Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.
An old strain of English magic had returned’: stars on why they fell in love with Kate Bush
There Are Uses for All Kinds of Books'
Read Something of Thrilling Quality'
Queens of Infamy Longreads
Glamorous heiress, 45, charged with having sex with 14-year-old boy four times in one day. “An Australian horse heiress is saddled with charges after being accused of having sex with a 14-year-old boy four times in a single day. Savannah Daisley, 45, faced Waverley Local Court in Sydney on Tuesday on child sex abuse allegations, with Judge Jaqueline Milledge denying her bail over the ‘quite disturbing’ allegations.”
The Ultimate Summer 2022 Reading List Literary Hub I’m posting this for its list of lists, as I don’t think much of the compiler’s prime recommendations, other than the recommendation of Mohsin Hamid’s latest, which is on my to-read pile. I’ve enjoyed many of his previous novels, although some I found not as fine as touted. These lists will prod me to get serious about this summer’s reading. Curling up with a good book is one of the only ways I’ve found to escape being overwhelmed by the flood of contemporary bad news.
THE GODFATHER AT 50: Skip The Offer, Take The Cannoli.
My latest over at Ed Driscoll.com,comparing The Offer, Paramount+’s bloated and highly fictitious Mad Men-esque 10 episode making of series with Mark Seal’s brilliant recent book, Take the Gun, Leave the Cannoli.
Weird facts to toy with your sense of historical time
Barry Lopez on Storytelling and His Advice on the Three Steps to Becoming a Writer
“It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”
The End of the Art-Baby Problem The New Republic
Ada Calhoun comes to terms with a neglectful father in ‘Also a Poet’ WaPo of Inefamyens
Bob Stanley’s pre-history of pop breathes life into a lost musical era New Statesman
A Brief History of Women’s Eyebrows in ArtHyperallergic
The resurgence of Venice’s prized dorona grapeBBC
19th-century letters between two sisters reveal early records of avian life in Madras Scroll
RIP: Hells Angels founder Sonny Barger dead: Motorcycle club leader ‘passed peacefully’ from cancer at 83.
Barger wrote six books, including an autobiography titled “Hell’s Angel – The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club,” in which he detailed the infamous 1969 Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in Livermore, California.
The Angels were on hand as security for the Rolling Stones at the counterculture event where Santana, Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed. It was designated the “Woodstock West” with the Grateful Dead headlining.
But the concert became so bloody and violent with multiple fights and the stabbing death of concert attendee Meredith Hunter by Hells Angel Alan Passaro that the Dead refused to perform. The entire incident was caught on tape and became the basis for the 1970 documentary”Gimme Shelter.”
Flashback: 53 Years Before the Astroworld Concert Disaster, There Was Altamont.