Costello

There’s a moment in the title story of this beautiful, quietly shattering collection when the protagonist recalls being with an ex-boyfriend: “She almost wished to return to those times, to the fidelity of being she had felt then, the streaming across into each other, the mornings spent in bed when a thought that might have been his became hers.” This luminous image of union is in sharp contrast with the lonely disconnection not only of the protagonist’s current relationship, but of all relationships in this…

What can you do inside a short story? Of the many engagements with other writers in Mary Costello’s collection, one ambition appears to guide her particularly; that of the narrator in a Jorge Luis Borges story who glimpses the Aleph, the point in space that contains everything, in Costello’s rendering, “the tiny sphere that encloses the whole universe, that makes visible every point and every place and every act from every angle, and in every light”. In her second book of short stories – The China Factory appeared more…

I’m Just A Lucky So And So – that’s a lyric Mack David wrote in 1945 for Duke Ellington, the same Mack David who co-wrote Baby It’s You with Burt Bacharach, a song I first heard performed by the Beatles.Yet despite these links back to its very beginnings, Burt Bacharach isn’t part of the dull orthodoxy of rock music. When a dogmatic journalist faulted his absence from the rock’n’roll revolution in the 1950s, Bacharach responded, “I was studying with the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud and listening to Dizzy…

Billy Joel had a special guest on deck last night at Madison Square Garden. Midway through the piano man’s performance, he called Elvis Costello onstage to perform Costello’s 1978 tune “Pump It Up” along with his own song “Allentown.” Costello sang the lively “Pump It Up” while Joel played piano, and the pair joined vocals to duet on “Allentown,” off Joel’s 1982 album The Nylon Curtain. Definitely had not bingo-carded Billy Joel bringing Elvis Costello onstage at MSG tonight to sing Pump It Up while Billy…

A former fugitive accused of falsely telling investors he was a billionaire, a Harvard MBA, and a special forces veteran appears set to plead guilty on Wednesday in connection with an alleged $35 million fraud, a court filing suggests.Would-be cannabis mogul Justin Costello, 42, is accused in federal court in Washington state of swindling thousands of investors and others with a slew of bogus and extravagant claims about himselfCostello, who fled after learning he had been indicted in late September, has been held without…

Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsFBI Poster for Justin CostelloFBIThe Securities and Exchange Commission has agreed to settle a civil lawsuit against a man accused of five separate penny stock pump-and-dump schemes, court filings Friday revealed.The man, David Ferraro, is accused of using his prolific Twitter account to assist another defendant, former federal fugitive Justin Costello, on the stock schemes. The SEC says the duo allegedly netted almost $800,000 in illicit profits in those efforts.Costello, 42, himself…

Image: NetflixAnimation master Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) returns with Wendell and Wild, a spectacle of stop-motion oddities that was well worth the wait. The highly anticipated Netflix production is a collaboration with co-writer Jordan Peele, who also co-stars with his Key & Peele comedy partner Keegan-Michael Key.As it turns out, Selick was a huge fan of the show and had approached the duo back in 2017 to work together as Peele’s directing career began to take off. All the while, this peculiar…

Prosecutors on Tuesday asked a California federal judge to jail without bail a recent fugitive accused of a brazen $35 million fraud that involved him falsely telling investors he was a billionaire, a Harvard MBA, and a special forces veteran who was wounded twice in Iraq.An FBI SWAT team caught the fugitive, Justin Costello, in a remote area near San Diego on Oct. 4. He was carrying a backpack loaded with six one-ounce gold bars worth $12,000, U.S. currency worth $60,000, another $10,000 in Mexican pesos and banking…