I bring Topper to the South for Easter in 1956. The boy is in Los Angeles, so we don’t see him. It feels strangely empty to be back home without him here. On Easter Sunday, he’s in San Diego for the Milton Berle Show. I drive over to visit his parents and see their newContinue reading “Chapter 37: Rowan Oak”
Category Archives: Aesthetics
Den enfaldige mördaren
Essay · Film & Memory The Angels of Skåne Hans Alfredson’s Den enfaldige mördaren — released in 1982 and almost entirely unknown outside Scandinavia — is one of the great films of its decade: a fable of class, cruelty, and avenging grace set in the flat southern Swedish countryside, carrying in its long frame aContinue reading “Den enfaldige mördaren”
Chapter 36: Mystery Train
The boy is now a superstar. I can’t explain it. I’ve never experienced anything like it, nor, I believe, has America. It’s unnerving. It makes me nauseous. Sometimes, when it fully hits me, the realisation of it, I have what can only be described as a nervous breakdown: strange, weepy convulsions. “This can’t be goodContinue reading “Chapter 36: Mystery Train “
A Room with a View
Essay · Literature & Ideas The View From the Window and the Cost of Looking A Room with a View is a comedy, and it is a love story, and it is a novel about Florence, and it is a sustained philosophical argument about the relationship between the body and the soul that Forster dressedContinue reading “A Room with a View”
Mel Brooks at 100: the Brooklyn kid who turned laughter into a weapon
As the last surviving titan of America’s golden age of comedy reaches his centenary, we celebrate a man who spent eight decades proving that the surest way to defeat a monster is to make a room full of strangers laugh at it There is a story Mel Brooks likes to tell about The Producers. AContinue reading “Mel Brooks at 100: the Brooklyn kid who turned laughter into a weapon”
Chapter 35: Heartbreak Hotel
We’re at a restaurant in the city with executives from the boy’s record label. His cousin is here too, the one who thinks I talk too much for a girl. Tilly has promised to drop by. When she does, I’m chatting with Scotty, DJ, and Bill while the boy works the room, charming all theContinue reading “Chapter 35: Heartbreak Hotel “
The Decorated Life: The Bloomsbury Group, Charleston, and the Art of Living Differently
They remade British culture, reinvented the novel, revolutionised art criticism, and painted every available surface of a Sussex farmhouse in colours that the English countryside had never previously entertained. A century later, the Bloomsbury Group remains the most argued-about, most imitated, and most misunderstood intellectual community in English literary history. By Bergotte There is aContinue reading “The Decorated Life: The Bloomsbury Group, Charleston, and the Art of Living Differently”
Chapter 34: Fame & Fortune
The boy has his first recording session for RCA in Nashville. It’s a far cry from the sessions at Sun with Sam, where it was all about the feel, not money, not making a hit. Now he’s under a whole new kind of pressure, both nervous and in a foul mood. He works best whenContinue reading “Chapter 34: Fame & Fortune”
HBC
Essay · Film & Lives The Woman Who Would Not Be Placed Helena Bonham Carter has spent forty years systematically refusing the career that her face, her name, and her early notices seemed to have arranged for her. That the career she built instead — stranger, darker, funnier, and more various than anything the corset-dramaContinue reading “HBC”
Chapter 33: I Forgot to Remember to Forget
Back home in Memphis for Christmas 1955, the world feels different. The newspapers are still full of the bus boycotts beginning down in Montgomery, and the air is uneasy, watchful. I write a cheque to the local branch of the NAACP and drive it over in person to Hosea Lockard’s office, intending to thank himContinue reading “Chapter 33: I Forgot to Remember to Forget “
My World of Interiors 