[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the great hidden figures in musical history is Billy Strayhorn, who seems to be a bit less invisible every year. When I was getting hard into jazz in the early '90s, haunting record stores and hoarding Coltrane and Mingus records right after college, Joe Henderson's Lush Life album came out and electrified the jazz world: One of the greatest saxophonists of the … [Read more...]
The Poetry of Leonard Cohen
[contextly_auto_sidebar] HE was born before Elvis, had his songs covered by everyone from Judy Collins to the Pixies, and managed five decades of brilliant work in a field that tends to see only bright flares. Leonard Cohen is known as a more-or-less rock musician to most of us, but he started out as a poet, publishing books for a decade before his debut LP. The other day I met Cohen's son, … [Read more...]
Ten Years After: Remembering The Recession
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A GREAT number of Americans have "moved on." Their lives are fine, and the Great Recession is just a bad, dimly recalled memory, like a really bad winter flu from years ago. But for a number of us, it was one of the defining events of our lives -- something whose consequences we deal with every day or every week. Over the last few days, the press has run a number of … [Read more...]
The Return of Jeffrey Deitch
[contextly_auto_sidebar] AS recently as a few years back, it would have been hard to predict that controversial art dealer Jeffrey Deitch would have any reason to come back to Los Angeles for anything more complicated than a French Dip at Cole's. But now the man pushed out of the Museum of Contemporary Art -- and for a while, synonymous with faux-sensational, shallow Warholism -- is one his way … [Read more...]
The Strange Death of the Alternative Press
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I've been meaning to revisit some of the abiding concerns of this blog and the book that inspired it. Mostly, I'm talking about what we used to call the press and now typically describe as the news media. My overall sense is that some parts of the creative economy have healed since I began writing my book in the teeth of the recession and … [Read more...]
Reading With Aimee Mann
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LAST week I took a wild guess and approached singer/songwriter Aimee Mann for my musicians-on-writing column, All the Poets. As a longtime fan I had a vague sense that she was literary -- whatever that means -- but could not recall a specific reference to a novel or poem in any of her songs. Nor had we talked about books of any kind across the several interviews we'd … [Read more...]
Guest Columnist: Empty Room at the Top
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Here is the latest piece by CultureCrash's regular guest columnist, Lawrence Christon. Christopher O'Riley, of course, is best known to some of us for his classical-piano interpretations of Radiohead, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. EMPTY ROOM AT THE TOP By Lawrence Christon For years it’s been routine, whenever possible, for me to make … [Read more...]
Indie Publishing With Hat & Beard
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the things I'm most interested is how non-corporate, non-mainstream culture can survive after the 2008 crash. My conversations with J.C. Gabel -- the intense, passionate publisher of a small LA press called Hat & Beard -- give us all a glimpse of both the challenges to independent culture merchants as well as the possibilities. Hat & Beard is about to … [Read more...]
Max Richter and Classical Minimalism
[contextly_auto_sidebar] When it comes to a classical concert, how long is too long? What do you do when you get restless? And what state -- one of heightened curiosity? a sharpened intellectual edge? greater empathy? physical relaxation? -- should a piece of art music put its audience members? In what way is art meant to be transformative? These are all questions addressed, implicitly, at … [Read more...]
The Music of Inequality
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Remember the recession? A lot of Americans had their lives turned upside down by it. But popular music -- however you define the term -- never really engaged with the crash itself, or the widespread suffering and steep inequality that followed. In a new story for Vox, I looked at a wide range of American music released over the last decade, since the stock market crash … [Read more...]