The Lives They're Living

Brian Cullman on Peter Stampfel

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician based in New York and in France.  He has written extensively for The Paris Review, Antaeus, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice and has won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor award for excellence in music journalism three times. He has three solo albums on Sunnyside and is currently a member of Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas. His new book is called How to Prepare for the Past: Travels In Music and Time.   The book is a memoir composed of vignettes, many about Brian’s encounters and relationships with fascinating people, from the 1960s on, most of them musicians and most of them no longer with us. The book kicks off with a story about Ed Sullivan, and a few of the other people we meet are Dr. John, Jimi Hendrix, Nick Drake, Paul Bowles, Big Joe Turner, and Sandy Denny. Brian's website [https://www.briancullman.com/] Peter Stampfel's website [https://peterstampfel.com/wp/] Peter playing "Bird Song [https://youtu.be/JDnCg0ZEcVQ?si=Mn2BvcAOdFIYGlP4]" to a clip of Easy Rider, Radio City Music Hall, 2019 "Moment of Peter Stampfel" is from a 2010 interview [https://youtu.be/6ZeBaAYIh4c?si=XpKEfrqhLukqvHxF] he did called "Advice to Musicians"

Jonathan Coleman on Nan and Gay Talese

Jonathan Coleman's books include AT MOTHER'S REQUEST: A True Story of Money, Murder, and Betrayal (which won an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and was made into a CBS miniseries); EXIT THE RAINMAKER; LONG WAY TO GO: Black and White in America;  and a collaboration with basketball icon and NBA logo Jerry West, WEST BY WEST: My Charmed, Tormented Life.    He began his career in London on Ian Hamilton's legendary journal The New Review, became a book editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster, then worked as a journalist for CBS News. He has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications, and is a contributing editor of The Sunday Long Read. He is also an award-winning voiceover talent and recently narrated the audiobook of Ken Auletta's HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence. For many years, he taught narrative nonfiction writing at the University of Virginia. Jonathan's essay on Jerry West [https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/a-marriage-of-sorts], from The Hedgehog Review. Aaron Latham's 1973 New York Magazine [https://nymag.com/news/features/56311/] piece on Gay. "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold," by Gay Talese, originally published in 1966 in Esquire [https://classic.esquire.com/article/19660401106/print]. "Your moment of Nan Talese" source is a Library of America conversation [https://youtu.be/S4nEapx-Mow?si=e6dP3YvhGKNtMeAq] with her author Margaret Atwood.  Photo is of the Taleses' wedding day in Rome, 1959. Credit: Elio Cardone.

Jane Leavy on Sandy Koufax

Jane Leavy grew up on Long Island, where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. She worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel, up the street from Yankee Stadium, where her grandmother’s synagogue held services on the High Holidays.   She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, covering baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the sports section and writing profiles for  the Style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including profiles of comic Danny Kaye, Jane Fonda, National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, and basketballer Muggsy Bogues, which was longer than he is tall.   Then she moved to writing books, beginning with Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball”. Then she wrote the national bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy Book: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood , Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and now Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It.   Jane's website [https://janeleavy.com/] Sandy Koufax career statistics [https://www.espn.com/mlb/player/stats/_/id/23910/sandy-koufax] Vin Scully's call [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WINiz0Bfb-0] of the final inning of Koufax's 1965 perfect game Koufax's 2022 speech [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQw9KzwTy7E] at the unveiling of his statue outside Dodgers Stadium The photograph shows Koufax after his perfect game--the four balls he's holding in his very large hands represent his four no-hitters. Credit: Bettmann

Tim Page on Stephin Merritt

Tim Page has been the chief classical music critic for the Washington Post and New York Newsday and a regular contributor to the New York Times, where I first encountered his byline. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism for work for the Post. He’s a professor emeritus of musicology at USC and his many books include The Glenn Gould Reader, Dawn Powell: A Biography, the memoir Parallel Play, and four books for the Library of America imprint, on Powell and Virgil Thompson. Tim grew up in Storrs, Connecticut, where as a kid he was the subject of a celebrated short documentary film, A Day With Timmy Page. Over the course of his career, he has done a stint as a cocktail pianist; played keyboards and composed for his own rock band, Dover Beach; and served as the host of New, Old and Unexpected, a daily program on WNYC-FM, where he presented hundreds of radio premieres. Stephen Merritt's website [https://www.houseoftomorrow.com/] Tim Page's Subtack [https://substack.com/@timpage54?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page] Stephen Merritt and the Future Bible Heroes, "Memories of Love" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYVEPH1opbc&list=RDZYVEPH1opbc&start_radio=1&pp=ygUgc3RlcGhpbiBtZXJyaXR0IG1lbW9yaWVzIG9mIGxvdmWgBwE%3D] Photo of Merritt by Kevin Yatarola

Mike Jensen on William "Speedy" Morris

Mike Jensen spent 35 years covering basketball and other sports for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His book about Philadelphia basketball will be published in 2026 by Temple University Press. In 2024, Mike was inducted into the Big 5 Hall of Fame. He also won national Eclipse Awards for his horse racing coverage of Smarty Jones and Barbaro. Among other honors, he was named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year and won the Jim O'Connell Award by the United States Basketball Writers Association for Excellence in Beat Reporting. He still has the trophy for winning a foul-shooting contest at the 1976 Julius Erving Basketball Camp. His subject, the legendary William "Speedy" Morris, spent more than fifty years coaching basketball in Philadelphia on the. high school and college levels. Morris's speech [https://youtu.be/3NZmOuvYBAQ?si=446ffCYOUrjPDvMR] on being inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2011. Mike Jensen article [https://share.inquirer.com/8fybSt] on the Speedy Morris "coaching tree." Comprehensive coverage [https://tedsilary.com/speedymorrisend.htm] of Morris after he coached his final game, in 2020. The photo of Morris, taken when he was coaching Penn Charter high school in 1983, is from this site. Morris teaching [https://youtu.be/JY45qbgouxg?si=dL851SMQW9zHbHEJ] the pump fake.