The Misread City

The Roots of a Polymath: Lars Jan

2012-01-26T10:44:00.000-08:00

FOUNDER of the Los Angeles avant-gartde performance group Early Morning Opera, Lars Jan is a polymath interested in a lot of things, especially our era in which screens of various kinds have infiltrated both public and private spaces.

We spoke about the age of the screen, as well as some of his artistic models -- everyone from Gerhard Richter to Fellini -- for my Influences column. Here is that piece: This ended up being an intriguing discussion.

Jan's new piece, Abacus -- which he just premiered at Sundance -- comes to REDCAT next week.

Cinematography, the Oscars and "Tree of Life"

2012-01-25T11:14:00.000-08:00

AS everyone in Los Angeles knows well, Oscar nominations were just announced today. I've written about some of the films nominated, including The Artist, which drew 10 nominations.

One article I've not posted, because I can't seem to find an online link, was a story in which I spoke to cinematographers from five films: My Week With Marilyn, The Descendants, Drive, Margin Call and The Tree of Life. Emmanuel Lubezki of Tree of Life was just nominated for an Academy Award which he seems to have a good shot at.

(The Mexican-born Lubezki, by the way, also shot Children of Men, The New World, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Ali.)

Whatever you make of this film -- which has become the love-it-or-hate-it movie of the last year -- it's visually distinctive, from its verdant recollections of 1950s Texas suburbia or its more cosmic sections that recount the history of the universe.

Here's a bit of what he told me -- the full story is in AwardsLine's Issue 5.

Though the film has been compared to “2001: A Space Odysssey” and Renaissance painting, Malick’s edict was that the film capture the chaos of life itself. “He wanted the film to feel found, not rehearsed, not designed,” Lubezki says. “You had to wait for a moment that felt real, before you rolled the camera. We could not control the butterfly that flew by, or the wind, or what a baby might do: It’s watching, helping Terry and everybody else get to these moments that felt almost like an accident.”

David Milch's "Luck"

2012-01-23T12:41:00.000-08:00

WHAT do get when you cross the men behind Deadwood and Miami Vice with Dustin Hoffman? Bet you didn't think it would be a television series set at the Santa Anita racetrack and revolving around a quartet of degenerate gamblers, a crusty Kentuckian who talks to himself, some nasty white-collar criminals and a few noble, beautifully photographed horses?

Somehow, this is what fortune -- or at least, HBO -- has given us, and my curtain-raiser on the series Luck is here. I was lucky enough to sit down with David Milch, Michael Mann and Hoffman recently and speak with them about the show.

As rich as it is, this program seems like -- no pun intended -- a real gamble for the cable network. I'll be interested to see whether people watch it, in part because I have another story on Luck planned.

The Return of Steve Reich

2012-01-19T09:03:00.000-08:00

ON Tuesday I saw a fascinating concert by Steve Reich and Bang on a Can at Disney Hall. Once considered a minimalist with few ties to the mainstream, Mark Swed wrote in his review, Reich is now one of the most important and influential composers alive.

I sat down with Reich a few years ago and found him very accessible and easy going. My article starts by referring to the landmark "Music for 18 Musicians," which he led on Tuesday night. I've heard this piece perhaps more than any other piece of music not by the Beatles, and it was a thrill to see it and get a sense of exactly where all those shifting sounds emerged from.

The concert led off with the classic early Reich piece, "Clapping Music." Here is Swed's full review.

The Roots of Christopher O'Riley

2012-01-12T13:21:00.001-08:00

THE eclectic pianist O'Riley came to my attention a few years ago for his interpretations of music by Radiohead, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. He's recently teamed up with Matt Haimovitz, the wild-man cellist who cam render Bach and Hendrix with equal skill. (In '05 or so, Haimovitz put on a radical and memorable show at a restaurant in LA in which a fight nearly broke out.)

O'Riley, who comes to town with the cellist next Wednesday, is the latest subject of my Influences column. He had a lot to say, so here's a bit I did not have room for:

If I’m not playing the piano, I’m likely reading or seeing a film. I read widely and voraciously. I find the world of the imagination to be enriching, inspiring and a great influence on how deeply I invest myself in creating my own pieces. I am more in awe of writers than I am of most musicians/composers. Some of my faves: David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, James Joyce, Roberto Bolano, Charles Dickens, Thomas Ligotti, Stephen Graham Jones, Chuck Palahniuk, Kris Saknussemm, Ken Bruen, Megan Abbott, Salman Rushdie, Stona Fitch, Donald E. Westlake, Christopher Hitchens, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy.

Pacific Standard Time: The Gallery Scene

2012-01-09T13:32:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER bit of catching up here: My latest article concerns the art galleries that made Los Angeles an important center for contemporary art in the years before the LACMA opened. I looked primarily at three gallery owners -- Irving Blum of Ferus, Virginia Dwan and Riko Mizuno.

The late, great Wallace Berman

HERE is the story, which due to the Times' layout looks like it is almost entirely a correction. (It's not.)

It's notable, of course, that two of these key figures were women, especially given how macho the LA art world was in the first few postwar decades. (Ferus included.) Here is a page about a show at Crossroads School about woman gallerists in the '60s and '70s.

Some of these themes will be part of a West Hollywood branch of Pacific Standard Time called It All Started Here.

William Faulkner Headed to HBO

2012-01-02T12:13:00.000-08:00

THE holidays have slowed me down -- happy new year, by the way -- so I'm a bit late on getting this up. Recently I had a story in the LA Times on David "Deadwood" Milch and his new deal to oversee adaptations of Faulkner's novels and stories to HBO.

When I began this piece, I thought the idea preposterous: I remember struggling with The Sound and the Fury as a high school student. But as I spoke to my sources -- two literary scholars and a television historian with experience in audience testing -- it started to seem feasible, if still difficult. If anyone can pull this off, it's David Milch.

Will be curious to see how this unspools.

Closing of Laemmle's Sunset 5

2011-12-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

IT was one of those places that seemed like it would be there forever. But the Laemmle Sunset 5 -- which always seemed to me the key indie cinema in Los Angeles -- closed last month, largely because of competition from other theaters.

The good news -- or some variation of that -- is that Sundance Cinemas will renovate and reopen the space, and the Laemmle family just opened a seven-screen arthouse on Lankershim in North Hollywood.

HERE is my LA Weekly story on the ups and downs of the local arthouse scene.

I spoke to a number of people, including filmmaker Gregg Araki, dilm critic Bob Koehler and company president Greg Laemmle. One source I didn't have room to include was Rose Kuo, now executive director of Film Society of Lincoln Center, who haunted the theater constantly when she moved to L.A. "I lived near Franklin Avenue and Gardner so I went to movies there every weekend, sometimes seeing 2 or 3 movies in one day."

2011 in Music

2011-12-21T12:22:00.000-08:00

IT'S always a bit daunting to have to sum up an entire year's musical output -- even the best of it -- so I'm not gonna try to do that. But I'd like to mention a few unexpected highlights.

First, I'm a surprised as anybody that Chapel Hill's '90s heroes, Archer of Loaf, reunited and managed to fill the Troubadour for not one but two nights. Those guys have not lost a bit of energy from the days of Icky Mettle (which has been reissued.) I'm still not sure how Eric Bachmann bulked up like that.

A record that's crept up on me over the years if Eleanor Friedberger's Last Summer. I don't love everything on it -- and I find myself alternately loving and hating its baroque production -- but it's beguiling at the very least. It'd also, despite EF's Brooklyn origins, an LA record -- "Inn at the Seventh Ray" namechecks not only the famed hippie cafe, but several of my favorite Highland Park hangouts. (I spotted her at my coffee shop there one day.) She also helped Wild Flag with "Beast of Burden" for its Troubadour encore.

The Troubadour show by Sleater-Kinney sequel Wild Flag kicked about as much ass as I expected. But my favorite "new" band -- at least to me -- is Veronica Falls, a British combo that combines noise with melody in a way that reminds me of shoegaze crossed with '60s girl groups.

The first song that grabbed me on their self-titled LP, on Slumberland, is Bad Feeling, but the whole thing is strong and tuneful. If you like the strain that runs from Jesus and Mary Chain through Ride and onward, you'll like these guys.

I saw a lot of good shows this year -- old favorites like Stephen Malkmus at the Music Box and Grant Lee Phillips at Largo, new favorites like LA indie band Army Navy at the Satellite -- but the show that startled and engaged me the most was the reunion of the Jayhawks. This was a show I was told by a music-journalist friend who'd seen them play before that this show would be a snooze.

The Minnesota alt-country gods had spent the last decade or so effectively broken up, so seeing Gary Louris and Mark Olson on the same stage was a thrill from the beginning. But I'm not so die-hard a fan that that was enough, and the new album, Mockingbird Time, had not yet kicked in for me. The show's mix of warmly acoustic instruments, vocal harmonies and electric guitar was absolutely devastating, though, and new songs like "Hide Your Colors" sounded of a piece with '90s Jayhawks classics like "Two Angels" and "Miss Williams' Guitar." Wow. That new record now sounds to me pretty close to Hollywood Town Hall and my favorite of theirs, Tomorrow the Green Grass.

The record that's called to me the most this year has probably been the new Gillian Welch/Dave Rawlings LP, The Harrow and the Harvest. (I spent a couple hours with the two this summer -- here is the ensuing story. The duo are also on the cover of the new issue of Acoustic Guitar.)

Quiet, downbeat, delicate and introspective, the record grabbed me first with the songs "Dark Turn of Mind" and "The Way the Story Ends" and didn't let go. (I'm now playing "Down Along the Dixie Line" every morning on guitar.) The album, and the triumphant show at the Music Box, reinforced not only how wonderful their songwriting is, but how intricate and original Rawlings guitar playing is. My only criticism is I want more from these guys. But as the eight-year wait since Soul Journey showed, you can't rush this stuff.

Our biggest lost opportunity, here on the West Coast, was the chance to see The Feelies, one of my all-time favorite bands, which reconvened this year and played a number of East Coast dates. But they didn't make it out here. That new record, Here Before, may be there best since The Good Earth, the warm, Peter Buck-produced record that dominated my last two high school years. In any case, I keep my fingers crossed for this wonderful band to come to California.

And the musical development I'm most looking forward to is the return of Spain, the classic indie-meets-country-folk band led by Josh Haden that should have a new LP, and more shows, in 2012.

And a happy holiday to all the music fans out there, in Los Angeles and beyond.

Death of the Clerk

2011-12-18T14:11:00.000-08:00

TODAY I've got a new story from my Salon series on the demise of the creative class. It looks at the humble store clerk and asks, What does it means that these people -- and the places they work, like Rocket Video, Tower Records, Dutton's Brentwood Books, and so on -- are disappearing?

I spoke to a video store clerk, writers Jonathan Lethem and Dana Gioia, an MIT research scientist and others.

Here is that story.

UPDATE: Here are some late-breaking figures about the decline of creative jobs in Southern California.

Introducing the Best Burger Poll

2011-12-16T17:18:00.000-08:00

THE LA Weekly has just announced a sure-to-be-controversial top-10 burgers list. Over here at the Misread City, we can occasionally lift our noses out of Faulkner (you'll see that one next week) and foreign film (next week also) to consume quantities of ground beef and carmelized onions. To inaugurate the poll, here is a short ode to the burger written by Wendy Fonarow, a UCLA-trained anthropologist, LA native, and longtime friend of the Misread City.

Don't forget to vote.

Here she is:

As an anthropology professor and researcher in indie music, I find it funny that over the years, students have asked me to write about burgers more than anything else.

There are few subjects that will derail me from the topic at hand, but the beloved cheeseburger is one of them. From espousing the placebo effect of In-and-Out burgers (don’t be jealous you don’t have such an amazing placebo) or railing against those who bag on McDonalds for being disloyal, burgers are in my blood and perhaps make up 20 percent of my body mass. Being a native Los Angeleno makes one extraordinarily well positioned to discuss burgers.

