[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...]
What Silicon Valley means For Culture
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="WjZxcPtWCK6ExlRGkfHJTGqGfWWntSeY"] RECENTLY your humble blogger was able to connect the current situation in the world of technology -- the money, the power, the self-deception -- with the history of the arts. Specifically, I'm talking about cultural patronage, and I take it back to Haydn, Moneverdi and Velazquez. This piece of mine from Salon may interest Arts … [Read more...]
“How the 1 Percent Always Wins”: Interview
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="TzbKntNFyZcSQHgIrdjr9IhXNfnnrZ7q"] A timely and engaging new book by the labor historian Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence, contrasts the way Americans responded to the first Gilded Age -- with protests, class rhetoric, even violence -- to the situation today, where movements like Occupy come and go and populist energy is directed not against capital but … [Read more...]
Greil Marcus and the History of Rock N Roll
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1o2sCoXE2Fn6bznjQ3wr9tT1LIaHHcnX"] MANY of us interested in music, American history and culture in general discovered this scholar and scribe with one of his great early books like Mystery Train or Lipstick Traces. Marcus popularized the idea of using music as a "secret history" for other cultural forms, his book connecting Dylan's Basement Tapes to Harry Smith's … [Read more...]
The Origins of the Creative Impulse
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="CjGJi1ElzHO4Eiypu9nm3yJ0WNWxidhx"] WITH the release of my book getting close, I'm going to start salvaging some of the great epigraphs that helped me tell the story -- in some cases, the history or even prehistory -- of the creative class. These, then, are other people's words which helped me to explain things, but which I lost in the edit. Here is the first, from … [Read more...]
Jazz and Starbucks
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="3JEnMcrdtVkWILcqYCAtf8k4lzIbNOYE"] WHO listens to jazz these days? Besides a small, dwindling number of purists, almost anyone who goes to a chain coffee shop, it seems. Are they really listening? Those are some of the questions music historian Ted Gioia gets into in a fascinating essay in The Daily Beast, in which he talks about the mostly mid-century jazz that … [Read more...]
Celebrating Route 66
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="1HoMw0eKbPzQBS6WAPogsGZlqRRM0XrN"] WELL, that sure was an unexpected pleasure. I thought I knew a bit about Route 66, but there are apparently dimensions to the legendary historic highway I'd not considered. The press preview I walked out of this morning left me thinking that this medium-sized exhibit at the Autry was the best social-history show I've seen in … [Read more...]
Historical Documentary and “The Story of the Jews”
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="Jxeq7goyZFHTuT1NApP4ZsOM8ZKVKFcG"] TODAY I have a piece in the Los Angeles Times about a new documentary, commissioned by the BBC but playing in the US on PBS, The Story of the Jews with Simon Schama. (The first part broadcasts Tuesday night.) Schama, the British-born, Cambridge-educated historian who now teachers at Columbia, is likely known to many of my readers … [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...]
Why Jazz Happened
THE history of an art form is more than just the biography of its exemplars. But you wouldn’t know it by reading most histories of jazz. (I’m speaking here of some books I really like, by the way.) A fresh, engaging new book by Marc Myers, a Wall Street Journal contributor, tells the story so differently than the way we normally hear jazz history that reading it is a kind of unfolding revelation. … [Read more...]