media & press
"A hero is a goddamn stupid thing to have," legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said two weeks ago. Actually, it was actor Erik Jensen, impersonating Bangs — his hero. Read More >>
One of them says that as soon as he returns home, his instinct is to lock his door because it has become natural for him to feel locked up. Another describes the daily ordeal of taking a shower and seeing his scars, including the obscene words that were carved into his buttocks by fellow prisoners. Read More >>
The snapshots are thrust at us urgently, as if they were passports being shown at a border crossing, official proofs of national identity. Mostly, they are prosaic pictures of family members or houses. Sometimes a diploma will be offered up instead, or theater reviews clipped from newspapers or a membership card to a duck-hunting club. Later, other, more frightening, pictures will be shown, but they all serve the same function. Read More >>
IT wasn't the death penalty issue that first made Susan Sarandon interested in making the movie "Dead Man Walking." Read More >>
WHEREVER the baggage of a life in the theater takes her, the actress April Yvette Thompson carries with her a little shrine, a small altar woven through with the Afro-Latino Santeria traditions that are part of her background’s very many strands. Back home in her apartment in Harlem, she has assembled a more permanent one, studded with mementos: her first baby picture, family portraits, childhood jewelry and adolescent keepsakes intended to celebrate the preciousness of her past. Her Vassar diploma doesn’t fit, and she keeps it on her desk.Read More >>
"By and large, plays and movies about the Iraq war have focused on either American soldiers or the politics leading up to the conflict. At the New York Theatre Workshop, the new documentary play Aftermath offers a completely different focus: It looks at the stories of ordinary Iraqis whose lives have been uprooted by the war." Read More >>
In his 33 years on earth, rock critic Lester Bangs left behind tens of thousands of pages of writing. He died of a drug overdose in 1982 — but this month, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, Calif., Bangs and his ideas are coming to life on stage in the new one-man play How to Be a Rock Critic. Read More >>
Critics aren't the most obvious subjects for drama. But if anyone qualified for a theatrical presentation, it would be the late Lester Bangs, whose caffeinated, take-few-prisoners prose and rock & roll–animal image (accurate or not) made him nearly as iconic as the musicians he loved, dissected or trashed. Read More >>
"A hero is a goddamn stupid thing to have," legendary rock critic Lester Bangs said two weeks ago. Actually, it was actor Erik Jensen, impersonating Bangs — his hero. The setting was a rehearsal room at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in the Culver City neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Jensen and director Jessica Blank were working on the one-man play they wrote about Bangs (who died in 1982, at age 33), How to Be a Rock Critic. Read More >>
