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Americans are obsessed with fame. You could lay the aforementioned claim at any generation's feet, but few generations embody the American fascination with notoriety as potently as millennials and Gen Z. Although the problem was already quite pronounced before the advent of social media, apps like Instagram and Tik Tok have only exacerbated the issue. — Read the rest
In this interview, Amanda Petrusich talks with Nick Cave about grief, resilience, religion, music, and Faith, Hope and Carnage, a book based on his conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan. Sure, these are topics you’d expect in a Q&A with the Australian singer-songwriter, but that doesn’t make it any less rich or moving. I like their exchange about channeling spirituality or some kind of “enigmatic otherness” when making music, and dealing with loss over time, which Cave says gives us a deeper understanding of being human. His thoughts on AI, ChatGPT, and art also bring music to my ears.
Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.
High school lockers in Langley, Virginia. Photograph by Elizabeth Murphy. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0.
This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.
Of all the things I didn’t know when I was thirteen, two pained me the most: music and romance. I had no instrument, no boyfriend, no way of predicting, when I dared to accompany the radio in the car, if my note would match that note. Girls who could sing, I observed, had hookups and breakups, and, even better, the whispered hallway dramas that led from one to the other. I made certain inferences. And yet I didn’t see how to, well, join the chorus. A good ear is innate, isn’t it? You can unwrap a hundred Starbursts with your tongue and still know nothing of kissing. So I kept my crushes to myself. I stopped singing in the shower.
But ignorance is good for desire. I don’t doubt the subtle pleasures of connoisseurship, but can it compare to the transcendence of a teenager, luxuriating in her loneliness, who detects in the generic bridge of a Maroon 5 song a message for her alone? To the brief and sacred innocence in which I really, truly took it to heart: “She Will Be Loved”? Hard not to cringe for her, except that I envy her, too.
The lucky truth is that I still don’t know much. Not for lack of trying. My first real boyfriend had thousands of lyrics in his head. He made me playlists, as boyfriends often do. The Velvet Underground, A$AP Rocky, Tom Waits. Yo La Tengo. Later, I dated a drummer and learned (kind of) about jazz and samba, about Milford Graves, who transcribed heartbeats into music notation. An education of sorts, but who, in the end, wants to be schooled by love? These days, I play the Top 40 wherever I go. I turn up the volume. In the seat beside me, the person I love says, I thought you hated this song. And maybe I did! Every now and then, I sing, though not because I’ve conquered any fears or learned any lessons. Mostly, I still just listen.
Clare Sestanovich is the author of the story collection Objects of Desire.
Trance music never went away, writes Philip Sherburne, and I agree. But I’ve not progressed with the sound since I first fell for it 25 years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, impressionable teenage raver. Whenever I listen to my “Old School Trance Favorites” playlist on Spotify, I’m whisked back to 1998 — on some dance floor in some dark warehouse, with a classic track like Three Drives’ “Greece 2000” or Veracocha’s “Carte Blanche” blasting in the room. The trance we danced to in those years was uplifting, life-changing. But as I ventured deeper into this world, the sound was a mere step in a longer journey — it marked a period of raving with training wheels, of hours-long DJ sets of spoon-fed transcendence.
Still, as some of Sherburne’s sources perfectly put it in the piece, there’s just something about trance, and listening to a “vintage” trance anthem from the late ’90s and early ’00s, however schmaltzy it may be, can give me shivers like no other type of music.
Sherburne writes a fun piece about the revival — or perhaps reimagination — of trance among a younger generation of producers and DJs who are outside the scene and, thus, more open-minded and experimental.
But where those projects carried a whiff of mischief, the new wave of trance feels like a more earnest and direct homage. Perhaps it’s a generational shift, as artists who first discovered electronic music from their friends’ stepdads’ Tiësto CDs begin to look back on their own musical upbringing. Maybe it’s just that people are jonesing for all the euphoria they can get right now.
Vestbirk believes that the shift is partly generational. A new wave of clubbers doesn’t have the same prejudices about trance that the old guard did. And the artsier end of the scene is bored with techno, which—in its overground, festival-filling incarnation, with an emphasis on formulaic structures, identikit sound design, and gaudy spectacle—has become as stale, commercialized, and ridiculous as mainstream trance once was.
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“They’re a little eccentric” is a phrase I suspect most of us have heard used to describe a certain kind of memorable person. For me, it evokes my childhood dentist — an elderly man who favored colorful bow ties and humming loudly as he worked, and who once wagged his finger in my face and gravely advised, “never marry a woman who makes you chop wood.” I still don’t quite know what he was getting at.
