Posts From Author: Month: January 2015

Curtain Call: Runnin’ Wild

The House of SpeakEasy will set the cat amongst the pigeons tonight at its second annual gala, Runnin’ Wild. Below, a video collage of our splenderific guests by way of introduction. Jim Dale is a Tony Award-winning actor, playwright, voice artist, and much more. He is the voice of the Harry Potter audiobooks in the States, the star of eleven films in Britain’s classic Carry On series, and a highly acclaimed Broadway star of both musicals and dramas. His one-man show Just Jim Dale is set to transfer to London’s West End in May. Read our interview with Jim about his seven decades in showbiz, and check out his 1966 hit song “Georgy Girl,” as performed by The Seekers, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. Simon Doonan is the Creative Ambassador for Barneys New York, and the writer of several hilarious fashion books and memoirs. Read our review of his latest, The Asylum: True Tales of Madness From a Life in Fashion, which comes out in paperback from Blue Rider Press next month. In this video, Simon talks about the time he was invited to design the holiday decorations for the White House during the first Obama […]
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ReadEasy, 26 January 2015

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular scrapbook of peculiarisms, thoughts, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. I love Twitter the most during events like #sotu -- it was so lonely before this, listening in the void.— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) January 21, 2015 Björk‘s Vulnicura was released on iTunes two months early last week after leaking online, and music critics, many approaching rapture, have risen nobly to the challenge of describing this dense, intense new album. Ann Powers over at NPR, in an excellent essay on Vulnicura‘s relationship with melodrama, closes in on Björk’s singing of the word emotional: “Climbing it like one of the cliffs she often evokes in her pastoral lyrics, she lets it open up like a vista on its central, circulatory ‘o.’ The word becomes a Valkyrie’s cry, a statement of purpose both sacred and humanly thrilling.” Jon Pareles in The New York Times: “[The songs] linger in dissonance and ambiguous tonality… The physicality of Björk’s voice and the strings are even more striking against the impersonal electronic sounds, all the better to reveal the interior landscape of heartbreak and healing.” Coup of the week, though, goes to Jessica Hopper at Pitchfork, whose […]
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Jim Dale on Harry Potter, Carry On, and His Return to the West End

Jim Dale is a showman of the old school; a true renaissance performer. He’s won a Tony, two Grammys, and four Drama Desk Awards. He’s received countless other nominations, including an Academy Award nod for the song “Georgy Girl,” later a huge hit for The Seekers, back in 1966. He’s been a pop star, a radio DJ, an actor of stage and screen, a voice artist, a playwright, a producer, a stand-up comedian, and many other things besides. Your smaller relatives will recognise him instantly as the voice of the American Harry Potter audiobooks. New Yorkers will remember his performances in Barnum (for which he won the Tony), The Threepenny Opera, Me and My Girl, Candide, and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. The Brits among you will be familiar with his eleven-film run in the Carry On series of comedies. When I spoke to Jim last week, it had just been announced that his one-man show, Just Jim Dale, which played to excellent reviews for the Roundabout Theatre Company on Broadway last year, will transfer to London’s West End in May. Charles Arrowsmith: Many congratulations on the forthcoming West End transfer! What are you looking forward to […]
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Stephen Lang: An Actor Prepares

Stephen Lang is an actor and a playwright and probably a very familiar face. You’re most likely one of the hundred million or so people who saw him as Colonel Miles Quaritch in Avatar (2009). You’re rarer, and luckier, if you saw him opposite Dustin Hoffman on Broadway in Death of a Salesman (1984) at the start of his career. Maybe you caught him on tour with his one-man show, Beyond Glory, which has been staged sporadically, including a successful Off-Broadway run, for nearly a decade now. Perhaps best known for his military-style roles in films and TV projects like The Men Who Stare At Goats (above, deadpan, hilarious) or the historical epics Gettysburg (1993) or Gods and Generals (2003), Lang is a highly talented and versatile actor with a filmography that includes Manhunter (1986) and Tombstone (1993), and the TV series The Fugitive and Salem. I spoke to Stephen this week about the forthcoming Avatar sequels, the metaphysics of performance, and writing his own show. Charles Arrowsmith: A number of your best-known roles have seen you play military men, and your play Beyond Glory was a tribute to the valor of the US armed forces. For you, what sort […]
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Bedlam and Barneys: The Life and Pahty Tahmes of Simon Doonan

