Word: showbiz
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...title role, came out, as did a fat, contentious biography by Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller, Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce! My friend Gary Carey wrote an excellent book, the 1975 Lenny, Janis & Jimi, about three charismatic performers who died of drug overdoses. (Even in that sad showbiz trend, Lenny was first.) A few years later, Bob Dylan released the ballad Lenny Bruce: "He was an outlaw, that's for sure / More of an outlaw than you ever were / Lenny Bruce is gone but his spirit's livin...
...Many of Lenny's routines were either tart showbiz tales (his 20min. saga of a lousy comic playing the London Palladium) or just funny-silly (a woman comes home to find her husband in bed with a chicken ? a love object that, 10 years later, Woody Allen would turn into a sheep and, 35 years on, Edward Albee would make a goat). But the repertoire he had in mind was much broader, deeper, riskier than those. So, with a mixture of bravery and bravado, Lenny decided to bring the intimacy and threat of uninhibited talk to the nightclub stage...
...Lenny made plenty of enemies. But in saying what he thought, at great price, he liberated stand-up, and all showbiz behavior. A live performance, for comics and rockers and actors, was henceforth designed not to seduce the audience, to play to the old expectations of charm and propriety, but to confront, challenge, titillate, outrage it. I think only jazz musicians had tried that before. Secure in their improv skills, they dared to investigate the farthest reaches of aural experimentation. And if the ringsiders didn't get it ? if a Charlie Parker was literally playing only to the band...
...Lords in return for their generosity. Labour is not the only party under scrutiny, but the pledges of impeccable probity made when it came to power in 1997 are coming back to haunt it. Levy's arrest, said his lawyer, "was unnecessary, disproportionate and ... entirely theatrical." An instinct for showbiz partly explains his prominence. Success in the music industry moved Levy into exalted circles. He met Blair at a 1994 dinner party. A peerage - as membership of the Lords is called - followed three years later. Not everyone was so lucky. Four men recommended for peerages last year were blocked...
...Louis XVI, and the last, unlucky Queen of France, Marie Antoinette might have been one of those films that some liked, some didn't. But at the end of the movie's first screening a few critics expressed their displeasure with a smattering of boos, which Variety, the preeminent showbiz trade publication, strangely cited as being "Gallic-accented...