Essay · Comedy & Lives Can We Talk? Joan Rivers was the funniest woman in the history of American comedy, and the qualifications embedded in that sentence — the word woman, the word history — are themselves part of the argument she spent sixty years making: that the comedy establishment’s willingness to tolerate her existedContinue reading “Joan Rivers”
Category Archives: Blog
Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of a Mother
Grief, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Maternal Love: Jørgen Vestergaard’s Historien om en moder (1977) By Bergotte The Story of a Mother Here is a film that is seared into my memory from childhood: Jørgen Vestergaard’s 1977 Danish stop-motion animated short Historien om en moder (The Story of a Mother) represents one of the mostContinue reading “Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of a Mother”
Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose
They were young, they were beautiful, they were consumed by their own myths and their own fevers before any of them reached forty. Byron, Shelley, and Keats between them invented the idea of the artist as hero — as outcast, visionary, martyr to beauty and freedom. The invention was magnificent and partly fraudulent and changedContinue reading “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know: Byron, the Romantics, and the Heroic Pose”
Leonard Cohen & David Bowie
Essay · Music & Ideas Two Ways of Dying in Public Leonard Cohen and David Bowie both knew they were dying when they made their final albums. Both kept the knowledge largely to themselves. Both produced, from that knowledge, work of extraordinary quality that addressed mortality directly and without evasion. And there the similarity endsContinue reading “Leonard Cohen & David Bowie”
Ovartaci
Essay · Art & Lives The Chief Loon and the World Inside the World Ovartaci lived for fifty-six years inside a psychiatric hospital in Risskov, near Aarhus, and made, in those fifty-six years, approximately a thousand works of extraordinary formal intelligence and phantasmagoric density — paintings, drawings, sculptures, mixed media pieces built from whatever materialsContinue reading “Ovartaci”
Eddie Murphy
Essay · Comedy & Culture The Force That Arrived at Nineteen Eddie Murphy is the most naturally gifted comedian America has produced in the second half of the twentieth century, and the case for this claim is not primarily about the films, though the films at their best are extraordinary, and not primarily about theContinue reading “Eddie Murphy”
Riding in Cars with Boys
We drove back to Los Angeles the next day. It was one of those sunny days suspended in time. We both knew something in our story had ended, and neither of us understood that something else had already begun. When I said goodbye to him at his hotel, I pretended it was nothing. We didn’tContinue reading “Riding in Cars with Boys”
The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky
By Bergotte The series has been moving, in its way, toward this. Homer gave us mortality without consolation. Ovid gave us transformation without stability. Dante gave us love as the architecture of the universe. Shakespeare gave us the self as performance, unmoored from any fixed ground. What Dostoevsky gives us is the consequence of allContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky”
Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969
Essay · Music & History Four Days on Max Yasgur’s Farm Woodstock was not what it was advertised to be. It was not three days of peace and music — it was four days, the weather was frequently terrible, the organisation collapsed almost immediately, the food ran out, the sound system failed repeatedly, and atContinue reading “Woodstock Music and Art Fair, 1969”
Natalie Wood
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Never Quite Belonged to Herself Natalie Wood was one of the most naturally gifted actresses of the Hollywood studio era, a woman who made the transition from child star to adult performer with a completeness that almost no one manages, who received three Academy Award nominations beforeContinue reading “Natalie Wood”
