By Stephen Fried Philadelphia Magazine June, 1983 The Sound: A tight, simple rhythm, pulsing, throbbing. A smooth, cool guitar lightly plays a handful of notes, but just the right notes. The feel is subtle, complex; a combination of what is right about jazz, what is...
By Fred Schruers Premiere May 1993 “I have to straighten out my karma,” says Sharon Stone. “I’ve become a sex symbol, which is an absurd thing for me. Particularly since I symbolize a kind of sex I don’t believe in.” That swirling girl-on-top, biting, moaning,...
By Helen Dudar Esquire January, 1976 Before she became Pauline Kael, before she was much more than a wonderful surprise occasionally encountered in obscure journals, before she was canonized as America’s best critic of film, Pauline Kael took an ax to the work of...
By Willie Morris Inside Sports May, 1980 I finally came home. It was not too late. I always had home in my blood—Mississippi—but with this final homecoming the love I had for home stunned me. Much of it has to do with the land, its sensual textures—one’s memory...
By Fred Schruers Rolling Stone February 5, 1981 Bruce Springsteen, in the abstract, is just the kind of guy my little New Jersey hometown schooled me to despise. Born seventy-seven days apart, raised maybe fifty miles apart, this beatified greaser and I grew up...
By Alex Belth Bronx Banter October 14, 2014 Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008) was one of our most prolific and entertaining writers. Now, we’ve got this posthumous treat: The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany, published by the University of Chicago...
By Ron Rosenbaum Esquire August 1982 The way Wayne Newton explained it to me, it all started with a post-midnight punch-out in a private suite at the Frontier hotel. Wayne is knocking them dead in the Frontier’s showroom when these two wise guys swagger onto the...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader November 2, 2020 Know this: The Village Voice website is now a curated trove of stories from their vast archives. Has been for a while, too. Praise is overdue. The site is terrific and for this we are grateful.
By Seymour Krim The Village Voice September 9, 1959 When has an inside phrase like “making it” or so-and-so’s “got it made” shot with such reality through the museum of official English? In this terse verbal shorthand lies a philosophy of life that puts a gun in the...
By Brad Darrach People September 3, 1979 A sunburst blonde lolls on lavender satin sheets. Her mouth is large, scarlet, half-open. Her blank blue eyes smolder like sapphires in candlelight. “My beauty,” she murmurs breathily as her sensuous snout writhes with allure,...
By John Eskow Rolling Stone August 23, 1979 There is a deceptive air of chaos at the Mork & Mindy rehearsal. Robin Williams grabs his crotch and stomps around the room, mocking himself in a street-kid growl: “I gotcha shazbot, right here, buddy. Yeah, here’s...
By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc April 1984 Picture this: your dinner guest is Thomas Pynchon, the writer much of scholarly America considers our best living novelist. He is also a tantalizingly shadowy figure; a generation of fervent readers has fantasized meeting him,...
