[contextly_auto_sidebar] MUCH of the nation has been debating the latest Ken Burns documentary, which I -- the son of a Marine officer nearly killed in 1967 -- have not yet had the stomach to watch. This essay on the war comes from regular CultureCrash guest columnist Lawrence Christon, born the same year as my late father, and a fellow Marine with all kinds of complex and conflicted feelings … [Read more...]
The Literary Richard Thompson
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FEW living musicians fascinate me as much as Richard Thompson, the London-reared, Los Angeles-dwelling, Fairport Convention-founding guitarist and songwriter whose recording career just hit the 50 year mark. I've been listening to Richard's work for three decades now -- since I first heard "Valerie" and "A Bone Through Her Nose" on WHFS as a teenager -- and have been … [Read more...]
Jonathan Lethem and Rock Criticism
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SINCE I was a teenager, I've been fascinated by the lions of music journalism and rock criticism -- Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, and others, especially from the field's 1970s heyday. The novelist Jonathan Lethem and his Pomona College colleague (and resident Dylanologist) Kevin Dettmar have collected 50 years of the stuff -- "From Elvis to Jay Z" -- … [Read more...]
“Money is a kind of poetry”: Lee Siegel’s The Draw
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the finest memoirs I've read in many moons comes from veteran literary and culture critic Lee Siegel. His book The Draw tells the tale of an intellectually serious young man in a family w/ a messy, complicated relationship to money and class, which set repeated roadblocks before him. It's lyrical, succinct, at times painful. Here is my Q+A with Siegel, who is … [Read more...]
Walter Hopps and “The Dream Colony”
[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR Angelenos in the visual arts world, Walter Hopps (1932-2005) was an almost godlike figure -- an eccentric, disorganized, perpetually tardy pill-popping genius who both discovered young artists and found ways to frame established figures that made them seem new. Hopps -- best known in these parts as a founder of the legendary Ferus Gallery in the late '50s and … [Read more...]
The Late, Great Kevin Starr
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LIKE a lot of people, I was originally baffled when I moved to California, which in my case was 20 years ago, this July. Some of the key to its complex code arrived in the books of historian Kevin Starr, which begin with statehood and move epoch-by-epoch to the early post-World War II years. Today I have a sort of appreciation of the man, who I regret to say I met … [Read more...]
Cory Doctorow’s Post-Apocalyptic Utopia
[contextly_auto_sidebar] THE other day I hung out with Burbank resident and globe-trotter Cory Doctorow, who is a cult figure with a very large cult. We talked mostly about his new novel, Walkaway, which is intellectually fascinating and really moves. Will try to fill in this post a bit for now, but here is my LA Times profile. I will point out that obvious that I find him a bit … [Read more...]
All the Poets: Rhiannon Giddens
[contextly_auto_sidebar] The second installment of my Los Angeles Review of Books -- All the Poets, in which musicians discuss their literary influences -- went up the other day: Rhiannon Giddens, who earned her reputation with the string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, talked to me about her childhood interest in science fiction, in the African roots of what we think of as Appalachian or … [Read more...]
Songwriting’s Roots in Poetry and Prose
[contextly_auto_sidebar] GENERALLY, I'm skeptical of the glib and automatic denoting of any intelligent or articulate musician as "a poet." But the connection between popular song and literature go back, in the Anglo-American tradition, at least as long as The Beatles' interest in Lewis Carroll and Dylan's borrowing from Scottish Border ballads. Of course, at the beginning of the Western … [Read more...]
The Late, Great Derek Walcott
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Folks, This week CultureCrash guest columnist Lawrence Christon looks at the legacy of the Saint Lucia-born, US-residing poet Derek Walcott, who died March 17. I share Christon's fondness for DW's verse, and was pleased enough to meet the poet once or twice at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Inst in CT, which I covered in the mid-'90s. It’s been nearly a month since … [Read more...]