Tag
Celebrity
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“The Diva Always Has a Transcendent Virtuosity”: Deborah Paredez on Divas, Tías, and Celebrity
“The diva is so often seen as remote and unattainable and onstage; I wanted to see how divas allow for a connection.”
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India’s Fans and India’s Future
Obsession is one of the hallmarks of love in Indian cinema: specifically, a love that breaks down borders.
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Babe Ruth’s New York @100
Ruth embodied a new and yet very old phenomenon—celebrity—in a technological era poised to capitalize on him.
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B-Sides: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Unconsoled”
Ryder, the world-renowned pianist whose brief visit to an unnamed foreign city occupies the full 512 pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 The Unconsoled, finds …
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The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
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The Bingewatch: We’re All Fired
Liberal grief in the wake of Trump’s election has occasioned binges galore: binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-weed-smoking, and not least …
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson”: A Reading List
In 1995, viewers across America were transfixed by the the O. J. Simpson trial, with its noirish mixture of L. A. glamour and dead-eyed depravity. This February, over two decades later, the trial is back as historical fiction. The aim of FX’s The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, as Nicholas Dames wrote last week…
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson” as Historical Fiction
The location is wrong. The white Bronco is clearly weaving through traffic on the 710 South as it approaches its intersection with the 10, on the eastern border of El Sereno, just by the Cal State LA campus. In June 1994, O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings would have had no reason to venture that…
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First-Class Reading and Airport Futures
In-flight magazines are the nadir of non-literary writing. How did they come to be a destination for A-list authors? …
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Close to the Bone: An Interview with Filmmaker Debra Granik
Debra Granik is the director and co-writer of Winter’s Bone, which was nominated for four Oscars including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her latest film, the documentary Stray Dog, follows the everyday life of a Vietnam veteran. A. O. Scott called it an “implicit challenge to the lazy habit of looking at American life…
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A Brief History of Women Accepting Oscars
From the comfort of the couch, the Academy Awards hold a perverse attraction. What will fall flat more often: the dreadful jokes, or the award recipients as they clamor up the stairs to claim their prize? How far will the host go in biting the hand that feeds? How bright the teeth, how lofty the…
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Quiz: Can You Match the Punk Memoirist to the Lyric?
In “The Female Body of Punk,” Ivan Kreilkamp reviews recent memoirs by Viv Albertine, Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Kim Gordon, and Carrie Brownstein. As Kreilkamp puts it, “Although these women position themselves in very different ways in relation to the movement and the music, their life narratives reveal the possibility of a punk history centered less around the…
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The Female Body of Punk
A decade after the Sex Pistols were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the once marginal and vilified punk movement has, for better and worse, been thoroughly assimilated as a major aesthetic and cultural force. One welcome effect of this canonizing process has been a recent wave of new memoirs by some…
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“I Just Wanted People to Hear my Voice”: An Interview with Holly Woodlawn
On December 6, 2015, Holly Woodlawn, the film and cabaret performer known as one of the Warhol Superstars and an inspiration for Lou Reed’s famous song “A Walk on the Wild Side,” died of cancer-related complications at age 69. It was a sad day for me. I interviewed Woodlawn (born Haroldo Santiago Franceschi Rodríguez Danhakl…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which…
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Lending an Ear
It’s 2006 in Iowa City. Two women sit at opposite ends of a library table, fingers arched over their keyboards. A moment’s pause, then they begin—an étude on the voice for four hands. The reading room is so quiet that the clacking of their keyboards easily fills the room, but neither of these women is…
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Bigmouth Strikes Again
I never expected Morrissey to be a hopeless romantic. But then again, I never expected that I would be one, too. As a struggling queer growing up a generation after the moody singer, I relied on our shared disdain for conventionality and lack of imagination. The misunderstanding and abuse inflicted on him by dumb, unloving…
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All About the Clothes
Though Grace Coddington is well-known in her native Britain by lovers of London’s Swinging Sixties, most Americans only learned who she was from the 2009 documentary about the making of Vogue’s annual landmark, The September Issue. This despite the fact that she has worked at American Vogue since 1988, and arrived there on the same…
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Books Full of Women
Biography never tells the story of a single life. Even a biography ostensibly focused on an individual also tells the story of its subject’s family, friends, or associates; it invites us to download bits of the lives of others and make them our own: biography as file sharing. Collective biography compounds the melding of author,…
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Wanting Out
I can remember the first time I met Mark Anthony Neal. I was a graduate student, and he was visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching a class entitled “(Il)Legible Blackness.” The course aimed to familiarize students with recent work in black aesthetic theory and included discussion of a wide range of artists and…
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To Chuck or Not to Chuck
Cricket has a certain charge in writings on the postcolonial world as a site of political contestation between decolonized subjects and their former colonial masters. Scholars such as C. L. R. James, Arjun Appadurai, and Simon Gikandi have written of cricket as a central part of the “colonial ecumene” (Appadurai) in India and the West…
