged streets, speeding and failing to yield to pedestrians, as the Big Bagel law requires. But on the Upper East Side, on ...
OK. Magnanimity in victory is a sine qua non among civilized men and women, so let me not be the first to rub it in. Last week I wrote that I feared the worst and felt sorry for Britain. I was convinced throughout the campaign that a certain testicular fortitude was missing on the part of the voters, and that David Cameron would be vacating 10 Downing Street. But not for the first time I was proved wrong. The only testicular ...
If any of you see Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, walking around with a begging bowl in his hand, it’s because he took me to dinner recently and I sort of went a bit nuts with the wine and the VF chief ended up with the bill. We went to a new Bagel restaurant, Chevalier, a futuristic marvel with great food and wine and even grander prices. New York is no longer elegant, and there are no longer society types dressed ...
Talk about how the mighty have fallen. Time magazine was for the better part of the 20th century the model for American newsweeklies. Its style of epigrammatic terseness and punchy prose became known as “Timespeak,” its compact format an invention of its founder, Henry Luce. Luce was the son of a missionary and was born in China. He was devout, brainy, single - minded and convinced America was a miracle conceived by the ...
A recent column in the FT had me mad as hell and not about to take it any more. The writer, Simon Kuper, calls Vienna a backwater, a bit like calling the Queen a busted flush because of her age. Sure, he writes how great Vienna was back when the Habsburgs ruled the roost, attracting people from all over, “some of them nuts.” He includes Freud, Hitler, Stalin, and Trotsky. Not the nicest bunch I can think of, but then the ...
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One of those self important, so called pundits once asked Norman Mailer if fascism was coming to America. The pompous one had once worked for Time magazine, so Norman answered him with a pun. "It's going to be a Luce sort of fascism." Mailer was always unpredictable and hard to pin down where ideology was concerned. I once introduced him to a beautiful Israeli woman who immediately asked him why he had never visited ...
New York - “Gimme a BLT on rye and hold da mayo” is a great Noo Yawk sound. So is boid for bird, and toerty toird for 33rd street. True working class accents no longer exist in the Bagel, and one is far more likely to hear “Deme un BLT y guarde la mayonesa,” by our Dominican or Puerto Rican cousins. The fire escape is also going fast, and as some wit pointed out, the next time Tony woos Maria in West Side Story ...
Ah Spring, the spring of our frost bitten age. At the Polish Club in London, a wonderful place studded with portraits of Polish patriots who have fought and sacrificed for the West’s freedom. In this beautiful and heroic setting, your High Life correspondent gave a speech about what it’s like writing for the Spectator and Takimag, with some odds and ends about my life in general of fifty years ago. The big surprise turned ...
"There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th century fiction than the legacy." So writes a female columnist in Britain's best newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, and then goes on to say some rude things about trust fund babies. According to the lady, a will stands as a symbol of the baleful power of craggy old age over brilliant youth. What rubbish. Judging by my own children, the moment I mention money " ...
End of season is always bittersweet, the melting snows a bit like autumn leaves, but the days are longer and soon spring will chase any remaining winter blues away. The Eagle Club’s closing is a perennial festive day, with speeches by our president Urs Hodler, an almost teary goodbye to our very own Pino – seating us and feeding us for 44 years – and the Taki Cup awards, the last two years won by my son J.T. in record ...
It’s a famous quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one that Elton John should ponder, when he’s not out shopping, that is. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Mind you, Elton John is a hysterical, spoilt, ugly fat man who thinks his opinions count. (Perhaps with non-talents like Liz Hurley and Victoria Beckham.) ...
Flipping through some television garbage trying to induce sleep, I came upon an old western starring Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone and Rock Hudson. Once upon a time the above names would trigger common points of reference. A collective vocabulary signifying the Fifties, chrome tailfins, standard issue gray flannel suits, hats, and stifled alternative views. No longer. Common points of reference today are unrecognizable, at least ...
