Author Archive

Thoroughbred Soprano Sasha Lazard

Written by Jessica Willis on June 25, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Stock divas, brown pop princesses, assorted starlets and vamps who have yet to bleed are everywhere. Obviously. From the world’s food courts they come, singly or in clots of twos and threes, borne from the bazaars of Dungalore, the malls of East California, the streets of South Detroit. It’s an infestation. But where have all
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The Sand-Filled Oyster Summer is sexy. Yeah, and spring …

Written by Jessica Willis on May 28, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

There’s something so obvious, so hopeful, so bittersweet about bumster short shorts, increased condom sales, complicated daiquiris and exposed viscera. During the summer we’re forced to be Brazilian for 113 days of the year. Summer is about trying too hard. That might be sex, but it isn’t sexy. Summer is about loosening up and bending
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A Victorian Medical Mystery

Written by Jessica Willis on May 21, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Mollie Fancher had one hell of a commute. June 8, 1865 was a very hot afternoon in Brooklyn, and after a day of shopping, Mollie was riding home on a crowded Fulton St. horsecar–a trolley pulled along railroad tracks by a team of horses. The missing link of mass transit. The horsecar did about six
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Remembering Edie Sedgwick

Written by Jessica Willis on April 9, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

In 1982, 11 years after her death by booze, barbiturates and boredom at the age of 28, Edie Sedgwick finally got the sympathy she needed and the biography she deserved. It was the big, glam and smartly lurid biography we deserved, too–a titanic tale of a troubled, beautiful heiress on a whirlwind tour of closeted
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Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields

Written by Jessica Willis on March 12, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

The thesis of Alan Glynn’s The Dark Fields (Bloomsbury, 342 pages, $24.95) is What If This Happened? As in what if a pharmaceutical company and an elegant NYC cocaine dealer invented and distributed a pill that turned the user into a genius? What if there was perfection in a pill? What if Eddie Spinola, a
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The Bitch in Habitual

Written by Jessica Willis on March 5, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Friday. n Thirty-seven cigarettes until the moment of reckoning. One on the desk, a newly opened soft pack of Marlboros, and one pack in the pipe: snug down at the bottom of the carton my stepdaughter bought me maybe 10 days ago. Thirty-seven, not counting the stale pack of Pall Malls that Duff snuck me
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Nick Tosches Searches for The Last Opium Den

Written by Jessica Willis on February 19, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death. –Jean Cocteau Let me out, for I wanna get off. This is the
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Ellen Freedman Can Cure You of Math Anxiety

Written by Jessica Willis on January 22, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

We laugh about Dead Lips today, but the truth is, he really humiliated me. Dead Lips: he was a tortured LBJ democrat, perhaps; or a Nixonite with a completely fused cervical spine. Ramrod of posture with a slap of gray Brylcreem tilted askew on his scalp. Full pocket protector. Plaid shirt. You know the man.
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Joyce Carol Oates’ Faithless Is a Joyless Task, with a Repetitive, Groaning Refrain of “Nobody Wins”

Written by Jessica Willis on January 1, 2002. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

One of the many damaged readers in my family turned me on to Joyce Carol Oates in 1990. Eyes closed, the damaged reader said to me, "It’s too strong. I had to keep putting it down. You try." And into my lap she dropped Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, Oates’
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A Gal Can Dream…of a Van Halen Reunion

Written by Jessica Willis on December 18, 2001. Posted in Miscellaneous, Posts

Give me a Van Halen reunion, ’cause if I’m bereft for much longer, I’ll start paying heed to the New Seriousness and drag my Simply Red albums out of the garage. I’ll start believing that Springsteen really is the one true voice for our times. I’ll never truly give up my faith, but I’ve spent
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