[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...]
Archives for December 2017
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...]