Musician/composer/conductor David Amram is still flourishing at age eighty-nine. And he's made music with everyone from Jack Kerouac to Charlie Parker.

  Ten things I know about John Perry Barlow: 1. John Perry Barlow died this past February at age seventy, but people have been trying to describe him for decades. Among the attempts: “Internet guru,” “the thinking man’s Forrest Gump…

When you meet the film director Barbet Schroeder, whose distinguished career has spanned more than five decades, and you ask him about his next project, you should not be surprised to hear a response like the one the intrepid auteur gave me two years…

Catching up with Jack Garfein.Jack Garfein was telling me a story about Henry Miller.“I would visit Henry every weekend during the seventies at his house in Pacific Palisades,” he said. “One Sunday when I walked in, Henry was holding a book and…

In Just Kids, Patti Smith calls the painter and singer-songwriter Bob Neuwirth “a catalyst for action,” and she should know—it was Neuwirth, “trusted confidant to many of the great minds of his generation,” who urged her to write her first song. In a…

Daniel Menaker doesn’t waste time in signaling his penchant for self-deprecation. The title of his wise, playful, deeply felt new memoir is My Mistake. And the memoirist, no mere tease, is happy to detail the errors he’s made during his life an…

“Paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much,” announces a character in the new novel Bleeding Edge—yet because its author is Thomas Pynchon, let’s not take that valorizing of paranoia too lightly; elsewh…

Whenever I rang the phone at a certain house in the kudzu-covered college town of Gainesville, Florida, I knew what I was likely to hear: not a polite “hello” or “good afternoon,” but a gruff-voiced, rural Georgia-accented statement of self: …