A Brief and Deliberately Random History of Pain, Suffering,
and Artistic Triumphs
25,000
Cave paintings emerge in Paleolithic Europe, depicting violent hunting scenes and other everyday horrors of prehistoric society.
3100
Written language develops in Mesopotamia only to be destroyed by Twitter nearly five millennia later.
1400
In Ancient Egypt, the most talented artists in the land are commissioned to paint elaborate depictions of Pharaonic life in the tombs of Luxor. Their talents are so appreciated that they are entombed—alive—when their benefactors die.
850
Homer writes The Iliad, an epic poem set during the Trojan War.
630
The Sapphic poet Sappho is born on the island of Lesbos. She later becomes the first female writer to break through the marble ceiling.
432
Phidias carves the Statue of Zeus, which becomes one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Two years later, the artist is charged with embezzling gold and dies in prison.
335
Aristotle’s Poetics marks the first comprehensive theory of literary and dramatic structures. Perhaps not coincidentally, literary and drama critics become annoying the following year.
29
Augustus Caesar bullies the poet Virgil into writing the Aeneid, a 10,000-line poem celebrating the glory of Rome.
95
On the Greek Isle of Patmos, a cave dweller named John has a revelation about the end of the world. He writes the final chapter in what is arguably the most influential piece of literature in history: the Bible.
1048
Persian poet and unrepentant ladies’ man Omar Khayyam is born in what is now Iran. Almost a millennium later, his Rubaiyat is quoted by another famous gadabout, President Clinton, as he apologizes to the nation for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
1308
Hell-obsessed wordsmith Dante gives birth to the Italian language by standardizing a blend of southern dialects with Florentine and Latin (see Chapter 3).
1348
The Black Death wipes out roughly half the population of Europe, influencing art across the continent. Gothic allegories such as Danse Macabre, a morality tale about the universal nature of death, are all the rage.
1503
Leonardo da Vinci starts work on the Mona Lisa. The artist, a notorious procrastinator, labors over the painting for decades but never finishes it.
1564
William Shakespeare is born. His known body of work helps mold the English language into its modern form, leaving behind a sizable lexicon of great adjectives for tortured writers, including the word tortured itself.
1603
Japanese artists develop a new style of hyper-realist theater called kabuki. Pundits later refer to anything slightly over-the-top as “kabuki-esque.”
1606
Notorious bar brawler and king of chiaroscuro Caravaggio murders a “polite young man” over a tennis match. Pope Paul V issues a death warrant, but the lovely portrait of the pontiff that Caravaggio had painted earlier evidently plays well in the artist’s favor, and he is soon pardoned.
1612
Artemesia Gentileschi, the first female painter to be accepted into the Accademia di Arte del Disegno, in Florence, is raped by her painting teacher. Afterward she makes a career out of painting decapitated men.
1631
Empress, muse, and world-renowned beauty Mumtaz Mahal dies. Her grief-stricken husband, Shah Jahan, commands the construction of an extravagant tomb for his beloved at her birthplace. Twenty years and 20,000 workers later, the Taj Mahal is finally finished.
1694–95
Johann Sebastian Bach is orphaned at the age of ten, when both of his parents die within eight months of each other. He moves in with his brother, who introduces him to music.
1750
Kikuya, a hot-footed shamisen player and part-time prostitute, becomes Japan’s first professional female performing artist: a “geisha.”
1774
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s semiautobiographical tale of an ill-fated love affair, inspires the earliest recorded instances of copycat suicide, as lovelorn young men around Germany kill themselves in the same manner as the book’s tortured protagonist.
1791
Mozart dies while writing Requiem (see Chapter 1).
1815–16
Troubled teen Mary Shelley pens her famous horror novel, Frankenstein (see Chapter 2).
1824
Unable to hear the audience’s enraptured response to his Ninth Symphony, Ludwig van Beethoven is turned around by a contralto to see the noiseless clapping and cheers.
Charlotte Brontë is shipped off to the Clergy Daughters boarding school, where an abusive faculty and unsanitary living conditions serve as fodder for her signature novel, Jane Eyre.
1849
A semiconscious Edgar Allan Poe is discovered wandering around the streets of Baltimore (see Chapter 5).
