All posts tagged: Confessional

The Confessional Era of Plastic Surgery

The Confessional Era of Plastic Surgery

Published by José Betancourt

Recently the actor Denise Richards shared several photos of her bare face that triggered a wave of double takes. In some, her side profile reflects the gentle weathering expected of nearly 55 well-lived years; in others, her face rewinds to how it looked during her Bond-girl era. It was as if, as one fan put it, she’d acquired a time machine. But nobody needed to guess how she transformed: She also posted an image from the morning of her facelift. In it, ink markings peppered her features, illustrating exactly where a surgeon would soon cut her skin open. Richards didn’t just cop to cosmetic surgery. She shared who did it, how she prepared, what recovery felt like, and—perhaps most surprising—what it looked like, via post-op photos at two days, five days, eight days, 10 days, and 3.5 weeks: A bandage swaddled the former model’s face in one, and purple bruises bloomed atop her cheeks; a handful of tiny, stitched scalpel cuts on the corners of her mouth and eyelids still looked fresh. Her goal, she …

Sondheim Was a Confessional Artist

Sondheim Was a Confessional Artist

Published by Sam Flores

Stephen Sondheim was so firmly established as a divine eminence in the theater world that, in his 80th year, he wrote a song of self-parody called “God.” Unlike his celestial counterpart, however, Sondheim never sought to make creations in his own image. The songs he wrote—words and music (sometimes, just words) for 20-odd shows and films, including West Side Story, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd, and other works of mordant virtuosity that lifted the American musical to new creative heights—had nothing to with him as a person, or so he would always insist. With the exceptions of “God” and a single song from Merrily We Roll Along, “Opening Doors,” about youthful aspiration, he claimed that he wrote solely in the voices of characters to suit the particulars of the drama. Since the rise of the rock era, when singing songwriters established self-expression, self-reflection, and self-celebration as the lingua franca of popular music, it’s been hard to think of musical artists and their art as separate entities. Sondheim came up in an earlier tradition, during which the …