By: Franklin Bruno

G.P.’s writing is both ludic and lucid, and anything but inhuman.

By: Franklin Bruno

Vs. the psych­olo­gizing and soft-soap liberal­ism of “white ele­phant art”

By: Franklin Bruno

Given his much-imper­son­ated rasp and gift for Menckenesque quips (“Horse sense is the thing a horse has that keeps it from betting on people”), it’s surprising to find W. C. FIELDS (1879-1946) telling Photoplay, as […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Recalling SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004) as “a leading public intellectual” — a category she did not invent, but perhaps perfected — is no substitute for rereading the early, electrifying essays collected in Against Interpretation and Styles […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Interviews with TODD HAYNES (born 1961) are well-stocked with the film-studies and queer-theory jargon the filmmaker absorbed at Brown and Bard, and several of his movies have the air of academic exercises, at least on […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Even if Brooklyn-born JEAN­MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-88) had never taken brush (or spraycan) to canvas (or wall, or door panel, or helmet), he would merit a berth in New York cultural history for producing K-Rob and […]

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: Franklin Bruno

“St. Louis Blues” may be “the jazzman’s Hamlet,” as one critic has it, but its author, W.C. HANDY (1873-1955) might be compared more fairly to Aeschylus than to Shakespeare. Just as the Greek’s works served […]

By: Franklin Bruno

The last man standing of Sun Records’ early roster has been known to set himself among even loftier company. “Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and JERRY LEE LEWIS [born 1935]…. That’s your only four […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Like Bea Arthur, Pearl Bailey, and Redd Foxx, the televisual omnipresence of JULIUS “NIPSEY” RUSSELL (1918?-2005) belied his status as a veteran of less sanitized showbiz pursuits. He tap-danced his way out of his native […]

By: Franklin Bruno

He began his critical career as a Welsh signalman’s son drawn to English literary tradition, and ended it as a Cambridge don extolling the vitality of rural and working-class life. In between, RAYMOND WILLIAMS (1921-88) […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Over his fecund scientific career, ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER (1887-1961) placed quantum wave mechanics on a firm mathematical basis, contributed to the theory of color measurement and perception, and, in the 1944 lecture “What Is Life?”, anticipated […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Kurt Weill settled into a successful Broadway career after escaping Nazi Germany, but the American soujourn of Brecht’s other major Weimar-era musical collaborator did not end so fortunately. HANNS EISLER (1898-1962) set his Schoenberg-trained hand […]

By: Franklin Bruno

For much of the 1940s, LENA HORNE (born 1917), Hollywood’s “sepia Cinderella,” was relegated to one or two set-piece numbers per film. Opulent, glamorous, and static, her turns in Two Girls and a Sailor and […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Today, the name MARY McCARTHY (1912-89) first brings to mind the frank bed-hopping and catty portraiture of The Company She Keeps and The Group, her biggest seller. But she was also an immaculate stylist, and […]