We are the cutting edge of fast food, hybrid cuisine and the innovators of so much including the drive through squawk box. I’m often asked what is the best burger and my answer is “only a heathen would ask that.” It’s like saying what is the best dessert. How can you compare a pie, to an ice cream cake or a donut? Only a person who doesn’t like sweets would do that.

There are genres of burgers: the thousand-island, the mayonnaise, the restaurant, the mustard, the chiliburger, and the hickory. These are the major ones and I might include the outdoor grill, sans cheese, and bacon-added as well. It is perhaps these distinctions that capture the imagination of my students. Most people tend to have a favorite style and therefore use their favorite flavor profile to trump these enormously different categories of food.

So if there is going to be a discussion, let’s be precise. Shall we begin with a vote for your favorite restaurant style burger? I’d tell you mine, but then I’d have to make you take me there.

Christopher Hitchens, R.I.P.

2011-12-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

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, agree with Hitchens, and on some political matters, such as the Iraq War, I tend to disagree rather strenuously. But I can't think of a livelier or wider ranging writer: The essays on turmoil in the Middle East, rebel John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Orwell's Animal Farm, or conservative hero Edmund Burke could only have come from Hitch.

I'd long enjoyed Hitchens' writing, but thought of him as a kind of witty, debate-club contrarian until I met him in 2004, during an article I was writing about his friend Martin Amis. Hitchens and I had a drink -- it was about noon, so mine was lemonade, his a double (or was it a quadruple?) Johnny Walker. Hitch was funny and engaging as we spoke about shared interests -- the life and work of Salman Rushdie, George Orwell -- and entirely sincere on the matter of the Iraq War. (Which ended, sort of, the same week he died.) I was not convinced of this war launched by an incompetent boy king, but I was entirely persuaded that Hitchens had his reasons, and they were not merely for show.

(Here is a smart piece for Salon about the told-you-so by religious zealots after the death of the atheist writer.)

Since then, out mutual friend and literary agent Steve Wasserman, who was at his bedside last night, has kept me apprised on Hitch's condition; I felt like I knew him even though he would not likely have recognized my name. I'll wager that Hitchens, because he wrote so personally and so forcefully, had that effect on a lot of people. We won't see his like again.

UPDATE: Here is a fascinating Katha Pollitt obit that does not let him off the hook for his political switch, his bullying or his self-destructive drinking.

Author Chuck Palahniuk

2011-12-01T09:43:00.000-08:00

ODDLY, it was a very pleasant evening the night I met with Chuck Palahniuk in Portland a few years back to discuss his then-new novel, Snuff, over dinner. (The book is not as appetizing.)

The Fight Club author has a new novel, Damned. And HERE is my conversation with him.

Here's part of my profile:

Palahniuk's method is to sniff out such subjects, then pounce. "Things that last in the culture tend to be those unresolved issues," he said. "Like Ira Levin's 'The Stepford Wives' was a wonderful, entertaining way to discuss what Susan Faludi would later call backlash. Levin did that again with women's health and abortion with 'Rosemary's Baby.' He was always so ahead of the curve."

The Classical Violin and Heavy Metal

2011-11-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

RACHEL Barton Pine walks both sides of the fence -- a classical violinist who plays a 1740s instrument but also rocks out to Black Sabbath and Guns N Roses. I get into her wide range of musical passions in the latest of my Influences column in the Los Angeles Times.

The violinist, by the way, plays this Sunday at one of the most amazing places I've ever seen chamber music -- UCLA's Clark Library in the West Adams district. Most of the time, the place is an important repository of rare books, 18th century English history and material related to Oscar Wilde. But the wood-lined room in which the chamber series takes place is intimate and resonant -- and very hard to get into.

The Making of The Artist

2011-11-28T15:12:00.001-08:00

SOMETIMES it takes the French to appreciate the best aspects of American culture. Whether it's jazz, detective novels or the films of Howard Hawks, the Gauls have often seen something in our own art that we've overlooked.

The silent, black and white movie The Artist is the latest example. It's an homage to American cinema of the '20s and early '30s. I wrote an extensive feature HERE for the Hollywood Reporter that looks at how an outlandish idea by director Michel Hazanavicius became a damned fine movie and a credible Oscar contender.

The Roots of Preservation Hall

2011-11-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

THE latest installment for my Influences column is Ben Jaffe, son of the founders of Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the New Orleans institution's current leader. (My story is here.)

Jaffe, who marched in carnival parades as a 9-year-old and later attended Oberlin College, described classic Crescent City figures -- Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong -- as well as some lesser known musicians and a few wild cards, including Andy Warhol.

The group will be at Walt Disney Concert Hall next Tuesday, in collaboration with a contemporary dance group, the Ben McIntyre Project.

Kenny Burrell and The Future of Jazz

2011-11-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

LAST week I wrote a story about the jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell, who celebrates his 80th birthday with a concert at Royce Hall on Saturday. In the course of it, I corresponded with music historian Ted Gioia about Burrell and some related issues concerning the past and future of the art form.

I've included here our exchange. Gioia's The History of Jazz, on Oxford University Press, was recently published in a new edition.

1) Two of his Midwestern contemporaries -- Wes Montgomery and Grant Green -- had signatures: Octaves and an expanded harmonic sense for the former, a churchified single-line style for the latter... Does Burrell have anything as immediately recognizable? What defines his playing?

Younger jazz players pride themselves on their skill in mimicking different styles or approaches, but Kenny Burrell embodies the jazz tradition. He is a master of the blues. He understands Ellington, bop, hard bop and cool at a very deep level. When I hear him, I feel as if the best of the music's past is channeled effortlessly through his guitar.

I sometimes think that phrasing is a lost art in jazz, and perhaps especially among guitarists. Even first rate performers can end up playing with their fingers, when they ought to be guided by their heart and ears. But Burrell knows how to shape a phrase, where to place the proper emphasis, how to construct a solo. He has unerring instincts -- like a great boxer, who has a feel for right move at the right moment.

2) He's outlived those two, and most musicians of his generation. Has his style evolved or his playing deepened since then, or did he sort of peak around the time of Midnight Blue?

Burrell has made outstanding recordings in every decade. His early albums, such as Guitar Forms and Midnight Blue, are probably the best known, and rightly praised. But check out his 75th birthday album, which shows him still at the top of his game. And don't underestimate the poise and self-confidence Burrell demonstrated during the fusion period and after, serving as a champion for the jazz heritage even while his peers imitated the theatrics of rock. With his mastery of the guitar, Burrell would have been forgiven for watering down his music in exchange for a taste of rock auditorium fame, but he stayed true to his own core values.

3) JL Collier describes the guitar as being unusual among jazz instruments in being pioneered and defined largely by white players -- Lang, Django, and on. (It strikes me that today's Big Three are also all Caucasian.) Is there anything to this, and if so, what do we make of a player, like Burrell, who is so consistently drenched in the blues. There's something interesting, isn't there, about his use of an African-Amer form for an instrument that has not been defined by African Americans.

The African-American tradition in the development of jazz guitar is much stronger than Collier's comments may suggest. No one had greater influence on the role of the guitar in jazz than Charlie Christian, and the whole blues guitar tradition -- which strongly shaped the jazz sensibility -- is almost entirely the contribution of black players. The more interesting change happened later. With the rise of rock music, the electric guitar entered the mainstream as a default instrument of Middle American teenagers and the defining sound of popular music. Burrell came of age during this period, but he held firmly to his own tradition, his own approach, his own set of values. In any era, jazz artists earn praise by channeling their own personal vision through their instrument, but Kenny Burrell did this at a time when there were many, many ways for a jazz guitarist to go astray.

4) Burrell faults the classical establishment for not embracing jazz as "America's classical music," leaving this stuff to be crushed by the pop world...He admires Wynton's formal take on jazz and his assertion of jazz's status as an art music that needs the kind of support and concert halls as orchestras/chamber music. I recall this battle from the early '90s and founding of Jazz at Lincoln Center. How do you come down?

I feel that much of the hostility aimed at Jazz at Lincoln Center or Wynton is misguided. We need institutions to preserve the tradition. This does not come at the expense of those who want to move the tradition ahead. Blowing up the Mozart Festival does nothing to enhance the opportunities for modern composers. Burning old books doesn't get people to read new ones.

5) Because of the number of talented and well-trained players leaving universities to find limited playing opportunities, Burrell wants to launch an LA based big band (18 pieces) that will start small but eventually have a real season and become a West Coast version of Jazz at Lincoln Center and inspire similar projects in other cities. Does this seem at all feasible?

You need more than great players to create a vibrant jazz scene, you also need the right institutions. People who only know Kenny Burrell as a guitarist probably aren't familiar with all the work he has done off-stage to support and advance jazz on the West Coast. His vision of a LA-based counterweight to JALC is very much in accord with his other efforts over the years. I hope he succeeds.

6) I imagine Burrell, who has taught at UCLA since 1978 and founded the jazz program in '96, is to some a symbol of the move of jazz into academia. Does this transition from brothels and commerce into universities seem to have helped the music at any level?

If I can compare the jazz scene today with the situation when I was coming of age during the 1970s, most of the conditions have worsened. There is less jazz on the radio today, less jazz on TV, fewer jazz clubs and less visibility of jazz in the broader culture -- but the single area that has changed for the better is the growing support of jazz from universities and arts institutions. Many complain about jazz turning into an academic discipline. But those of us who remember what it was like when jazz was excluded at universities find it hard to see this as a negative trend.

Remembering Spalding Gray

2011-11-08T14:13:00.000-08:00

THERE'S a new collection of journals by the great actor and storyteller Spalding Gray, with a tribute event tonight at the Laemmle Sunset 5. (More detail here.)

Soon after Gray's 2004 disappearance -- it was eventually deemed a suicide -- I spoke to several theater and performance figures who walk in Gray's footsteps. I wrote:

With his mix of despair, humor, preppy shirts and New England dryness, he was sometimes called "the WASP Woody Allen." But many of those inspired by his techniques went in very different directions. Some created aural collages; some explored their ethnicity; others became ranters. John Leguizamo, Danny Hoch and Eric Bogosian, at various times, did all three.

HERE is that story, which includes discussions with Anna Deveare Smith ("He introduced me to the idea that normal human behavior is performative") Julia Sweeney, Tim Miller and Eric Bogosian.

Kenny Burrell and the Jazz Guitar

2011-11-04T16:49:00.000-07:00

RECENTLY I had the pleasure to walk down memory lane with one of my musical heroes, who marked his 80th birthday over the summer and is still going strong.

Here is my story on jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell, who will mark that milestone with a concert on Saturday Nov. 12. Burrell's playing is a very elegant and disciplined take on the blues.

Burrell told me a lot of interesting stuff -- including that his original inspirations were Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, and that he's generally more influenced by horn players than other guitarists.

Burrell's record Midnight Blue, which has Stanley Turrentine on tenor, was one of the first jazz guitar records to really turn my head around. (I can play the line from its opening track, "Chitlins Con Carne," a little bit.)

One bit I didn't have time to get into the story: When I asked Burrell what the most important thing for him to do when he improvised was, he said, "I listen."

More later.

Wild Flag at the Troubadour

2011-11-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

THERE was so much buzz about Wild Flag – the indie super group made up of members of Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Quasi and the Minders – that the question going into Thursday night’s show at the Troubadour, the second of two packed Los Angeles shows, was whether this would be a good night of indie rock, or something transcendent.

The answer turned out to be, a little of both.

The Portland/DC four piece is a kind of back-to-basics girl-group garage band. There’s also a bit of jazz-damage to the guitar playing – Helium’s Mary Timony, who took up more space onstage than I expected and seemed to smile a lot more than I recall from the 1990s, has aways played chords that were harmonically strange and arrayed up and down the neck of the guitar. With Carrie Brownstein, in an outgrown Joey Ramone haircut unleashing rockstar kicks and Pete Townshend windmills, this was a band – despite a keyboard replacing the bass – harkening back to the great two-guitar groups of punk New York.

