Culture

Music

Playing the Gold Standards

Food

The Love-Hate Relationship With Leftovers

Film & Television

Saving the Jewish Creators of Superman

Film & Television

Extra! Extra! 'Reader" All About It

And this book-based film may make the most headlines come Oscar night

By:

Michael Elkin

The boy in the striped pajamas has taken them off. Much of the writings about "The Reader" -- the Oscar-nominated, Holocaust-oriented film that turns a page on the past -- has focused on the explicit nude scenes between Hanna (Kate Winslet) and Michael (David Kross), to whom the German transportation worker gives transporting tutorials in sex prefaced by his reading...

Theater

Tracking 'Leah's Train'

A transgenerational drama of a Jewish family with an Asian cast on board

By:

Michael Elkin

Trains of thought carry Karen Hartman's heartfelt haikus of drama to people of all stations of life. And now, a production of an award-winning work from 2000 has arrived on time and on message in a world-premiere production in 2009. Traveling "Leah's Train" ... switching tracks, crossing cultures and picking up an Occidental tourist along the way has proved a...

Books

Literature Gone Askew

By:

Robert Leiter

For someone like myself who came of age reading the great works of the 20th-century modernists -- writers like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Marcel Proust -- the highly ubiquitous postmodernist movement, which was spawned by the excesses and political shenanigans of the 1960s, has generally been an irritant to me. Whether it's Andy Warhol's soup cans or...

Music

Songwriter's Clearly Arrived

By:

Michael Elkin

Up-and-coming, rock-'n'-rolling Erik Janson has discovered that "Morning in Paradise" is followed by afternoons in nirvana. After a terrific reception for his album of folk-rock that folk in all genres took to, the young and ruggedly handsome singer/ composer has found "Morning in Paradise" is the music of the night played by hundreds of stations nationwide. Now, his sound has...

Film & Television

Why 'Will Work for Food' Works

By:

Michael Elkin

What's that dizzying acrid/sweet smell coming from inside that college boy's dorm? Could he be smoking ... Lox? Could be if the boy in question was Adam Gertler and the controlled substance he was smoking came from the uncontrollable white waters of Alaska, where salmon was king and bagel its bride. From whitewater to whitefish, Gertler girded early on for...