The Human League, Soft Cell and Alison Moyet at the Hollywood Bowl: New Wave Grows Up

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles — June 4, 2026

REVIEW by Alexander Laurence

For many of the fans arriving at the Hollywood Bowl on Thursday night, the Generations Tour wasn't simply a nostalgia trip. It was a reunion with music that has remained part of their lives for more than four decades. Since there was no Cruel World this year, this was the next best thing.

Featuring The Human League, Soft Cell, and Alison Moyet, the tour brought together three artists who helped define the electronic pop explosion of the early 1980s. All three recently appeared at Cruel World Festival, a reminder that synth-pop and new wave have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in recent years, influencing newer acts such as Ladytron and The Faint while attracting younger listeners discovering the music for the first time.

The audience itself reflected that legacy. The crowd skewed older, largely made up of people in their 50s and 60s, along with a noticeable LGBTQ presence that has long been part of the fan base for these artists. Looking around the Bowl, it was easy to see people reconnecting with a soundtrack that helped shape their youth while introducing it to friends and family.

Alison Moyet opened the evening with a characteristically understated performance. Her voice remains rich and expressive, but the crowd response felt somewhat muted. Perhaps the relatively early 7:30 p.m. start time contributed to the subdued atmosphere. The audience seemed content to settle into the evening rather than fully engage.

Soft Cell quickly raised the temperature. Marc Almond remains one of pop's most distinctive and charismatic frontmen, and songs like "Memorabilia" injected the night with much-needed energy. For a few moments, the Hollywood Bowl no longer felt like an outdoor amphitheater in Los Angeles but like a downtown club from another era.

During "Memorabilia," I found myself transported back to the legendary Danceteria nightclub of the early 1980s. It felt less like watching a heritage act and more like stepping into a living piece of electronic music history. The sensation was so vivid that I half expected to be dancing on ecstasy in 1982 New York.

That year holds particular significance for me. I graduated from high school in 1982, the same year "Tainted Love" and "Don't You Want Me" dominated radio and MTV. Yet my relationship with these artists has never been entirely tied to those hits. In fact, I didn't see either Soft Cell or The Human League live until around 2000.

My own tastes gravitated toward some of their less celebrated work. I've always preferred Soft Cell's third album, Last Night in Sodom, and much of Marc Almond's adventurous solo catalog. That's why one moment during the set stood out. When Almond encouraged the audience to sing along to "Say Hello, Wave Goodbye," one of the most beautiful songs in the Soft Cell catalog, the response was surprisingly weak. It suggested that many attendees may still view Soft Cell primarily through the lens of "Tainted Love."

The same phenomenon exists with The Human League. While "Don't You Want Me" inevitably generated the night's biggest singalong, Dare remains one of the finest albums of its era, a record whose influence extends far beyond its biggest hit. The band's polished performance served as a reminder that their legacy rests not only on a handful of radio staples but on a body of work that helped redefine pop music.

What struck me most throughout the evening was that this wasn't really about nostalgia. These artists feel relevant again. Their fingerprints can be heard all over contemporary electronic music, indie rock, and synth-pop. The crowd may have been older, but the music didn't feel old.

Perhaps that's why tours like this continue to resonate. We're seeing a generation of listeners who came of age with new wave reclaiming these artists as an important part of their identity. Some were there the first time around. Others discovered the music later. Either way, they are finding community in songs that continue to speak across generations.

At the Hollywood Bowl, The Human League, Soft Cell, and Alison Moyet weren't simply revisiting the past. They were reminding us why this music never really went away.

Read about the history of FIVE FINGERS MAKE A FIST (2007)

Read about the history of FIVE FINGERS MAKE A FIST (2007)

https://open.substack.com/pub/portinfinite/p/five-fingers-make-a-fist?r=1lmkkl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

All the bands I played in 1980s: The OC and LA scene

All the bands I played in 1980-2012
BY Alexander Laurence

Besides all the noise I made with my brother when I was 10 years old, my music career probably started around the summer of 1981. The plan was to form a band with Patrick Quinn, who I knew in High School. Patrick was good a classical music guitarist and he liked punk rock music. I took guitar lessons that summer and learned to read music. It was very traditional. I remember studying the cover of a Plasmatics single and learned how to do a bar chord. In the Fall of 1981, Patrick moved to SF to go to college and I was still in high school. Through some friends, I met Rick Harrison, and we decided to form a band along with Benny Rapp and Greg Sisson. Greg Sisson was in one the first punk bands from Huntington Beach, called The Slashers.