So it’s hard not to miss with this combination, and Brownstein was a killer frontwoman and oddly friendly host. A New York Times review from early in the tour described the band as having trouble syncing up – that was certainly not a problem last night.

When the show was only good, or perhaps really good, the songs were simple three-chord stomps, with some great guitar freakouts near songs' end. But they were a little straightforward and easy to predict. Of two new songs, one was not quite ready despite a cool bridge.

The very best stuff – the two opening songs ("Black Tiles" and "Electric Band," both from the very fine debut LP on Merge) and few tracks across the middle of the set, and the triumphant encore – made clear why we're all so excited about this band. These songs saw one of the best drummers in the business, Quasi's Janet Weiss, kicking it hard, and a weirdly affectionate combat between the two guitars evoking memories of Verlaine and Lloyd.

The encore made these roots explicit: Television’s See No Evil (above), the Stones’ Beast of Burden, and a Ramones-inspired Do You Wanna Dance. The Fiery Furnaces' Eleanor Friedberger (who I seem to be running into a lot recently – she hangs at my coffee shop when she is in town) came up to sing the last two songs.

Let’s hope this band has a long and rich career. They’re not enough to save indie rock, but they might save a few souls, one night at a time.

Philip Glass With the New York Philharmonic

2011-11-03T10:03:00.000-07:00

COMPOSER Philip Glass is making his debut this week at the New York Philharmonic. Yes, you heard that right. Let's move on -- it's awkward for everyone involved. But he's glad to be there now.

Glass's appearance is with his own ensemble and the orchestra itself, playing behind Godfrey Reggio's film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, the score for which may be the composer's best-known work. (I saw Glass and company perform this at the Hollywood Bowl a summer or two ago -- truly kickass, and this film about technology's impact on our lives seem even more pertinent now, I think, than it did when it appeared in the early '80s.)

I spoke to Glass -- who I seem to running into a lot lately -- for a story in the Playbill. Here it is. Glass was happy to look back at what became his first feature film score and one of his first big pieces.

(For all my West Coast partisanship, wishing I was in New York right now.)

Digital Parasites

2011-11-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

THE Internet has brought us lots of good things; it's also put an enormous number of people out of work, especially members of the creative class who've been turned into underpaid, unstable content providers. Information, after all, wants to be free.

"It's tempting to believe that the devaluation of creativity we've seen over the last decade was somehow inevitable," writes former Billboard editor Robert Levine, "that technology makes information so easy to distribute that any attempt to regulate it is futile."

Levine's new book -- Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back -- argues that it didn't have to be this way. Various industries -- music, newspapers, publishers -- swallowed a lot of b.s. about how the Web was going to make everyone rich, and now they're living with the consequences.

I spoke to Levine for today's Salon here. It's part of the Art in Crisis series I'm writing with a number of other scribes. Please check it out.

UPDATE: And here is a review from Sunday's (27 Nov) NYT Book Review, calling this book an important statement.

The Roots of Christine Ebersole

2011-10-26T15:05:00.000-07:00

YOU'VE got to be in awe of an actress who can portray both Little Edie and Big Edie from Grey Gardens. Winning a Tony for the feat is not likely easy, either.

I spoke recently to Christine Ebersole, the actress and singer who's done everything from Tootsie to Saturday Night Live to Noel Coward. That piece, part of my Influences series for the LA Times Culture Monster page, is here.

I should not spoil it, but despite the very fine names on her list (Carol Lombard, Joni Mitchell), I was most impressed with the words of the late New York theater director with whom she closed out our conversation.

Novelist Neal Stephenson

2011-10-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

ONE of the smartest, as well as the toughest, writers I've ever encountered in Neal Stephenson, who is somewhere between a cyberpunk writer, a science-fiction novelist and a cultural historian.

I met Stephenson, who has a new novel out, in his hometown of Seattle just before the publication of Anathem. HERE is my interview with the author of Snow Crash and The Baroque Triology.

One of Anathem's observations seems more and more true to me as we move into the future.

"That idea kept coming back to me, because it still seemed fresh," Stephenson said, "the idea that book-reading people were more and more diverging from the mainstream, that they're a separate culture invisible to media culture."

And here is a Salon review of his new thriller, Readme.

The Hell of Freelancing - or is it Purgatory?

2011-10-13T15:58:00.000-07:00

FOR some people, going it alone is a blast, and lucrative as well. Advocates of the "free agent nation" see it casual, flexible, energetic -- a way to tap into your real talent and potential.

Free agent Reggie Jackson

They say we've moved beyond the stodgy, gray-flannel-suited Organization Man of mid-century, who was all about conformity and corporate loyalty.

But for many writers, artists, musicians and so on, dealing with a collapsed economy and a shifting culture driven by the Internet, it's not much fun. These stories tend not to get told.

The second piece of my Salon series on the fate of the creative class is up. Please check it out.

Catalina's Jazz Club at 25

2011-10-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

SOMETIMES culture works in strange ways. Twenty-five years ago this month, Catalina Popescu, who had emigrated to LA from an authoritarian Romania, a country without an especially rich jazz tradition, met the horn player Buddy Collette, and within a week had opened a jazz club.

A quarter century later, Catalina's on Sunset is still open. With the demise of the beloved Jazz Bakery (soon to rise again), it's become the most consistent place to see major national acts in Los Angeles.

Here is my piece in today's LA Times about some of musicians who made Popescu want to open a jazz club and keep it going through good times and bad.

Happy birthday to the club, which celebrates with a bash on Monday night.

Introducing Pacific Standard Time

2011-10-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

IT'S finally happened. After a lot of talk, the postwar art blowout Pacific Standard Time has opened at dozens of museums and spaces across Southern California.

Your humble blogger wrote a piece for Los Angeles magazine about the origins, offerings and meaning of the whole thing -- it includes a dozen recommended shows, from the Getty's overview, Crosscurrents, to a show of swimming pool photography in Palm Springs. Here's an image that describes what I liked about this period:

Walter Hopps, the curator-genius who steered the gallery in its radical early days, originally supported his art habit by working as a psych-ward orderly. Kienholz lived, as he put it, “on the fringes of society, like a termite,” so poor that he bartered a painting for the removal of an aching tooth. Irwin made his money winning dance contests—the lindy mostly—and betting on horses. Billy Al Bengston was so broke that he couldn’t afford a battery for his car: The art school dropout parked his ’37 Pontiac facing downhill, nose toward the Malibu surf, so he could roll-start it.

Here's something art critic Dave Hickey just told the New York Times:

Wildman Ed Kienholz

“It’s corny,” said Dave Hickey, an art critic and a professor in the art and art history department at the University of New Mexico. “It’s the sort of thing that Denver would do. They would do Mountain Standard Time. It is ’50s boosterish, and I would argue largely unnecessary.”

You be the judge.

The Perils of the Creative Class

2011-10-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

WE were supposed to be entering a laptop wielding, latte-sipping world where the Internet made us all more "connected," weren't we? But the Internet, combined with the bad economy and a restructuring of American life, has led to an erosion of the very creative class it was supposed to invigorate.

HERE is my new piece in Salon which looks at the state of the much hyped creative class in 2011. It's the first of a series in which we look at how artists, writers and people who deal with culture are faring -- a story that has been largely untold.

I spoke to a number of sources, including artists and writers struggling with the creative life and Internet skeptics Jaron Lanier and Andrew Keen.

Colin Meloy on Gillian Welch

2011-09-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

YESTERDAY I had this story on country/folk duo Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, who perform in LA Thursday night.

One thing I did not have room for that in that article was a long quote given to me by Colin Meloy, who employed the two on The King is Dead, his latest record by the Decemberists. Meloy turns out to be a longtime fan -- here's his entire thought. Thanks to Meloy, whose last Decemberists show for several years we caught in Portland a few weeks back.

I was introduced to Gillian at Rockin' Rudy's, a very fine record store in Missoula, MT. I think a friend turned me on to her first record right after it came out. I was immediately smitten. It happens that I also spent the summer of '97 working in the vineyards of the Willamette Valley in Oregon and the song "One More Dollar" felt particularly auspicious.

Tucker Martine and I were wanting to create a kind of vibe on The King is Dead that we had always loved in old country records -- the idea of pairing a male and female vocal really hot in the mix, like every song was a duet. I'd always loved Neil Young's record, Comes a Time, and was really taken by the fact that the late, great Nicolette Larson sang on nearly every song, lending a tone and tenor to the record that just wouldn't exist without her voice. We wanted to do something similar with The King is Dead.

Gill and Dave very clearly work in a completely different way than many people I know. I get the feeling for all their love of simplicity and clarity comes from a kind of insanely finicky place. Which is funny; so many of her songs feel so off the cuff, so underthought. But there's a lot of thinking that goes on, I think, to get to that place.

Like all great artists and musicians, she and Dave, as far as I can tell, are just great lovers of music -- of all sorts. Their collective voice tends toward the Americana/country side of things, but their hearts don't necessarily hew to just one thing. And it all makes perfect sense to me -- they are the bridge between Robyn Hitchcock and the Louvin Brothers. And if you think about it, that bridge isn't necessarily that long.

Refracting the Tradition with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings

2011-09-27T09:34:00.000-07:00

I DON'T think I've been this starstruck since I interviewed Martin Scorsese a few years back. Meeting Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings -- two of most distinctive and harmonically complex figures in the new acoustic movement -- was one of the thrills of the summer.

My story on the duo -- and recent years and a solo album have shown how important Rawlings contribution is -- runs today in the LA Times. (It precedes their show Thursday at the Henry Fonda Music Box.)

Part of what intrigues me about the two is the way they take the tradition of pre-rock Appalachian brother bands -- the Louvin Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Delmore Brothers -- and cross them with a more modern harmonic language. It's all over the new record, The Harrow and the Harvest.

Rawlings, who is emerging one of the most individual guitarists of his generation, is steeped in old-time mountain music but is also informed by Gang of Four’s spiky post-punk, Johnny Marr's weeping riffs and Richard Thompson’s otherworldly chime. (Check out his recent LP, A Friend of a Friend, as Dave Rawlings Machine. The song "Ruby" and the cover of Neil Young's Cortez the Killer are good places to start.) His 1935 Epiphone archtop, often played with the capo us as high as the 9th or 10th fret, has lately become one of my favorite things to hear.

“If I could compare it sonically to ‘Time (The Revelator),’ ” he said abour Harrow, which he produced, “I’d say this record comes forward out of the speakers, and creates the atmosphere more in the space you’re in,” as opposed to what he calls the shy and “retiring” quality of the earlier album. “This record is more intimately recorded – we’re sitting around and gently playing the songs. The way we play when we’re not recording.”

Welch, who grew up on LA's Westside in the Reagan years and not in 1930s Appalachia, is sensitive about the issue of her authenticity.

In one key way, in fact, she had a pre-modern upbringing: While she grew up singing classic folk and country music, she never heard recordings of them: She knew the songs only through an oral tradition. Years later, she attended UC Santa Cruz, and was at first a bit lost, personally and musically – she sang briefly in front of a psychedelic surf band – but was exposed to old recordings by a bluegrass deejay housemate.

“And I have this complete, strange epiphany,” she recalls. “I’m hearing these sounds I’ve never heard before, but they’re the songs I’ve known since I was as kid.” The experience turned her head around. “And then presto, we’re done. And then I’m just like every other person who just needed a record player, these records and a door that locked.”

Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus

2011-09-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

THE other day I was lucky enough to speak to Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophone legend who performs at UCLA's Royce Hall tonight, Thursday, and at Segerstrom Hall in Orange County on Sunday.

These days, the once-brash, mohawk-rocking Rollins is 81, and, he's many decades from authoritative, agenda-setting records like Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West.

But the Rollins I spoke to was easy to speak to, boyishly enthusiastic, and sort of innocent in his love of other musicians, like composer Jerome Kern, who he called his favorite, and saxophonist Don Byas, who he called "One of my first idols and I prided myself that I could play a little bit like him." (He spoke specifically about falling for a '40s recording of "How High the Moon" Byas made with Jimmy Jones on piano.)

