James Toback is a very intelligent screenwriter and director who discovered Harvey Keitel and also turned Mike Tyson into an actor of sorts, mostly playing Tyson. Toback relishes pushing people's buttons and has a devilish radar for psychodrama"all of which comes into play in his latest movie, the riotous Seduced and Abandoned, a fly-on-the-wall depiction on how to get"or not get"a movie financed during the Cannes ...
If, according to a Viennese wit, psychoanalysis is the disease that calls itself the cure, then Steve Cohen’s deal with the US government is the highway robbery that calls itself justice. Cohen is a bald Wall Street hedgie whose $18-billion fund, SAC, has scored Madoff-like returns the last twenty-odd years. He is a secretive kind of guy whose first wife blew the whistle on him because of his lack of generosity toward her. ...
NEW YORK—He came from a wealthy background but was always in trouble. His parents were not particularly religious, but nevertheless they insisted that little Jimmy read the Torah scroll and grow up to be a good Jewish boy. You can imagine their horror when they found naked pictures of Hedy Lamarr and Brigitte Bardot among the holy pages—the former in Ecstasy, the latter in Contempt. He was given a hiding and taken to all ...
NEW YORK—Libyans are among the most civilized people on Earth. When a Russian hooker (I assume) killed a Libyan Air Force officer, a mob stormed the Russian embassy seeking revenge. They failed, but not for lack of trying. This time last year another mob murdered the American ambassador and three others in a similar attack, although no Yankee gal had harmed any Libyan flyer. The civilized Libyans also did democracy proud when ...
NEW YORK—The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it always induces the same wonderment it did long ago. Once walking the streets, however, reality sets in with a bang. And it is a bang! Manhattan is one big building site, cement mixers and drills having replaced the soft tunes of Tin Pan Alley as I first heard them when walking to Broadway and 47th Street. Back then it was the ...
A man whose reputation rivals that of the Clintons" for dishonesty and lies recently claimed overhearing a conversation by a gangster confirming that Bobby Riggs had thrown his match against Billie Jean King in the infamous Battle of the Sexes on September 20, 1973. (King won 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.) According to the Clinton wannabe, Bobby was $100,000 in the hole to the Sopranos, and in order to extricate himself he told the hoods ...
The Swiss canton of Ticino is holding a referendum on a burqa ban, and it is about time. Burqa, niqab—it’s all Arabic to me, although I understand firsthand how deep-seated the hatred of women is in Arab countries that men wish to cover them up. Funny enough, when you see these bearded assholes shouting on TV, it is the men who are so ugly it should be a mandatory cover-up. When I lived in the Sudan and Egypt while on ...
Ini yaitu berjenis-jenis pertanda permainan domino sesuai untuk perjudian Anda. Jika Anda ingin bertaruh uang Anda sendiri dan menempatkan keterampilan gameplaying Anda untuk tes dengan taruhan. Permainan dominoQQ dapat dimainkan dengan uang tunai dan menawarkan elemen kegembiraan ekstra untuk bermain. Ingat, Anda tidak semestinya bertaruh dengan uang sungguhan. Anda selalu dapat bermain dengan counter, krupuk, korek api, atau ...
To London for a brief visit to meet Spectator readers, as nice a reason as I can think for getting on an airplane, except for an assignation with Rebecca Hall, my latest obsession with the fairer sex. Our new digs in Old Queen Street remind me a bit of my school days, not that the Spectator’s building is ivy-covered red brick, but more of a mystical communication with the past. Who knows what goes on in one’s brain, ...
I used to see him in El Morocco, the most famous nightclub of its era during the late 1950s and early 60s. He was a very handsome man, beautifully tailored and with impeccable old-fashioned manners, and a heavy drinker. Wine, champagne, and cognac were his drinks, and vodka later in the night. Although invited to sit in the owner’s table where only unaccompanied men were permitted, he was never without female company, and ...
Cicero was a wise human being who wrote that a man with a garden and a library has all he needs. He also said that only a man without a brain Tweets. (Well, he would have said it were he around today.) The Oxford philosopher John Gray, a man I used to get drunk with until he gave up the sauce, insists that the pursuit of distraction has now been embraced as the meaning of life. Gray knows what he's talking about. In his latest ...
Stop the presses. Call out the National Guard. Order in the tanks. The Simon Wiesenthal Center is mad and is not going to take it anymore. Especially from Vini Lunardelli, the Italian winemaker that labels some of their wine bottles with pictures of Adolf Hitler. The little Italian winemaker has been selling Nazi-themed wines for twenty years, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center has had about enough. “Jewish life in Europe…[is] ...
Just before I left for the Greek islands I went to dinner at Eugenie Radziwill’s, whose other guests included the great Barry Humphries, his wife Lizzie, and a man I had never met before but whose name rang a distant bell: John Sutherland. The bell turned out not to be so distant, the prof having reviewed a book for the Speccie just that week. I was late as usual and when introduced to Susan Sutherland, I made the gaffe of ...
There is no doubt in my mind that we wish our destruction. What else could it be? An Elders of Zion plot? Hardly. They would be among the first to go down, although unlike us, they would put up a fight. The only thing I can think of is extreme stupidity. Take the cases of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Republican senators who traveled recently to Egypt. McCain has an excuse. He was chained to a wall and tortured in the Hanoi ...
ONBOARD THE WEATHERBIRD OFF THE PELOPONNESE—The old girl groans and creaks as we tack time and again, the breeze right on the nose as we negotiate the turquoise coastline. She’s gaff-rigged and good upwind, the only annoyance being the ubiquitous speedboats driven by fat Greeks who come by for a look-see. From my porthole I see only green pines and olive trees with the light blue of sky and sea as background. My maternal ...
PORTO HELI—I am standing on the deck of a 100-foot schooner that was built in Normandy in 1931 by Gerald and Sara Murphy, the golden American couple who invented the south of France as a summer playground and were in the forefront of artistic and literary Parisian life at the time. More importantly, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald trod on the exact spot where I’m standing—relaxing, rather. I’m surrounded by ...
