According to Lotte Lenya, longtime leading lady and intermittent wife of collaborator Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht was a brilliant and shameless appropriator of other writers' material. Whether a brilliant reinterpreter or shrewd plagiarizer -- the critics have been divided -- there's been no debate
In 1981, New York witnessed the formation of the first successful white hip-hop group. Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA emerged from the hard-core punk scene of the late 1970s and fought for our right to party to a different sound. Their "Licensed to Ill" sold 720,000 copies in six weeks, making it Columbia'
Even before he was born, Quentin Tarantino was being prepared for the entertainment business. His mother named him after Quint, the Burt Reynolds' character from "Gunsmoke." By the time he was two she had moved the family from Tennessee to the movie capital of the world, Los Angeles. When he was eigh
As an artist, a gay man, an AIDS victim, and a Cuban American, Felix Gonzalez-Torres roamed the periphery of our culture. But who put him there? Whose agenda draws the lines between marginal and mainstream? And once those lines are drawn, how does one lodge protest? In his poignant, political Install