[contextly_auto_sidebar] IF we needed another reason to disdain the billionaires who increasingly dominate our political and cultural life: The Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts shut down several news sites, including Gothamist and LAist because the New York staff tried to unionize. This is from a new New York Times op-ed by Hamilton Nolan, "A Billionaire Destroyed His Newsroom Out of … [Read more...]
2017 PEN USA Literary Awards
[contextly_auto_sidebar] TYPICALLY, the PEN awards, held at a fancy hotel in Beverly Hills, ends up as one of the best parties of the year for literary and journalistic folk. The group and its events, of course, also have a bloody point to them: PEN is, mostly, a free-speech group, and its annual banquet is an attempt to honor artistry and freedom of expression and to raise money so they can do … [Read more...]
A Turning of The Tide?
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SINCE I turned my book Culture Crash in four years ago, a few things I described have proven me a bit pessimistic. (Visual art may be healthier than I predicted, and music steaming has become a bit more artist-friendly.) In some cases, though, even this grim tome of mine was a bit rose-colored. Even though I wrote -- against the advice of my editor -- a cautionary … [Read more...]
The Legacy of ’90s Indie Rock
[contextly_auto_sidebar] IF you live long enough and write for a living, there's a pretty good chance you will end up "curating" -- to use the current term - your own youth. That's what happened to me when I tried recently to make sense of where "alternative" or indie rock was 20 years ago today. I see it as a cultural high point, and its making -- as well as unmaking -- remain fascinating … [Read more...]
Classical Music and The Echo Society
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOMETIMES -- certainly not always -- it makes sense to take a chance and see something you have very little sense of. Because I had the night free and knew/ liked some of the people involved, I went Sunday night to the final concert of a weekend-long chamber-music festival (or something) in Los Angeles's Silverlake Hills. I figured there'd be a cocktail party for a few … [Read more...]
Lauren Greenfield and “Generation Wealth”
[contextly_auto_sidebar] GENERALLY, I think the art world has missed the opportunity to address the Great Recession and the amping up of income inequality and the one percent that followed. But some visual artists have made strong and eloquent statements, and one of them is longtime Los Angeles photographer Lauren Greenfield. I caught her Generation Wealth late in its hometown run at the … [Read more...]
Richard Wilbur, American Poet, 1921-2017
[contextly_auto_sidebar] JUST a quick post to note the death of the great poet and translator Richard Wilbur. Until two days ago, when he passed away at 96, I would have called him America's finest living poet. Like most kids, I studied some poetry in high school and college -- Eliot, Auden, Yeats, Langston Hughes, Bishop, etc. I even, in my very early 20s, fell hard for a few poets in … [Read more...]
Billy Bragg and the Rebel Power of Skiffle
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Back in the mid-'80s, I was in a Calculus class when a friend I knew mostly from our shared love of punk rock handed me a hand-labelled cassette of a musician I'd never heard. When I got home, I played this selection of songs by Billy Bragg -- A New England, Greetings to the New Brunette, It Says Here -- which reminded me of the Clash in their political force and Dylan … [Read more...]
Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, Darker Than Ever
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LAST night, seeing Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings play their last real LP, 2011's The Harrow and the Harvest, at the Orpheum in downtown LA, I realized that this was not just a record that I liked, or one that had made me play around with a couple of its songs on guitar, but one of the finest and most timeless albums of the last decade. It's got songs like Scarlet … [Read more...]
Patti Smith in All the Poets
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I've been doing a series on musicians and their interest in literature and writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books. So far, all of these have been strong interviews with artists I love about figures I share an ardor for. In some cases, the conversations have taken me down intellectual alleyways I did not expect to go, which is even better. … [Read more...]