An old rock-and-roll legend has it that Bob Dylan and George Harrison were supposed to record with Elvis Presley, but The King was a no-show. As Dylan tells it, though, Presley “did show up, it was us that didn’t.” In a rare interview with writer Bill Flanagan, posted to Dylan’s website Wednesday night, Dylan was more generous with […]
…Above all, Craig has written the kind of phenomenal role that you pray that an actress of Sara Kestelman’s unflagging calibre will come by at the summit of her career. She excels at characters who have been seared by a terrible past but who don’t give an inch of ground by succumbing to a speck […]
Throughout his nearly 84 years, Willie Nelson has crafted more than his share of timeless ballads. Now, another can be added to that impressive list. In the black-and-white video for the lilting “It Gets Easier,” the Texas-born icon, armed with his faithful six-stringed sidekick Trigger, sings “It gets easier as we get older; it gets […]
In the spring of 1975, Joan Didion returned to her alma mater, U.C. Berkeley, to deliver the school’s prestigious Regents Lecture before a crowd of (mostly young, mostly female) admirers. She began with an admission: “Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell.” The lifted title was “Why I Write.” She […]
It is one of Hollywood’s most iconic images: a lawman walking down a deserted Western street toward a showdown with four armed killers. For more than 60 years, High Noon, starring Gary Cooper, has embedded itself in our culture and our national memory. Its title itself has become legendary, connoting a moment of truth when […]
“There’s no such thing as world music.” That’s what drummer Mickey Hart told us when we asked him about the term “world music,” which was coined 30 years ago. This year, we’re touching base with artists who were attracted to global sounds or who became champions of those sounds and to reflect on what this thing, […]
At a recent event in Los Angeles, producer Toshio Suzuki explained that Hayao Miyazaki is hard at work on a new movie. Miyazaki entered semi-retirement back in 2013, as he felt it was difficult to continue the long working hours necessary in animation production. However, even before that Miyazaki would often say he was retiring […]
WASHINGTON — The exhibition “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Hirshhorn Museum is great fun if you like to be dazzled by rooms whose mirrored interiors create countless, ever-diminishing reflections of themselves and anything in them. And who doesn’t? Ms. Kusama, who was born in Japan in 1929, made her first Infinity Mirror room, “Phalli’s […]
“Everybody is excited that I’m turning 90 years old because it gives them a chance to exploit something that they think is milestone but I find to be absolutely terrifying,” Belafonte said in his signature deep, raspy voice. (He stopped singing in 2004 because of issues with his vocal cords.) “When I think about the […]
From photo-like paintings to out-of-focus works, he is consistently inconsistent and beyond his time. Gerhard Richter, at 85, claims to have to system – but has become one of the world’s most expensive artists. Gerhard Richter can walk through his chosen hometown of Cologne virtually unrecognized. He is inconspicuous, humble in appearance – a small, […]
Drag is as old as Xenophon’s fear of women, but in our transgender, anti-binary age transvestism onstage can seem quaint, a relic from a shameful past when gay people adhered to certain patriarchal assumptions about what made a man and what made a woman. Although the work of such sui-generis theatre artists as Charles Ludlam—who […]
“Miss Oates Loves to Splash Blood On Us” sniffed the headline of Geoffrey Wolfe’s New York Times review of Joyce Carol Oates’ 1971 novel Wonderland. It’s hard to imagine so curt yet quailing a dismissal atop a Times consideration of the other major novelists of her day, something like “Mr. Updike Lives to Compare Vulvae […]