In thinking about what he and other jazz musicians really do when they are improvising, he came back to another saxophonist's description of telling a story. "I think Lester Young put it succinctly -- it's about logic. You can't just play anything. When I take a solo, the music has to make sense. I just happened to be one of the guys, along with John Coltrane, who stated playing long solos. Back then, everything was geared to shorter records."

And while Rollins' records have not matched his '50s classics, as a live performer he has reached another peak, says jazz critic Gary Giddins. My full interview with Sonny Rollins HERE. See you at Royce Hall.

UPDATE: Here is the set list from last night's very potent show. Especially pleased with guitarist Peter Bernstein, wielding an old-school archtop.

1.       Patan jail
2.       Serenade
3.       Blue Gardenia
4.       Nice Lady
5.       They Say It’s Wonderful
6.       Nishi
7.       Don’t Stop the Carnival

Pacific Standard Time's Life and Times

2011-09-19T15:38:00.000-07:00

WE'RE getting close to the launch of a gargantuan art blowout -- much bigger than an exhibit, not as cheesy as a "celebration" -- called Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945 to 1980. This will be a six month initiative involving museums and galleries from Santa Barbara to San Diego, Santa Monica to Palm Springs.

For Sunday's LA Times I put together a timeline intended to be helpful in orienting interested parties. I hope it's a good read too and tells part of the story of this remarkable state. The chronology -- HERE -- tracks things from the work of Salvador Dali's (right) with Hitchcock, through Ed Ruscha and the Ferus Gallery and the Watts Towers (above), up to the presidential election of Ronald Reagan.

I'll be writing more about Pacific Standard Time: Please stay tuned.

Violinist Ray Chen Nods to Elvis

2011-09-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

Ray Chen is a young classical violinist who's got both a golden tone and the kind of catholic taste I find all too infrequently in conservatory trained musicians.

Chen is the latest subject of my Influences column: Here he talks about his love of J.S. Bach, Yo-Yo Ma and Elvis Presley.

The Taiwan native also wrote to me about his love of friends and family, food and drink, and exercise. For a touring musician, especially one who plays repetitive motions on an instrument like a violin, it's serious business. He told me had just gotten back from the gym.

I love keeping myself healthy and in shape, especially if it means that you can eat more! But on a more serious note, exercising is a great way to provide stress relief, keep one's endurance on the road, and also prevent common problems that musicians can get, like carpal tunnel syndrome and other muscle-related injuries. My goal is to still be playing violin when I'm 85 years old - like my former teacher Aaron Rosand who can still give me a run for my money when he takes out his violin!

Chen plays tonight here in SoCal at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Photo courtesy Ray Chen.

Pres. Obama and the Plight of the Middle Class

2011-09-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

FOLKS, I'll be appearing on KCRW's To the Point with Warren Olney, which will broadcast today at noon on 89.9 FM in Los Angeles and later, presumably, elsewhere around the country on the PRI network.

We'll be talking about Obama's jobs speech and the larger issue of the middle class during the economic downturn. I'm there to discuss my experience as a laid off newspaper reporter who's struggled with the collapsed economy.

One bit of Obama's speech was especially resonant for me:

These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.

Anyway, we'll be discussing this and more shortly.

Update: With the show now up and broadcasting from KCRW, I want to recommend a very intelligent discussion in which your humble blogger was just okay.

One point: Chicago small business owner Jay Goltz, who wrote a smart piece for the New York Times about hiring, took issue with something I said about taxes and the rich. He made the point that someone making $250,000 is in very different shape than a billionaire hedge fund guy. I did not have time to respond, but I agree completely. (We need more small business owners like him and fewer too-big-to-fail corporations.)

Finally, this matter connects to a larger point which I did not get time to make, but: The most affluent 400 people in this country hold as much wealth as the bottom 150 million. So to even talk about the middle class is a bit of a nostalgic fiction, at least in the way we used to discuss it as a robust center of American life.

These days, politics dances to the tune of the top 1 percent, not the middle class. There is class warfare in this country: It's that very richest tier against the rest of us -- and they're winning. Bigtime.

The Struggle Over Middlebrow

2011-09-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

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 are good, which are "good for" us, and so on -- has fascinated me for a long time and had shaped a lot of my cultural journalism. I engaged with the highbrow-middlebow-lowbrow question in a reported essay for the LA Times that I expected no one would read. Instead, I heard more from it than almost anything I've written.

HERE is the piece, which begins in a discussion of Macdonald's writings on middlebrow and Clement Greenberg's "Avant Garde and Kitsch." (The pugnacious but also supportive relationship between the Ivy League-ish anarchist Macdonald and Jewish art critic Greenberg is a big part of Menand's piece.)

This is the kind of piece that I consider the beginning (or continuation) of the discussion -- it's hard to have the last word on anything as complex and ever changing as culture and what it does to us.

Christianity and Tom Perrotta

2011-08-30T10:36:00.000-07:00

ONE of my favorite-ever author meetings was a lunch interview with Tom Perrotta around the time of The Abstinence Teacher. (I was in New England and swung to the fringe of Boston to meet him.) The novel's film adaptation was already rolling despite the fact that the book hadn't come out yet -- credit the success of Little Children for that one.

The Abstinence Teacher, like his new one, The Leftovers, is partially about latter day Christians and the culture of the religiously devout, not often examined in literary fiction.

Perrotta and I spoke about a lot of things -- rock music, fatherhood, literary craft -- and especially his upbringing as a not-terribly-devout Catholic in New Jersey in the '60s and '70s, in the wake of Vatican II and other softenings of the church.

With The Abstinence Teacher, I was struck by the way Perrotta balanced satire with an unexpected empathy. Here's what I wrote at the time:

More than anything, though, his work is defined not by a type of character or a setting in the suburbs but by a tone of voice: cutting and observed with a kind of oracular detachment, but with forgiveness and respect for old-fashioned decency. It's also a tone, rooted in realism, that doesn't draw attention to itself.

In a funny way, the premises and the novels themselves seem to be rendered by a different writer.

"The setups to my stories are often more satirical," he said, "but the execution isn't. In the course of writing, my sense of the characters deepens, and the story becomes something different from what I intended."

HERE is that interview and profile. Looking forward to his new one.

The Roots of Philip Glass

2011-08-24T14:24:00.000-07:00

THE minimalist composer is the latest subject of my Influences column in the Los Angeles Times.

We spoke about his teacher Nadia Boulanger, sitar player Ravi Shankar, composer/philosopher John Cage, Gandhi and Allen Ginsberg, who Glass got to know well.

I mentioned to Glass before we started to talk for real that I had a new respect for anyone who wrote music since I'd started a very amateur study of music theory. He told me it's not hard for kids -- as his nine-year-old son is showing him. "Their minds are much more agile."

HERE is the full piece.

He'll be at the Hollywood Bowl next Tuesday.

The Return of Brian Selznick

2011-08-19T13:52:00.000-07:00

IF you’re the kind of grownup who enjoys smart, well-drawn children’s novels, you might be as excited as I am to hear the Brian Selznick has a new novel, Wonderstruck, coming in September.

I met Selznick a few years back on the publication of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, his nearly wordless book about an orphan hiding out in a Parisian train station. (I have another, more recent connection with his work: He illustrated Barbara Kerley’s The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse and Hawkins, a favorite of my dinosaur-loving son.)

Selznick – who is descended from film producer David O. Selznick – and I spoke about the literary tradition of orphans, silent movies’ genius of telling stories through images, and the groundbreaking work of Maurice Sendak. I’m not the only one interested in the Cadecott Medal-winning book: Martin Scorsese’s 3-D adaptation, with Jude Law and Ben Kingsley, comes out comes out in November.

Here is my LATimes interview with Selznick.

Wonderstruck, according to a story in the latest School Library Journal, will involve “two interconnected tales,” one all text, the other in black-and-white images. The first will tell of “12-year old Ben Wilson as he leaves rural Minnesota for New York City, a few months after his mother’s death, in search or a father he’s never known. And the wordless companion story follows a New Jersey girls who’s deaf and who embarks on a risky quest of her own, in 1927.”

Jazz, Joni Mitchell and the Hollywood Bowl

2011-08-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

YOU'LL get less of the introverted poet of Blue and only a hint of the lipstick-and-beret chanteuse of Court and Spark. Instead, Wednesday night will summon the jazz phase Joni Mitchell went through in the mid-to-late '70s.

HERE is my LA Times story on the Hollywood Bowl show, Joni's Jazz, which will include all kinds of good people -- including Herbie Hancock, who recently took some well-aimed criticism about the pedestrian nature of the Bowl's jazz offerings, Glenn Hansard, Aimee Mann, Cassandra Wilson and Wayne Shorter.

I enjoyed speaking to several of the above -- though I must admit Shorter and I got lost walking down memory lane a bit: He mused about his years in the army, during which he met Lester Young at a mid-'50s Canadian gig (Pres took him downstairs to the wine cellar to see if they could find better cognac than what they were serving at the bar) and raving about the open-mindedness of European jazz fans. ("The crowds -- they're poppin'. All the generations; 13-year-olds into really out stuff. Really feeling it.")

Michell's jazz period included the album The Hissing of Summer Lawns -- which has what we'd later call "world music" touches and which will be performed in its entirety at the Bowl -- and ends with her tribute to bassist/composer Charles Mingus, who died a few months before its release. (Though some very good people play on Mingus, its fusion vibe makes it a lost opportunity for me.)

Mitchell is of course a major figure and innovative guitarist -- Richard Thompson is fascinated with her alternate tunings and his old band Fairport Convention covered "Chelsea Morning" and "I Don't Know Where I Stand" -- who I find it easy to like and hard to love. I'm happy for the the Bowl concert -- which has a mix of the usual suspects and some imaginative choices -- to change that.

Simon Reynolds Goes Retro

2011-08-08T18:29:00.000-07:00

HAS the end of cultural history ever been so much fun?

Your humble scribe has been reading Simon Reynolds since his work was a well-kept secret of the British music press. (He was also, during the ‘90s, one of two rock-crit Simons in the Village Voice, the other being the code-cracking rock sociologist Simon Frith.)

He’s written with insight and intelligence about rock n roll, subculture, shoegaze, “post-rock,” electronica and rave culture. His biggest hit stateside has probably been Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984, published in this country in 2006. (Due to Henry Rollins plug for the British edition, I had my Manchester-dwelling sister drag one home for me for Christmas one year.)

Reynolds’ latest book – which arrives about a year after his move to Los Angeles – is Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. The book concentrates on popular music, but it stretches to include all kinds of related subjects, among them memory, hipster retro culture, the psychology of the collector, the "big in Japan" phenomenon, commodity fetishism, YouTube and digital means of recording and storage.

I read nearly everything I find by Reynolds, but this book taps into several longtime passions of mine: In college, as I tried to make simultaneous sense of postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson and the emerging sample-madness of hip hop, I wrote an essay called “Pop Will Eat Itself” which laid out some of the issues that would continue to fascinate me for the next two decades. But I only scratched the surface what Reynolds gets into here. (I also had no idea how much of a retro cat I would become as an adult.)

Now please allow me to slip back to my Vox tube amp, collection of ‘60s jazz records and stash of prewar noir novels: Here’s Simon.

When did you realize that it had gotten this bad? That we were not just living through garden-variety nostalgia but might be poised to swallow our own future?

Shortly before deciding to do the book! Which would have been 2007 or so. But the feeling had been creeping up on me for a while, I’d been blogging stuff with retro themes for quite a while.

The book comes out of this mounting sense of bemusement at the phenomenon of retro that built up over the Noughties, and from a feeling of alarm at what it seemed to herald for the future – which is to say precisely an absence of future, the repetition of the already-heard.