1866
Emily Dickinson takes to wearing nothing but white dresses year round. Unfortunately, no one sees them, as she also becomes a recluse on her family’s estate and will remain so until her death, twenty years later.
1873
When he isn’t hiding turds under a friend’s pillow, getting piss drunk on absinthe and stabbing his wrists, cussing out the town priest, or being shot in the arm by his lover, pretty-boy wordsmith Arthur Rimbaud finds time to write A Season in Hell.
1877
The final installment of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is released. In what is now known as the Werther Effect (see 1774), a suicidal memoirist named Sophia writes about leaping in front of an oncoming train as did the novel’s heroine. Her estranged husband, Leo Tolstoy, is merely annoyed.
1879
At fourteen, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec breaks his second femur within eighteen months, permanently stunting both his legs while his torso continues to grow. He later makes a career of stripping the glamorous varnish from Parisian nightlife and exposing the ugliness of others.
1884
A three-year-old Pablo Picasso gets caught in an earthquake (see Chapter 1).
1889
Vincent van Gogh checks himself into the mental asylum where he will paint Starry Night (see Chapter 8).
1895
Oscar Wilde is convicted of “gross indecency.” Devotees sport green carnations in their lapels, a secret Victorian symbol for fellow “sodomites” (see Chapter 5).
1900
Marcel Proust’s lopsided scowl is immortalized in a photograph.
1902
An adolescent Irving Berlin runs away from home and starts singing for pennies in Bowery saloons (see Chapter 2).
1904
Arshile Gorky, a seminal figure in the American Abstract Expressionist movement, is born. His life will be beset with misfortune: His mother will die of starvation in his arms (after having survived the Armenian genocide); his studio will burn down; his wife will leave him; he will get cancer and wear a colostomy bag; he will break his neck, back, and painting arm in a car wreck; and then, at the age of forty-four, he will slash his last painting and hang himself from the rafters of a barn.
1906
Vaudeville star and Gibson Girl Evelyn Nesbit’s millionaire husband shoots and kills her lover, architect Stanford White. Alcoholism, morphine abuse, and serial suicide attempts take their toll on her beauty and career—both of which will quickly fade into oblivion.
1908
An eighteen-year-old Adolf Hitler is rejected by Vienna’s Academy of Art. He gets a little bit upset.
1909
Screaming-pope painter Francis Bacon is born.
1910
Gustav Mahler seeks counsel from Sigmund Freud when he learns that his wife, the socialite and cultural strumpet Alma Mahler, is having an affair with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Unable to shake his love for the cleft-chinned lovely, he dedicates his eighth (and most brooding) symphony to her.
1912
Egon Schiele is convicted of “public immorality” (see Chapter 5).
1915
D. W. Griffith’s silent film The Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Clansman, premieres. In later years, the film’s leading lady, Lillian Gish, will claim to have been blacklisted from the entertainment industry due to accusations of anti-Semitism and right-wing xenophobia. Until her dying day, Gish will blindly defend the film’s glaring racist content.
1917
At the age of ten, the future “Bronze Venus,” Josephine Baker, witnesses the Race Riot of East St. Louis.
1925
Theodor Geisel gets fired from the staff of his college magazine after he’s caught drinking gin in his dorm. In order to keep contributing to the publication in secret, he starts going by his middle name, Seuss.
1926
Ingmar Bergman, the son of a sadistically authoritarian pastor, loses his faith at the age of eight. For the next six decades, he wrestles cinematically with religion—and his father’s cruelty—most patently in his film that won four Academy Awards, Fanny and Alexander.
1927
Modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan’s fondness for dancing with—and wearing—long, flowing scarves becomes her undoing when one wraps around the spoke of a convertible and snaps her neck. Gertrude Stein burps, “Affectations can be dangerous.”
Fuddled flirt Clara Bow stars in It (see Chapter 1).
1929
Arthur Miller goes from riches to rags on Black Thursday, October 24 (see Chapter 2).
1931
Lee Strasberg, of New York’s Group Theatre collective, develops Method acting. The technique encourages actors to get in touch with their inner pain, as if playing a dead hooker on Law & Order for twenty years isn’t painful enough.
Todd Jones is born and develops a debilitating stutter that renders him virtually mute until high school. He will later lend his voice to one of the most shocking twists in blockbuster history when he booms, “Luke, I am your father.” Long after giving up the nickname “Todd,” James Earl Jones earns a new moniker: “The Voice of God.”
