WHAT IT IS: LYNDA BARRY AND THE WHY OF COMICS
We can’t think of anyone more deserving of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ than cartoonist Lynda Barry, who was...
Books
THE COCKETTES: CONJURING MAGICK IN SAN FRANCISCO AND TAKING IT ON THE ROAD TO NYC
The Cockettes were a “hippie theater group” formed in 1969 and based in and around Haight-Ashbury. The group...
IN THE STREET WITH NICK TOSCHES (RIP), ROCK SCRIBE, NOVELIST AND MASTER OF ‘STUDYIN’ NOTHIN’
Bob Pomeroy met Nick Tosches on a Manhattan sidewalk bench. Prior to that, Pomeroy had collected, read and...
FRIED & JUSTIFIED: INSIDE THE POST-PUNK YEARS (1978-98) WITH MICK HOUGHTON
Mick Houghton came of age as a pop music ‘obsessive’ in the 1960s. By the 1970s, he was...
KATHY VALENTINE: ALL SHE EVER WANTED
Kathy Valentine was born with a rock ‘n’ roll heart, so it was no surprise to find herself...
MY OWN PRIVATE ORWELL
George Orwell died over 70 years ago. It would be hard to find another writer of his generation...
HIT LIST: ROCK & ROLL AS A GRAPHIC NOVEL
We love rock & roll, but learning how it’s produced, marketed and compromised for mass consumption is a...
KINKY 101: LIFE ADVICE FROM DOMINATRIXES
Financial journalist Lindsay Goldwert saw parallels between the work of dominatrixes and how all the rest of us...
DIANE NOOMIN: UNDERGROUND COMIX ARTIST GOES FROM TWISTED SISTER TO EMPOWERING WOMEN
As co-editor (with Aline Kominsky-Crumb) of the all-female Twisted Sisters Comics in the 1970s and 1980s, Diane Noomin...
LOOKING BACK AT 1973…AND THE ROOTS OF PUNK
On Tuesday, Thomas Dunne Books, a St. Martin’s imprint, releases 1973: Rock at the Crossroads, a deep 347-page...
FACE IT: DEBBIE HARRY HAS HAD A HAPPY AND LUCKY LIFE
Elizabeth Hand, a much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, offers an appraisal of Debbie Harry’s new memoir and discovers that...
LHASA DE SELA MATTERS
Beautiful but uncategorizable music flowed through Lhasa de Sela (1972-2010), whose itinerant, off-the-grid childhood with spiritually-inclined parents allowed...
ENTERING FREAK CITY: HANGING OUT WITH HARRY CREWS
The hardnosed, hard-living Southern writer once dubbed himself ‘Freak City’ and, despite a lifestyle (booze, drugs, fistfights, etc.)...
WHEN JACK KEROUAC HAD HIS CRACK-UP
Spiraling down a silo of despair and drunkenness in the wake of his On The Road/Dharma Bums celebrity...