Robert Altman makes memorable films: some because they are sublime, some because they are ridiculous. A few are both. He did his best work — the films that established him […]

“Darling, I would love to take you by the hand, take you to some twilight land,” sings the country songwriter, his voice wistful and cracked. He struggles through the verses, […]

Tim Burton, like his work, is a wonderful mess. He’s falling-apart funny and completely alienated; he’s morbid and ironic; he’s the serious artist as goofball flake. A self-described “happy-go-lucky manic-depressive,” […]

“As he was carrying the wood away, dancing and staggering on, he met over a million ‘homeless-ghosts’ of his kind who were listening to my cry as a radio. Whenever […]

Our last Ice Age lasted over 800,000 years and ended only recently, some 20,000 years ago. We all know about it because we have the stones and the bones and […]

In his last decade of disappointment and disaster, Francis Ford Coppola lost his studio and his audience and his fortune; lost his artistic instincts and his confidence; and lost, above […]

When you enter the world of David Cronenberg, there are no slashers in the closet. No one pops up out of the bathtub after a certain drowning. The wind doesn’t […]

At Euro Disney, outside Paris, four high-profile architects have built five hotels celebrating various aspects of the American landscape: the Hotel New York, the Sequoia Lodge, the Cheyenne, the Newport […]

“I’m such a lucky person. I don’t know how, but everything happens to me just as I want it to. What’s funny is I don’t even believe that some people […]

It’s a nice day for a white wedding, sneers Billy Idol from the opened doorway of Bob Geldof’s London town house. Walking into the entrance hall, I hear rhythmically creaking […]

The first wave of a fusion between jazz and rock idioms began with Miles Davis around 1970 and was quickly taken up by a generation of musicians sensing a unique […]

It’s simply scandalous, but I’m telling you it’s true. In liberal-arts college dorms and suburban bedrooms, in big city apartments and bleached beach houses across this country, a goodly number […]

Marketeer, provocateur, propagandist, genius, racist, humorist, writer, actor, director, producer, pitchman, chauvinist, homophobe, hoop fan, hype artist, egotist, entrepreneur, innovator, caricaturist, visionary, radical, reactionary: Spike Lee has been called all […]

David Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1946. His father worked in the woods as a government research scientist; his mother worked at home, raising David, his brother and […]

Squat but substantial, Willie Nelson looks like a caved-in monument. His craggly, crinkly, pigtailed country head is fit for a hippie Mt. Rushmore (Michael Sagrow, L.A. Herald Examiner). There he […]

Musician recently received a number of phone calls from a bass playing friend of ours in Florida. Jaco Pastorius was in a Fort Lauderdale studio mixing tracks from a recent […]

A matterhorn of cassettes twists above the couch: Paul Simon, Patti LaBelle, Keith Jarrett, Yaz, Little Richard, Gang of Four, Miles Davis, Morrissey, Rush, the Pretenders. On the shelves, the […]

Behind the cactuses and the adobe wall and the spray of foliage above the railroad-tie steps and the stone landing, past the gardeners and the white BMW, beyond the security, […]

Three years, two hundred out-takes, a few mistakenly erased tracks, and one shattered shank after Aja, Steely Dan has come sauntering out of hibernation with a ravishing new record, Gaucho. […]

Chanting, chanting, chanting like singing wafts into the den. With it, the fragrance of fresh cut flowers, incense, and fish frying in the kitchen. For the next half hour, Wayne […]

BORN IN 1946, the only child of a Jewish stockbroker father and a French Catholic mother, Oliver Stone was raised in an East Coast tradition of button-down conservatism. Since then, […]

So here we are sitting in this drab Radio City rehearsal room in hushed anticipation of a word-of-mouth press conference given by a pop superstar in honor of the birthday […]