The pioneers of my favorite period of jazz -- the '50s and early '60s -- have been dying off at a dispiriting pace lately. A few weeks ago we lost trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, whose "Open Sesame" and work on early Herbie Hancock records i love. The other day i walked into amoeba's jazz room and heard the clerks blasting his classic "Hub Tones." but over the last year or so i've been rediscovering … [Read more...]
Archives for 2009
LA WEEKLY, NEW TIMES, VILLAGE VOICE, ETC
Readers and media-watchers here in LA have followed the dismantling of the LA Weekly as editors like Joe Donnelly (who i once worked for) and film critic Ella Taylor were shown the door... here's a long, provocative "autopsy" by longtime lefty journalism Marc Cooper that is a kind of mini-history of the alt press, perhaps the bookend to the elegantly written but somewhat puzzling louis menand … [Read more...]
BELATED BEST RECORDS OF 08
Afraid the days are past where i could do a definitive top-10 of all the year's music, but here are a few new ones i've really liked:Beach House is a dream-pop duo from baltimore, sort of a chick-led version of Galaxie 500, a less strung out Mazzy Star or a non-Japanese Sugar Plant. I've played this one, the aptly named "Devotion," incessantly; it is perfect hangover music and gets you to a really … [Read more...]
DONALD WESTLAKE AND FILM
FOLKS, here is my debut as an LA Times freelancer. i'll be doing regular film writing for them.the story is about the prolific crime writer donald westlake, and the generally poor job Hollywood has done handling his talents. there are lots of European adaptations i didnt have room to get into -- i hear great things about costa-gavras' "Le Couperet," made from the novel "the ax." (the novel and … [Read more...]
JAZZ PHOTOG WILLIAM CLAXTON
well i plan to run a full set of links to my old LATIMES stories somewhere on this blog, but in the meantime i've been going through a serious jazz revival over the holidays, playing a lot of monk and billie holiday and lester young in particular... it's gotten me thinking about one of the truly coolest people i ever had the pleasure of knowing in roughly 20 years writing about artists of all … [Read more...]
MAN MEN, RICHARD YATES AND MY DEBUT IN KENTUCKY
....here is a piece i wrote for my good friend david daley, who is an editor at the Louisville paper and runs the cool fiction site "five chapters" ... he gave me chance to get into my love of overlooked aspects of the early postwar period... of course there is much else to say about those years. i wish i'd had room to get into the tradition of social criticism, on topics like alienation and "the … [Read more...]
FIRST POST: BACK FROM THE DEAD + NYT
Hi Gang, I'm glad to report that after a period of enforced silence I'm back with a few stories I'm proud of.Here's the first, a New York Times piece on a 70s cult novel called "Ecotopia."The novel is not as well written or nuanced as Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia," which by coincidence i reread at about the same time (that is tough company)... but it's a "novel of ideas" … [Read more...]