As we snake along California’s infamous Pacific Coast Highway toward Los Angeles, the moon glints off the oscillating ocean, distant high-rises pockmarked with lights reveal the ever-working pulse of industry, a flock of pelicans traces the horizon in fluid flight, our car hugs… Read More—
Ninety years ago, Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Like a 20th-centurymystic, Kerouac sought spiritual enlightenment in the two-lane temple of the roadleading to the American West. Kicked out of college, wrecked by illness, divorced and looking at… More—
From 1971–1973, filmmaker Jack Hazan gained intimate access to David Hockney and his circle of friends and lovers to create A Bigger Splash. It was a critical time in Hockney’s life. A long-term relationship with fellow painter Peter Schlesinger had recently dissolved and during this acutely emotional period he was under pressure to work faster and create new work. Rather than filming a pure documentary, Hazan crafted a mesmerising film, using a More—
My brother, who is a year older than me, and I spent our teenage years growing up in the Wiesbaden of the seventies. The European headquarters of the US Air Force was located there from 1954 until 1973, when it was relocated to Ramstein. Camp Lindsey was the best-known facility, and the last US Air Force unit did not leave the base until 1993, when the Lindsey Air Station was finally returned to More—
This story of Charles Mingus begins with the story of his best friend in Los Angeles. Buddy Collette (1921–2010) was one of jazz’s greatest multi-instrumentalists and spent his whole life in LA. Both men grew up in the suburb of Watts with people from many different ethnic backgrounds—white, black, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and despite a sharp separation between different ethnic groups they moved between all of these worlds, which stimulated their creativity and had More—
Death by car is the stuff of doomed, high-octane legend. This, at least, is what a quick inventory of some of its notorious fatalities suggests, which comes together like a collage of derailed idols (James Dean), conspiracy theories (Princess Diana), and the culmination of incendiary lifestyles (Jackson Pollock). Statistics paint a different picture, of course. Counted, the car crash seems unquestionably commonplace: according to the World Health Organisation, road accidents tally a yearly death toll of 1.2 million, with another 50 million injured. All the same, it’s an event whose sheer mechanics – the thrusting of bodies and fracturing of metal – retain the power to shock. More—
