PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar
By PJ Grisar
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Culture 2020 Hopeful Pete Buttigieg Won An Award For This Essay On Bernie Sanders In High School
37-year-old South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a longshot presidential candidate in an already crowded Democratic field. At press time he’s still jockeying for the 65,000 individual donors needed to qualify for the first round of Democratically-sponsored debates in June. Meanwhile, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders has raised $10 million for his campaign less than…
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Culture 7 Questions For Barry Avrich, Director Of ‘Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World Of Ben Ferencz’
Only a day after he learned about Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, filmmaker Barry Avrich was in contact and getting ready to make a documentary about him. The resulting film, “Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz,” now playing at New York’s Cinema Village and opening in select cities Friday March 1,…
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Music What You Need To Know About R. Kelly’s Lawyer, Steve Greenberg
R. Kelly’s latest legal case was never going to be a low profile affair. The “Trapped in the Closet” singer, whose real name is Robert Kelly, was arrested in Chicago Friday, February 22, on charges of aggravated sexual abuse spanning over a decade and involving four women, three of whom were minors at the time,…
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Culture At 95, the heroes of the Ghost Army relive the battles of WWII
The 603rd Camouflage Engineers used inflatable tanks, planes and more to dupe the Germans
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Culture ‘Porgy And Bess,’ ‘Akhnaten’ To Lead Met Opera’s 2019-2020 Season
After almost three decades, the Charleston-set “Porgy and Bess” is coming back to the Upper West Side. The Metropolitan Opera’s 2019-2020 season, announced on February 20, will open on September 23 with a new production of Ira and George Gershwin’s folk opera, the first since 1990. The staging, brought over by director James Robinson after…
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Film & TV ‘Curb’ Director Larry Charles Feared Getting Comfortable, Now He’s Swapping Jokes With ISIS
In many ways, Larry Charles has stuck quite close to his creative associate Larry David. They met as writers on the show “Fridays” in the 1980s, collaborated as writer-producers on “Seinfeld” through the ‘90s and continued their partnership well into the new millennium with Charles’ directing on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But while David, at least…
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Books Ottessa Moshfegh Fangirled Out At Whoopi Goldberg’s House
Author Ottessa Moshfegh has defied the old warning, “never meet your heroes.” She wasn’t disappointed. Those who’ve read Moshfegh’s second novel, 2018’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” won’t have much trouble guessing who that hero is. Like her book’s unnamed protagonist, who spends a year fettered to her bed self-prescribing medication and binging films…
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Theater A ‘Lolita’ Musical Flopped 50 Years Ago. After #MeToo, Does It Have A Future?
Almost no one wanted to publish Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” After multiple rejections, the Russian writer finally managed to place the novel at Olympia Press, a publisher with a reputation for accepting borderline pornographic work, in 1955. While many might have applied those terms to “Lolita,” the narrator of which, Humbert Humbert, is a pedophile, Nabokov…
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