by Seth Rogovoy In a bizarre, almost meta- confluence of perfect timing, disgraced fraudster financier Bernie Madoff died in prison last week, just as Alicia Jo Rabins’s brilliant, rock musical film “A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff” began making the rounds of film festivals, with various online screenings, on its way toward a broader theatrical…
by Seth Rogovoy (FORWARD, 7.12.20) – It’s as predictable as death and taxes. Bob Dylan releases a new album and critics hyperventilate that it is his best since his masterful 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” The latter was an acoustic song cycle largely about the dissolution of a marriage (his marriage?), and it does…
by Seth Rogovoy There are two kinds of people during a pandemic: Those who read “The Plague” by Albert Camus, and those who don’t. I, like thousands if not millions of others, am in the first category. I’ve always been a fan of Camus, but I had never read “The Plague,” which, for those…
by Seth Rogovoy (HUDSON, N.Y., April 24, 2020) — In the past few weeks, Bob Dylan has released two new songs, “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes,” which people have combed for references to the current COVID-19 pandemic. Never mind that these songs were most likely written and recorded months if not years…
by Seth Rogovoy (April 17, 2020) – Oops, he did it again. In the deep, dark, blackness of the night, the Mystic Oracle of Hibbing let drop a new utterance. Today, we awoke to the new sounds of Bob Dylan’s “I Contain Multitudes,” just three weeks after Dylan stunned believers and non-believers alike with a…
by Seth Rogovoy Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul‘, a newly released, 17-minute ballad about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is not only a work of epic genius – formally, structurally, and otherwise – but, like the Talmud itself, it veritably demands a close reading in order to comprehend fully what the Nobel…
by Seth Rogovoy Don’t let the provocative title of Eva Hoffman’s How to Be Bored fool you. Hoffman’s book is not a how-to for being bored, but rather a how-to of how to be when one finds oneself being bored. Or, more precisely, a manifesto in favor of “boredom” as opposed to its opposite…
by Seth Rogovoy On paper it sounds like a car crash, a horrible disaster, or worse – a gross indecency that violates the memory of those who died in the Shoah. But in practice, Hunters, a new Prime Video 10-episode TV series starring Al Pacino leading a vigilante band of Nazi hunters and executioners,…
by Seth Rogovoy I failed in my book-reading goals for 2019. Not necessarily by not reading a total of 50 books, which I had set out to accomplish, but in not keeping better track of what I read nor taking better notes about what I read. Suffice to say that I hope to begin…
by Seth Rogovoy (NEW YORK CITY, N.Y., October 24, 2019) – Seeing the revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal currently on Broadway (at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, directed by Jamie Lloyd, running through December 8), reminds a theatergoer of the pleasures to be found in pure drama. By that I mean drama that isn’t about…
