For a guy few outside of the British Navy know much about, Samuel Pepys is getting a lot of play these days. He is the subject of a new biography by Claire Tomalin, reviewed last week in the NY Times, and his daily diaries have been turned into a blog …
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Nicolas Lemann on Daniel Ellsberg
Long New Yorker essay on Ellsberg and his new book on the Pentagon Papers: To anyone over a certain age (forty-five?), Daniel Ellsberg needs no introduction, but it would be quite a challenge to explain Ellsberg to someone who had never heard of him. There was this brilliant young man …
Read More »Bill Wyman Stones Book Out Today
PW Daily on the lavish new Stones memoir: Bill Wyman has been a great pack rat. In some 40 years touring with the Rolling Stones, he amassed a treasure trove of material, including rare photographs, tour posters and ticket stubs, letters and telegrams. These objects–combined with his surprisingly crystal-clear recollections …
Read More »No Real “Nirvana” for Cobain
The Observer has an ongoing series on Kurt Cobain’s diaries, including images of the actual journals, and Barney Hoskyns’ essay on his importance: “There’s something wrong with that boy…” noted William Burroughs when, in 1993, Kurt Cobain dropped in to pay his respects in Lawrence, Kansas. ‘He frowns for no …
Read More »Adolph Green Dies
Lyricist of classic Broadway and Hollywood musicals.
Read More »‘I Am Not A Junkie’
Last night Dawn and I went to a Halloween party – she was Courtney Love and I was Kurt Cobain. No one recognized us – they just thought she was a whore and I was Jeff Spicoli. How soon they forget. We are once again in tune with the zeitgeist: …
Read More »Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation
Every biographer of a musical figure, indeed every writer about music, must deal with the issue of conveying the essence of one medium through the use of another: the “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” conundrum. While we seem to have no trouble feeling the abstracted meaning of …
Read More »Sex, Death and Videotape
The sordid, bifurcated life of Bob Crane comes to the big screen. I loved Hogan’s Heroes as a kid: I didn’t much care that a comedy about prisoners of war in WWll was in preposterous bad taste. The fantasy that the prisoners were actually empowered by their situation was the …
Read More »Columbus: In His Own Words
We neglected Columbus on Columbus Day (other than a discussion of Mayor Bloomberg’s decision not to march in NYC’s parade). Gary Farber points us to a rather grim assessment of Columbus in the New Yorker: Columbus was one of history’s great optimists. When he read in Marco Polo that the …
Read More »“It’s a Cesspool”
Joni Mitchell latest to dump on recording industry: The veteran singer/songwriter, on the promotional trail for a new album, says she is “ashamed” to be part of the music business and may stop recording. “I just think it’s a cesspool,” the 58-year-old folk-rock icon said in the latest issue of …
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