The Asylum: True Tales of Madness from a Life in Fashion by Simon Doonan NY: Blue Rider Press, 2013; 288pp Simon Doonan once called Kate Moss “a working-class slag from a crap town.” This got him into hotter water than he deserved given that it was hedged by a friendly subordinate “just like me.” All he wanted was to express the pride and solidarity Brits from such crap towns (Doonan: Reading; Moss: Croydon) tend to feel. His riotous latest, The Asylum, out in nattily tactile paperback next month (those pinheads are extruded, amigos), is full of moments when figures from the world of fashion have opened their mouths and been promptly misunderstood. That time Karl Lagerfeld said Adele was “a little too fat, but she has a beautiful face and a divine voice.” When Tom Ford slipped a delicate “cunt” into a eulogy. Galliano-gate. In his author’s note, Doonan quotes Diana Vreeland’s “Exaggeration is my only reality;” by the end of the book one feels this really is the only context in which haute couture can possibly be understood. Not that Doonan’s not fully cognizant of the high absurdity of fashion at its most fabulously unacceptable. The book’s title is […]
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Screaming and Laughing at the Same Time… with R.L. Stine

For many people, R.L. Stine‘s is a name that will induce a spasm of delicious fear. Stine has been frightening children since the publication of his first shocker, Blind Date, in 1986. And it’s fear on an industrial scale: his books have sold over four hundred million copies, prompting the New York Times to speculate that he “may have given more chills to more children than any author in history.” He’s sold more than Tom Clancy and John Grisham, more even than Stephen King, to whom he’s often been compared. Some three hundred books after Blind Date, he’s still at it, with plans for a new raft of Fear Street titles following the success of 2014’s Party Games (St. Martin’s Griffin). Last seen in 1995, Fear Street is one of several phenomenally popular series Stine has created, the most famous of which is perhaps Goosebumps. From Welcome to Dead House in 1992, via The Cuckoo Clock of Doom (Stine’s favorite, 1995), to the most recent instalment, The 12 Screams of Christmas (2014), the Goosebumps series made Stine America’s bestselling writer for three consecutive years in the 1990s, according to USA Today. It was also a hugely successful TV series. Stine […]
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ReadEasy, 19 January 2015

A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. I'm at that bit* in my new book where I've no idea what's going on or what I'm doing.*from around page 30 to page 250— Ian Rankin (@Beathhigh) January 13, 2015 Ahead of the House of SpeakEasy Gala on Wednesday, January 28, at City Winery NYC, read our reviews of books by our guests, including P.J. O’Rourke‘s The Baby Book: How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again (Grove Press, 2014) and Susan Fales-Hill‘s Imperfect Bliss (Atria Books, 2012). Rachel Kushner on “Bad Captains”… “My aspiration to spend time at sea as requisite literary training died long ago,” writes Kushner in the London Review of Books, “as a teenager, on a white-knuckled ferry ride to Elba during a torrential rainstorm.” But never mind the fraying of “the thin membrane of civility” that occurs in bad weather; what do you do if your captain abandons ship? In a wide-ranging meditation on “the noble law of the sea,” encompassing Joseph Conrad, Jonathan Franzen, Jean-Luc Godard, and The Love Boat, the author of The […]
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Imperfect Bliss

Imperfect Bliss by Susan Fales-Hill NY: Atria Books, 2012; 304pp The narrative and social challenges facing women in the early twenty-first century are at the center of Susan Fales-Hill’s second novel, the romantic comedy Imperfect Bliss. Its heroine, Bliss (Elizabeth) Harcourt, spends much of her time attempting to shield her young daughter, Bella, from the pernicious myth that princesshood is both attainable and desirable. Her sisters — Diana, Charlotte, Victoria — all struggle, more or less consciously, with the roles pressed upon them by that oppressive Big Other of adulthood, reality TV. Their mother, a woman who’s so successfully internalized the racist jibes she suffered as a child that she’s placed a ban on her daughters marrying black men, is the grotesque (if not unsympathetic) product of a lifetime of such social molding. Forsythia’s aspirations for her daughters are grand, as evinced by her naming them after British royals, but they do not necessarily involve happiness. When we meet Bliss, she’s on day 375 of a sex drought following her separation from her by-now-ex-husband Manuel, a politician she caught cheating in his campaign office. Divorced, mid-thirties, and sharing a room with Bella in her family home in an upmarket suburb […]
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The Boom Years: P.J. O’Rourke On What Went Wrong… And Right

The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again by P.J. O’Rourke NY: Grove Press, 2014; 272pp “History would have been very different,” writes P.J. O’Rourke; “a C+ at least — if the Baby Boom had ruled the world.” Born in the two decades between the end of the Second World War and the advent of The Beatles on US shores, the Baby Boom is a 75-million-strong demographic that got American history in a headlock in the Sixties and likely won’t let go for another couple decades, given the way the next election’s shaping up. As a generation (and a generalization) they are responsible, near enough entirely, for the world we live in now. And the contradictions of a generation that can be all Haight-Ashbury one minute and selling collateralized debt obligations the next may seem too titanic for a single book to lasso. O’Rourke, though — a journalist, satirist, commentator, and sort of one-man fourth estate — is up to the task. It helps that O’Rourke is one of the funniest and sharpest commentators of his generation. Not for naught is he allegedly the most cited living person in […]
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