Free Republic

When Cory Monteith died alone in a room at Vancouver's Fairmont Pacific Rim last weekend, he took up permanent residency in a sad but famous corner of popular culture: A celebrity registry of bitter suite ends. Fortunate stars that grow old naturally can look forward to meeting their maker covered by monogrammed sheets and framed by pictures of their younger-selves on nearby walls. Their families will gather to remember and mourn — perhaps later to fight over the estate. But troubled and addicted celebrities are continually found by demons as they sit alone, not sheltered inside fine homes or a...

Neil Young will reunite with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay for a pair of performances as Buffalo Springfield for Young’s annual Bridge School benefit concerts in Northern California, with lineups that also include Pearl Jam, Elton John and Leon Russell, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and several other acts. The reunion of the influential country-rock band born in 1966 in Los Angeles will feature Young, Stills and Furay as an acoustic trio, given the Bridge School’s history of unplugged performances by all participants. The group's other two original members, bassist Bruce Palmer and drummer Dewey Martin, died in 2004 and 2009,...

The Perfect Recipe by Ari Bussel We were working on a new art installation on Wilshire Boulevard in the Business Triangle of Beverly Hills. The installation shows the bare, naked Faces of Humanity, stripped from our differences, make-up and externalities. Suddenly the artist said, “We should add a large sign reading “FREE PALESTINE.” We burst out laughing, as I quickly added “and in small letters in between the two words add ‘us from’.” We realized this would attract an avalanche of immediate attention: A Jewish artist calling from the very heart of Beverly Hills to FREE PALESTINE. I continued thinking:...

The Adler posse knows a thing or two about the concert business. Lou Adler, the patriarch, is responsible for some of the great American cultural touchstones of the past 40 years, and a few of these moments are showcased on the wall of his home office in Malibu. There's the movie poster for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a film he introduced to America as an executive producer. Next to it is a framed poster for Cheech & Chong's Up in Smoke, another production deal he spearheaded. He oversaw the production of Carole King's Tapestry, one of the best-selling albums...