[contextly_auto_sidebar] THERE has been, of course, an enormous amount of talk about Oprah Winfrey since her truly impressive speech at the Golden Globes Sunday night, and some have proposed her as the ideal candidate for the Democrats to pit against President Trump in 2020. Even with her candidacy far from declared, there has been a substantial reaction against this notion, with many … [Read more...]
Britain, Rock n Roll, and 1966
[contextly_auto_sidebar] WHAT was the real heart of the '60s? That depends, of course, on what we really mean when we talk about that much-mythologized and contested decade. The British rock critic and social historian Jon Savage, best known in the States for his chronicle of punk and the Sex Pistols, England's Dreaming, sees 1966 as the era's key year, and his book, 1966: The Year the Decade … [Read more...]
Documenting the Athens Music Scene
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the first things I saw when I moved to Athens, GA, two years ago was a gallery -- okay it was the landing of a rock club, the Georgia Theatre -- devoted to large, beautifully produced photographs by a guy named Jason Thrasher. Plenty of Athens musical heroes -- R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, for example, and members of the Elephant 6 bands -- were here, as well as … [Read more...]
The Afterlife of Adam and Eve
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of my favorite books of the year is the effort by Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt to make sense of several thousand years of Adam and Eve. Where did the original myth and its imagery come from, how did it resonate down the centuries for Christian, Jewish. and Muslim believers, for philosophers and theologians, and for poets like John Milton and artists like … [Read more...]
The Murder of the LA Weekly
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOUTHERN Californians have been bludgeoned with bad news lately, as a number of media outlets -- LAist, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles magazine, the LA Times, and the OC Weekly -- have either shut down or seen major layoffs. (In Orange County, editor Gustavo Arellano resigned after being asked to machine-gun his staff.) Perhaps the most disturbing of these is the fresh murder … [Read more...]
LA saxophonist Danny Janklow at The Blue Whale
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few years, much of the attention to the resurgent Los Angeles jazz scene has gone to Kamasi Washington, a titan of a tenor saxophonist who I had the pleasure to see at the Hollywood Bowl over the summer. His communal, late-Coltrane, South Central approach to the jazz tradition is for real, powerful, even -- a word I try to avoid -- inspiring. But there … [Read more...]
Rolling Stone, Music Journalism, and the Baby Boom
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LIKE a lot of people I know, I've just finished the biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Sticky Fingers is more than just the story of one man, though it gets close to its subject: It's a real cultural history of English and American music, of American magazines, of pop culture in general, and a shadow biography of what I call Boomer Triumphalism. Wenner, … [Read more...]
The Literary Roots of Lou Reed
[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...]
Arts Funding, US vs. UK, and Chamber Music
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the key issues which underlies this blog and the book which inspired it is the role of public funding in the arts. I hate to give the end away, but one of the concluding points of Culture Crash is the need for more funding in the US, and something closer to a British or European model. (This is hardly an unpopular opinion among my colleagues.) Similarly, I am … [Read more...]
Camerata Pacifica and Chamber Music in SoCal
[contextly_auto_sidebar] RECENTLY I've enjoyed a performance by the chamber group Camerata Pacifica and several conversations with its founder, Adrian Spence. I disagree with the cheeky Ulsterman on some points -- I am in some ways an American Anglophile with a European bent, he is a Brit who prefers American ways -- but I find him insightful and, with his group, unorthodox in an intriguing … [Read more...]