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 “
Category Archives: Aesthetics
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 “
Phil Spector
Essay · Music & Culture The Sound He Built and the Silence It Left Phil Spector invented one of the most ravishing sonic experiences in the history of recorded music and then, across the following decades, dismantled every reason to enjoy it cleanly. The Wall of Sound remains. So does everything else. By Bergotte · LosContinue reading “Phil Spector”
Chapter 32: Autumn Leaves
At Bryn Mawr, I take a seminar on women’s causes, descended from the work of Katharine Hepburn’s mother, a suffragist and alumna who fought for women’s rights at the turn of the century. In one class, our professor says something that stops me in my tracks: “Feminism without racial justice is white women demanding equalityContinue reading “Chapter 32: Autumn Leaves “
Chapter 31: Moonglow
“When do you have to be back at college?” he asks as I pick him up from Palm Springs Municipal Airport. “Last week of September.” “What about Topper? Where is he?” “He’s back at Harvard.” I reply. I change to other topics before the boy can ask more questions. We pull into the drive ofContinue reading “Chapter 31: Moonglow”
Roger Hargreaves’ The Mr. Men
Essay · Literature & Ideas Little Books, Absolute Selves Roger Hargreaves set out in 1971 to answer his son’s question about what a tickle looks like, and in doing so produced one of the stranger philosophical projects of the twentieth century: a universe populated entirely by beings who are identical to their own single quality,Continue reading “Roger Hargreaves’ The Mr. Men”
Chapter 30: The Memphis Flash
I find myself at the Louisiana Hayride in the days after my birthday, seated in the audience beside his little girlfriend, whom, for some reason, I’ve been appointed to chaperone. Oddly, I don’t mind. I look out for her: buying sodas, finding our seats. She feels so young to me, untested, unarmoured, especially beside theContinue reading “Chapter 30: The Memphis Flash “
My World of Interiors 