It also comes from curiosity about how things had gotten like this, and how far the roots of retro could be traced. Because as soon as I started thinking about the subject in depth, during the writing of the proposal, I realized that retro had been this spectre on the periphery of my consciousness going way way back. There is a piece I wrote in a fanzine in the mid-Eighties, when music seemed to be stagnant and deadlocked, where I mention en passant that there’s been a glut of reissues and retrospection and that hasn’t helped the situation! So one of the things the book is showing is that retromania as a phenomenon is not an overnight development, it’s something that’s built up over a couple of decades.

What happened in terms of the swarming, ever-expanding digital archive of pop culture that has accrued over the past decade — filesharing, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc etc etc — that was the fruition of tendencies and directions that go back to long before the Internet. So part of the book is also an investigation of the history of retro; I’m looking back at pop’s own looking back, the history of revivalism and what I call “timewarp cults’.

You open the book describing the 17th century origins of the word “nostalgia." For how long have human beings longed for the past? Did Cro-Magnon man pine for the days when he was pushing the Neanderthals aside?

I think looking back to the past and venerating it is something that runs through the entirety of human civilization and is almost certainly part of every culture on the planet. The idea that things were better in the some glorious earlier time, that the ancestors were wise and just and existed in some kind of perfect state of equilibrium, but that at some point things went awry and the current situation we inhabit is fallen or lesser... this is a near-universal way of seeing things. And on the individual level, we are all prone to nostalgia, I’m sure. Certainly daydreaming about my personal past, feeling wistful about lost moments, is a big part of my make-up.

Nostalgia in the sense of nostalgia for the popular culture and everyday trappings (food, clothes, transport, how stuff looked and was designed, etc etc) of an era that you personally lived through... I think that is a relatively recent development, though. It seems like a 20th Century thing. That kind of nostalgia is inextricably linked to how fast fashions, entertainment, and so forth, change: they’re two sides of the same coin. And that cycle definitely got faster and faster as the 20th Century proceeded. Hence there’s more to be nostalgic about.

That kind of nostalgia is different from antiquarianism or an interest in history or the olden days. When I was very young I wanted to be an archaeologist and that impulse is to do with the thrill of treasure seeking (I had a very naïve idea of what being an archaeologist was like, which was shattered when I attended my first dig) and a fascination for how differently people lived in olden times. There are many ways of being interested in the past that don’t have anything to do with nostalgia. People who form Early Music ensembles aren’t nostalgic, I don’t think. They don’t want to go back to the days of bubonic plague and petty criminals being drawn-and-quartered.

But retro is something a little different from nostalgia, right?

In the book I talk about retro in two ways. There is a sort of vague use of “retro” as an umbrella term for anything to do with phenomena that have some relationship to the past; usually it’s a derogatory or slightly mocking use of the word.

All the things that get loosely described as ‘retro’ are dealt with in the book: nostalgia, reunion tours, heritage culture, rock museums, revivals, reissuing, remakes, etc. However ‘retro’ actually has a more specific meaning that actually has little to do with nostalgia as an emotion of genuine loss and longing towards the past. Retro in this narrower, precise sense refers to a cultivated appreciation of past styles, usually with a sense of irony as opposed to anguish. Retro aesthetes are charmed by the quaintness of things from the past, but they don’t want to go back in time. This “pure” retro is much more aestheticized and style-oriented. In a non-pejorative sense, just a simple statement of fact, it is superficial: it attends to and delights in the surface properties of the style.

That’s why ‘retro’ in this sense first manifested in the world of fashion and graphic design. Then it gradually spread into, or emerged within, music. And initially it was a rarefied, sophisticated sensibility, and in the rather earnest context of rock culture in the 70s, it was cutting edge. The pioneers of it in rock would have been figures like Roxy Music, or later the B-52s. Art school and/or gay musicians. Nowadays it is really widespread in “post-indie” music culture and a lot of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking operators currently active approach the past as this gigantic flea market of sound and style and imagery through they sift for style signifiers to play with.

Haven’t cultural critics decried this kind of thing before? Paul Weller and company went retro decades ago, and I recall a 1986 Esquire article calling the ‘80s “The Re Decade.” What’s different now?

It’s a recurrent complaint that’s emerged at moments of seeming stagnation in music. In the Seventies, journalist and cultural pundits noticed that there was a lot of revivalism going on, particularly the Fifties revival that was big in rock but also took in things like American Graffiti and Happy Days, but I think there was also in the Seventies a bit of Twenties revivalism going on and probably some other decades got dabbled with too.

In the Eighties postmodernism reached the music and youth press as well as mainstream magazines, so I’m not surprised to hear about that Esquire article; I can remember pieces in The Face about ‘The Age of Plunder’. There was recycling going on all across from music (with so many Eighties pop groups referencing Sixties soul) to Swatch watches with their use of Constructivist and Suprematist imagery. In the early 90s I wrote a piece whose working title was actually ‘Retromania’ for the Guardian and it talked about the reissue explosion and also two then-new rock magazines, Mojo and Vox, that had a very pronounced orientation towards the rock past, collector culture, and so forth.

As I say this has been building for years, but I think what makes it different now is the scale and intensity, and how it’s been affected by digital culture, how that has induced a state of atemporality. Also this current stagnant, directionless phase has gone on much longer than any previous lull: it’s been like this for about a dozen years, where no new major movement or genre in music has come forward. Indeed, tying in with what I said about digiculture, I think you can loosely time the onset of the current malaise-without-end-in-sight to when broadband kicked in and a whole bunch of things to do with the Internet took off and started pushing us towards the Cloud and the state of perpetual connectivity.

If someone wrote a book this year about the dangers of pollution, or overpopulation, or global warming, I don’t think anyone would say, “oh we’ve heard this before, there were lots of scares about environmental issues in the 1970s, or people were worried about the ozone layer back in the early 90s... ’.

Someone in the UK compared Retromania to An Inconvenient Truth. I think there’s some truth to that in so far as the problems I’m examining didn’t come about overnight and at various points people have remarked upon these syndromes before and expressed alarm about them.

The advent of recording and photography made retro possible. How has technology – which we associate with the future – quickened the process?

Well I go into this in some depth in the book, obviously. It’s a BIG topic. To keep it short, I will say that we’ve seen in the last twenty years a bumpy but implacable transition from the Analogue System to the Digital System, with things like CDs and iPods as transitional formats and technology that will disappear as all culture becomes subsumed as the Cloud. The Analogue way of experiencing culture involved dearth, distance, and delay: there was a limited number of cultural artifacts that most individuals could afford, these took a solid form that had to be physically transported (in the case of magazines, recordings, if not radio and TV, although the latter were limited by broadcast range), and that involved waiting (for things to be released or published or broadcast). The Digital way of experiencing culture is organized around super-abundance, post-geographical proximity, and instantaneity/immediacy. There are no limits. Yet human beings remain stubbornly analogue entities and as many many people are discovering there is a lot to be said in favour of limits.

This can’t be good. What does it tell us about Anglo-American society in the 21st century, that we’ve become -- as your subtitle has it -- addicted to our own past?

Well, it could be telling us lots of things. That we’ve become victims of our technology. That we bought into the ideology of convenience as a supreme value. Or could it be that old stuff seems comfortable at a time characterized on the one hand by mind-blowing technological changes (the aforementioned digiculture stuff) but on the other hand characterized by an anxiety-stoking sense of political-economic deterioration/deadlock/instability. The past seems alluring because the present is a mess and the future is hard to envisage in positive terms. “Better days” have become something it’s more plausible to project backwards in time rather than forwards in time.

More Trouble at the LA Times

2011-07-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

THIS week saw the fourth (or fifth?) wave of executions since I myself was sent to my bitter end in October 2008. My heart goes out to my old colleagues who've suddenly lost their jobs -- you deserve better.

Unlike a lot of former Times people, I still get the paper delivered and derive some -- though it looks like in the future, less -- of my income, from the place. (The company that gave Cereal Killer Mark Willes, David Hiller and others who helped sink the ship multi-million dollar golden parachutes has just cut all freelance book coverage: Man, those $500 book reviews were bleeding the place dry!)

And today's front page piece by Scott Gold on the Jupiter mission shows just how good the Times' coverage can be even in these difficult days.

But what I'm struck by is the kowtowing, go-team! farewell notes that fired LATimes staffers write as they're on their way to the gallows. I wrote one too, on the day I was told, out of the blue, that I had til 5 pm to leave the premises or be escorted out by security.

Jack Shafer at Slate penned a piece not long ago about what angry employees write when they are cashiered.

I guess I'm not thinking anger, but honesty. How bout this:

"Today is my last day at the Times. Those of you at your desks: I will miss you all. Someday, when you least expect it, this will happen to you, too, and you will be writing one of these stupid notes as you madly pack your belongings and shuffle toward the guillotine.

"And you will, as I soon will, struggle to keep your marriage together, to keep your kids in school, to keep your house from being repossessed. You may not sleep straight through the night for months (or years).

"If the economy continues to limp along as Congress obsesses over the deficit and ignores unemployment, you might not work for years. Some of you will never hold a job again. For some of you, things will go a bit better, but the chances of you regaining your current salary are almost zero.

Meanwhile, Tribune brass are giving themselves bonuses and Sam Zell is griping about how hard the deal he cooked up ended up being to his net worth.

Have a bitchin' summer..."

Journalists pride themselves on "speaking truth to power," so I'm scratching my head as to this docility. (My friend Steve Wasserman describes picking up "a whiff of the good commissars being sent to the Gulag and thanking the Party for the privilege of serving.")

Part of it is just confusion -- I was so blindsided that day that I was in a kind of low-grade shock, and mostly just remember a good friend buying me lunch and another friend helping me get out of the building before security dragged me out.)

My wife, who works in the school system, says teachers, librarians and others work their fingers to the bone until the very minute they are laid off -- and with few plans as to what to do next -- because they see themselves as working for "the kids," not some uncaring bureaucracy that will fire them in the blink of an eye.

I did the same thing -- I was toiling for "the reader" whom I idolize and revere, staying up late reading the books I was covering, or obsessing over my stories while I was taking a shower or clearing the table or watching a movie, so that reader could have the very best work I was capable of. "Go, Scott, go!" my editors said. "We love what you are doing! Keep it up!"

But as with these "classy" farewell notes, it's all a lie. To the people who fire you, you are a number on a spreadsheet.

If you still work at the Times -- and I have many friends left at what is still, most days, quite a good paper -- please protect yourself. Take it from me: No amount of good evaluations, no number of high fives, no apparent love and support from your bosses will save you.

And my best wishes to those now launched on the dark adventure I've been on for almost three years now. Good luck -- you will need it.

Eddie Izzard at the Hollywood Bowl

2011-07-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

THE other morning -- it was the 4th of July -- the phone rang. It was Eddie Izzard calling from England. I'd had no caffeine yet. And due to the holiday -- on a Monday no less -- and a kid who'd just gotten out of the emergency room, I'd completely forgotten that he'd be calling.

Yikes.

But Izzard ended up being a perfect gentleman and we spoke for a while about his career and the figures who'd shaped him, including some of my very favorites, The Beatles and Monty Python. He talked very sincerely about his debts to earlier comic figures and referred to himself as an inheritor of a rational, humanistic tradition going back to Darwin and beyond.

HERE is my brief feature on the comedian, who I look forward to seeing perform tonight at the Hollywood Bowl. Be there or be square.

The 5 Browns on the Piano

2011-07-17T17:47:00.000-07:00

Photo Andrew Southam

A GROUP of cherubic, Julliard-educated young people came to Irvine this weekend to play 5 pianos in tandem. This could be heaven or it could be hell, but this group of siblings is good.

HERE is my interview with the band in the LA Times. There is more to the story than met the eye when I accepted this piece -- their backstory is a bit complicated. I enjoyed talking to two of the young men in the group a great deal; their sincerity was unfeigned.

Happy 100th to John Lautner

2011-07-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

THIS weekend would been the 100th birthday of the man who may be my favorite architect -- he was voted runner up, just below Neutra, in this blog's Favorite California Modernist poll not long ago.

