[contextly_auto_sidebar id="5PEO4QFSNmxgzHgSPv9UaaL0AEAfjMDQ"] SOME of America's smartest publications -- the ones that often offered robust and serious jazz coverage in decades past -- have recently been running articles (satiric, critical or otherwise) dissing one of my favorite art forms. New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Review of Books... What's behind it? Music historian and CultureCrash … [Read more...]
Was Beethoven a Bad Influence?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="BuXkCBK03a5HewprMNjDnGKXPBsl6eH9"] A FASCINATING Alex Ross story in the New Yorker looks at the incredible impact of Beethoven -- has any artist reshaped his art form more? -- and then acts if he has kept music from evolving. Here's Ross on Ludwig van: He not only left his mark on all subsequent composers but also molded entire institutions. The professional … [Read more...]
Was Adorno Right?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="6oJMFpFGim9R2BdzLisDHKzhOIShkqfL"] I WANT to go back for a minute to Alex Ross's wonderful piece, "The Naysayers," on the Frankfurt School. Ross drifts between interpretations here, but he comes up with a very resonant description of what's gone wrong with our culture over the last few decades: If Adorno were to look upon the cultural landscape of the twenty-first … [Read more...]
Do Adorno and Benjamin Still Speak to Us?
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="BzVPwGiB459dyUluIjJVpzR7FI0D0eim"] THERE's an excellent Alex Ross essay in the latest New Yorker on the Frankfurt School and the rise and fall and perhaps rise again of its reputation. Ross leads this way: In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,” a disgraced academic named Chip Lambert, who has abandoned Marxist theory in favor of screenwriting, goes to … [Read more...]
“The Disruption Machine” and the Arts
[contextly_auto_sidebar id="R3zLDzzRclVKKTROWNxF41CXdu70ZMpQ"] Jill Lepore's New Yorker article, "The Disruption Machine," which looks at one of the key fallacies of the digital crowd, has become much discussed. Her challenge to a theory that describes how newer, smaller companies destroy old ones may not seem to relate to the world of arts and culture. But these things are intimately … [Read more...]
Cheering George Packer’s "The Unwinding"
LORD know this book does not need any more praise, but I want to wave the tattered American flag for George Packer's The Unwinding, which just won the National Book Award. The book is not perfect -- more on that in a minute -- but it is lyrical, powerfully reported, passionately written, and lives up to its subtitle: "An Inner History of the New America." As research for my own Creative … [Read more...]
Rachel Kushner’s "The Flamethrowers"
ONE of our favorite debuts in recent years is Rachel Kushner's Telex From Cuba. I was aware of this novel only because of a tip from New York literary agent Chris Calhoun, and once I read the galleys I was a bit abashed to see what a substantial talent was here in my city, until then invisible to me.In any case, Rachel is invisible no more. Here sophomore novel, The Flamethrowers, which came out … [Read more...]
The Future of the Movies
THIS week in Salon, I interview David Denby, one of the New Yorker's film critics. We spoke about his new book, a collection of new and old essays and reviews, Do the Movies Have a Future? here.A few years ago, I might have told you that Denby was too pessimistic and a little stodgy. I think it's clear today that his cautionary tone is warranted. In a nutshell, he's concerned that films have been … [Read more...]
The Struggle Over Middlebrow
I JUST finished a very intriguing Louis Menand piece on culture critic Dwight Macdonald and the notion of middlebrow. (For those Easterners snorting that I am getting to the story so tardily, let me quote my friend and fellow Angeleno Manohla Dargis, who says that most weeks we get the New Yorker so late it seems to've been delivered by pony express.)The notion of cultural hierarchy -- which works … [Read more...]
The New Yorker’s Young West Coast Writers
THE New Yorker recently announced its 20 Under 40 list of American writers, running some of them in their summer fiction issue and others since. Two of the bunch – Daniel Alarcon and Yiyun Li – were fairly recent profile subjects of mine, and I’ve enjoyed, without surprise, watching their rise. Both are foreign-born writers who’ve settled in the Bay Area and show the ability – despite nativist … [Read more...]