But what do we really mean when we call someone eccentric? The word renders a verdict of harmlessness: A person’s style, conduct, or mannerisms may be memorable, but not concerning. And truthfully, we need people who are a bit of a character (to use an equally common euphemism). Their difference reinforces our sense of stability, their peculiarity a necessary splash of color in a landscape of conformity. We love to hear about them, to speculate why they are as they are — the odder, the better. Whether in documentaries like Grey Gardens or the five stories collected here, well-reported tales of quirkiness always invoke a small thrill, vaulting their subjects out of the realm of local gossip and into a wider imagination.
However, it’s no accident that every entry here concerns individuals who are, to varying degrees, rich or famous. The sad truth is that the lives of the everyday working class are seldom celebrated, and least of all those whose habits and personalities fall outside of the bounds of “normal.” To quote a character in Ellen Raskin’s novel The Westing Game, “the poor are crazy, the rich just eccentric.” Wealth affords many privileges in life, among them the indulgence of oddity, and such indulgence is only magnified in the face of celebrity. Behavior that would be considered problematic becomes acceptable, even admired as a natural by-product of genius. (See: Andy Kaufman; Bjork; and, at least up to a certain point, Kanye West).
Whatever your take on the meaning of “eccentric,” these stories — sad, inspiring, tragic, and incredible as they are — provide a fascinating glimpse into the minds of those whose lives are anything but conventional.
Every sport has its enigmatic geniuses, players of supreme natural talent whose volatile nature as often as not trips them up. Remarkably often, a pattern repeats: The young upstart appears as if they had ridden down on a lightning bolt, shakes up the landscape and transcends the limits of the sport, yet somehow never quite reaches the heights they could have, and should have, achieved. In boxing, “Prince” Naseem Hamed shot to fame on the back of extraordinary talent mixed with equally extraordinary theatrics, only to fall frustratingly short of all-time greatness, abruptly walking away from a sport he no longer loved. In soccer, mercurial French footballer-cum-poet Eric Cantona, an eccentric genius if ever there was one, lost the captaincy of his national team thanks to a bizarre display of temper. Basketball, of course, has Dennis Rodman, a player who eternally walked a tightrope between outrageous skill and self-implosion. Pick any sport you like and there will always be numerous examples; in chess, however, Bobby Fischer stands alone.
The World Chess Championships of 1972 were memorable for several reasons. Russia had dominated the competition for 24 years prior, and no American had won since the 19th century. The world was in the middle of a Cold War. The man who held the crown, 25-year-old Russian Boris Spassky, had learned how to play on a train while escaping Leningrad during World War II. Yet, Spassky’s opponent might have been the most memorable element. Bobby Fischer was the definition of a prodigy: At 14, he had won the U.S. Championship with the only recorded perfect score in the history of the tournament. Fifteen years later, he carried the hopes of a nation upon his shoulders. But which Bobby Fischer would turn up — the confident, happy young man, or the paranoid, furious recluse? Would he, in fact, turn up at all? Chess aficionados will already know this story, but Darrach writes with such insight and elegance, transporting us to a world of fantastic intrigue and unbelievable pressure, that even if you know the outcome, this article is a thrill from start to finish.
I was 2600 miles northeast of the Yale Club when the crisis broke. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, waiting for Bobby to fly up for the match. Spassky was waiting, too—he had arrived eight days before—and so were 140–150 newspaper, magazine and television reporters from at least 32 countries. They were getting damn tired of waiting, in fact, and the stories out of Reykjavik were reflecting their irritation.
Those of us who grew up in England during the ’80s and ’90s will surely remember Frank Sidebottom, a bizarre character who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, lighting up various children’s TV shows and briefly enjoying his own series before disappearing back to the strange realm from which he had emerged. What made Sidebottom so singular was the fact that he wasn’t human. Rather, he was human, but his head wasn’t: Atop his shoulders sat an inflatable plastic oval, which Sidebottom never removed.
Watch Sidebottom’s first appearance on national TV.
At the heart of this fantastical story, here recounted by firsthand witness Jon Ronson, lies an astonishing quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” What begins as a tale about an eccentric, imaginative musician soon becomes one of identity, acceptance, and the blurring of the line between fiction and reality.
I never understood why Chris sometimes kept Frank’s head on for hours, even when it was only us in the van. Under the head Chris would wear a swimmer’s nose clip. Chris would be Frank for such long periods the clip had deformed him slightly, flattened his nose out of shape. When he’d remove the peg after a long stint I’d see him wince in pain.
The tech zillionaire class is a modern phenomenon that tends to divide opinion. Depending on which side you listen to, the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are either visionary gurus transforming our society into a better, more desirable model, or childlike narcissists who treat the world and everything in it as disposable playthings. As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. The late John McAfee, who made a fortune from virus-protection software at a time when most had never even heard of the term, came to prominence in an era before the Tony Stark model of entrepreneur-as-hero entered the public imagination.