Lautner's Chemosphere house, above the trees

Not long after wild-man publisher Benedikt Taschen restored the Hollywood Hills-sited Chemosphere House, which had fallen into very serious disrepair, I wrote a lengthy piece on both the octagonal structure and on the ornery architect. Here it is.

I spoke to a number of people for the story, including architect Frank Escher, who helped remake the place, the realtor who had struggled to sell it, original resident Leonard Malin, and design historian Alan Hess, who coined the spot-on term "organic modernist" to describe Lautner.

Happy birthday to John Lautner, a man who disliked Los Angeles but did a great deal to make it a more interesting place.

UPDATE: Here is a wonderful piece by Alan Hess from Saturday's LAT Home section on Lautner and LA.

Retro rock with LA's Dawes

2011-07-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

ONE of my favorite newish West Coast bands is the LA quartet Dawes, who both draw from the classical canyon rock of the 60s and 70s and work to carve their individual place in the tradition. The voices of Jackson Browne, the Byrds, Neil Young and others echo through their songs.

HERE is my profile of the band in today's LA Times.

I really enjoyed talking to singer/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith: We could have discussed music all day. (I especially enjoyed the alt-country version of the Replacements "Achin' to Be" he knocked out on his J-45.) Taylor told me he and the gang run a wedding band as a side project where they play Motown and Stax/Volt songs -- I'm tempted to get married again just to book these guys to play.

When I'm away from California, playing Dawes' music in the car is one of my best way to remember my adopted home state. Weirdly, at a restaurant last night I heard "Time Spent in Los Angeles."

Please note: An editor at the Times wrote a deck suggesting that the band lives in Laurel Canyon. For all their roots in that sound, these guys are rockin in La Crescenta.

Two Weeks in Indie Rock

2011-07-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

OVER the last few weeks I've seen a bunch of bands and gotten some good new albums by groups on tour; three of the four are from the Golden State. I'll have to be brief here, but I want to sign the praises of a few of them.

The bands are:

The Bixby Knolls:

I've been hearing about these guys for a while now, so was happy to stumble into them at a show at the Silverlake Lounge about a week ago. There's a real punk-style force to these guys, but it's matched with fine, melodic songwriting and a style as retro-Brit as their name... Remind me of the Buzzcocks and The Jam. Nothing I find on youtube matches what I saw the other night, but here's something:

Duniven:

I've known Patrick as my bartender at The York, one of my favorite gastropubs in town, for a while now -- it often takes me a long time to order food and drink because we get sidetracked into conversations into Neil Young, Ryan Adams or Blonde on Blonde. So I was pleased to finally check out his band, which reflects his fandom but also takes his influences somewhere. Very sweet old California backup band complete with chick on tambourine.

Patrick, who some might know from the Capshuns, also plays a mean harmonica. The late hour required me to split mid-set, but here's a talent to watch. Here's the last song from a recent set.

The Postelles:

Missed these guys at the Echo last week because of exhaustion, but as I keep playing their debut LP over and over again and kicking myself for it. They're a young bunch of Anglophiles from Brooklyn with a knack for catchy, hard pop and an association with the Strokes. A reviewer on the All Music Guide called them too squeaky clean, but frankly I find that louche, prep-school swagger of the Strokes a bit lame at this point. I'll take the more polished style of these guys anyday. And next time they're in town I'll be there for sure.

Alela Diane:

This Northern California singer-songwriter impressed me with her last record, the intimate folky LP To Be Still. Her voice and songwriting have deepened since then and her music has taken an alt-country direction. (Some have said she sounds like Cat Power fronting one of Gram Parsons' old bands.) Whatever it is, she's a serious talent and I'm not gonna let her get in and out of town next time without catching her set. Here's a sweet little live bit from a benefit in NY; it's the first song from her new LP, on Rough Trade.

I guess the moral of this story is that I need to sleep a lot less.

The Roots of Bobby McFerrin

2011-07-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

IS there a more annoying song from the 1980s than "Don't Worry Be Happy"? Maybe -- a lot of bad childhood memories are now flowing back, some of them involving George Michael -- but not one of my favorite number from that low dishonest decade.

Debut LP

HERE is my brief LA Times exchange with the man who helped revolutionize jazz singing and has made an impact in the classical world as well. (He also did the right thing after George Herbert Walker Bush stole his song without permission, just as Reagan did with Springsteen's not-so-conservative "Born in the USA.")

Miles pic by Tom Palumbo

McFerrin, needless to say, is an interesting guy, and he lists his among his most important influences Miles "Prince of Darkness" Davis and the Christian savior. Now that's what I call a diverse roster.

McFerrin is at the Hollywood Bowl next week, by the way.

Kickass swimmer Diana Nyad

2011-07-05T14:55:00.000-07:00

NOT often do I venture far from my music-film-authors obsession to write about sports, but I could not resist the chance to speak to Diana Nyad, the record-breaking swimmer and NPR commentator who has decided, in her 60s, to swim more than 100 miles between Cuba and Florida.

We spoke about regrets, physical endurance, killer sharks, nasty jellyfish and the importance of Neil Young for the site SecondAct.

"I used to be a thoroughbred racehorse," she told me, explaining that her style was more graceful when she was young. "I'd get colds all the time -- but I was fast. Now I'm more like a Clydesdale. I'm much stronger."

Here is my full piece.

Nyad takes off on her journey -- twice postponed now -- as soon as the weather cooperates. The Misread City wishes her luck.

Rockin in 1970

2011-06-23T17:09:00.000-07:00

ON Friday I have a New York Times review of an interesting if imperfect new book called Fire and Rain, which looks at the year 1970 and the making of four hugely popular records -- The Beatles' Let it Be, CSNY's Deja Vu, James Taylor's Sweet Baby James and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.

If you love all these artists, by all means pick up David Browne's book. Otherwise -- as I get into in the review -- it's a mixed success.

Browne's key records sold like crazy at the time -- but even then there were people who considered them insubstantial. "I consider his soft sound a cop out," Ellen Willis wrote of Paul Simon in the New Yorker. "And I hate most of his lyrics; his alienation, like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore." (My guess is that she was rocking out to CCR at the time.)

(This BBC video of James Taylor from 1970 is better than almost anything on his albums, by the way.)

More on all this later. What's your favorite record from 1970?

The Return of the Archers of Loaf

2011-06-16T12:40:00.000-07:00

WHEN the band filed at the Troubadour the other night, I wondered if this might be an Archers of Loaf cover band -- a Chapel-Hill-meets-'90s nostalgia version of Beatlemania. But despite the fact that gawky, bespectacled Eric Bachmann has transformed himself into a lumber jack since the band's late-'90s breakup (don't rock musicians usually waste away?), this was the Archers of old -- all the hummable melodies, modern jazz-meets-Sonic Youth-inspired harmonic weirdness, the onstage jumping around, and those unforgettable songs like "Web in Front" and "Wrong."

This was one of those reunions I never thought I'd see, and I certainly did not think this North Carolina band that never got its due would make it to the West Coast. (They ended up with two sold-out nights at the Troubadour to kick off a whole West Coast tour.) I went to school in Chapel Hill in the early '90s, so this is a band I've been seeing for a long time -- real pleasure to see their genius undiminished.

HERE is a Spin piece by my Raleigh-based colleague on their reuniting. The tour still comes through New York, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, Phil, NC, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

The band's albums are also being reissued by Merge.

All hail the Archers!!

Britain's "Electric Eden"

2011-06-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

THE best of it still sounds as fresh as the day its long-haired practitioners pulled out their mandolins and plugged in the amps: British folk rock is one of the great unsung stories, at least in this country. The new book, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, gets at the movement's greatest musicians -- Vashti Bunyan, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Bert Jansch, Anne Briggs, many others -- and connects them to currents deep in British literary and cultural life, including the resistance to industry, the flight to the landscape and the search for a distinctively British (and sometimes pre-Christian) culture.

HERE is my LA Times interview with author Rob Young, former editor of Wired magazine and clearly a major Brit-folk obsessive. He was inspired to write about music by Revolution in the Head's Ian MacDonald's book on Shostakovich and sees the aim of music writing as deciphering cultural codes.

This is a wonderful and well-researched book, though like the music it chronicles, it rambles a bit. It's hard to imagine an American publisher allowing this much backstory -- William Morris, Holst, druids, etc. (The book is put out by FSG in this country but is primarily a reprint of a Faber and Faber book published previously in the UK.)

And while this was not the book's primary goal -- which was to chart the late '60s/early '70s heyday of British folk rock -- I would have liked to see a bit more on the contemporary scene. Gen X West Coast artists in particular -- Stephen Malkmus, The Decemberists, Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart -- have been voracious at consuming and reviving this stuff otherwise ignored by the marketplace. (It recalls to me the way Boomer musicians both in Britain and America helped bring black blues figures -- Lonnie Johnson, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt -- back into the light in the '60s.)

Here are some bits from my conversation with Young that did not make it into my Times piece:

Which recordings or artists from the classic period seem to hold up best?

I guess that's a cue for some of my personal favorites. If you allow that the classic period is 1969–72, which I call the Indian summer of folk-rock, then I'd have to mention Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, Incredible String Band’s Wee Tam And The Big Huge, Fairport Convention's Liege And Lief, John Martyn’s Bless The Weather and Sandy Denny's The North Star Grassman And The Ravens.

All very different: Drake is Romantic in the original sense, and his "River Man" is a haunting and supernatural vision, with the ghostly string arrangements of Harry Robinson. Martyn is ecstatic and almost funky, using his Echoplexed acoustic guitar for the first time in scintillating patterns. Fairport's album is one of the cornerstones of modern English folk, with rocked-up ballads and wistful, melancholic songs written in a traditional idiom.

ISB are on a personal quest, and their album pulls in all kinds of ethnic and exotic instruments in a panoply of world religions and spirit codes. Denny's LP is loaded with omens and her songs are autumnal, washed by the unruly sea of fortune. I could have chosen many more but this is a radiant selection that couldn't have come from anywhere else but Britain.

The Incredible String Band

Where can we hear the legacy of this period in contemporary music? Did it leave any traces in mainstream – or not so mainstream – culture or thinking in Britain or the States?

Well, I hear it in all sorts of unexpected places -- the weirder side of Kate Bush, the pulverising, organic avant rock of late Talk Talk, even the uncanny electronic reveries of Boards of Canada. But this is not too much about the folk tradition any more, more a shared set of sensibilities that tap into the complex British relationship with the landscape, with memory and nostalgia, the constant longing to reconnect with a more innocent age.

Interestingly, the musicians who I find most convincingly replicate the sound world of classic folk-rock tend to be Americans -- Joanna Newson, Devendra Banhart, Espers, Matt Valentine's various projects... There seems to be an empathy in musical terms there – whereas it's hard to find current British folk music that doesn't sound trite, but which preserves some of the mystery, the occult presences that the best folk contains.

Making "Winter's Bone" a Reality

2011-06-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

ONE of the best films of 2010 was Winter's Bone, a kind of little movie that could which ended up with an Oscar nomination for star Jennifer Lawrence and her very tough performance as a determined Ozarks girl. (The actress just showed up in various states of undress in the latest GQ.)

Tonight the wonderful country-folk band that plays throughout the film performs at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery as part of a national tour.

It's easy to forget that this movie came close to not happening at all; it was largely due to the determination of its director and producers -- and some good luck -- that it saw the light of day. Here, in an exclusive for The Misread City, is how it happened.

Much of the praise that greeted Winter’s Bone – Debra Granik’s lean, mean tale of a determined girl on the trail of her reckless father – focused on its setting in Missouri’s poor, isolated Ozark Mountains: This was not the kind of film Hollywood is often accused of making, in which a film crew condescends to or caricatures a region far from Brentwood or the Upper West Side.

“The last thing we wanted to be,” says producer Alix Madigan-Yorkin, “were tourists dropped into the Ozarks. Every aspect of the life was really well observed before the production.”

