According to an article on Forbes.com, the Hollywood family comedy The War With Grandpa—adapted from the 1980s children’s book by my father, Robert Kimmel Smith, and starring Robert De Niro—earned just over a million bucks box office on its first day of release, October 9, making it the number-one movie in the Coming-Apart-at-the-Seams States of …
My sister, Heidi Pie Aronson, and I co-wrote this remembrance of our father, who passed away on April 18. *** Robert Kimmel Smith, novelist and author of the children’s books Chocolate Fever and The War With Grandpa, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89. He passed peacefully from natural causes, said Margery …
Everybody knows Brooklyn’s number 42, but I’m surprised how many people are unaware of how popular music got integrated in the 1930s, paving the way for Robinson and Rickey to break baseball’s color line after World War II. The pivotal figure for jazz was Teddy Wilson, whose musical compatibility with the King of Swing created …
Here’s my article on “the Democrats’ do-si-do,” published on Common Dreams in the wake of former VP Biden’s entrance into the race. (Here’s hoping they fix the woefully outdated bio. And photo—I haven’t worn that goatee in years!) Let me know your thoughts on this thinkpiece!
Behold your wordsmith’s first contribution to The Syncopated Times, a thoroughly charming monthly periodical out of Utica, New York. (“Syncopate Close to Home!”) The April issue contains my review of The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. The book is the culminating volume of …
The Original Cornell Syncopators are a student band that plays in the earliest jazz styles. Their historical acumen is such that they make recordings on Thomas A. Edison cylinders from the nineteen-aughts! I produced a 15-minute audio feature for WRFI Community Radio News enitled: “Time Machine—Recording Hot Jazz on Cylinder.” In May 2019, the band …
Here’s the link to my career retrospective of media critic and activist Jeff Cohen. It appeared on the cover of the April 18 edition of the Ithaca Times. [article as a PDF screenshot]