Reeds

Carol Reed’s 1955 film is a rich slice of gentle, sentimental comedy, adapted by Wolf Mankowitz from his own novel. It’s a little bit broad and not in the class of The Third Man or The Fallen Idol, but forthright and heartfelt, and boasting a veritable aristocracy of British character acting talent.In the bustling world of Petticoat Lane in London’s East End, then the traditional home of the Jewish community, a shy little boy called Joe mopes and daydreams around the place; he’s played by Jonathan Ashmore, with the rather…

How do stars – or any of us – tick? Artists, of course, have bodies of work for their exegetes to parse, and Lou Reed’s is one of the more influential in western popular music. From his early days in the Velvet Underground documenting the New York demi-monde to a series of dissonant and beautiful solo works thereafter, the public Reed had a reputation as a curmudgeon who did not suffer fools gladly.But he had another body of work: his actual body, damaged by drug use and beleaguered by diabetes and hepatitis C. That body…

The living room. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) The kitchen. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) The dining room. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) The barbecue area. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) The sunroom. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) The sunroom. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) The home’s lush garden. (Photo by Mark Karlstrom) A California Monterey-style home once owned by late Academy Award-winning actress Donna Reed is for sale at $4.175 million in Palm Springs. Sited on a three-quarter-acre lot in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood, it’s made up of…

In the later years of his life, Lou Reed kept an office in Manhattan’s West Village and a storage space in New York City’s Chelsea district. The latter, says his former technical assistant Jason Stern, was “stacked almost floor to ceiling” with unlabelled cardboard boxes. “I had no idea what was in them. I never asked Lou.”When Reed died in 2013, the question of what to do with it all loomed large for his wife, the artist, musician and film director Laurie Anderson. No, she sighs, Reed left no instructions regarding his…

Lou Reed’s earliest versions of some of the Velvet Underground’s greatest songs, including I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin, have been unearthed and will be released in August.The US record label Light in the Attic, in partnership with Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson, will release Words & Music, May 1965 as the first album in a new archival series.It features demos of songs that Reed recorded with future Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale, and mailed to himself in a notarised package as a way of securing copyright…