Part of what led to the nuanced treatment of the setting, oddly, was the long uphill climb to financing. “The fact that we couldn’t find funding for three years,” says Anne Rosellini, both a writer and a producer on the project, “was our best friend.”

As the New York-based filmmakers – who had come together over their love of Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone novella and the subsequent scripts -- waited for this or that source to come through, “We kept going down to the Ozarks to do research – with our d.p., bringing back look books,” that captured the region’s cabins, ponds and hillsides, and the beauty that survived the poverty and ravages of crystal meth.

“If this thing was going to convey some tone and flavor,” says Granik, “we needed to get our asses down there. And to marry the screenplay to lived reality. Find a house, a school, that [heroine] Ree would really inhabit.” There was no way to rush it."

“We were able to take a really deep look,” Rosellini continues. “And we shot the film on location, on people’s private land – that took years to line up. Two New York women can’t just show up and do what we did.”

Winter’s Bone has also drawn enormous acclaim for Jennifer Lawrence’s staring role. The Louisville native plays the implacable teenage girl who marches over fences and across frozen ground, defying violent neighbors in an effort to track down her father, who is wanted on bond and quite possibly dead. This aspect of the film, too, would have turned out very differently if its funding path had been more conventional.

“We went through the standard way of trying to get this off the ground,“ Madigan-Yorkin says of the early stages of development. “Trying to attract an actor who could draw funding.” One early potential funder, “was pushing us toward names that were more familiar.”

When expected financing fell through, on Halloween 2007, it was devastating, says Granik. “This company eventually said, ‘We’ll lose our shirt.’ It was truly dreary at the end.” She felt such a sting at her American story being rejected by American financiers that she wished she could flee to Europe. “You feel like one of those disenfranchised jazz musicians. We felt throttled down.”

But the financing they eventually landed – which was modest -- offered a major advantage: “We could cast who we wanted, Madigan-Yorkin says. ” And for the viewer, “You could disappear into the film: Actors faces and names weren’t jumping out at you.”

By the time $2 million in funding came through – mostly from a group of New York based private investors – the team was ready to make the film their own way.

The resulting film developed significant buzz after its first Sundance screening, attracting Roadside Attractions to distribute and winning the Grand Jury Prize.

Winter’s Bone – which was on the regional film festival circuit for months -- also won something that may be more valuable, Madigan-Yorkin says. “This earned most of its money in the heartland. The people in Missouri, where we shot it, really embraced it. Usually you make your money in the standard art house circuit,” in big cities on the coasts.

Rosellini credits that resonance to the respect they showed that setting and the time they had to sink into it. “You get financing from a production company and you don’t get the luxury of that kind of research,” she says. “If Debra and I could have been in development forever… That’s the most fun time. In this case there was no one to tell us no.”

“If we’d gotten the funding earlier – and we were pretty far down the path with someone – who knows.”

Downtown LA Bookstore for Sale

2011-06-06T09:15:00.000-07:00

JUST shy of five years ago, I went to visit a sharp new bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. It arrived at a time when downtown, and particularly the Old Bank district, seemed to be sparking: Pete's had opened recently, and a video store and (if memory serves) good new Vietnamese place were a few steps away.

The sudden appearance of Metropolis Books startled so many locals that some thought it was a movie set.

The shop's owner seemed very sincere about the endeavor, and the stock was on the small side, but well put together. I think I bought my beloved copy of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas that day and still have the store's bookmark.

Here is the 2006 LA Times story I wrote on the place and its hopeful future.

Well, all good things come to an end, and bookstores in Southern California have been ending a lot recently. LA Observed reports today that the place is for sale.

(Sigh.)

New Music Festival in Venice

2011-06-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

PLEASE NOTE: This is a post that went up last month; Blogger has misdated it. Trying to fix. Don't go to First Lutheran this weekend unless your aim is to praise the Lord.

The Calder Quartet

THIS Saturday sees two programs of contemporary music, by composers well known and obscure, that tries to take the measure of the classical scene in 21st century Los Angeles. It's called Hear Now and includes solo performers and the Eclipse, Lyris and Calder Quartets.

I spoke to Hugh Levick, both the organizer of the festival and one of the composers -- he's up alongside more famous names, among them Thomas Ades and Esa-Pekka Salonen -- whose work will be performed at the First Lutheran Church of Venice.

First Lutheran

As a young man, Levick earned a writing degree at the University of Iowa and headed to Paris to write a novel, but his interest in jazz saxophone and its furthest edges brought him back to music. He's a guy inspired equally by Kafka, Coltrane and Walter Benjamin.

HERE is my brief piece on his work and influences.

MOCA's "Art in the Streets"

2011-06-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

THE other day I belatedly made it over to the Museum of Contemporary Art for its celebrated -- and blockbuster -- Art in the Streets show. I can't remember longer lines for a museum show; maybe Murakami or something.

Overall, this seemed to me a strong and engaging show. If anything it was perhaps too large and complete, in its commandeering of the entire Geffen Contemporary space and aiming to tell the history of graffiti, skateboard culture, tagging, hip hop and related phenomenon from the early '70s to the present. (As you'd hope from a show at a Los Angeles museum, the West Coast was not entirely overlooked, as it sometimes is in histories of contemporary art. But see below.)

The volume at times was overwhelming, with some parts verging on theme park, but mostly this was a well balanced and at times exciting show. I especially enjoyed the display of schooled artists inspired by street art -- the Juxtapoz crowd -- which included Barry McGee and the late Margaret Kilgallen. (Two of California's greatest artists of my generation; LACMA, during an earlier regime, both commissioned and later destroyed some of their work.)

So with all this popular, rad, exuberant and accessible street art, why do I feel a bit uneasy about the whole thing? Part of it is that I'm smelling the acrid scene of hype. LA Times critic Christopher Knight got at some of my misgivings in an provocative essay that I fear will be overlooked because of its appearance on Memorial Day weekend.

His Sunday essay argues that MOCA's claims that street art is "the most influential art movement since Pop" is "overblown." Here's Knight:

"Art in the Streets" cites global reach, including London; São Paolo, Brazil; Athens; and Tokyo, as evidence. (Sixty artists are surveyed.) Since the 1970s, however, the deepest impact on art culture has come from Conceptual art, not graffiti.

Conceptualism is the primary lingua franca of art today — like it or not, and for good or ill.

Knight has other problems with the show, including some artists he considers overlooked (I wrote about LA artist Gajin Fujita here) and an issue familiar to West Coast culture vultures:

Mostly MOCA tells a mythic tale in which graffiti, an Expressionist art form, is largely born in Manhattan, spreads across the country and finally envelopes the world. If the story sounds familiar, that's because it replays New York School legend, long since discredited, about Abstract Expressionist painting in the 1940s.

Another sour note: We've all been complaining for years that museums build their exhibits around their gift shops; British street artist Banksy even has a film called Exit Through the Gift Shop.

But this may be the first show I've seen in a long time -- and I've been going to big exhibits in London, New York, D.C. and LA for more than 20 years -- where you are basically forbidden to go into the gift shop. At least, that's the way it seemed when my wife and son walked into the museum store and I, lagging along by a few feet so I could reed a wall label, was kept out because the shop had reached capacity. Soon a substantial line had built up, and the museum lost both my loyalty and the $20 or $30 I might have spent on a book. (If the guard had been less rude it would have pissed me off less.)

In conclusion, despite some mixed feelings about the genre and the exhibit itself, this show did a lot to win me over. Knight excepted, I don't seem to be alone here. My four-year-old son -- who is by now all too familiar with museum shows -- reclined on the bean-bag chairs in the theater showing Spike Jonze's inventive skateboard videos and offered, "Dis is da life!!"

And who can argue with that?

Choreographer Meg Wolfe

2011-05-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

A DARING and musically radical dance piece is coming to REDCAT next week. I imagine there is so much avant-garde work coming regularly through this little performance spaced nudged into the corner of Walt Disney Concert Hall that many of us tend to take it for granted. But this piece -- trembler.SHIFTER -- sounds truly rad, as the kids say.

I had the chance to correspond with the piece's choreographer -- LA's own Meg Wolfe, a former denizen of the Lower Manhattan scene, who collaborates here with composer Aaron Drake -- about the work that's influenced her own. (I am writing the LA Times' Influences column most week.)

Her inspirations, she offered, ranged from rock poetess Patti Smith to the BP oil drilling disaster. See the full piece HERE.

And for space, the published story omitted the most surprising and perhaps distinctively LA of her influences. She chose the film Miracle Mile, which she calls "a crazy movie from 1988."

Wolfe writes: "I watched this early on when I was starting the project and feeling particularly apocalyptic, on the suggestion of costume designer Marcus Kuiland-Nazario. The color scheme! Mare Winningham's hair! L.A. missed connection sappy love story, nightmare end of the world pile-up on Wilshire Blvd., and death by La Brea Tar Pit... it could be all too real."

And we'll see you, from June 2 to 5, at REDCAT.

Neil Young Poll

2011-05-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

Over here at The Misread City we've been spending a lot of time lately mulling on what makes West Coast music distinctive. We were hoping to launch a poll of best West Coast rock album (Forever Changes? Pet Sounds? Sweetheart of the Rodeo? Wild Gift?) but realized that for some artists there's no obvious best album.

Neil Young may be the most extreme case of this. The Canadian associated with Topanga Canyon, who has long since moved to the northern part of the state, has put out so many good records it's easy to get lost in his body of work. (There are also plenty of clunkers in the '80s.)

So this week we honor St. Neil with a poll of his finest albums. I struggled over which ones to include -- for various reasons it's hard to do these polls with more than four or five options. I added Everybody Knows this is Nowhere after some unrest. That's not only the first Crazy Horse record but the first Neil album I ever heard -- blasting from record store speakers -- that showed me a side of him I did not know from the stuff overplayed on AOR radio.

There are so many good Neil records -- though the unmistakably great ones seem to be clustered heavily, if not completely, in the early '70s -- that I've had to restrict this category to studio records. So if you're asking where Rust Never Sleeps -- a real breakthrough that sounds, to my ears, less fresh than it did years ago -- that and others are disqualified be they are at least in part live albums.

With a poll like this there are always a few that must be left off to keep voting concentrated, and I do regret that there was no room for the blistering Ragged Glory and others.

In any case --- you can vote for as many of these as you like. So whether you like your Neil mellow, electric, folky, grungy... just vote!

UPDATE ON JUNE 3: AFTER A TIE BETWEEN TWO LPS AND A TIE-BREAKING VOTE, AFTER THE GOLD RUSH IT IS!

West Coast jazz on the Internet

2011-05-20T14:48:00.000-07:00

FOR a jazz fan, Internet radio can be like going to one of those really bad mall food courts: Despite the superficial variety, much of what's served is awfully gooey. There are several "smooth" jazz stations for every one that plays real music. (This reflects, surely, the state of today's marketplace.) Commercial jazz radio us is not much better.

But from an airy modernist house in Palm Springs, a former IT manager from Boston runs a great little station, dedicated to the heyday of West Coast jazz, called Forever Cool. (You can also get it through iTunes.)

HERE is my piece on Keith Roberts and his station, which I highly recommend. More on it later.

Jo Nesbo and Nordic Noir

2011-05-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

FOR years now we've been hearing about a charismatic Norwegian crime writer whose novels were plotted with verve and driven by a weirdly compelling alcoholic detective. With the success of Stieg Larsson's Girl trilogy, the time may be ripe for Jo Nesbo, whose sometimes horrifying new novel, The Snowman, kicks ass.

I spoke to Nesbo from his home in Oslo recently for a profile in this Sunday's Los Angeles Times. We had a lot to talk about. Besides the writer Jim Thompson -- whose The Killer Inside Me inspired him to become a crime novelist -- Nesbo and this blog share an interest in American alt-country: He told me about a club in '80s Oslo that brought American cowpunk bands, and at least once, R.E.M., to town. (His novel namechecks Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and Willie Nelson.) He's also into graphic novelist Frank Miller.

