By Nik Cohn From Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom 1969 Next came the Fab Four, the Moptop Mersey Marvels, and this is the bit I’ve been dreading. I mean what is there possibly left to say on them? In the beginning, I should say, the Beatles were the Quarrymen, and then they...
By Lucy Sante For The University of Chicago Press 2009 The Parker novels by Richard Stark are a singularly long-lasting literary franchise, established in 1962 and pursued to the present, albeit with a 23-year hiatus in the middle. In other ways, too, they are a...
By Donald Westlake From Writers on Directors 1999 Here are two things Stephen Frears said to me. The first was several months before The Grifters was made and, in fact, before either of us had signed on to do the project. We had just recently met, brought together by...
By Ellen Willis From The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll 1980 Janis Joplin was born in 1943 and grew up in Port Arthur, Texas. She began singing in bars and coffeehouses, first locally, then in Austin, where she spent most of a year at the...
By Brad Darrach Life December 1987 Meryl Streep is gray with cold. In Ironweed, her new movie, she plays a ragged derelict who dies in a cheap hotel room, and for more than half an hour before the scene she has been hugging a huge bag of ice cubes in an agonizing...
By Mike Sager GQ September 1994 “Good evening, folks,” says the comic, freeing the microphone from its stand, charting a course across the stage, his shadow following. His right hand searches the pocket of his baggy pants, puddled atop weary moccasins. The cool mesh...
By Allen Barra Inside Sports May 1985 It’s hard to think back on this story now without sadness. You hear so often about some running back who could have been the greatest. Well, Marcus really was the greatest, or at least he could have been. I’ve never seen...
By Lucy Sante From Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! 2004 In a corner of my office, on top of a bookcase, lies a hunting horn—a sort of bugle, curved in the manner of a French horn. It has occupied a place in my inner sanctum wherever I’ve lived since childhood....
By Ralph J. Gleason Rolling Stone July 4, 1974 Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was three weeks and four days past his 75th birthday when he died last month in a New York City hospital. He had played his music in almost every part of the world except China and...
By James Wolcott Texas Review May 1982 Coffee and Coca-Cola, the crackling hiss of food on the fry, the ring of laughter in a bustling room—Diner, written and directed by Barry Levinson, is a bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until...
By Charles Simic From Writers at the Movies 2000 Only recently, with their issue on videotape, have all the films of Buster Keaton become widely available. It’s likely one may have seen The General (1926) in some college course, or caught a couple of shorts at some...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker November 26, 1984 Stop Making Sense makes wonderful sense. A concert film by the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December, 1983, and the footage has...
