
Popular Culture

In the spirit of all Augusts, endured and half-remembered, some music-memory beach reading from two parallel realities.

John Giorno’s influence as a cultural impresario, philanthropist, activist, hero, and éminence grise stretches so widely and across so many generations that one can almost forget that he is primarily a poet.

The prolific New York lyricist digs into songcraft on the occasion of his new autobiographical album, 50 Song Memoir.
A few years ago, I drafted two linked stories, one about Kurt Cobain and the other about Raymond Carver. Both grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Both had fathers who worked at a sawmill. Both were, in one way or another, working-class kids.

Gabriele Beveridge has quite the eye for sad-looking models in posters—the kind of women who hawk things like hair dye and shampoo.

“They own their own image. In a world where image is everything, that’s a very serious kind of ownership.”

Bond keeps expanding a performative repertoire that’s equally personal and political. On the occasion of V’s gallery exhibit in London, Episalla queries the self-designated “trans-genre artist.”

“I don’t think being a cynical, academically oriented deconstructor should stop one from being a wild and crazy performer.”

In the New York of a decade ago, the square inches of blue eye shadow, lip-disappearing moustaches, and ludicrously suggestive grapefruits dotting the pages of Soul Jazz Record Publishing’s history of disco record covers were still easily plucked from dollar bins and discarded curbside stacks.
