[contextly_auto_sidebar] Back in the spring, when I pitched the Los Angeles Review of Books on a regular column on musicians and their literary interests, my editor immediately came up with the title All the Poets. The phrase, of course, comes from the Velvet Underground song "Sweet Jane." So it seems somehow symmetrical that the latest installment of this feature is a conversation about Lou … [Read more...]
2017 PEN USA Literary Awards
[contextly_auto_sidebar] TYPICALLY, the PEN awards, held at a fancy hotel in Beverly Hills, ends up as one of the best parties of the year for literary and journalistic folk. The group and its events, of course, also have a bloody point to them: PEN is, mostly, a free-speech group, and its annual banquet is an attempt to honor artistry and freedom of expression and to raise money so they can do … [Read more...]
A Turning of The Tide?
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SINCE I turned my book Culture Crash in four years ago, a few things I described have proven me a bit pessimistic. (Visual art may be healthier than I predicted, and music steaming has become a bit more artist-friendly.) In some cases, though, even this grim tome of mine was a bit rose-colored. Even though I wrote -- against the advice of my editor -- a cautionary … [Read more...]
Richard Wilbur, American Poet, 1921-2017
[contextly_auto_sidebar] JUST a quick post to note the death of the great poet and translator Richard Wilbur. Until two days ago, when he passed away at 96, I would have called him America's finest living poet. Like most kids, I studied some poetry in high school and college -- Eliot, Auden, Yeats, Langston Hughes, Bishop, etc. I even, in my very early 20s, fell hard for a few poets in … [Read more...]
Billy Bragg and the Rebel Power of Skiffle
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Back in the mid-'80s, I was in a Calculus class when a friend I knew mostly from our shared love of punk rock handed me a hand-labelled cassette of a musician I'd never heard. When I got home, I played this selection of songs by Billy Bragg -- A New England, Greetings to the New Brunette, It Says Here -- which reminded me of the Clash in their political force and Dylan … [Read more...]
Patti Smith in All the Poets
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I've been doing a series on musicians and their interest in literature and writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books. So far, all of these have been strong interviews with artists I love about figures I share an ardor for. In some cases, the conversations have taken me down intellectual alleyways I did not expect to go, which is even better. … [Read more...]
The Literary Richard Thompson
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FEW living musicians fascinate me as much as Richard Thompson, the London-reared, Los Angeles-dwelling, Fairport Convention-founding guitarist and songwriter whose recording career just hit the 50 year mark. I've been listening to Richard's work for three decades now -- since I first heard "Valerie" and "A Bone Through Her Nose" on WHFS as a teenager -- and have been … [Read more...]
The Beatles After The Beatles
[contextly_auto_sidebar] I THINK it was the writer Michael Chabon who once told me he loved family partly because it gave him a glimpse at four different generations and the way they saw the world and its history -- starting with his grandparents and all the way down to his own children. That's the way it is for most of us, including me. My situation is unusual though not unheard of: My … [Read more...]
Remembering Sam Shepard
[contextly_auto_sidebar] MUCH of the world was taken by surprise by the death of playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who was felled (like Charles Mingus, a jazz artist who he was in some ways simpatico) ALS. To me, it was a bit like the sudden departure of Bowie and Prince. But I must admit that while I knew vaguely that the actor I loved from The Right Stuff was a playwright, I did not know … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem and Rock Criticism
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SINCE I was a teenager, I've been fascinated by the lions of music journalism and rock criticism -- Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, and others, especially from the field's 1970s heyday. The novelist Jonathan Lethem and his Pomona College colleague (and resident Dylanologist) Kevin Dettmar have collected 50 years of the stuff -- "From Elvis to Jay Z" -- … [Read more...]