Last month Museyon Guides launched three extremely handsome guidebooks about film and travel. The New York Times recently ran a short piece about the series.
I contributed articles about film locations in San Francisco and Italy, which made for a highly enjoyable research process: The Conversation, Dirty Harry, The Birds, Bullitt, Invasion of the Body [...]
One of my recurring frustrations with entertainment biographies is overdocumentation. Concert dates, recording sessions, studio memos pile up as if the profusion of unmediated data will ultimately transmit a deeper understanding of the performer. Usually, though, all that minutiae just ends up obscuring the subject. That you learn a singer took a fifteen-minute break during [...]
The other day Liza pointed out this passage in Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica:
A car rolled up and got stopped in traffic in front of us. Music poured from the radio, carrying a voice that was all smooth and elegant, except burps and grunts kept popping out of it like a baby trying to talk. “She says [...]
Since reading Susie Boyt’s memoir, I’ve been thinking a lot about Judy Garland and Michael Jackson–as have others–and I found this clip on YouTube. It’s Michael Jackson doing Fred Astaire’s moves while singing “Get Happy,” one of Judy Garland’s signature songs, and it’s totally riveting. The melody is so decidedly hers, but the voice is [...]
Forty years ago a massively popular performer died from a drug overdose. Judy Garland was 47 at the time. Her fan base was enormous. Some 20,000 people lined up to view her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.
Susie Boyt, who was born a few months before Garland’s death, has [...]