We called ourselves THE SLIP KIDS. We were named after a song by The Who or China White, a punk band who were our friends. Sisson didn't play with us for the first few months because he didn't have any gear. We rehearsed as a trio for a few weeks. I was horrible. I knew how to play but I had no experience playing with others. Rick Harrison had one song, and I wrote three songs pretty fast. I realized that in this band we lacked a vocalist, a songwriter, but it was okay. I realized that even though I didn't know what I was I doing, I had to be the main songwriter and default leader, even though it was Rick's band. There was a big difference in direction we all wanted to go. Rick and Benny wanted to be like the Damned or Generation X. I was more into the Buzzcocks and Wire. I think that we sounded unique: a combination of lack of ability and the confusion of ideas. None of our songs had titles, but to me a few came to be known as "Genocide" and "Another Reality." It was late 1981, and I was feeling that punk had already been done. What we did was a little pop punk and very limited musically.

(Greg Sisson and Rick Harrison, Slip Kids 1982?)

For a few weeks we practiced with Don Snell, who was a great guitarist and a lot older than most of us.  Me, Rick and Benny were all 17 or so. Don was at least 20. With Don, he was more of a lead guitarist and I played rhythm. With Don, we played all our five original songs, and one song by Don, and also "Untouchables" by Gen X. The song by Don was like a hardcore punk song. It was more like an instrumental song. I was thumbs down on that one. It was actually more like a weak song by Wire. The band was getting ready to actually play a show. We all hung out in Hollywood one night. Benny told me how they wanted Frank Martinez (at one time in The Vandals) to be the lead singer. In my own mind I wanted to be the lead singer, and I wanted Craig Stonoff (Movement) to be the guitarist. 

A week passed and I was out of the band, and Frank and Greg Sisson were in. A few months later I heard THE SLIP KIDS were playing at a party at a friend's house. I watched them and was bored. Rick nodded his head when they played one of my songs. It all sounded a little dated to me. It took so long to write songs and find people to play with, by the time the songs were actually played to an audience, it was a little dull. I remember trying to start another band very quickly. I heard that Don Snell and Jeff Milucky were forming a band, and I wanted to join, but that never happened. Stonoff wasn't really doing Movement anymore, but he was very negative about any new bands. He was really jaded.

Around this time I wrote my first decent song entitled "Powerline." 

I found a flyer in Zed's Records in Long Beach. There were two guys in Palos Verde looking for a guitarist. I was getting better at guitar and had taken a class in music theory. I taught myself how to play a little piano. One of these guys in PV was Steve Brown (later he would be in the SF band Broom). These guys were great musicians. They could play anything. We played during 1982 when I was 18, and they were closer to 15. We were more like some post punk bands like Magazine and Joy Division and Outer Circle. I played guitar and keyboards. The drummer played a different beat on each song. We had slow songs and fast songs. I had a big tape recorder and recorded most of our practices. We created a ton of material quickly. We had one song called "The Other Room." I met this guy named Adam who wanted to play with us, but Adam ended up playing with Jesse Rodrigues from Movement. It was a long drive to Palos Verde, and sometimes we wouldn't practice for a month. I had left high school and a few months had passed. When I came back to Palos Verde, Steve Brown was playing with a whole new group of guys. It was more rock oriented. By the end of 1982, I was more into Birthday Party and stuff like that. The Palos Verde Group never had a name, and soon we went our separate ways. We did have one song that was a little like Nirvana "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and I had written a song with very similar chords to Mazzy Star "Flowers in December" in 1982. We were a little more advanced and probably could have done something interesting.