1932
Cleveland high school student and aspiring artist Jerry Siegel is devastated after his father dies in a robbery. That same year, he teams up with his friend Joe Shuster to create a new character: a bulletproof avenger named Superman.
1934
Under Stalin’s orders, Socialist Realism is officially defined by the Soviet Congress. The movement sweeps across the USSR, glorifying poor people in kitschy hyperrealistic fashion. Or else.
1938
Robert Johnson, the legendary blues guitarist and rumored soul seller, dies under mysterious circumstances. He becomes the founding member of the posthumous 27 Club.
1939
Growing bored with conventional jam sessions, Charlie Parker develops bebop, a complex style of improvisational jazz (see Chapter 7).
Jim Crow laws prevent Hattie McDaniel (who will become the first African-American Oscar winner) from properly attending the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind. A descendant of slaves and a former maid herself, she was sometimes criticized for playing “the help,” to which she responded, “I’d rather play a maid than be one.”
1941
The United States enters World War II. The conflict provides American artists with endless content, from Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy to Inglourious Basterds.
1942
Abandoned by her husband, Foxy Sondheim takes out all of her anger and sexual frustration on her son, Stephen. The twelve-year-old seeks refuge with his friend’s father Oscar Hammerstein, who schools him on how to weave the familial darkness into theatrical brilliance.
1944
Jackson Pollock pees in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace.
In August, Yves Montand and his girlfriend, Edith Piaf, lead an impassioned and defiant “La Marseillaise” at the Comedie-Francaise as American forces begin liberating France.
1945
Sarah Vaughan is denied entry into a whites-only hotel in Washington, D.C. Twenty years later she dances with President Johnson in the White House.
1948
Jack Kerouac coins the term “Beat Generation” in a landmark victory for hipster rights.
1949
George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four eerily predicts state-sanctioned surveillance but glaringly omits cell phone cams.
1950
Peanuts, a comic strip by the broken-hearted cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, debuts (see Chapter 3).
1951
Little Brown & Co. publishes The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. American teen angst is born.
1955
James Dean, the cinematic personification of teen angst, rebels without a cause—or a seat belt.
Black-clad Johnny Cash has his first hit with “Cry, Cry, Cry” (see
Chapter 1).
1956
A British tabloid accuses Liberace of being “fruit-flavoured,” a term implying he was actually (wait for it) gay. The be-glittered, feathered, ermined, and jewel-encrusted Mr. Showmanship himself sues and wins. Once he receives the check for damages to the tune of £8,000, he sends a telegram to the reporter saying, “What you said hurt me very much. I cried all the way to the bank.”
1957
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. O’Neill, having died from alcoholism three years earlier, is unable to attend the ceremony.
1959
The monsignor of melancholy is born: Steven Patrick Morrissey, who will later be known strictly by his surname.
The French New Wave crests with François Truffaut’s semiautobiographical tormented tale of childhood, The 400 Blows.
Ken Kesey, a writer and human guinea pig, volunteers to take part in a CIA-financed study on the effects of psychoactive drugs. His time at the mental hospital inspires his first published novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
After being relegated to a tour bus, Waylon Jennings jokingly tells Buddy Holly, “I hope your ol’ plane crashes.”
1960
Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita heralds the coming age of voyeurism and celebrity obsession through its protagonist, a sleazy tabloid photographer named Paparazzo. The term is derived from the Italian word for the buzzing sound of a mosquito.
After years of medical, legal, and financial troubles, Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston is laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Florida.
1961
The International Neo-Dadaist movement Fluxus flexes its nothingness. Five years later, pseudo-member Yoko Ono will break up the Beatles while Fluxus superstar and video artist Nam June Paik will encourage people to climb inside the vagina of a sperm whale.
1962
Marilyn Monroe dies at thirty-six (see Chapter 8).
1963
Sylvia Plath Hughes is laid to rest in Heptonstall, England. For decades her devoted acolytes will repeatedly chisel her married name off her headstone in patent smites against her pariah poet husband, Ted Hughes (see Chapter 8).
John Hughes goes to high school in suburban Illinois and never leaves (see Chapter 2).
1964
Lenny Bruce gets arrested for cursing at a Greenwich Village club (see Chapter 3).
