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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 […]
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Star-spangled motorcycle daredevil EVEL KNIEVEL (1938 –2007) showed the world you can be fearless and self-destructive and — if you understand hype — become an American icon. He stole his first bike. He jumped a […]
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Like Camus and Derrida, LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-90) came from Algeria. Unlike them, he murdered his wife — taking his philosophy of anti-humanism a little too far, as the clunky grad-seminar joke has it. (In court […]
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It is as impossible to think of the 20th century absent Cosimo from The Baron in the Trees (1957), by ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985), as it is to think of the 19th without Raskolnikov, the 18th […]
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As the trickster-philosopher Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People STEVE COOGAN (born 1965) was jaunty, vulnerable, inspired, and frequently full of shit. It was a part only he could have played. When […]
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The world’s foremost contemporary comic theorist led a teenage breakdance crew, and wrote his Cambridge thesis on the American Civil Rights movement before he planted his ass in Eminem’s face. After university SACHA BARON COHEN […]
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ALEISTER CROWLEY (1875–1947) Mountaineer, fiendish hedonist, and magus incandescent, ALEISTER CROWLEY (1875–1947) remains one of the more remarkable figures of Edwardian letters, though his peculiar reputation makes a frank assessment of the man a rare […]
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Along with Justices Brandeis and Cardozo, Justice (later Chief Justice) HARLAN STONE (1872-1946) was counted among the Three Musketeers — the progressive minority of the Supreme Court during the early years of FDR’s presidency. Since […]
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Buster Keaton begat two great cinematic heirs, both of whom embraced the elaborately set-up visual gag: Jackie Chan and JACQUES TATI (1907-82). Like so many French icons of the 1950s and ’60s (Serge Gainsbourg, Anna […]
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Alia, a telepathic four-year-old girl who, in the bestselling science fiction novel of all time, roams the battlefields of Arrakis slitting the throats of imperial stormtroopers, gained her powers in utero because her mother drank […]
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THOR HEYERDAHL (1914–2002) lived a long life, but so much was left undone: he might have piloted an ice floe from Porvoo to Hokkaido to prove Finland’s nomadic Sami peopled Japan; he might have shown […]
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The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of […]
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At one point in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), we find washed-up silent film stars literally and figuratively playing out their last hands. A small ashen-faced man declines to bid on consecutive hands, and with […]
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