David Fear
The phrase “new Hollywood cinema” is an ambiguous designation for a town that repeatedly reinvents and rejuvenates itself. It’s often applied to two closely-related – but very distinct – time periods. One is the late 1960's-to-mid-1970's, now known as ...
Nancy Chapple
Does the narrator of a memoir need to be likeable? What if he’s particularly unsympathetic? What if the life he describes is so very different from your own that you can only shake your head in amazement? Augusten ...
Lewis Whittington
If James Gavin's biography Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker was fiction, it would have a shot at being the great American novel. The bootstrap story of a poor trumpeter (with missing teeth) who couldn’t ...
Lewis Whittington
One of the most fertile partnerships in all of ballet wasn't seen on stage, but was danced behind the scenes - the collaboration of composer Igor Stravinsky and choreographer George Balanchine. Both Russian artistic emigres to the West, together ...
David Fear
The term “screwball comedy” is one of those genre labels that, like film noir, seems to be applied as loosely as it is frequently. Once upon a time, “screwball” denoted a very specific type of film from a very ...
Lewis Whittington
Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (2002), David Kaufman Charles Ludlam was a man of the theater with the ego of no less personages than Moliere, Shakespeare and Wilde.As ...
Eva Hunter
There’s a reason New York’s "Hell’s Kitchen" was called by that name, and—to a large degree—that reason is Owen (called "Owney" by his mother and his friends) Madden. Born in Ireland in the late 19th Century, Madden emigrated to ...
Arthur Lazere
On her very first LP, on the Bethlehem label in 1957, there was, in the singing and piano playing of Nina Simone (1933-2003) an authority, an artistic confidence unusual in a novice performer of 24. She had been trained ...
David Fear
If you’ve found yourself left breathless by the breakneck pace of Hollywood’s recent action thrillers, you probably have one man to thank: John Woo. It was Woo who almost single-handedly opened the eyes of the West to the hyper-kinetic ...
Nancy Chapple
Dispatches was praised by John le Carre as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." There is a masculine mystique that revolves around wartime fear, bravery, foolhardiness. Can a war book equally ...
