Author: David Smay
David Smay is the co-editor of two books about pop music, Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth, and Lost in the Grooves. He's also the author of Swordfishtrombones, the 33 1/3 series entry on Tom Waits. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
Ted Hughes
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The very public tragedies in the life of TED HUGHES (1930-98) sometimes overshadow his work. He’s been blamed him for the murder/suicide of his second wife and daughter, and most famously for the suicide of […]
Read This PostMichelle Yeoh
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Most Western filmgoers didn’t discover the greatest female action star in the history of film until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — or when she blew Pierce Brosnan off the screen in Tomorrow Never Dies. But […]
Read This PostWong Kar-Wai
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Moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong at age five, WONG KAR-WAI (born 1958) learned to speak Cantonese at the movies. He hustled his way into the Hong Kong film boom of the ’80s, screenwriting hackwork […]
Read This PostAnna Akhmatova
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ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) was the Joni Mitchell of her day, strikingly angular and beautiful, wrapped in a Spanish shawl, tearing through love affairs with the celebrated poets and artists of her age. Her early work […]
Read This PostAnita Berber
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What did it take to be the most scandalous performer in Weimar Berlin? ANITA BERBER (1899-1928) had a penchant for going out in public naked under her sable wrap, affairs with married women and judges, […]
Read This PostJoseph Brodsky
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I know it’s a bold claim, but JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-96) just might be the greatest poet ever to be rejected by the Soviet School for Submariners. (Tragically, there were no survivors of the School for […]
Read This PostYvonne Craig
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Without question, YVONNE CRAIG (born 1937) had the coolest TV credits of the Sixties: Batman, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, 77 Sunset Strip, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Wild Wild West. Even knowing that she was a […]
Read This PostChester Brown
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Though CHESTER BROWN (born 1960) is still creating vital work, nothing’s ever going to match the jolt of subversive glee we got upon seeing Ronald Reagan topple into an immeasurable vat of shit, get stuck […]
Read This PostBrian Eno
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The contemporary iteration of BRIAN ENO (born 1948) as cerebral master of oblique strategies is certainly worth considering. But my affection is for the balding, androgyne playboy of the early Seventies. Nobody had more sex […]
Read This PostDonovan
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Unfairly dismissed by Sixties rock critics as a fey and twee Dylan wannabe, DONOVAN (born 1946) was clearly the unacknowledged legislator of all things fey and twee. Cat Stevens and Marc Bolan carved their entire […]
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