THE other day I spoke to Joe Boyd, the Britfolk impresario, because of his new tribute record, Way to Blue. The album is in honor of Nick Drake, who Boyd helped discover way back in the late '60s, and whose career was delicate, melancholy and all too short.Today, Drake is revered not only be neo-folkies but by the leading jazz musician of my generation, pianist Brad Mehldau.Boyd, of course, also … [Read more...]
British History and Texas Music
A SHORT, insightful new book about the making of the modern world – told in microcosm – has just come from the pen of a noted indie rocker.Here at The Misread City, we’ve been impressed with the melancholy genius of Matt Kadane since the first record, What Fun Life Was, from his old band, Dallas slowcore quartet Bedhead. Like the group that followed, The New Year, Bedhead was defined by melodic … [Read more...]
Tom Stoppard and "Parade’s End"
THIS week on HBO, Americans can catch up with a literary adaptation that hit hard in the UK last year: Parade's End. Godlike playwright Tom Stoppard adapted this series of four short novels by the underrated Ford Madox Ford -- published in the '20s and set around World War I.Yours truly had a story today on the miniseries and the process of adapting a very long and difficult text. It meant, among … [Read more...]
Return of the Shoegazers
FOR a few thousand of us, last week marked one of the musical events of the decade. After more than 20 years of near-silence, My Bloody Valentine released a new, noisy, hazy, dreamy new album. I spent part of 1990 in England, where the shoegaze revolution was roaring full force, and passed much of the '90s sulking through record stores trying to find out of print EPs and import singles by this … [Read more...]
New West Coast Folk
SOMETHING about the cool weather, the melange of religious songs and the reflective tone of the end of the end of the year leads me to play a lot of acoustic folk music around the holidays. (And lest you jeer at the frigid winters we have in Southern California, I’ll tell you that it was in the 50s most of today and I could actually see my breath this morning. Okay, so we’re not in Yorkshire.)In … [Read more...]
Richard Thompson’s "Cabaret of Souls"
HIS tunes are famously dark. But anyone who's paid attention to Richard Thompson's between-song banter, or seen his semi-comic 1000 Years of Popular Music, know how funny the guy can be. (He was beaten only by Hendrix for The Misread City's poll of favorite guitarist.)So we wasted no time checking out his Cabaret of Souls, a theatrical staging of the Underworld that is sort of an oratorio, sort of … [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...]
BBC’s New "Copper"
COMING from BBC America this summer is a new series called Copper, created by Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide, Borgia) and set in 1860s New York. Much of the show takes place in Five Points, the rough Irish neighborhood some of us know from Scorsese's Gangs of New York. The protagonist is a tormented, Irish born detective named Corcoran.I've not yet seen much of the show, but it hits several of my … [Read more...]
Imagining Mars
WHATEVER the faults of John Carter, the new film based on the early work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we're happy to have the chance to head back to Mars. Given the way NASA funding is going, this may be our only chance.As a species, we've been fascinated with the Red Planet for a long time -- the film is only the latest of a long line. Why does it draw us to it, and how has our thinking about Mars … [Read more...]
Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P.
SOMETIMES even when you know something's coming, it knocks the wind out of you when it arrives. That's the way I felt this morning when I opened the paper and saw that Hitchens had succumbed to cancer that virtually every reader knew he had. (Here is the New York Times obit.)I've spent the last few mornings reading an essay or two in his latest collection, Arguably. I don't always, or even often, … [Read more...]