By: Lynn Peril

She was devoted to comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

By: Lynn Peril

Even if you didn’t know his name, you knew his “Kustom Monsters.”

By: Lynn Peril

Rock‘n’roll, horror movies, and Orange Sun­shine acid

By: Lynn Peril

Find out why “the name of Marie Vassilieff will remain in the history of Montparnasse.”

By: Lynn Peril

Meet the woman who trans­formed paleo­anthro­po­logical field re­search.

By: Lynn Peril

At the age of 15, ARI UP (Arianna Forster, born 1962) was lead singer of England’s all-girl punk band The Slits. No creamy underage dream vixen, she: Up was a teen Medusa who wasn’t about […]

By: Lynn Peril

Dubbed the “Striptease Intellectual” by the American Mercury, GYPSY ROSE LEE (1911-70) wowed the boys with her witty chatter as she removed all but her G-string and two strategically placed bows. An autodidact who penned […]

By: Lynn Peril

A virtuoso pianist with a biting wit, OSCAR LEVANT (1906-72) was equally at home with Schoenberg’s atonalism and Gershwin’s jazzy rhapsodies, dated a series of Broadway chorus girls, acted alongside stars like Fred Astaire and […]

By: Lynn Peril

HARRIET MONROE (1860-1936) was the original zinester. In 1912, at the age of 51, the former Chicago Tribune art editor and moderately successful poet (her “Columbian Ode” — “Columbia! Men beheld thee rise/A goddess from […]

By: Lynn Peril

The Clash was on the front lines of the punk revolution of the late 1970s, but bassist PAUL SIMONON (born 1955) shared some similarities with an iconic rebel of the previous generation. Like the Beatles’ […]

By: Lynn Peril

Finnish-born MAILA NURMI (1921-2008) kicked around Hollywood as a hatcheck girl and pinup model before a turn as the Charles Addams cartoon character later named Morticia changed the course of her life, not to mention […]

By: Lynn Peril

On September 23, 1969, a group of women, conspicuous among them a tall, patrician blonde, handed out mimeographed leaflets to passersby and newlyweds alike at New York City’s marriage bureau. Rather than wedding-day platitudes, the […]

By: Lynn Peril

Classically chiseled male bodies in sumptuous black and white.

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 […]

By: Lynn Peril

The time: 1977. The place: the hinterlands of Wisconsin. My friend Jacqué (pronounced “Jackie,” of course) and I are huddled together in her smoked-mirror-tiled bedroom listening to Queens of Noise, an album by all-girl band […]