Towards the end of 1982, I had met Jeff McCann. He had just moved to Huntington Beach from Texas. The band we formed was called SATAN'S CHEERLEADERS. It was mostly Jeff's esthetic and style. We played a bunch of instrumentals by The Cramps, Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones. For a while it was just me and Jeff, and then we were joined by a guy named Mark. It was the first two guitar and drums, no bass guitar band that I knew about. Some girl who played bass in our band was in The Cramps for a few years. I think now that Jeff was ahead of his time. I wanted to write some original songs, but my songs didn't really go with this band, which was more like a psych garage band. I quit some time in 1985, and was replaced. I met up with Jeff again at Long Beach State, and we played for fun again, in 1988, after they had played a few gigs. They were doing this retro garage rock instrumental thing in 1983, and now, a few decades later, it seems like every other band now is like that.

                                       (Mark and Jeff from Satan's Cheerleaders)

Satan's Cheerleaders live at Safari' Sams 1985: https://archive.org/details/sc1985-10-10

At the same time I had try to form a band with Greg Yalch. We were in this band called MASQUE for a few weeks. But the other guys wanted to be a Bauhaus clone band. I wrote a few songs with Yalch. One has survived called "So Happy." By 1983, when there was idle time, we were joined by Clark North (who is now an important Tattoo Artist). We hung out more than actually did anything. I left and was replaced by Brad Logan and Rob Whitecotten. They called themselves Cinema of Cruelty, or COC. I remember one show at Clark's house by Edison High. Greg used to play me wild tapes of his new band. Logan quit and went on to join a hundred punk bands. Some new guys joined and they called themselves THE BELLJAR. I saw them play at Safari's Sam in 1986, and Greg was the only original member left. It was a far different band, more like The Doors and the paisley underground bands. The Belljar was one of those bands that wore a lot of black and could be taken as a Velvet Underground revival band. Greg Yalch got heavily into drugs and the band broke up by the end of the 1980s. 

 

The Bell Jar (Greg Yalch, left, and Clark North)

I also played with Sharon Vaughnn in a band called HOUSE OF CARDS. I had met her when she worked at Fedco. Sharon was in a rockabilly band. Me and Sharon played with a number of people. One who I remember was Dave who later played in Swamp Zombies. I saw them play a few years later in San Francisco. I was originally the guitarist, but Sharon found some guy who wanted to play guitar and wanted me to play bass. I lasted a few weeks. I heard that they played some places like Radio City, where many of these bands also played.

From 1982 to 1985 I was always making tapes. I had a little recording studio in my bedroom. I would record demos all the time with anyone who would come over. I had a drum set in the corner of my room that belonged to my girlfriend. Mark Held and I had a band called FUMES. We also did some rap songs in 1984 and performed them live at a poetry night at Safari Sam's in 1984. Our best songs were "Recovery Room" and "Fuck The World." They were like anti-punk songs. I recorded a lot of dub reggae tracks. I recorded hours of drums tracks, in case I wanted to use them as a backing track. The Mark Held stuff was more experimental. More anti-rock. In my own mind I wanted to do something more like Eno and Talking Heads. 

Mneumonic Devices

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPT 1985
a film by Alexander Laurence

By 1985, I did record some songs with Ann De Jarnett (Mneumonic Devices). I started making 8mm films and most of the stuff we did was like soundtrack music. Ann De Jarnett and Greg Yalch were in my first film The Immaculate Conception (1985). For about a year all we did was films and photography. I sold my guitar and my amp and retired from bands for at least a year.

For about a year, I didn't do much music. I started to take college more seriously. But I still had time to try out for a goth band. I was in EX-VOTO with Larry Rainwater and Greg Bevington for about a week. I couldn't play it with a straight face. It was like a Sisters of Mercy clone band with drum machine. We played songs by Steppenwolf, Joy Division, and Bowie. I couldn't get the guitar part right in their song "In The Modern Time." They wanted me to make noise and play power chords, and not play any real guitar stuff. It was secondary. The bass riff was on top of everything. They were goths.

Ex Voto

I had lost focus. I was never going to be in a proper band. I was in the middle of an English Lit degree. But in 1987 some things happened. Wire reformed. I had written a ton of poems. Patrick Quinn was going to move back to the west coast from Boston. I had envisioned a band ever since the days when I hung out with Ann of Mneumonic Devices. It was like a band that combined rock and classical influences. I had written about 30-40 songs. This new band I called THE ELIZABETHANS. But Quinn didn't actually move back to California until 1989, and when we started to play the new songs, he struggled. We could only play the simplest stuff, the drones of songs like "Heliotropes Turn Black." Then we co-wrote a bunch of songs together, but there was no band. Just a massive amount of songs on tape and ideas. As the years went on, it was easier to record songs, and do demos. I started out with a two track tape machine, where you could only record live takes, or music, and dub in the vocals.

