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 [...]
My grandmother was born in 1905 and I don’t remember her having much interest in the popular culture of my childhood. I just don’t think she paid that much attention to a lot of what was on television and the radio in the 70s and 80s. But she always loved to watch Michael Jackson move.
Here [...]
I really assumed she’d live forever. Such amazing delivery and timing.
Bea Arthur, star of ‘Golden Girls’ and ‘Maude,’ dies at 86, LA Times
Golden Girl Bloopers, YouTube
The detective series starring John Cassavetes as a jazz pianist turned private eye lasted one season (1959-60). Jay Maeder in the Daily News writes that Johnny Staccato “was regarded as just too downbeat and strange – too hip for the room, as they say.” But there are twentysome episodes circulating. A commenter on IMDB.com provides [...]
Estelle Bennett, Ronnie Spector and Nedra Talley-Ross
Estelle Bennett, a Singer for the Ronettes, Is Dead at 67, NY Times
I’ve been meaning to write about the incredible experience of being in the audience at the performance of Gypsy in which Patti Lupone battered the fourth wall into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces, but I haven’t had the time to collect my thoughts—or really, to recover. I do hope to detail the extraordinary command performance, but [...]
Wyclef Jean and the cast of The Electric Company sing “Electric City.”
The Los Angeles Times reports that “beat-boxing, it turns out, is a surprisingly effective tool for repeating consonant and vowel sounds.” There’s much more at the new school Electric Company headquarters and here’s an old school lesson from Easy Reader.