My Checkered Career

I’ve been a staff writer covering arts and culture at the Los Angeles Times, a reporter and movie reviewer at The Daily News in New York, a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, a senior editor/producer and the theater critic for MSNBC.com, and a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

Writing of mine has also appeared in “little magazines,” among them VDRSVP, The San Francisco Earthquake, Notes From Underground, Ricochet, Unmuzzled Ox, as well as in Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, Trans-Atlantik, The Journal of Film History, and IT: International Times, The Newspaper of Resistance. Years ago in one of his many volumes (I think it was “The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America”), the critic Richard Kostelanetz praised me in my youth as a leading avant-garde poet. I would have proved him right by living up to his expectations, but journalism paid the rent.

I’m the author of several books, including The Z Collection: Portraits & Sketches, just published by Blue Wind Press in a new 2018 edition. My biography of the Hollywood director William Wyler, A Talent for Trouble, is available as an ebook at Amazon and an ebook on iTunes at the Apple store. Putnam published it in hardcover, and Da Capo Press published it in paperback.

The Z Collection published in a new European edition by Moloko.

Recently I’ve been writing poetry described as “deformed sonnets.” In case you’re interested, you can check some of them out in this collection: Your Obituary Is Waiting.

My poems have been published by Peter Engstler Verlag in a bi-lingual English-German edition titled FOURTEEN: Deformed Sonnets. The German translation is by Gregor Potts. My theater criticism, published in two volumes, is also available: Second Nights (Vol.1) and Second Nights (Vol. 2).

In case anyone is interested, Collateral Damage: The Daily History of a Blog, traces blogposts of mine from more than a decade ago with a foreword by William Osborne. “If there is a single ethos that defines this collection of blog entries,” he writes, “it is that the arts do not exist in a vacuum, that culture is holistically connected to every aspect of society. … This blog captured the American cultural zeitgeist in the aftermath of 9/11. Written in Manhattan during a 14-month period between May 2002 and July 2003, it provided witty, detailed, atmospheric snapshots of a wide cross-section of the arts, media, and politics during a pivotal time in U.S. history, attracting millions of readers as the most popular blog by far during the early years of MSNBC.com.”

I am also the co-author of the experimental fiction Cut Up or Shut Up, a collaboration with Carl Weissner and Jurgen Ploog (and with a “tickertape” intro by William S. Burroughs).

Books I’ve edited include Brion Gysin Let the Mice In, co-written by Gysin, Burroughs and Ian Sommerville (Something Else Press), and The Something Else Yearbook, an anthology of the arts.