1965
Recording what she intended as notes for her autobiography, Judy Garland admits, “I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and couldn’t. So what? Lots of people can’t.” (See Chapter 7.)
1966
Valerie Solanas hands her play Up Your Ass to Andy Warhol. Two years later, when he refuses to produce the charmingly titled work, she shoots him in the chest.
1969
John Kennedy Toole, depressed and humiliated by the rejection of his book A Confederacy of Dunces, hooks a garden hose to his car and gases himself to death. Twelve years later the novel will receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
1969—continued
With the Vietnam War at its peak, the Woodstock music festival calls for “three days of music and peace” among a generation of young, idealistic baby boomers—most of whom cut their hair and “get real jobs” within six months.
1970
More famous for her stints in asylums than soundstages, the actress Frances Farmer dies. Her volatile imbalance and striking beauty become the inspiration for three plays, a rock opera, a feature-length film, a made-for-TV biopic, and several books; even Kurt Cobain, Boy George, Everything But the Girl, and Mylène Farmer (who changed her name in Frances’s honor) paid homage to Farmer in song.
Controversies and conspiracy theories swirl around the deaths of Jimi Hendrix in September, Janis Joplin in October, and Jim Morrison nine months later. All three were twenty-seven.
1971
Famed photographer and freak-fancier Diane Arbus takes a fistful of barbiturates, slits her wrists, and slips into a bathtub.
Shooting begins on The Godfather. Marlon Brando shows up for his paycheck and turns in one of the most memorable roles in film history (see Chapter 2).
1972
Though historians disagree on the exact hour, it is widely accepted that on the evening of October 5th, Elvis Aaron Presley transitioned to Fat Elvis.
1973
Reclusive janitor Henry Darger dies. His landlord, upon entering Darger’s hovel, discovers a 15,000-page manuscript and hundreds of large cartoons depicting children involved in epic battles. Soon he will become an icon in the world of Outsider Art, and his paintings will fetch upward of $80,000.
1973—continued
Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” tops the charts. Thirty-seven years later, Warren Beatty is devastated to learn that the song was not entirely about him—rather it was inspired by an apricot-scarfed David Geffen.
Hilly Kristal opens CBGB on the Bowery, where he intends to showcase country, bluegrass, and blues acts. The club becomes the birthplace of punk within a few months (see Chapter 6).
1974
Seven-year-old Kurt Cobain is prescribed Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder (see Chapter 8).
1975
Karen Carpenter’s battle with anorexia nervosa brings the disorder to the collective forefront when the Carpenters are forced to cancel their Japanese and European tours. With her body too damaged to fully recover, she dies eight years later at the age of thirty-two.
1977
Diane Keaton wins an Oscar for her portrayal of Annie Hall, a character Woody Allen created after getting dumped by Diane Keaton.
1978
Artist Robert Mapplethorpe shoves a bullwhip up his ass and takes a picture.
1979
Michael Jackson undergoes his first plastic surgery at the age of twenty-one. It seems harmless at the time (see Chapter 1).
1980
Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a concept album about the depths of human isolation, tops the Billboard 200. Grammar geeks debate whether the double negative in the line “We don’t need no education” is meant to be ironic.
1980—continued
Richard Pryor freebases cocaine, ignites himself with 151-proof rum, and runs down the street. Two years later, after much psychological and physical rehabilitation, he will joke about it to thunderous guffaws.
Love tears Ian Curtis apart.
Annie Leibovitz shoots a naked John Lennon wrapped around his wife. Five hours later, Lennon is shot again—this time on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota.
1981
Christina Crawford’s tortured childhood tale, Mommie Dearest, makes it to the big screen, defying any critic with fingers to not type some variation of the word “kabuki” (see 1603) in their reviews.
1982
John Belushi parties for the last time at the Chateau Marmont (see
Chapter 7).
1983
Tennessee Williams dies in what looks like a set of one of his own plays—a chic New York hotel suite littered with half-empty wine bottles and pills peppered about the room.
1984
Dr. Haing Somnang Ngor, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, becomes the first Asian actor to win the Academy Award, for his debut performance in The Killing Fields. Twelve years later, he is shot dead in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles—rumored under orders from Pol Pot.
1986
Ice-T propels gangsta rap into the mainstream with the single “6 in the Mornin’.” Its realistic depiction of inner-city violence among African-American youths speaks to white suburbia.
