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 Alex Belth The Stacks Reader Welcome to The Stacks Reader, an online trove of classic journalism and writing about the arts and culture that began innocently enough fifteen years ago in the microfilm room of the New York Public Library. I was there doing some...
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 Wendell Smith Chicago’s American April 5, 1961 SARASOTA, Fla.—Meet the loneliest people in Sarasota, Fla.—Mr. and Mrs. Edward Wachtel. They are the proprietors of the DeSoto motel, the eight-unit establishment where the Negro members of the White Sox have been...
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...
By Seymour Krim From Shake it For the World, Smartass 1965 I met Kerouac only twice, both for brief periods of not more than 15 minutes, and communication between us was abrupt and unreal. What I wrote about the man and writer was the result of feeling, experience and...
By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair June 1992 New York is a city famous for its talkers, its riffers, rappers, and raconteurs. But let’s face it, a lot of them are seriously overrated—depend on canned routines and canned Attitude, self-congratulatory cynicism and stale camp...
By Richard Ben Cramer Rolling Stone March 1984 How was I out to lunch? Let me count the ways. I was new to magazines, never having written for a national publication, much less for ROLLING STONE. I was a newspaperman, just returned from the Middle East—a bit unsteady,...
By Jerome Holtzman From No Cheering in the Press Box 1973 I never felt that I was a bug-eyed fan as such. I wasn’t one of those who dreamed of being a sportswriter and going around the country traveling with ball players and getting into the games free and, oh, dear...
By Paul Slansky The Village Voice March 1979 On February 4, 1974, Albert Brooks walked on the stage of The Tonight Show for the 22nd time. His past performances had included some of the funniest bits ever seen on the show: an impressionist whose imitation of various...
By Helen Lawrenson Show 1964 Collected in Latins Are Still Lousy Lovers It would seem that John Huston has an obsessive to make movies the hard way. He picks the most difficult, inaccessible, uncomfortable, even dangerous, locations—where almost everyone in the...