In the meantime I recorded some stuff with Devin Rench. We called out new band VICTIM. It was more industrial sounding. We had a friend who worked for Yahama and we recorded a few tracks at his studio. I showed Devin the songs I had written previously. He wasn't interested. Devin wanted to write his own lyrics and wanted me to do the music. We tried to play some parties with backing tracks but it never really worked. 

That is mostly what I did during the 1980s.

PS.

1) I probably only played two real gigs in the 1980s.

2)  I wrote about 100 songs during this time.

3) I also wrote 20 short stories and 3 novels.

4) I focused on going to college during the later part of the 1980s.


5) There was no internet in the 1980s, so you had to do demos and play live shows to be noticed.


6) The bands I was in, Ex-Voto, Satan's Cheerleaders, The Belljar, released records years later after I had left the band.


7) All this happened in LA and Orange County.


8) There were hardly any PR people in the 1980s. Now there are 3 publicists for every journalist.


9) There were no computers like today and no itunes in the 1980s. If you wanted to hear a record you had to own the record.


10) I realized that I didn't have the patience for bands. I moved to San Francisco in 1988. Things would be a lot different there during the 1990s.

Scott Sellers RIP 2017. Top left with blonde hair. 

Other guy in these photos is Clark North, now a famous tattoo artist based 

in Las Vegas. Both were in The Bell Jar and Bar Twang Blues.

Donald Grose, aka Utopian Cow, moving to New Mexico

Donald Grose, aka Utopian Cow, moving to New Mexico and building his own house slots neatly into a lineage that runs from punk rock to land art to Americana music. Like Robert Smithson’s earthworks, it treats land not as backdrop but as medium—an insistence that meaning can be carved directly into the ground, outside institutions and markets. There’s a strong HB punk rock ethic in it too: DIY to the core, suspicious of polish, grounded in doing rather than asking permission. Building your own shelter echoes the same refusal that powered hardcore scenes—if the system doesn’t serve you, you build something else, louder or quieter, but on your own terms. And threaded through it all is Americana’s long obsession with self-reliance, wide-open spaces, weather, waiting, and work—the idea that songs, houses, and lives are shaped by timing, land, and grit. Grose’s house becomes a kind of lived artwork and folk song at once: an earthwork you can sleep in, a punk gesture slowed down to desert time.

A man from elsewhere comes to New Mexico and builds his own house, and it’s easy—especially from the outside—to slot that gesture into a lineage of land art, punk refusal, Americana self-reliance. But from a New Mexican, Latinx perspective, the land has never been an empty medium waiting for inscription. It is already written on. It holds acequia routes, burial grounds, grazing paths, old grants broken by courts, fences that came later. The desert is not a blank canvas; it’s a palimpsest.

So when Donald Grose builds his own house, the act doesn’t begin with Smithson. It begins with adobe. With families who have been mixing mud and straw for centuries, raising walls with cousins and neighbors, not as an art gesture but because shelter had to be made by hand. DIY here isn’t rebellion; it’s inheritance. It’s what you do when banks don’t lend to you, when developers aren’t building for you, when survival depends on knowing how to fix a roof before the monsoon rolls in.

That shifts the meaning of the gesture.

The punk ethic—do it yourself, don’t ask permission—resonates, yes. But in New Mexico, permission has always been complicated. Whose permission? The state’s? The county’s? The land grant’s? The tribe’s? The family’s? Suspicion of institutions didn’t arrive with hardcore; it arrived with conquest, with broken treaties, with property lines drawn in distant offices. Self-building isn’t just aesthetic refusal. It can also be memory of exclusion.

And the land-art comparison feels different too. Smithson treated earth as material for concept. Here, earth is also ancestor. It feeds chile, it cracks in drought, it remembers footsteps. To “carve meaning into the ground” implies that meaning wasn’t already there. From this vantage point, building a house is less about inscribing and more about entering into relationship—accepting wind that never stops, light that bleaches everything honest, water that must be shared carefully.

