Thursday , March 28 2024

Tag Archives: Biography

17th Century Blogger

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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‘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: …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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“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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