SINCE I first fell hard for classical music in my mid-20s, my favorite style to see live is chamber music. Early on, I think that came from my love of seeing rock n roll and small-combo jazz in small clubs. The intimacy of a string quartet in, say, an old stone church had some of the same energy and directness.In recent years, perhaps the best venue for chamber music I've found is the Clark … [Read more...]
Michael Chabon’s "Telegraph Avenue"
LONGTIME Californian is one of our favorite writers here at The Misread City.I had the pleasure to speak to him the other day about his new novel, set on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It's a long, rich book centered around a used vinyl shop that specializes in various styles of black music from the '60s and '70s. (If Brokeland Records really existed I would go digging for an original Blue Note … [Read more...]
"Creative Destruction" Announcement
GANG, yesterday the Los Angeles news/media website LA Observed made the first public announcement of the book that grows out of my Salon series. Here it is.The book's working title is Creative Destruction: How the 21st Century is Killing the Creative Class, and Why It Matters.There's a lot up on the LAObs post, so I'll leave that to explain the project. (Here are links to individual parts of the … [Read more...]
The Long Shadow of John Cage
ONE hundred years ago today, a child was born in Los Angeles who would go on to... well, what exactly was Cage's impact anyway? I've been trying to figure that out since I studied experimental music at Wesleyan two decades ago.Whatever it is, part of what interests me about Cage is how his influence -- ideas like indeterminacy, his reworking of certain Asian ideas including the Tao, prepared … [Read more...]
Remembering David Foster Wallace
DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own -- an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work -- I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of … [Read more...]
Frenchman at Neutra’s House
RECENTLY I was invited to architect Richard Neutra's old house in Silver Lake to check out the "intervention" by the French artist Xavier Veilhan, who created a number of sculptures to refer to the pioneering modernist's life and work.The press events and opening were quite groovy -- movie stars, French people, music by a member of the French band Air.Los Angeles' Silver Lake, of course, is … [Read more...]
Classical Music on the Radio
NOT long ago I got to hang out at the Hollywood Bowl in the middle of the day -- which was a decadent pleasure in itself -- while talking to Brian Lauritzen, the KUSC deejay who has come to dominate classical broadcasting in town.Brian is still young yet, but he has several decades of commitment to both music and public radio, and he has a deep feeling for the sometimes complex role that music can … [Read more...]
Hollywood Novelist Bruce Wagner
A FEW years back I spent some time at the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge with Bruce Wagner, who was much more at home there than I was. (He grew up nearby and has spent his career as a writer skewering Hollywood.)Wagner has a new novel, Dead Stars, out, and returns to his main subject, the excesses of the movie world and its network of agents, moneymen, wannabes and so on.When he and I spoke, … [Read more...]
The Roots of a Jazz Pianist
EVEN as a lover of the jazz standards, when a solo piano disc arrives with all the obvious, shopworn numbers -- "Round Midnight," "All the Things You Are" -- I'm not in a rush to play the damn thing. (Unless it's by, say, Thelonious Monk or Randy Weston.) So I was knocked out by the nuance and mystery the pianist Kenny Werner summons in his new recording -- called Me, Myself and I -- of mostly … [Read more...]
True Eclecticism with Wild Up
ONE of the oddest and most beautiful concerts I've been to this year took place at the Hammer Museum a few weeks ago.Here's a bit of what was on offer as the museum and the musician's collective wild Up (they don't cap the "w") came together:The fruit of this union was a July concert that began with a conductor in a cowboy hat, a menacing toreador, the sound of tumbleweed being rolled through the … [Read more...]