Minor spoilage for those of you who haven't completed Hallows—which King justifies by observing that if you haven't read it yet, you must not be that big a fan.
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Now that the dust has settled on The Deathly Hallows, Stephen King weighs in on the series and on J. K. Rowling. King, of course, is one of the few fiction authors who can write about Rowling's success without bitterness, and his thoughts on Rowling's craft are sharp. He also knows just a little bit about toiling in the genre-novel wilderness.
As Jeff Wong and I took our daily constitutional along Brooklyn's Greenbelt this morning, we spotted these colorful boulders along the shore. You never know who you're going to run across in this borough.
Photo credit: Jeff Wong
For good measure alone, Critics, particularly the cranky ones like I've recently become, all deserve a well–placed boot up the arse once in awhile and so, much to my delight I too loved much of The Simpsons movie I prematurely sniffed at last week on this forum. I even get to add this delicious addendum: The critics are wrong! It's pretty wonderful. Many great bits. Much self-deprecation. Maggie emerging as a full–blown character. Okay, okay: I was wrong.
Saw a wonderful guitar pull over the weekend. For those unfamiliar with the term, guitar pulls involve three of four people, sitting…
Garth Cartwright profiles David "Honeyboy" Edwards on the eve of his European tour. He heard Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, the musicians regarded as Delta blues founders, play when he worked on a plantation. Big Joe Williams taught him music and how to hobo. He busked with the Memphis Jug Band, hung out with a teenaged Howlin' Wolf, and recorded for Alan Lomax. And in 1945 he took Little Walter to Chicago.
And he knew Robert Johnson! "'He was a nice person,' says Honeyboy of Johnson, who was poisoned in Mississippi in 1938 aged 27. 'He wasn't a hellraiser, but he loved whisky and was…
Has Scorsese made the ultimate up-close-and-personal documentary about the Rolling Stones? While I'm sure it's a good concert movie, I'm not sure there is any reality to the Stones any more. As a student of film, Scorsese knows that when the legend becomes fact, you shoot the legend.
David Gates is grumpy about the hoopla over On the Road's 50th anniversary. Grumpy, but not to the point of ignoring the occasion.