On Friday afternoon, a longtime employee of the city of Virginia Beach—an engineer in the public-utilities department—entered the municipal complex where he worked with a .45-calibre handgun and began shooting. According to the authorities, at least a dozen people, on three floors of the building and in a car outside, were killed, along with […]
Roky Erickson, a guitarist and singer in the 13th Floor Elevators, a foundational psych-rock group from Texas, died on Friday. The cause of death was not immediately announced, but Erickson had a long history of health troubles. In 1968, when he was just twenty-one, he was institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia, and he received electroconvulsive therapy […]
Ever since my early teens, I have had two obsessions: music and journalism. When I was a senior at Hudson Catholic Regional High School for Boys, in Jersey City, in 1982, I took a journalism class, and the teacher assigned us to interview “a chosen hero in your field.” I picked the rock critic Lester […]
Last week, I read a report in the Times about the current conditions on Mt. Everest, where climbers have taken to shoving one another out of the way in order to take selfies at the peak, creating a disastrous human pileup. It struck me as a cogent metaphor for how we live today: constantly teetering […]
The Angel of Death, the story goes, was sent to collect Avigdor Lieberman. Answering the door, Lieberman saw the spectre before him, pulled him in by the collar, pummeled him, spat on him, and threw him out. When Death returned to Heaven, he went straight to God. “Lieberman?” God asked, sizing up the bruises. “You […]
The pop-music bio-pics keep coming because they fulfill several basic needs, for viewers and for musicians. For viewers, the musical bio-pic offers an inside view of celebrity, involving the magic of supreme talent, the business practicalities that go into its realization, and the crafting and sustenance of a public persona apart from the artist’s private […]
Hey! Sorry, but I’m running a bit late. I’m heading out the door right now, I promise. I just need to get out of bed, shower really quick, and then stare at my closet for ten minutes as I air-dry. Five minutes out, I swear. I just need to paint my room. It’ll take, like, […]