The Americana thread—self-reliance, wide-open space, grit—also carries weight. Those mythologies often flatten the Southwest into backdrop for individual freedom. But wide-open spaces here are layered with labor: shepherding, railroad work, fieldwork, military bases, uranium mines. Weather and waiting aren’t romantic—they’re economic facts. Work is not a metaphor; it’s generational.

So Grose’s house, seen from here, becomes something slightly more complicated than a “punk gesture slowed to desert time.” It enters a landscape where slowness was already practiced, where building with your hands was never countercultural but ordinary. The difference may lie in intention. Is the house a retreat from systems, or a joining of place? Is it an artwork, or does it become accountable to community and land?

There is still something admirable in choosing to build your own shelter. That kind of labor earns respect anywhere. But in New Mexico, the act sits inside a much older continuum of mud walls, vigas, tin roofs, and patched fences. It doesn’t begin the story; it joins it.

From a Latinx, non-gringo perspective, the most interesting question isn’t whether the house echoes punk or land art. It’s whether it listens. Whether it learns the rhythm of acequia cleanings, of vecinos helping raise a wall, of wind that sandblasts pride down to humility. In that sense, the house is not just an earthwork you can sleep in. It is a test of belonging.

And belonging here is not carved into the ground. It is grown, slowly, in the ground.

Sophie Calle: Overshare -- ART REVIEW by Alexander Laurence

Sophie Calle: Overshare

January 30, 2026 – May 24, 2026

@ UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

REVIEW by Alexander Laurence

Sophie Calle: Overshare
January 30 – May 24, 2026
UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art
Review by Alexander Laurence

 

I have been looking forward to this exhibition for ages. I first met Sophie Calle in the early 1990s, when she regularly showed work at Fraenkel Gallery and maintained a strong presence in the Bay Area. I remember encountering her at a lecture at Cameraworks, at a time when she had already produced Suite Vénitienne and The Sleepers. Both works are represented in this retrospective.

Calle was never really a photographer in the traditional sense. She is a conceptual artist who has consistently explored themes of voyeurism, surveillance, and intimacy—long before the digital age and the internet normalized these concerns. She is as much a writer as a visual artist, and language is central to her practice.

 

In the section titled The Spy, Calle follows strangers through the city. In one project she poses as a maid, photographing travelers in their hotel rooms. The Sleepers documents a series of strangers invited to sleep in her bed, recorded through photographs and diary entries. Cash Machine uses early digital video to capture people withdrawing money from ATMs. Seen now, these figures feel like ghosts from another era.

In The Shadow, Calle reverses the gaze by hiring a private detective to follow her. In Autobiographies, she sends her bed to a man in Northern California. Other works document encounters atop the Eiffel Tower, where Calle remained in bed and spent five minutes with each visitor. True Stories presents a collection of objects chosen by the artist, alongside brief, elliptical texts. There is also a tribute to Frank Gehry.

Toward the end of the exhibition, Calle turns to her parents. There is a video of her mother, who—like her father—has since died. In one poignant gesture, Calle brings her mother’s portrait and jewelry to the North Pole. Elsewhere, secrets are locked away in safes, withheld yet present.

The final work is a video filmed in Istanbul, showing people who have never seen the sea. They are taken to the North Sea, encountering water for the first time. It is a quietly powerful ending.

This exhibition is mysterious and deeply affecting. Sophie Calle invites us to reflect on human vulnerability—on surveillance, social media, identity, memory, and death. The question lingers: what does it all mean?

All photos taken by Alexander Laurence

BEST MUSIC OF 2025 / The Portable Infinite 40

BEST MUSIC OF 2025 / The Portable Infinite 40

ETHEL CAIN “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You”

BAR ITALIA “Some Like It Hot”

PERFUME GENIUS “Glory”

TOPS “Bury The Key”

ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF “Iconoclasts”

GEESE “Getting Killed”

CATE LE BON “Michelangelo Dying”

SUEDE “Antidepressants”

STEREOLAB “Instant Holograms On Metal Film”

BLOOD ORANGE “Essex Honey”

SWANS “Birthing”

BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD “Forever Howlong”

FKA TWIGS “Eusexua”

SPELLLING “Portrait Of My Heart”

GREENTEA PENG “Tell Dem It’s Sunday”

MELODY’S ECHO CHAMBER “Unclouded”

SQUID “Cowards”

JENNY HVAL “Iris Silver Mist”

MIKI BERENYI TRIO “Tripla”

DESTROYER “Dan’s Boogie”

PULP “More”

THE LAST DINNER PARTY “From The Pyre”

SPARKS “Mad!”

