03/25/08

The Locally Produced Fad Spills Over into Fiction

If you're friends with fiction writers, you've probably heard a lot of griping lately. The market for fiction—especially short fiction—is shrinking. Memoirs are hot, even if their writers haven't done anything particularly memorable. That's why now you see bookstores lined with faked biographies and "memoirs" written by people who are still in their twenties.

Westchester is fighting back, thanks to publisher JoAnn Duncan Terdiman and her Westchester Review. Terdiman believes that people love reading short stories and poetry as much as writers like writing them—and that a lot of those writers can be found here in the county. "There is so much talent here," she says. "And there is less of an outlet for...

03/18/08

Horton Hears a Has-Been '80s Band

03/11/08

Midseason in Westchester

They whiffed, they wobbled, they stalled, but midseason television shows are finally underway. Midseason replacements are in a very odd phase right now. Half the shows scheduled for debut were stunted by the writers' strike, which lead to a few truncated seasons. (We were just getting started, Sarah Connor!) The strike also prompted studios to talk big about how they're doing away with lavish upfronts and big fall premieres and switching to year-round programming, swapping in new shows and taking old ones off the air as the need arises. That sounds like television utopia, right? New shows all year? But right now, "new shows all year" translates into "we'll run whatever we were able to produce before the strike, and when those run out...

03/04/08

The Two Pop-Culture Fads Passing Westchester By

I try to stay current on all aspects of popular culture, even if they're on the fringes. Usually, even the most insular of subcultures, no matter how far outside of the mainstream they are, have some representatives planted in Westchester. We've got Live Action Role-Players, Wizard Rock bands, and our own Roller Derby league, and so on.

Yet recently, I've noticed two hands-on,...