Profiles
The king of New York, at home, in exile.
“The minute you have to raise one dollar, you’re in a world of compromise,” Ferrara says. “But I’m never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that’s gonna stop me.”
A portrait of Elizabeth Peyton
Her oil on board portraits are elegant miniature and trashy fanzine, like Edouard Manet in the NME. They are rarely bigger than a sheet of A4 and often considerably smaller. In daring, broad brushstrokes that explore the boundary between realism and abstraction, they depict her imagined relationships with Liam Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker, Jackie and John Kennedy, Oscar Wilde and his lover, Bosie.
Herbie rides again
As a Nichiren Buddhist, Herbie Hancock starts and ends each day with an invocation of the mystic law of cause and effect. He sits facing a sacred scroll, rings a bell, recites two chapters of the Lotus Sutra and chants nam-myoho-renge-kyo – meaning that in life there are threads unseen and every action has consequences. His cadence is a calming, measured monotone you could set your watch or tune your piano by.
Dion De Mucci
For a sixty-seven-year-old, Dion is evidently in robust health. He looks like Jack Nicholson might if he too had been sober for decades, with a micro-beard under his bottom lip, a black New York Yankees cap, and expensive shades. He is aware that “the junkie finding God is a cliché” but speaks the language of self-help regardless. “When is a train most free,” he asks, “on or off the tracks?”
Flash, one more time
With hindsight, making a mixtape of old school funk and hip-hop for Grandmaster Flash was a bad idea. “This is the wack part,” he tells me, a few seconds into Shack Up by Banbarra. “They’d be throwing water at the speakers if we played that part.”
William Sloane Coffin
This report was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s obituary programme, Last Word, in May 2006.
The Reverend William Sloane Coffin was a civil rights leader who used his pulpit at Yale university to encourage white students to join the African-American ‘freedom rides’ in the South. He also led controversial protests against the Vietnam war, in [...]
Ornette Coleman’s ideas
“The idea is immortal, it is without class and it doesn’t care anything about wealth,” he says. ” I could get my horn and play for you, and believe me, I would play something.”
David Simon profile
“There are eight hundred and ninety-seven television shows about the viable, affluent America,” he says. “There was one about the America that was left behind. Are they saying it was one too many?”
Gorillaz in Harlem
Gorillaz have sold more than twelve million albums and Damon Albarn has given just three interviews, including this one. It may well be the last.
Kurt Vonnegut’s last interview
Kurt Vonnegut is dwelling on the apocalypse. For the third time over lunch America’s funniest and most pessimistic novelist is explaining why he will welcome the end of the world.
