EVERY few years, Ryan Adams surprises me. He'll put out a song or album that reminds me what a goddam genius the self-destructive lad can be. He's someone I'm always on the verge of writing off as a narcissistic showboat, or a pastiche artist, but he comes through with some of the most poignant and alive work in the entire alt-country tradition. It's a bit low-key for me, but last year's Ashes … [Read more...]
Archives for 2012
The Future of the Movies
THIS week in Salon, I interview David Denby, one of the New Yorker's film critics. We spoke about his new book, a collection of new and old essays and reviews, Do the Movies Have a Future? here.A few years ago, I might have told you that Denby was too pessimistic and a little stodgy. I think it's clear today that his cautionary tone is warranted. In a nutshell, he's concerned that films have been … [Read more...]
Remembering Rodney King
IT'S not often that a theater performance stops me cold. But last week's Rodney King, a one-man-show by Roger Guenveur Smith at the Bootleg Theater left me both impressed and a little shaken up at the very least.When I moved to LA in 1997, the city seemed like a sunny, youthful, high-spirited place after a few years in New England. But underneath the good times, there was a sense that I was living … [Read more...]
Stevie Jackson on the West Coast
ONE of the things we have to do from time to time here is to admit that not all of the finest 21st century culture comes from the West Coast. (Okay, just most of it.) Exhibit A is the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian, who have been perhaps our favorite band since the fadeout of (West Coast band, sort of) Pavement in the late '90s.And one on the key members of that excellently melodic indie rock … [Read more...]
Ric Burns and the Civil War
IT'S not a pretty picture: The Civil War saw as many people killed as all American wars put together. In some places, the proportion of young men killed was quite high: Parts of the South essentially lost a generation. But the huge number of deaths, and the need to count the fallen, bury them, contact loved ones -- and to make moral/ spiritual sense of it all -- remade this country, says Ric … [Read more...]
Brilliant Chamber Music Series
SINCE I first fell hard for classical music in my mid-20s, my favorite style to see live is chamber music. Early on, I think that came from my love of seeing rock n roll and small-combo jazz in small clubs. The intimacy of a string quartet in, say, an old stone church had some of the same energy and directness.In recent years, perhaps the best venue for chamber music I've found is the Clark … [Read more...]
Michael Chabon’s "Telegraph Avenue"
LONGTIME Californian is one of our favorite writers here at The Misread City.I had the pleasure to speak to him the other day about his new novel, set on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It's a long, rich book centered around a used vinyl shop that specializes in various styles of black music from the '60s and '70s. (If Brokeland Records really existed I would go digging for an original Blue Note … [Read more...]
"Creative Destruction" Announcement
GANG, yesterday the Los Angeles news/media website LA Observed made the first public announcement of the book that grows out of my Salon series. Here it is.The book's working title is Creative Destruction: How the 21st Century is Killing the Creative Class, and Why It Matters.There's a lot up on the LAObs post, so I'll leave that to explain the project. (Here are links to individual parts of the … [Read more...]
The Long Shadow of John Cage
ONE hundred years ago today, a child was born in Los Angeles who would go on to... well, what exactly was Cage's impact anyway? I've been trying to figure that out since I studied experimental music at Wesleyan two decades ago.Whatever it is, part of what interests me about Cage is how his influence -- ideas like indeterminacy, his reworking of certain Asian ideas including the Tao, prepared … [Read more...]
Remembering David Foster Wallace
DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own -- an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work -- I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of … [Read more...]