(The countdown’s back! If it’s new to you, you can catch up here.) We open on Prince in a powder-blue polka-dot shirt, lying on the ground. “Owwww!” he comments. The background has lots of floating and rotating letters of, well, the alphabet. The blue-screen effects probably were moderately expensive in 1988, but the overall look […]
posted 16 September 2009 in 1988. 7 comments
I hadn’t heard Billy Joel’s “Pressure” in a long time: it hit #20 in 1982, but it doesn’t seem to have entered Joel’s canon of hits. So thank you, Sirius-XM ’80s channel. I thoroughly enjoyed the song this time around, even the throbbing synth sound (which sounds more dated than Joel’s ’50s pastiches on An […]
posted 14 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 4 comments
I had a really bad year after 9/11. Eventually I got my internal gyroscope back, but I never really felt the same way about downtown New York City ever again. Even today, eight years after the attack, it has industrial scars and missing buildings and missing people. Taking these flipwalk photos helped me feel like […]
posted 11 September 2009 in Photos. no comments yet
“Pink dangles in the air, upside down and 25 feet above solid ground.” That’s the opening line of my feature article on, yes, Pink, reported from Melbourne, Australia (where she is so much more popular than you would guess). I have no Pink link; the story can be found in the latest issue of Rolling […]
posted 10 September 2009 in Articles. no comments yet
Five B-sides that got regular airplay in the ’80s on Z-100, then NYC’s leading top-40 station: 1. Prince, “Erotic City” 2. Bruce Springsteen, “Pink Cadillac” 3. Bruce Springsteen, “Jersey Girl” 4. U2, “Everlasting Love” 5. The Police, “Murder By Numbers”
posted 2 September 2009 in Tasty Bits. 2 comments
Andy Warhol was at a production of The Cherry Orchard when New York City’s blackout hit; the actors kept going in the dark. “This was the moment these actors had been waiting all their lives for–to make the show go on,” he observed. From his entry the next day: Thursday, July 14, 1977 On TV […]
posted 26 August 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet
I just got back from a whirlwind trip to Australia. I’m pretty much completely jetlagged, but I’m just functional enough to blog, and I thought I’d share a couple of photos of the main train station in Melbourne.
posted 21 August 2009 in Photos. no comments yet
From The Andy Warhol Diaries, a description of a fundraiser for Jimmy Carter at the Waldorf: Thursday, June 23, 1977 We were up in the balcony. When the president came in he went around and shook every single person’s hand in the whole place and that took a few hours. Ann Landers was kind of […]
posted 19 August 2009 in Excerpts. no comments yet
Shotguns, bologna sandwiches, and rehab: that’s the summary version of my recent interview with Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith. If you want the details, you can pick up the new issue of Maxim (it’s my first piece for them; Joanna Krupa is on the cover), or just read it on their website here. It […]
Taken on Peck Slip, in downtown NYC.
posted 14 August 2009 in Photos. no comments yet
