[contextly_auto_sidebar] Over the weekend I made my first visit to Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. I didn’t have time to check out the entire museum, and I missed an exhibit dedicated to the Hapsburg Empire. But I did see most of what the place – a 1983 Richard Meier building with a 2005 Renzo Piano expansion – has to offer. I spent the majority of my time on the skylight level, which includes … [Read more...]
The Creative Class Thrives in Ancient Greece
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The second of my histories of the creative class just went up on the website for Radio Silence, the Bay Area journal dedicated to music and literature. Here's a passage from it: Greece saw a kind of civic society of music and dance. Every class from king to serf took part; the children of citizens were educated to sing and play the lyre; and guests at a drinking party … [Read more...]
Futurebirds at Georgia Theatre
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FRIDAY night I caught the Athens/Atlanta group Futurebirds at the Georgia Theatre. On record, they've developed a style some have called "psychedelic country," but it's also textured in a way that brings to mind the gentle lineage of lush electric-acoustic guitar rock that runs from the Velvet Underground's self-titled album through the Feelies to Real Estate. … [Read more...]
Memories of Marlon Brando
[contextly_auto_sidebar] I’M STILL LISTENING, MARLON By Lawrence Christon It doesn’t happen often because it can’t. The taste of the madeleine that unleashes a torrent of memories and associations, the thing that makes you stop what you’re doing and plunges you into unexpected reverie. With me, it was hearing Marlon Brando’s voice, that strange, half-vaulted, pureed-through-the-sinuses … [Read more...]
Where did the creative class come from?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="H6GVlMAv9FbtIDTE6yRckcn9TVgOyWzQ"] YOUR humble blogger has been absolutely swamped with a cross-country move and writing about pop culture (mostly) for Salon. I hope to never leave CultureCrash fallow for nearly this long. At least, I've got something I'm proud of to post: Here is a piece on the site of the Bay Area music-meets-literature journal Radio Silence. It … [Read more...]
Happy birthday to jazz pianist Bill Evans
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="YXdMgAzz7hJ9NRLELcZVcMFgrKuOTAA1"] Remembering the great and influential Bill Evans. Here he is playing "Waltz For Debby." Evans played on the immortal Miles Davis album Kind of Blue, which he shaped nearly as much as Davis himself did, and soon after led one of the greatest-ever jazz trios, a group destroyed by the death of his young bassist … [Read more...]
Arrested Development
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="RyUBLjwg2HD6V10HfzwzlBlMyZ8BZLTK"] IS our culture stuck in childhood or adolescence? Are we disregarding the depths or pleasures of maturity? CultureCrash's guest columnist weighs in. "Arrested Development" By Lawrence Christon The late, great acting coach Stella Adler was holding a master class on Jean Anouilh’s “Waltz of the Toreadors,” a play in which a … [Read more...]
The “Junk Dada” of Noah Purifoy
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="HXcsgRY1unTSSqSHfianPWxQXh7bVS8E"] RECENTLY I visited the LACMA and saw a number of shows, including the exhibit devoted to Noah Purifoy's work. Purifoy, who art critic Christopher Knight recently said "may be the least well-known pivotal American artist of the last 50 years," was a black Southerner who became a crucial part of the art movement that rose after the … [Read more...]
Neoliberal Economics vs. Democracy
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="yr02ykA7Q0RDGNfP4OZ9UZcMkpPsr0Ye"] THIS may seen far afield from a site devoted the arts, but anyone who's read CultureCrash the blog, or the book that inspired it, knows that economics and our values are central to my concerns. They also exert a major force on how culture does and doesn't work. Our economic assumptions give us a sense of what is -- and isn't -- … [Read more...]
Where to Start with Ornette Coleman
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="vGiRx28JEAJa3NJAi6uPVSLuqhSRvvpA"] THE great Texas-born jazz musician, who died last week, worked in a number of genres -- free jazz, symphonic music, funk -- and it can be hard for newcomers to get a sense of him. Here's how I began my Salon piece on Coleman: Miles Davis said he must be “all screwed up inside” to play that way he did. Max Roach punched him in … [Read more...]