1987
Matt Groening, an obscure cartoonist for the alt-weekly Los Angeles Reader, uses his own dysfunctional family as a model for the Simpsons.
1988
The ancient Romans may have invented graffiti, but it was Jean-Michel Basquiat who brought it from the streets to the most important museums the world over. His prolific career is cut short, however, when he dies at the age of twenty-seven of a heroin overdose.
1990
French artist Orlan begins cosmetic procedures that will give her the features of famous works of art (the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, for instance) but ends up looking like Mr. Potato Head and scaring the living hell out of innocent children.
1991
The all-girl punk band Bikini Kill publishes the Riot Grrrl Manifesto.
Disturbed and disturbing photographer Guy Bourdin dies—but not until his wife and two girlfriends kill themselves first.
1992
Sinéad O’Connor, protesting the tyranny of the Catholic church, tears up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Nothing compares, however, to the sound of one million eyes rolling.
1993
Actor River Phoenix overdoses on heroin and cocaine outside the Viper Room in the early morning hours of Halloween.
1995
Actor Iron Eyes Cody, after a lifetime of playing Algonquians, Cherokees, and chiefs—and most notably for his portrayal of the “Crying Indian” in one of the most effective PSAs ever—is finally honored by Hollywood’s American Indian community for his contribution to the representations of Native American life.
1996
Iron Eyes Cody is given something to really cry about when he is exposed as an Italian American, born Espera Oscar de Corti to Sicilian immigrants.
Jonathan Larson’s Rent debuts on Broadway, providing an explosive soundtrack for Alphabet City grit just in time for gentrification. Larson died earlier that year on the day before its off-Broadway premiere.
Like her aunt, uncle, and grandfathers before her, Margaux Hemingway continues the family tradition and offs herself—on the day before the anniversary of her grandfather Ernest’s suicide.
1999
Dana Plato dies of a drug overdose almost two decades after the first airing of Diff’rent Strokes.
2000
Edward Albee writes The Goat, or Who Is Silvia?, a play about the love that dare not bleat its name.
2001
One week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Eric Fischl finishes his bronze sculpture Woman Tumbling in response to people leaping to their deaths from the World Trade Center. The piece will be exhibited eight years later, though quickly covered up due to protests.
In an effort to pay off his enormous drug rehabilitation bills, the former child star and Teen Beat cover boy Corey Haim attempts to sell one of his teeth on eBay.
Actor Dennis Hopper has the first retrospective of his artwork at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. He acknowledges his indebtedness to Pollock, Warhol, and Rauschenberg—as well as years of heavy drug and alcohol abuse.
2002
Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha launches the mumblecore film movement. Ultra-low-budget directors, disillusioned with the Hollywood studio system, finally have a voice, albeit an inaudible one.
Nicole Kidman slaps on a plastic nose and takes home an Oscar for portraying one of the most tortured writers of all time, Virginia Woolf.
2003
Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, who once shot a teenager just for interrupting her concentration, dies at her home in the south of France.
2004
In January, after a lifetime of suffering from clinical depression, actor and playwright Spalding Gray jumps from the Staten Island Ferry. Two months later his body is recovered from the East River.
2006
Boy George apparently wanted to hurt himself when he called police about a phony burglary and then got busted with thirteen bags of cocaine.
2007
To prepare for the role of the Joker in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger locks himself in a hotel room (see Chapter 7).
2008
Amy Winehouse punches a fan (see Chapter 7).
2010
Lee Siegel, a critic for The New York Observer, declares, “Fiction has become culturally irrelevant.” His comment evokes outrage among the dozen or so people who still read The New York Observer.
Godmother of Performance Art Marina Abramovi´c has a 736.5-hour staring contest.
2011
Andres Serrano, after twenty years of staunchly defending his infamous photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, titled “Piss Christ,” learns that the piece has been destroyed by protesters in France.
Elizabeth Taylor dies. Debbie Reynolds (whose husband dumped her for the violet-eyed beauty) laughs, “Elizabeth loved life, and I know; she took part of mine.”
New York’s legendary Hotel Chelsea, former hothouse/flophouse to countless artists and writers—and site of an alleged murder by Sid Vicious—closes its doors to guests and goes condo.