By: Franklin Bruno

What musician has been more unfairly burdened with expectations set by his early work than TOM VERLAINE (Thomas Miller, born 1949)? His band Television’s 1977 debut Marquee Moon — especially Verlaine’s solo flight on its […]

By: Douglas Wolk

Sheila Escovedo, better known as SHEILA E. (born 1957), is a curious case: a totally solid musician and performer who’s spent the high points of her career in the shadow of a great one. The […]

By: Lynn Peril

Finnish-born MAILA NURMI (1921-2008) kicked around Hollywood as a hatcheck girl and pinup model before a turn as the Charles Addams cartoon character later named Morticia changed the course of her life, not to mention […]

By: Tom Nealon

It’s true that guitarist and drummer J MASCIS (Joseph Donald Mascis, born 1965) and Dinosaur Jr., drunk on jangly post-punk-death-metal, gave birth to an especially virulent strain of impossible-to-enjoy alt-rock. Much of their later work […]

By: Mimi Lipson

He knew his audience inside and out.

By: Joe Alterio

The only diploma that E.C. SEGAR (1884-1938) ever earned was from a correspondence cartooning class; but he was every bit as dedicated to his profession as Popeye, his most famous creation, was to roaming the […]

By: David Smay

TOM WAITS (born 1949) turns sixty today — and it’s not his fault that NPR wants to stick a bronze plaque on him and declare him a National Landmark. He’s been making little teratomas of […]

By: Patrick Cates

You suffer from severe anterograde amnesia; you are trapped, forever, at the end of 1955. Your memory of the events up to that point is coherent and complete, and yet you can’t remember anything that […]

By: Greg Rowland

LITTLE RICHARD (born 1932) arrived to pulverise our senses in the same pitiless manner that he attacked the upper register of the piano. He called himself the “Architect of Rock’n’Roll,” which is far more respectable […]

By: Sarah Weinman

If you know CORNELL WOOLRICH’s (1903-68) oeuvre at all, it’s most likely through the films of the standout directors who’ve interpreted it: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for example, was based on Woolrich’s story “It Had to […]

By: Peggy Nelson

The director most identified with the art film, JEAN-LUC GODARD (born 1930) got his start, not in film, but in criticism. Along with other members of what was termed La Nouvelle Vague, he developed the […]

By: Douglas Wolk

It can be hard to distinguish BRITNEY SPEARS (born 1981) the performer from Britney Spears the cultural construct — which one shaved her head, again? which one’s got the unerring song-sense that led her to […]

By: David Smay

The 1960s was a terrible decade for film and television comedy, but it did produce a stellar class of comedians working the beatnik demimonde: Mort Sahl, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Bill […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“That pig was telling me exactly what to do.”

By: Jason Grote

If there were to be a patron saint for misfit smart kids who do poorly in school, it would have to be MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1918-2007). A gifted writer from the age of 5, she was […]