Ralph Bakshi

By: Joe Alterio

If the sexualized children’s gardens of white gloves and dildos sharing the same animation cel are old hat to today’s otaku-obsessed hipsters roaming the pop-surrealist galleries, we have auteur animator RALPH BAKSHI (born 1938) to […]

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Francis Bacon

By: Patrick Cates

Unlike his namesake and ancestor, FRANCIS BACON (1909-92) was never granted a knighthood for his services to educated society. Nor should he have been. He deserved a title much loftier and more distinguished: Grand Horrifier […]

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Nestor Makhno

By: Lucy Sante

No one has come closer than NESTOR MAKHNO (1888-1934) to establishing that paradox, the anarchist nation. Born in rural poverty in the Ukraine, he got his education as a teenager in prison, where he had […]

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Pablo Picasso

By: Ingrid Schorr

Those who question or resist PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) are overthinking. No need. The man did all the thinking for you. He could have been an immensely appealing sentimental artist, but he forced himself to be […]

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Madlib

By: Douglas Wolk

The hip-hop producer MADLIB (born 1973) is also a helium-voiced rapper (Quasimodo) and a one-man jazz “quintet” (Yesterday’s New Quintet), among other alter egos. Since 1993, he’s contributed to dozens of recordings, and his breed […]

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“Weird Al” Yankovic

By: Sarah Weinman

To call “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC (born 1959) a parodist is to understate his technical proficiency and artistic skill. Anyone can satirize a song or a movie and upload it to YouTube, but Weird Al is […]

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Stiv Bators

By: Tor Aarestad

Though Iggy Pop did Iggy first (and better), STIV BATORS (1949-90) did Iggy with a striver’s zeal in the right place and at the right time. The arrival of the Dead Boys in 1977 marked the […]

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Ursula K. Le Guin

By: Joshua Glenn

Her Earthsea fantasy novels — most signally, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972) — concern the education of a young wizard, and are recommended for those who […]

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Wanda Jackson

By: Ingrid Schorr

A straight line runs from rockabilly pioneer WANDA JACKSON (born 1937) to Jason and the Scorchers and the Cramps. Watch a 1958 performance of “Hard Headed Woman”: Jackson juts her guitar in a most unladylike […]

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Divine

By: Mimi Lipson

“Just because you got them big udders don’t make you something special.” So says Earl Peterson (DIVINE, born Harris Glenn Milstead, 1945-88) to Dawn Davenport (Divine, again) in two of her greatest roles. And Earl […]

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Lotte Lenya

By: Lynn Peril

LOTTE LENYA (1898-1981) once described her voice as “an octave below laryngitis.” With her quavering vibrato and what’s been described as her “cavalier” approach to key, no one would mistake Lenya for a trained singer […]

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Evel Knievel

By: Annie Nocenti

Star-spangled motorcycle daredevil EVEL KNIEVEL (1938 –2007) showed the world you can be fearless and self-destructive and — if you understand hype — become an American icon. He stole his first bike. He jumped a […]

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Louis Althusser

By: Mark Kingwell

Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them, he murdered his wife — taking his philosophy of anti-humanism a little too far, as the clunky grad-seminar joke has it. (In court […]

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Italo Calvino

By: Tom Nealon

It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo from The Baron in the Trees (1957), by ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985), as it is to think of the 19th without Raskolnikov, the 18th […]

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