I was about to post a semi-howler regarding Eric Adams from a few weeks ago -- only to note that it was corrected the last day or so.
The New Yorker's legendary fact-checking continues -- only retrospectively.
You had to be around at the turn of the ‘60s into the ‘70s to understand how great he was. Johnny Cash singing “Sunday Morning Coming Down”: what honesty; what verbal precision. Kristofferson wrote like a Rhodes scholar who’d worked as a janitor at a Nashville record company office — which was exactly what he was.
The problem was when he started making his own records: he couldn’t sing. But who wouldn’t love to have written “Me and Bobby McGee”? There were other people who could sing it
And if he wanted to be a movie star, well, who wouldn’t have wanted THAT?
(Similarly, I remember, long ago, hearing one of the guys who worked in my law firm's cafeteria "knowledgeably" asserting that Dead Again had a "B-cast". Kenneth Branaugh, Emma Thompson, and Derek Jacobi: REALLY?????????)
Like Ian McKellen. As far as I'm concerned, the best Western actor of his generation. But was he a star before X-Men and Lord of the Rings?
(I was once in a coffee shop where it really chapped my ass to hear some self-appointedly "knowledgeable" Pop Culture Guy at another table loudly bloviate to his [female] companion that Patrick Stewart playing Macbeth was "stunt casting", because as a Pop Culture Guy he wouldn't know that Patrick Stewart was a leading Shakespearean before he was a Star Trek character. Those people make me furious.)