Norman Lear was born during the presidency of Warren G. Harding and made his bones as a TV producer in the days of Richard Nixon’s White House. It is now morning in Donald Trump’s America. In the foyer of the television producer’s Beverly Hills offices, CNN is blaring the latest on the faux post-election scandal […]
His mother was a librarian. His father owned a record store and would spend the evenings listening to unsold recordings. The son listened along to Mozart, Schoenberg, Schubert and Charles Ives. Philip Morris Glass was born on January 31, 1937 in Baltimore, into a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. He played violin at an early […]
PARK CITY, Utah – The It Girl of the Sundance Film Festival is reclined on a couch, finally taking a breath after a relentless day of being whisked around a snowier-than-usual Park City. Because of her performance opposite Jon Hamm and Geena Davis in one this year’s buzziest premieres, she’s being called the breakout star […]
or the past several years, John Cale, the Welsh musician and co-founder of the Velvet Underground, has been selectively reissuing his back catalogue. Some of these efforts are straightforward: an old record is remastered, and given new packaging, an updated set of liner notes, and perhaps a new video. Others are wild reimaginings. This spring, […]
Once a rebellious pop artist, David Hockney is now considered the greatest living British painter. An upcoming retrospective will showcase a collection of the artist’s celebrated masterpieces from the last six decades. Running from 9 February until 29 May, this highly anticipated David Hockney exhibition by Tate Britain promises to be one of the most […]
A good way to come at John Berger (1926-2017) is to do it by mistake or serendipity, to discover him in the wrong box. At least that was my story, as a music critic who never studied art. Individual, unmanaged, unmediated discovery, an outsider’s discovery, probably suits him best. Not the kind that happens in […]
On Netflix’s One Day at a Time, an excellent reboot of the Norman Lear original, Rita Moreno stars as 70-year-old Lydia, the grandmother in a multigenerational Cuban-American family living in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Moreno herself is a living legend. The star of West Side Story, Singin’ in the Rain, and countless other films and […]
A boy, asleep in the country, is awakened by a strong light outside his window and some strange rustlings in the house. A few feet from his bed, a toy monkey claps its cymbals together—like a stick banging the floor three times in a French theatre, announcing the beginning of a show—and tanks and police […]
Shocked at the election of their next president, many Americans at the end of 2016 turned to social media, petitions, polls, and the streets in protest. A century and a half ago, shocked at the assassination of the sitting president who oversaw the reunification of a divided nation, Walt Whitman turned to poetry. In “O […]
Every appearance by Martha Argerich is inescapably an event. She is such an exceptional pianist by any standard, and her visits anywhere were for many years such rarities that she long ago acquired a legendary status. But there is a problem. The problem with Argerich’s appearances is not, as it once was, whether she would […]
Bob Dylan admitted he was stunned and surprised when he was told he had won a Nobel prize because he had never stopped to consider whether his songs were literature. Dylan, whose speech was read out by the US ambassador to Sweden at the annual awards dinner, said the prize was “something I never could […]
In the early nineteen-sixties, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him: “Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that […]
