How Jon Bon Jovi wound up on a Star Wars Christmas album
From TheForce.net: "Here's how that came about: My co-producer was Tony Bongiovi. Jon Bon Jovi was his little cousin and by little I mean we were all in our 30s and early 40s but Jon at that time was 17 years old. And we were in the studio called Power Station, which is the studio that Star Wars built by the way. So, here you have his little cousin who was on salary sweeping the floors. And I was stuck on this one song. I had three different people come in to sing it and I didn't like the way any of them sounded. Tony says to me, "Why don't you try little Jon?" And after just the first few notes out of his mouth I said, "Yes! This is him. This is the one! This is the one who should sing it!"
The Alcott anarchist experiment in Massachusetts and why it failed
From Katrina Gulliver at JSTOR Daily: "From communes to cult compounds and new religions, different groups have tried to create alternative models of society. Bronson and Abigail Alcott (parents of Louisa May Alcott), for example, established such a community, called Fruitlands, in Massachusetts in the 1840s. Together with Bronson’s friend Charles Lane and their families, the Alcotts attempted to live out a vision of agrarian self-sufficiency. The Fruitlands experiment was also an example of both anarchism and veganism. But like many intellectuals who have attempted such self-sufficiency, the Fruitlanders had failed to anticipate the amount of labor involved in agricultural work."
He has a famous set of Richard Avedon prints, but he can't sell them
From Richard Woodward for the NYT: "Hanging in the foyer of Ruedi and Ann Hofmann’s art-filled home in Newburgh is a large black-and-white photograph by Richard Avedon. As master printer on Avedon’s last major project, “In the American West,” Mr. Hofmann was responsible for bringing out the myriad gray shades and material details in the landmark 1985 exhibition. Mr. Hofmann has 126 prints from “In the American West,” and they are pristine, having been stored in archival boxes for decades. The prints were Mr. Hofmann’s reward for his labor, he said, explaining that he struck a deal with Avedon in the fall of 1984. But there is a snag. None of Mr. Hofmann’s prints from the series is signed."
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