Cult of personalities: Almost 25 million people have visited Graceland since Elvis’ death in 1977; Beyoncé has 134 million followers on Instagram; and over 46 million adults read People magazine every week. Why do we care so much about famous people? In her new book, Sharon Marcus looks at The Drama of Celebrity, starting with […]
Cult of personalities: Almost 25 million people have visited Graceland since Elvis’ death in 1977; Beyoncé has 134 million followers on Instagram; and over 46 million adults read People magazine every week. Why do we care so much about famous people? In her new book, Sharon Marcus looks at The Drama of Celebrity, starting with […]
Axe grinder: Texas singer-songwriter Jackie Venson is starting to escape a tagline. Winning Best Guitarist at this year’s Austin Music Awards pushed Venson past all of the gender references that typically surround a woman with an electric guitar in her hands. Combining power, skill, and dreamy vocals, her music draws comparisons to Jimi Hendrix and […]
Water worlds: National Geographic photographers David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes share their underwater experiences in Coral Kingdoms and Empires of Ice, a photographic journey that captures three unique marine environments—Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea, the icy waters of Antarctica, and Canada’s extraordinary Gulf of St. Lawrence. Doubilet jokes that he’s spent more of his […]
If Todd Phillips’ Joker had been better, or worse, then the pre-release controversy might have been worth something. If it defied the odds as a prestige work, or if it were a sloppy misfire, the incessant discourse might have led somewhere interesting. But a technically slick yet thematically shallow production keeps us in exactly the […]
Though Antony and Cleopatra isn’t always considered a problem play, after seeing it at the American Shakespeare Center I can report that it really should be. Categorizing it as a problem play might be a lazy definition for a work defying easy literary taxonomies, but it does the trick. In ASC’s case (here comes a […]
Paul’s passion: Doctor Paul Koors was just beginning to make his musical talents known when he died tragically of an undetected heart condition at age 38. The ear, nose, and throat surgeon, who’d connected with musician Greg Howard during his residency at UVA, had just recorded a second album of country-tinged rock songs before his […]
Lynda Dawn At First Light (Akashik) The first sounds on Lynda Dawn’s debut EP—a fat keyboard bass line and synthetic handclaps and claves —come straight from the ’80s glory days of electrosoul. And as it turns out, so do all the other sounds, including the U.K. singer’s sultry, gospel-tinged vocals. On At First Light Dawn […]
By Charles Burns When Mia Lazar, a 17-year-old student at Blacksburg High School, first heard the news of Heather Heyer’s senseless murder at the hands of a white supremacist in Charlottesville, she was both rattled and ready to stand up for positive social change. Outraged by the rampant bigotry on display on August 12, 2017, […]
An artist’s journey The night Alp Isin heard that his friend and fellow artist Gabriel Allan passed away, he couldn’t stop thinking about Allan’s sculptures. Though Isin had seen “a bunch” of Allan’s pieces, covering a range of times and places, he “wasn’t sure what the totality was. That day, that night, I got this […]
Grand stage: A Stephen Sondheim and Richard Rodgers collaboration would appear to be a sure bet for any Broadway investor, yet 1965’s Do I Hear A Waltz? fell far short of critical acclaim. The redeeming factor is that it caused Sondheim to only accept projects where he could write both the music and lyrics, and […]