So Jon Stewart was at our gala. And someone put this together. And we liked it.
(Source: fuckyeahlatenighthosts)
So Jon Stewart was at our gala. And someone put this together. And we liked it.
(Source: fuckyeahlatenighthosts)
Cartoon of the day. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/JujoeO
FINEEEE
Thanks to a massive online database from the Department of Records, now you can peruse photos from 160 years of New York City history. Our Bryan Bedder set out to see how much has changed since the mid-1800s.
Radiohead’s “Creep,” Sung by Prince and Carrie Manolakos
But the song was suddenly rehabilitated when, over the weekend, a video of a singer named Carrie Manolakos singing “Creep” at small concert in New York went viral.
Manolakos, whose background is in musical theatre, performs the song with perfect earnestness, closing her eyes and choking back tears. She floats lightly over the soft notes and reaches up to a stringent wail towards the middle of the song. She takes all the qualities that made “Creep” moving in 1992—what Nick Hornby, writing in this magazine in 2000, called the song’s “unnerving sincerity,” its “mournful anguish,” and “the brilliance of [its] conceit”—and repackages them in an old-fashioned night-club singer’s torch song.
Manolakos’s version does what covers ought to do; it picks up a song that has sunken into throwback territory, dusts it off, and treats it like a classic.
- Andrea DenHoed writes about the arc of Radiohead’s “Creep”: http://nyr.kr/IbOg2h
Today in History - April 20
Billie Holiday records Strange Fruit, 1939.
Noted as the first major rallying cry for the Civil Rights movement, Strange Fruit was a poem originally written by Abel Meeropol, and first performed by his wife and singer Laura Duncan, at protest venues in New York City. However, it wasn’t until Billie Holiday recorded the song for Commodore Records that it became a major hit.
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.Image by TerryBlas
Biography at JAZZ: A Film By Ken Burns on PBS.
(Source: fuckyeahtattoos)
A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy?
I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few years. I went back for the trial in 1998 because, let’s face it, it’s not often that someone in your family becomes the focus of a sensational murder case, on the local news for weeks at a time, the circumstances of her demise so tawdry and bizarre that the story appeared in People magazine, on ‘Hard Copy’ and, eventually, on the guilty-pleasure pinnacle of true-crime cable-TV programs, ‘City Confidential.’ And there was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate. She’d always been kind of coldhearted. It was not an unfitting end.
“How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze.” — Joe Rhodes, The New York Times
See also: “The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist.” — Wired, Dec. 27, 2010
Today: finished adding the color on this commission. He’s soon to fly to Singapore!
If anybody needs me, the Master and I are chilling tonight, drawing and stuff.
Ink, watercolor, and marker. Nearly done.