WATER FROM YOUR EYES “It’s A Beautiful Place”

LAMBRINI GIRLS “Who Let The Dogs Out”

PATRICK WOLF “Crying The Neck”

CIRCUIT DES YEUX “Halo On The Inside”

SUDAN ARCHIVES “The BPM”

FACS “Wish Defense”

NOVA TWINS “Parasites And Butterflies”

YEULE “Evangelic Girl Is A Gun”

SOULWAX “All Systems Are Lying”

WISP “If Not Winter”

JUST MUSTARD “We Were Just Here”

SMERZ “Big City Life”

HEARTWORMS “Glutton For Punishment”

THE BUG CLUB “Very Human Features”

TAMINO “Every Dawn’s A Mountain”

20/20 “Back To California”

PURITY RING “Purity Ring”

THE PORTABLE INFINITE 25 BEST BOOKS of 2025

THE PORTABLE INFINITE 25

BEST BOOKS of 2025

Shadow Ticket 

by Thomas Pynchon

The Absence 

by Budgie

Into the Groove: The 1980s: The Ultimate Decade in Music History - The perfect stocking filler for the pop aficionado in your life

by Justin Lewis

Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

by Kelly Loudenberg, Makiko Wholey

Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion

by Chris DeVille

Fever: The Complete History of Saturday Night Fever

by Margo Donohue

Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard

by Robert M. Dowling

The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman

by Taylor Lewandowski

Alibi Lullaby

by Norma Cole

Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock – The Definitive Band Biography of the 1970s Avant-Garde

by Jonathan Gould

Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats

by Audrey Golden

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

by Francesca Wade

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below

by Jane Kamensky

Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of The Bangles

by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike

A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler

by Nathan Kernan

Service

by John Tottenham

The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York

by Peter Trachtenberg

The Adjudicator

by Susan Daitch

To Hell with Poverty!: A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four

by Jon King

Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí

by Michele Gerber Klein

Honorable mentions:

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: 

City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

by Paul Karasik (Editor), Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli (illustrator)

The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood

by Matthew Specktor

Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger

by Rob King

American Dreams in Havoc Heaven

by Vanessa Matic

Bread of Angels: A Memoir

by Patti Smith

THE PORTABLE INFINITE 20 BEST BOOKS of 2025

THE PORTABLE INFINITE 20

BEST BOOKS of 2025

Shadow Ticket 

by Thomas Pynchon

The Absence 

by Budgie

Into the Groove: The 1980s: The Ultimate Decade in Music History - The perfect stocking filler for the pop aficionado in your life

by Justin Lewis

Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

by Kelly Loudenberg, Makiko Wholey

Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion

by Chris DeVille

Fever: The Complete History of Saturday Night Fever

by Margo Donohue

Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard

by Robert M. Dowling

The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman

by Taylor Lewandowski

Alibi Lullaby

by Norma Cole

Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock – The Definitive Band Biography of the 1970s Avant-Garde

by Jonathan Gould

Shouting Out Loud: Lives of the Raincoats

by Audrey Golden

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

by Francesca Wade

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below

by Jane Kamensky

Eternal Flame: The Authorized Biography of The Bangles

by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike

A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler

by Nathan Kernan

Service

by John Tottenham

The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists of New York

by Peter Trachtenberg

The Adjudicator

by Susan Daitch

To Hell with Poverty!: A Class Act: Inside the Gang of Four

by Jon King

Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí

by Michele Gerber Klein

Honorable mentions:

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: 

City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

by Paul Karasik (Editor), Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli (illustrator)

The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood

by Matthew Specktor

Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger

by Rob King

American Dreams in Havoc Heaven

by Vanessa Matic