“The utmost of ambition,” Robert Frost once wrote, “is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of”: not on university syllabi but in the memory of a generation. Few poets achieved that ambition more Read More …
David Hockney is the world’s most expensive living artist as of Thursday night, when “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” his big, color-soaked picture from 1972, sold at Christie’s New York for $90.3 million. It’s a dubious distinction, Read More …
One would be forgiven for presuming that Metallica’s emotional range runs merely from pissed to super-pissed. I’m not sure there’s another American band quite as adept at reflecting a certain kind of masculine rage—a deep and splintering fear of helplessness. Read More …
This past week, the seasoned “S.N.L.” performer Kenan Thompson made the rounds of the morning and daytime talk shows to promote his role as Mr. Bricklebaum, the Grinch’s best friend, in the new Dr. Seuss movie, and found himself in Read More …
In February, 1971, a Broadway-bound musical version of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and a score by John Barry, went to Philadelphia, for a five-week tryout that gave out eleven nights after opening. Read More …
For most of us, apartment dwellers and city types, houseplants are an admission of defeat. We look wistfully at plants in the supermarket—tendrils and fronds, furry flaps, spines and holes and soft neon shoots—persuading ourselves that they might bring us Read More …
The South African artist William Kentridge’s performance piece “The Head and the Load,” currently at the Park Avenue Armory, is by turns dumbfounding, eviscerating, and beautiful. It chronicles—through dance, projected images, speech, song, pantomime, shadow play, and music, and in Read More …
Just inside Shelley Jackson’s Brooklyn brownstone, a pastel-splotched creature several feet tall held out its plastic paws in an attitude of supplication, or welcome. Its huge eyes had a lysergic taint, like those of a feverish child. Jackson, the author Read More …
Advertised as “a psychological-horror series set in the Stephen King multiverse,” the ten-part series “Castle Rock” (Hulu) stars a town that may be a hellmouth, or, at the very least, a suitably mundane home for motiveless evil. Castle Rock, Maine, Read More …
Last Wednesday, the Times ran a carefully reported feature story by Joe Coscarelli and Melena Ryzik about the indie-rock singer Ryan Adams and his devastating history of abusive behavior toward women. Adams sent 3,217 text messages, some of them sexually Read More …