Since he is widely considered the finest rock musician on any instrument, it's hard to be surprised that Jimi Hendrix won my guitarists poll quite handily. (Is that sound disgruntled Keith Moon fans smashing things in the background?) But there were some surprises along the way.To review, this poll asked people for their favorites -- a house- burning-down grab, not the most important historically … [Read more...]
The Twilight of the ’80s with Richard Rushfield
FOR years before I met him, I knew of Richard Rushfield as this dark legend -- a nihilist wit who ran an underground humor magazine, an online savant with a Nixonian five-o' clock-shadow who had come into the LA Times to destroy the print world from within. When I finally met Rushfield, at an art opening a few months back, I found him oddly innocent and charmingly bewildered, and I'm pleased to … [Read more...]
"After the End of History"
IT'S the kind of phrase, however memorable, that the speaker probably wishes he could take back. when francis fukuyama responded to the fall of berlin wall -- the close of the cold war -- by calling it "the end of history" it seemed to make sense, and it fit into an argument by postmodern scholars -- fredric jameson especially -- that we were living in a context-free epoch that had no use for … [Read more...]
Lydia Millet vs. Domestic Realism
ONE of the key impulses of my generation -- what we used to call generation x -- has been the move away from old-school psychological realism into fiction's "borderlands." that's michael chabon's term, and he's generally talking about the wild frontier between literary fiction and fantasy, pulp crime, sci-fi, lovecraftian horror and comics. but lydia millet is less interested in those fan-boy … [Read more...]