Though she may well have been “one of the world’s most celebrated, beloved and iconic performers,” who’d have wanted Judy Garland as a mother? When not remaining in bed “for days at a time, heavily drugged and in a deep state of depression,” she was, according to her daughter Liza Minnelli, slashing her neck with
In her seminal 1967 essay “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes of her former self, a 20-year-old naif arriving in New York City for the first time: “Was anyone ever so young?” Lena Dunham – an avowed Didion stan – should have used that line as the title of her new book, an account
In 1951, when J.G. Ballard was 20, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman premiered in London. Directed by Albert Lewin and starring James Mason, Ava Gardner and a solid cast of English actors, it was filmed on the Catalan coast by Jack Cardiff in lush MGM color. Man Ray contributed designs based on the work of
If there’s any consolation to be had in the prospect of AI bots filling the world with humanoids, it’s the look on their glassy faces when they realize that one of us has beaten them to it. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, 75, has installed casts of himself from Crosby Beach in Liverpool
It would be easy to dismiss A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles film made in 1964, as a throwaway period piece. The plot hurls the Fab Four into a meta narrative: they’re playing themselves while a director – a seething Victor Spinetti – panics as the boys are delayed on their way to a televised
A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbarán is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent to Caravaggio – a Caravaggio without the bad temper, brutal vices or criminal record. But it seems difficult to argue
There are two main schools of thought on AI in the Delingpole household. I, as the resident batshit-crazy reactionary tinfoil-hat loon, think that it is evil, indeed quite possibly satanic, and that everything would be much better if only we went back to horse transport, herbal salves and abacuses. And Boy Delingpole, representing technologically literate
Would you pay a tenner on the door to see the Cockroaches, the Fireman, Patchwork, the Network and Bingo Hand Job play your local pub? This unpromising lineup becomes a little more appealing (perhaps) upon learning that these are pseudonyms used by, respectively, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Pulp, Green Day and R.E.M. over the
