Jean-Jacques Beineix — RIP

Crowdsourcing works for bloggers too. Readers, can you point me to articles or books about French youth in the late ’70s and early ’80s? How prevalent were UK punk notions with youth culture, and, more importantly, did punk as UK bands understood it happen in big cities? These questions matter when assessing Diva (1981), the

Ronnie Spector — RIP

Blessed with a voice whose appetite — for love, religion, more love — never saw its vigor dimmed, the greatest of the early ’60s singers acquired the wisdom of an adult while keeping the ebullience of an adolescent. The Ronettes’ catalog remains astonishing: with the help of producer/scourge Phil Spector, Ronnie and her mates gave

Sidney Poitier — RIP

To those of us who matured during the years when he released Little Nikita and Sneakers, “Sidney Poitier” was a name, a property. He registered as a benign presence, faintly worried, as if he had lived long enough to understand the fragility of the enterprise. As a result, the Sidney Poitier who made Joseph L.

Peter Bogdanovich — RIP

In a three-year period Peter Bogdanovich became America’s most successful director, our premier revivalist and expert nostalgist, making it impossible to care about him again. The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc, and Paper Moon earned cumulatively $130 million in Nixon-era money; Ben Johnson and Tatum O’Neal won Oscars for Best Supporting Actor and Actress

The utility of stories: Joan Didion RIP

Joan Didion’s sentences were birds of prey aflight three hundred feet, spotting their prey but content to ride the currents, so long as the prey remained in sight, circling and circling, the distance between them narrowing, until the final swoop.

Bob Dole is dead

He looked the part of Bill Clinton’s legislative nemesis. Dark, stooped, with a timbre as musical as a leaf blower, Bob Dole was my introduction to workaday Republican incumbency shading into empowered hostility toward the New Deal.

Don’t you love farce? Stephen Sondheim — R.I.P.

I didn’t grow up with musicals unless the animated Disney or Don Bluth things (An American Tail) count. Escaping my milieu made no sense: I had to discover myself.

I can’t seem to take these changes: Deon Estus — RIP

In the spring of 1989 America had not yet rid itself of its George Michael fascination. Barely three months after Faith‘s last single “Kissing a Fool” peaked at #5 the biggest act of 1988 announced himself, faintly, discreetly. Those are Michael’s backup vocals on “Heaven Help Me,” the only hit for the former Brainstorm member

On duties and needs: a funeral

I can only credit the rude—no, impudent—health of relatives born between 1900 and 1940 for the sixteen-year gap between the death of my great-great aunt (you read this right) and my grandmother. Nothing chipped away at this woman’s glib, alarming positivity, I noted last week. She existed as a force of resolution. Problems like shavings

Yolanda Rueda 1924-2021

Grandmothers from what I’ve read and seen radiate authority. Rarer is the projection of assurance.

On the immodest Charlie Watts

To honor Charlie Watts in death, please don’t refer to him as The Greatest Rock Drummer.

Biz Markie — RIP

I listened to Vanilla Ice’s third single tonight, at the risk of gangrene. “I Love You” courted bathos. That’s the only mode he knew. In the same year Marcel Theo Hall showed contemporaries how to take a worn scenario — a crush insisting on a platonic relationship — into a terribly sung, beautifully wrapped scenario.