Sometimes, the most violent thing a person can do is stay still.
In 1979, Patti Smith was the high priestess of a certain kind of New York chaos. She was lean, androgynous, and spoke in a language that felt like it was being torn out of her throat. People called her the "Punk Poet Laureate,"...
It is 1996, and the sun is likely setting over Sunset Boulevard, that strange, gilded stretch of Los Angeles where everyone is pretending to be something else. Robert is speeding. He has a .357 Magnum in the car, along with cocaine and heroin, a trio of companions that suggest a man who has stopped ...
It is the glare that gets you first. Not the bars, not the heavy clang of the gates, but the way the sun hits that limestone quarry on Robben Island and bounces back with a blinding, aggressive whiteness. It’s enough to make a person squint until their face permanently carries the map of a struggle....
There is a specific kind of silence that follows a loud life. It isn’t the peaceful quiet of a library; it’s the heavy, ringing sort of stillness you get after a speaker blows out. In 1999, that was the sound inside a house in Richmond, London. The newspapers were screaming about the end of a twenty...