Again, we come to a crossroads. Was John McAfee a delusional paranoid or a tech-security messiah, hounded by government operatives and mysterious cartels desperate to protect their shadowy interests? Undeniably, he’s a fascinating figure, and the tales of guns, SWAT teams, wild flights, and deaths as recounted to journalist Stephen Rodrick are compelling, even as his readily apparent narcissism and deeply problematic trappings (such as his self-described “teenage harem”) are highly disturbing.
At dawn, we land in Atlanta, and the six-hour drive to Lexington passes in a haze. The Blazer fills up with cigarette smoke as Pool and McAfee check their arsenal: a Smith & Wesson .40, a .380 Ruger, and another three or four handguns in the front seat. “I like to have a small one in my waistband,” says McAfee. “Sitting on the toilet is a real vulnerable position.”
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Singer and dancer Josephine Baker would have been just as big a star, if not bigger, in the modern age of social media. Her talent, unconventionality, lifestyle, and beauty brought her fame and fortune at a time when few Black women could even dream of such a thing. She was the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture, became a celebrated performer at the Folies Bergère in Paris, received a medal for her work assisting the French Resistance during World War II, and was rewarded by the NAACP for her activism.
Baker was also temperamental, unhappy, and the instigator of a bizarre and unethical plan to combat racism that almost defies belief. In this absorbing piece, we learn of a side to Baker’s character that is little known to many. It is, if we needed one, a sharp reminder that celebrities are just as flawed as the rest of us, that good intentions don’t always lead to good results, and that a life led with all limits removed rarely, if ever, turns out well.
In photos taken at the time, the chateau looks more like an orphanage than a real home. The children slept in a room in the attic, in eight small beds lined up in a row. Whenever Baker returned home, even if it happened to be at 3 a.m., she would wake the children and demand affection.
I suspect all parents find tales of unhappy childhoods difficult, even disturbing, to read. We want nothing but the best for our offspring, especially if we have not enjoyed a peaceful and stable upbringing ourselves. The saving grace of this piece is the beautiful prose with which poet Edith Sitwell recalls her formative years growing up in a famously eccentric and almost casually cruel household. The various characters and events as described by Sitwell resemble appalling fictions, their grotesquerie landing somewhere between Charles Dickens and H. P. Lovecraft.
You can read a potted biography, and a selection of Edith Sitwell’s poems, at the Poetry Foundation’s website.
During her adult life, Sitwell was divisive, controversial, flamboyant, gracious, and scornful. She possessed a heart capable of absorbing and displaying the most delicate beauty, hardened perhaps, by her upbringing in a family so well off that it was able to wallow in a pit of morbid peculiarity. Her poetry is wonderous; her literary analysis revelatory. Many thousands of words have been written concerning Edith and the Sitwells, but almost certainly none as moving and striking as those you will discover here, written by her own hand.
I remember little of Mr. Stout’s outward appearance, excepting that he looked like a statuette constructed of margarine, then frozen so stiff that no warmth, either from the outer world or human feeling, could begin to melt it. The statuette was then swaddled in padded wool, to give an impression of burliness.
Sometime in the 1990s, a small group of amateur historians in Liverpool, United Kingdom, made a startling discovery. Local rumors had long circulated concerning a network of tunnels, even an entire subterranean world, hidden beneath the streets of the city’s Edge Hill area. The group was able to verify that a number of underground entrances did indeed exist, on land previously owned by a mysterious recluse named Joseph Williamson. Excavating by hand, they could not possibly have imagined what they were about to discover.
Read more about the man and his “underground city” at the illuminating website Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels.
Born in 1769, Williamson worked his way up through the ranks at a tobacco factory owned by the wealthy Tate family of sugar importers. Williamson married into that family, took ownership of the factory, and prospered. He retired when in his 40s, and here is where the story proper begins. For reasons that are still unclear (and still heavily debated), Williamson, utilizing a small army of employees, began carving out immense underground chambers beneath his homes. It must have taken a large amount of his fortune and a huge portion of his time. But why? When you’re rich, perhaps nobody asks. It’s known that Williamson was secretive about his tunneling activities, never revealing their true purpose. Fine arches led nowhere; certain passages were carved out and then filled in. All activity ceased with his death, and the labyrinth remained untouched until the locals whose voices you will hear in this excellent article rediscovered this giant conundrum.
“The whole place is so full of mysterious questions — an awful lot of questions that nobody will ever be able to answer,” Stapledon told The Post. “When you look at some of the structures underground, you think: How the hell did he create these? What the hell was he doing building all this stuff?”
Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.
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