[contextly_auto_sidebar id="hoQprz2ypgmwVraWLQKLkTyU9PmJUJUE"] WHAT would the world look like if a bomb wiped out everyone who wasn't a Gen Xer? A lot like the crowd that filed into the Hollywood Bowl last night. I kept telling myself that we were a very small generation as I saw the rows of empty seats for a show by the Breeders and Neutral Milk Hotel -- both cult bands who only released two … [Read more...]
Archives for September 2014
The Big Lie of Jeff Koons
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="vgKZ6xRHRblYrS2DIdm6RSmRakPmvRv4"] IS it possible that the most characteristic artist of our time could also be almost entirely full of b.s.? From what I can tell, that's exactly what we've got. Over the last week or so I've been underlining lines from Jed Perl's New York Review of Books piece on the art world's Gilded boy, thinking and talking about Perl's argument, … [Read more...]
Who Still Buys CDs?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="xAHGZG01AXb2m1exlG5WmI0Swyjbu2cn"] BESIDES Luddites and hipsters? (I'm borrowing here from the stage patter of the young folk duo the Milk Carton Kids.) Turns out, Japanese people still buy CDs. A country famous for loving technology and novelty are moving into the future by acting like it's the past. From a New York Times story: Japan may be one of the world’s … [Read more...]
What Killed Adulthood? Pop Culture or Capitalism?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="jery8F5jteMew95L1w4tWKmHZdFvaBDv"] ONE of the smarter back and forths over the last week or so has been the response to A.O. Scott's essay "The Post-Man," on how genuine adulthood has seeped out of American culture. He's taken the usual hits for being a nostalgic, entitled, puritanical white man -- charges I'm sure he could see coming a mile away -- most of which … [Read more...]
Author M.G. Lord on Culture Crash
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="gXQfcIniw8p3iX6eCSgrKCkQ9mR6Oq04"] Over the next few weeks I'll be posting the endorsements I get for my upcoming book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, due in January from Yale University Press. With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have … [Read more...]
Do Adorno and Benjamin Still Speak to Us?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="BzVPwGiB459dyUluIjJVpzR7FI0D0eim"] THERE's an excellent Alex Ross essay in the latest New Yorker on the Frankfurt School and the rise and fall and perhaps rise again of its reputation. Ross leads this way: In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,” a disgraced academic named Chip Lambert, who has abandoned Marxist theory in favor of screenwriting, goes to … [Read more...]
The Sad State of New Music
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="U0Diha6KNzqSf3E00pDolCNSLLKJwBcT"] THESE days I'm working on a series about commissioning new music -- and some of the news is good, offering more and different kinds of options to composers and audiences alike. But this Guardian piece recounting a survey of British composers reminds me how complex, wide-ranging and sometimes depressing the field of composing … [Read more...]
James Ellroy, The Big Picture
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="oWUL3zIX6tkrbLbqzzcrPNH15S6oj1MP"] HOW does the new Ellroy novel, Perfidia, shape our thinking of his career? How has he changed as a writer? How does he fit in to noir's history, and has he changed the field? These questions were on my mind while I was writing a recent profile of the edgy novelist, so I asked J. Kingston Pierce, editor of The Rap Sheet crime fiction … [Read more...]
The Death of Art’s Third Place
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="m8KE0CbwCulzkRvRmJL6ZGSvuY8h2kLD"] DAVE Hickey has long been one of the orneriest and most original voices in the art world -- his book Air Guitar is a revelation -- and he recently posted something that hits me almost literally where I live. He's talking about the disappearance of a discourse around visual art that is neither grounded in academia or the marketplace. … [Read more...]
Elvis Costello at the Hollywood Bowl
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="yoxDRYe0pvcibitrbAUITNZnhe94ChmB"] OVER the weekend, the former Angry Young Man played the Bowl, alongside indie piano man Ben Folds, both accompanied by the LA Philharmonic. I'm split on the show. Because both artists had equal billing, Costello had to squeeze a career that goes back to the 1970s into an hourlong set. It was too short, and his syncing up with the … [Read more...]