Filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's new feature is Party Monster, starring Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin. It's about a murder that took place in the drug-saturated New York City club scene in the early 1990s. Michael Alig, a party promoter, was convicted of killing a young drug dealer known as Angel. This is Culkin's first film in nine years. He plays Michael Alig. Green plays author/celebutante James St. James. Barbato and Bailey also collaborated on a 1999 documentary of the same name and on the same topic.
Musical legend Johnny Cash died today at the age of 71. We remember him with a rebroadcast of a 1997 interview with the singer and musician. Cash began recording albums and performing in the 1950s. Representing Cash's varied musical styles, he was inducted into the Songwriters, Country Music, and Rock and Roll halls of fame. Cash recorded over 1,500 songs in his career. Some of the most famous were "I Walk the Line," "Ring of Fire" and "A Boy Named Sue." Cash died of complications from diabetes.
NPR's Senior Foreign Correspondent Anne Garrels was one of the few journalists still in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq. Often she reported from her room at the Palestine Hotel as bombs flew overhead. In her new book, Naked in Baghdad, she writes about the war and its aftermath. The book also contains the e-mails that her husband Vint Lawrence sent to friends keeping them informed of her daily life in Baghdad. Garrels has also reported from the former Soviet republics, China, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Israel, and is the recipient of the Alfred I.
Krugman has collected the last three years of his New York Times op-ed columns in the new book, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. In the preface he writes that the book is "a chronicle of the years when it all went wrong again — when the heady optimisim of the late 1990s gave way to renewed gloom. It's also an attempt to explain the how and why: how it was possible for a country with so much going for it to go downhill so fast, and why our leaders made such bad decisions." Krugman teaches at Princeton University.
Jack Devine was stationed in Chile during the coup as part of the agency's Chile task force. He is now a crisis management consultant in New York with the firm The Arkin Group.
Late night talk show host Conan O'Brien celebrates ten years on the air Sunday September 14, 2003, with a primetime special on NBC. In 1993, he moved into the Late Night host slot when David Letterman went to CBS. Prior to Late Night, O'Brien was a writer for Saturday Night Live and writer and producer for The Simpsons.
Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project. He led the campaign to declassify official documents of the secret history of the United States government support for the Pinochet dictatorship. That information has now been collected in the new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. The book chronicles 20 years of policy in Chile from 1970 to 1990.
Keillor's new book is Love Me: A Novel. It's about the ambitions of a frustrated writer who publishes a piece in The New Yorker, writes a disappointing debut novel, and ends up penning an advice column in the local newspaper. Keillor is the host of A Prairie Home Companion, on the air since 1974. He has written 13 books, including Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, Wobegon Boy and Wobegon Days.
Lahiri's new novel is The Namesake. Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, her collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is about being an Indian immigrant in America, when the Ganguli family leaves Calcutta and settles in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Music critic Milo Miles looks at the career of reggae greats Toots Hibbert and his band, the Maytals. The group's recent re-issues are Time Tough, Funky Kingston (Island Records) and Monkey Man (Trojan Records).
Enter MeFranken's new book is Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Franken recently made headlines when the Fox News Channel tried to sue him over the phrase "fair and balanced," which Fox claimed as its own. Fox lost, and Franken got lots of publicity for the book, which is now a bestseller. Al Franken is an alumnus of Saturday Night Live, where his most memorable character was the simpering self-help sap Stuart Smalley.
Pete Best was the drummer for The Beatles in their early days in Liverpool and Hamburg. His mother, Mona Best, was the owner of The Casbah Coffee Club in Liverpool. The various early incarnations of The Beatles played The Casbah more than 90 times. Best has just co-written a large-format book, The Beatles: The True Beginnings. Today he writes, records and tours with his own group, The Pete Best Band.
