Norman Mailer

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Cinematic excess

Matthew Barney's seven-hour Cremaster Cycle descends in the Portland Museum of Art
Eight years after its completion, The Cremaster Cycle , Matthew Barney's interminable multi-media opus, continues to befuddle and intrigue audiences.
By ANNIE LARMON | November 10, 2010

Is the Boston Film Festival on the road to recovery?

Or is it flirting with disaster?
In recent years, the Boston Film Festival has alternated between catastrophe and semi-revival.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 13, 2010

Stuff and nonsense

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle returns
Despite millions in production design, Peter Strietman's splendid photography, and some witty if trance-inducing music by Jonathan Bepler, the six and a half hours of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is sheer movie tedium, inert and unmoving, broken up by imagery that's more irritating than fascinating in its self-indulgent preciosity.
By PETER KEOUGH | June 26, 2010

Grave Spotting

Spooky? A bit, but Massachusetts's cemeteries are also the bucolic, final resting places of many great American writers.
I asked the question this way: "Where would you want to be buried?" Not "do," but "would." That is to say if, by chance, you were to die, unlikely as that might be, where would you want to spend all of nonexistence?
By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | June 16, 2010

Eat, pray, shove

Cooking with Mailer in two new memoirs
So after all the roarings and the thumpings and the garlands and the scandals, after all the sex and the jazz and the fires on the moon and the women’s-libbers howling for his blood and the glass bouncing off Gore Vidal’s head, the old lion ends his days in comfortable domesticity on the crooked fingertip of Cape Cod, nibbling teriyaki-infused oatmeal and reading baseball statistics on the crapper.
By JAMES PARKER | March 30, 2010

Updike does death, R. Crumb does God, Vanity Fair does Proust

Gift books to savor
Trying to reach as broad a range of tastes and pocketbooks as possible, we this year scavenged everything from the front pages of the Onion to R. Crumb's genesis, to valedictory Updike. Stuff to read, stuff to look at, glossy pages and matte. Remember: be careful not to nick the pages or spill eggnog on them before you wrap. Happy holidays!
By PHOENIX STAFF | December 08, 2009

Vegas and Jungleland

Paul Shaffer and the Big Man tell all
Paul Shaffer is a happenin’ cat. Pick an It Moment from pop culture over the past 30 years and Shaffer was there. He was an original band member on Saturday Night Live . He played hapless promo guy Artie Fufkin in This Is Spinal Tap . Disco? He co-wrote “It’s Raining Men.” And he helped David Letterman break ground as his glittery, ironic bandleader/sidekick.
By JOYCE MILLMAN | November 24, 2009

Plain talk

Jesse Sheidlower gives the f-word its due
Jesse Sheidlower, an editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary , an expert in slang, and the author of The F-Word , can't stop talking about fuck.
By JUSTINE ELIAS | September 15, 2009

Deal or no deal?

Will the Globe 's biggest union balk at the Times Co.'s offer? Plus, the Christian Science Monitor 's quietly successful re-launch, and sportswriter Bill Simmons's GM jones
When the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe 's largest union, decided to take the New York Times Company's latest contract offer to its members last week, ratification seemed like a done deal.
By ADAM REILLY | May 15, 2009

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Review: Pontypool

Bruce McDonald deserves some credit for trying
Bruce McDonald's ambitious shaggy-dog story combining elements of Talk Radio , William Burroughs, and Night of the Living Dead succeeds about as well as could be expected.
By PETER KEOUGH | April 15, 2009

Stopped, dropped, and rolled

Letters to the Boston editor, October 17, 2008
I’d like to thank and commend Adam Reilly for writing about the journalists arrested covering the Republican convention in St. Paul.
By BOSTON PHOENIX LETTERS | October 16, 2008

Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ gets the treatment

Action speaks!
Long before suburban kids began digging Dr. Dre and Tupac, an earlier generation of young white people venerated the jazz and swing music of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
By IAN DONNIS | October 15, 2008

Hit men

George Kimball's Four Kings KO's the last golden era of boxing
At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars.
By MARK JURKOWITZ | October 02, 2008

War stories

Mailer on the ’68 conventions
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.
By CHARLES TAYLOR | August 19, 2008

Smoke screens

Does a surge of stoner movies mean America is going to pot?
What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke ?
By PETER KEOUGH | August 18, 2008

Sweet reads

Books: 2007 in review
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry the Phoenix wrote about in 2007.
By JON GARELICK | December 17, 2007

Cracking the nutcase

Letters to the editor
Since Colbert is making fun of know-it-all, combative, mean-spirited talk-show hosts, except when he is going after targets such as Bush, he isn’t Rambo-like.
By LETTERS TO THE EDITOR | November 28, 2007

Noah’s arc

Baumbach from Squid to Margot
William Faulkner conceived The Sound and the Fury from a mental picture of a pair of women’s underpants dangling on a clothesline.
By GERALD PEARY | November 20, 2007

Wrestle in peace

Remembering Mailer, the blustery king of American letters
In a life of many garlands and much renown, it was Mailer’s strange engagement with literary destiny always to be trapped on the wrong side of his art.
By JAMES PARKER | November 14, 2007

A hello to arms

In a New Hampshire tourney, our reporter takes arm wrestling down to its basics: power, triceps, and Kahlua beach balls
“Get psyched! Get PISSED!”
By JAMES PARKER | October 17, 2007

Armies of the light

Norman Mailer’s primal screen at the HFA
Maybe the trauma of another intractable war has sparked the movies’ recent interest in ’60s headliners.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 18, 2007

That pesky First Amendment

The feds seek tight restrictions on religious readings in prison¬
It’s going to be really tough topping the Bush Administration’s efforts to trash the US Constitution.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | September 12, 2007

Bouncers tell all

Tales from behind the velvet rope
A young man of my acquaintance, a callow pube of a London club-goer, got himself bounced not long ago from an establishment on the King’s Road.
By JAMES PARKER | August 22, 2007

Straight outta Kafka

The Bushies’ enthusiasm for torture is indefensible
We want to get into the shower and not emerge until November 2008.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | July 25, 2007

The sound and the Führer

Mailer takes on young Adolf
Having taken on such larger-than-life figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, Pablo Picasso, Jesus Christ, and, of course, Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer now essays “the most mysterious human being of the century,” Adolf Hitler.
By PETER KEOUGH | January 31, 2007