Latest news with #MamasandPapas
New Indian Express
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Edmund White, groundbreaking gay author, dies at 85
Childhood yearnings White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer 'who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.' His mother a psychologist 'given to rages or fits of weeping.' Trapped in 'the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,' at times suicidal, White was at the same time a 'fierce little autodidact' who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. 'As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,' he wrote in the essay 'Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,' published in 1991. As he wrote in 'A Boy's Own Story,' he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be 'normal.' Even as he secretly wrote a 'coming out' novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from 'A Boy's Own Story' told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection. 'For the next few months I grieved,' White writes. 'I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?' He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as 'Mama Cass' of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for 'A Boy's Own Story' after he caricatured her in the novel 'Caracole.' 'In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who'd helped me and befriended me,' he later wrote.
The Herald Scotland
21-05-2025
- The Herald Scotland
Holy smoke! Could Hamilton be doubling as Gotham City?
While dining out, David noticed a large group at the next table, and couldn't help overhearing a complicated tale involving a woman who had apparently dressed up as a nun. "She wis quite old," explained the narrator of the story. "And she'd a face that wid scare cats oot o' a midden". Our impressed correspondent marvels at this memorable turn of phrase, and says to the Diary: 'See Glasgow? See poetry?' Difficult for dummies Wise words from reader James Nester: 'A smart person can fake stupidity, but a stupid person can't fake smartidity.' Rocky road The infuriating aspect of the glorious weather is that you end up feeling guilty if you don't trudge out of the house every morning to experience the great outdoors, even though you'd rather stay at home with the curtains drawn, slumped on the sofa and snaffling an entire pack of Choc Ices. The teenage son of Chris Graham was packing a rucksack so he could climb Ben Lomond with some chums the following day, and he was clearly in a grumpy mood about the forthcoming adventure. 'It's rocky and it's bumpy and I'm not interested in the view from the top,' he snarled. 'I don't even want to see the view from the bottom.' 'Text your pals and tell them it's not your kind of thing, so you don't want to go,' suggested Chris, believing this was a reasonable position to take. 'No way!' said his shocked son. 'Why not?' asked Chris, 'Because,' his son patiently explained, 'it was my idea to climb Ben Lomond.' Cloth ears During a church service, reader Karen Hall heard the minister quote the biblical phrase: 'Don't store your treasures on Earth'. Karen's husband, who had clearly been catching some shut-eye during the service, woke and whispered to Karen: 'I don't get it. Why shouldn't you store your trousers on Earth?' Bobbing around While studying law at Glasgow University, reader Steve Buchan shared a flat with a bloke who rarely washed, and spent his time in bed strumming an acoustic guitar. Perhaps inevitably, he was known to one and all as Slob Dylan. Mum's the word 'I bought a lettuce from a grocery store called Mamas and Papas,' reports reader Nicola Williams. 'Unfortunately I can't eat it because all the leaves are brown…'
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carnie Wilson Reveals the Real Reason Why Wilson Phillips Broke Up
Carnie Wilson opened up about the tensions that led to Wilson Phillips' split in 1993 Carnie said she would ask Wendy and Chynna if they were getting back together "every year" after they split Carnie recalled crying on the phone to their producer after the group parted ways When Wilson Phillips broke up in the '90s — it was "ego" that got in the way. On Wednesday, April 30, Carnie Wilson, 57, appeared on an episode of The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan and revealed what ultimately led to their split in 1993. Carnie, who formed Wilson Phillips with sister Wendy Wilson and Chynna Phillips Baldwin in 1986, began by opening up about their group dynamic. "The three of us have been friends since birth. We couldn't come together with the pressure. Musically, we could come together, but spiritually and individually, inside of us was the egos." Things got "competitive" in the group. When they first got together with producer Richard Perry, who played a significant role in their success early on, their group name was "The Chynna Phillips Group" — and this "really pissed" Carnie off. "I thought to myself, 'Well wait a minute here. There would be no group if I hadn't gotten us together and had that love of harmony and said, 'Get in here and sing.' And there wouldn't be a group if Owen [Elliot] hadn't said, 'Let's record together.' I mean, there were five years where we didn't see Chynna," she said. Related: Carnie Wilson Says She Used to 'Get Butterflies' Around Late Beach Boy Uncle Dennis Wilson: 'Mysterious, Sexy Man' Meanwhile, Carnie told Corgan that she always loved "an ensemble" and "collective thinking... love... [and] energy." "I feel like that's the best way to get the most out of it. You want to be a solo artist? Great. But when it's the three of us, it's the three of us. And clearly the proof is in the pudding. That's what made the group, is the three," she said of the group, which released two studio albums before they split: a self-titled debut album in 1990 and Shadows and Light in 1992. "So when there was this, 'I want to stick out, I want to go solo,' yeah, it upset me," she continued, referencing Chynna's decision to go solo after the group split. "I had to accept it. I remember crying on the phone to [producer] Glen [Ballard] saying, 'How could somebody walk away from something so successful?'... It hasn't ended. I couldn't get over, I couldn't get past the shock." After the group parted ways, Carnie said she would asked Chynna, 57, and Wendy, 55, if they were going to get back together "every year" — but the answer was always "no." Carnie, Wendy and Chynna's story began after their parents, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas, hit it off at a basketball game in 1968. Related: Chynna Phillips Shares Clip of Wilson Phillips Reunion at Owen Elliot-Kugell's Book Signing: 'Born to Sing Together' '[Our dads] formed a really close bond, and of course me and Carnie and then Wendy all formed a very close bond as little girls,' Chynna told Rolling Stone in 2020. 'I used to go over to their house almost every single weekend, and we would play and sing and dance and put on shows and hang out together and swim. They became just a real fabric of my life.' After their split in 1993, they reunited in 2004 to record California. Then, in 2010, they reunited with Ballard for their first Christmas album, Christmas in Harmony. Two years later, they recorded Dedicated, a covers album showcasing songs by Beach Boys and Mamas & the Papas. Now, the women of Wilson Phillips continue to perform live together, with their latest performance at an afterparty for 90s Con at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, Conn., in March. Read the original article on People