Will Nesbo repeat the stateside success of Larsson, or even Henning Mankell? His publisher, Knopf, is certainly hoping so. When I asked Nesbo if he felt much in common with other Scandinavian noir writers, he told me, "Not really. I mean, they're writers. But not because they write crime of because they're Scandinavian. I do admire Karin Fossum -- she writes great prose, it's beautiful to read her. I think we're all very different writers. When I started writing crime fiction, I hadn't read any of the Swedish crime writers."

A lot of money rides on the question of whether American readers agree.

Nesbo is in LA next Tuesday.

Actor Roger Guenveur Smith

2011-05-17T06:09:00.000-07:00

TODAY I have a story in the LA Times on the actor Roger Guenveur Smith, who has acted in a number of Spike Lee movies and chronicled American -- and especially California -- history through his solo theater pieces.

One of them, Juan and John -- about a fight between Dodger John Roseboro and Giant Juan Marichal -- comes to the Kirk Douglas Theatre this week.

I'm traveling this week, so have to be brief... But HERE is my piece. Smith's work is smart and energetic and well worth checking out.

From Nick Drake to Spanish Guitar

2011-05-16T09:51:00.000-07:00

READERS of The Misread City know of this blog's fondness for the California-inspired English band The Clientele, who mix elements of British folk-rock with the West Coast pop of Love and The Mamas & The Papas. Since their wonderfully atmospheric and tuneful LP, Bonfires on the Heath, lead singer/guitarist Alasdair MacLean has been wondering about the next right step for his band, and he's now releasing the result of one of his side trips.

The new band is Amor de Dias -- led by Al and the Spanish artist Lupe Núñez-Fernández of the group Pipas, and their debut, Street of the Love of Days, comes out tomorrow. (Here is a video from it.)
They've got a similarly pastoral feel, though cut in some cases with downtempo electronica and Spanish guitar. The tour -- with Damon and Naomi -- comes to the West Coast from May 31 (Seattle) to June 5 (San Diego), with a June 4 date at LA's Satellite. (What we used to call Spaceland.)

MacLean is one of the indie world's best songwriters and a very fine, Tom Verlaine-influenced guitarist; we look forward to whatever he comes up with.

Will Amor spell the end of the Clientele, or will it give Al another direction for his dreamlike musings? Here's an interview exclusive with The Misread City.

What made you want to step outside the framework of The Clientele, a band that's recently released one of its best records and has gradually accumulated a decent audience in the States, with this new combo Amor de Dias?

Audience sizes and good reviews don't mean anything if you've run out

of inspiration. With the Clientele I felt that I had no new ideas.

That was the sign to take a break really. Amor de Dias was going on at

the same time and it was less pressure, more about fun; we didn't have

a record contract initially, so if the recording had gone badly we

could have quietly buried it and walked away. I think you can hear us

having fun on the record.

The Clientele seems to be coming out of Nick Drake and Marquee Moon, with maybe some French symbolism thrown in... What are the compass points for Amor de Dias?

Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa definitely; that side of bossa nova.

Spanish guitars. Some spooky folk music like Trees. New, more

percussive and complicated rhythms. Vocal harmonies. Painters of the

English countryside like Paul Nash and Samuel Palmer. Surrealist poet

Robert Desnos. An odd mixture I guess!

The album's title, The Street of the Love of Days has a funny and accidental origin. Can you remind us where the title comes from?

Yeah, me walking down a Madrid street called Calle de Amor de Dios. I

think I'm being really clever cos I can translate it: oh my, this

street is called "Street of the Love of Days". How poetic and

beautiful! Only I got "Dios" and "Dias" mixed up. it's actually called

"Street of the Love of God". All my Spanish friends shook their heads

at me, but the name stuck anyway.

Some or your earliest training was in classical and Spanish guitar, I think?

Yes I got to grade 6 in classical guitar as a kid. It affected my

technique as a guitarist a lot. I still think Spanish guitars are the

most beautiful musical instruments.

Your tour -- much of which is with perfect match Damon and Naomi, who geezers like me remember from Galaxie 500 -- takes you to some unconventional spaces, and you've played spots like old Victorian bandstands with your other group. How does playing an atypical venue change the experience for you, and for the audience?

With the Clientele it was a Victorian bandstand on a January day, the

wind strafing our poor frozen fingers. But I love that kind of thing.

Variety is the spice of life and all that. And we have friends to

suffer with us this time!

What's next for both sides of the Al MacLean Experience -- the Clientele and Amor de Dias?

With Amor de Dias we've been working on some longer, more experimental

pieces. Kind of improvised John Fahey-esque guitar things. And Lupe

has a great love for obscure disco records which will probably come to

the fore in some way. Oddly enough I can see us becoming a little more

lo-fi. But that might just be a passing fancy.

The Clientele is a difficult one. I think the most positive strategy

will be to try and save up songs here and there as the years go on,

count them up one by one until we have a really great body of work to

come back with. Something which almost writes itself.

New History of Jazz

2011-05-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

WEST Coast culture vultures know the name Ted Gioia for his fabulous West Coast Jazz, which looked at the scenes in LA and San Francisco starting with Dexter Gordon on Central Avenue and moving through the cool school and Dave Brubeck. Not only is the book a great read, it provoked a reconsideration of what was then a criminally overlooked time and place.

Gioia -- who has since written a very lucid book on the Delta blues and started blogs on science fiction and the detective novel -- comes out later this month with the second edition of Oxford University Press's History of Jazz. It lacks some of the rowdy, contrarian energy of James Lincoln Collier's The Story of Jazz, but it's a masterful and fair-minded work of compression and brings the art form right up to the present day.

The Misread City spoke to Gioia -- who grew up on the edge of Los Angeles and spent most of his life in California before somehow being fooled into moving to Texas -- about his latest project.

What were the existing jazz histories like when you launched on the your original History of Jazz for Oxford in the ‘90s? What did you think you could add?

When I took on the task of writing the first edition of The History of Jazz, the most recent general jazz history book in Oxford University Press’s catalog was Marshall Stearns's The Story of Jazz—which had been published before I was born. That book had been fine it is day, but a lot had happened in the jazz world since it first appeared.

And even Stearns’s book, for all its virtues, was quirky. He started his survey by looking at African music, and a third of the way into his book he is still stuck in Africa, trying to find a way to link up with American jazz. He seemed intent on explaining jazz in terms of other styles rather than on its own merits. It was in deliberate response to his approach that I began my book with a description of African music played in the New World—literally within the city limits of New Orleans back in the early 19th century. No leap was necessary because I started out at ground zero, at the birthplace for jazz, and drew the connections from that nexus point.

Needless to say, I had paid close attention to the other jazz surveys—by James Lincoln Collier, Mark Gridley, Joachim Berendt and the like. But I also carefully studied the works of critics and scholars, such as Martin Williams, Gary Giddins, Whitney Balliett, Gunther Schuller and others. I learned from all these sources, but also had my own perspectives to add. In fact, as I progressed in my writing, I was surprising myself by how fully formed many of my ideas were—almost as if I had been preparing subconsciously to write this book for many years. I suspect that my work as a musician played a key role in shaping my thoughts on various aspects of the jazz idiom—perhaps even more than the research I undertook as a jazz historian.

How do you put together a moderate-length history of something as sprawling and -- after the death of Charlie Parker, at least -- multi-headed as jazz?

I had already written a book on West Coast jazz at the time, and had learned some skills in how to pull together a coherent story when writing a genre survey. The biggest difficulty in writing this kind of book is in maintaining the narrative flow. You need to bring together all the individual stories and biographies and contributions into a coherent story. It can’t just be a compendium, but needs a broader sweep. You must control the subject, or it will control you. My ideal is to write non-fiction that moves ahead as deftly as a novel—perhaps an unrealizable goal, but always my desired end point. I’m probably different from other music writers in that regard.

In any event, I suspect that it was my success with West Coast Jazz that gave my editor at Oxford, Sheldon Meyer, the confidence to assign me a general jazz history. I was originally planning to write a biography of Stan Getz, when Sheldon asked me to write a jazz history survey instead. He realized that the Stearns book needed a replacement, and thought I could deliver it. I was amazed that he turned to me, especially given my comparative youth and the many other fine jazz writers on the Oxford roster at the time. This was the first—and only—time I my life that I wrote a book on assignment. But it didn’t feel like an assignment. As I mentioned, it seemed like I had been prepping for just this project.

I tried to apply what I had learned in writing West Coast Jazz in the context of the new project. In particular, I paid great attention to the quality and pacing of the writing. I've always felt that the prose style and panache of my books are as important as the informational content. So I worked hard on the writing. And I listened to lots and lots of music—but that part of work is always a pleasure. Writing, in contrast, can be hard work.

So, in an odd way, the key issues for me in addressing this complex subject had little to do with music. They related to controlling the pacing of the story and writing strong sentences and paragraphs.

How is this second edition different from the 1997 edition?

I knew I needed to update the book to deal with all the new developments in the music. A lot has happened in jazz during the last 15 years—indeed, a lot has happened to the whole music industry! But I also used this opportunity to revise the entire text. I went sentence by sentence through the original edition, and made countless changes. Sometimes these were based on new information that had come to light or on my own personal research. In other instances, I just wanted to improve the writing. Or I had new ideas I wanted to share with the readers. The end result is much different and—I hope—much better book than the 1997 edition.

Did any period or artist become more intriguing to you the second time around?

Some artists didn't get sufficient attention in the earlier edition of my book. There is more in the new edition on women in jazz. More on drummers, such as Chick Webb and Elvin Jones. More on some musicians whose influence has expanded posthumously, such as Andrew Hill. The section on the blues is much improved—due to the research I undertook for my recent Delta Blues book. But the casual reader may not notice many of these shifts. Sometimes the simple change of a word or phrase indicates the culmination of a long process of reevaluation on my part.

When you take the long view – from the ring dances in slave-era New Orleans, to, say, Miles from India in 2008 – what is the role of the West Coast in the music’s evolution?

Generally the West Coast is written about as a small sidebar in the history of jazz. But you can make the case that the West Coast played a much bigger role than most jazz fans realize. The very word "jazz" apparently comes from California, and the music itself arrived on the West Coast very soon after it appeared in New Orleans. Many significant events in the evolution and commercialization of jazz took place out West, for example the birth of the Swing Era. Many of the best bebop recordings were made in California—those Charlie Parker Dial sides may be the most important jazz recordings of the mid-1940s. I also tend to believe that hard bop—seen by most critics as the quintessential East Coast style—was deeply shaped by the residency of Max Roach and Clifford Brown in the LA area. They brought elements of West Coast jazz into their music that eventually were imitated by the Blue Note artists. Add to this the many great artists associated with West Coast jazz, and you can make a convincing case for the centrality of jazz from this part of the country. Or at least as something more than a footnote to jazz history.

It must have been especially tricky to compress the present and future of jazz into a 20-page chapter, here called “Jazz in the New Millennium.”

Well, I do cheat a little. I slip in quite a bit of new millennium jazz into the other chapters —when the subject fit into the narrative flow-- so I didn't need to cover all of it in that one section. By the time I deal with the current century, I have already addressed free jazz, postmodern jazz, the ECM sound, Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center, modern big bands, etc.—and you can't do that and stop the story at 1999. So that final chapter looks more at some over-arching themes, with much of the foundation for it set earlier in the book. That said, the author of a book of this sort needs to constantly squeeze and compress. This is especially challenging when dealing with the last decade, and I needed to make judgment calls about many artists still in the early stages of their careers, such as Darcy James Argue or Miguel Zenon or Jason Moran. Time will tell how well I have assessed the current scene.

How bright does that future seem?

The music is in great shape. Every week I hear outstanding new jazz recordings. The audience is a different story. The biggest challenge the jazz world faces right now is to develop the next generation of jazz fans. There are more fine jazz musicians than ever before—contrary to what you may have heard—but fewer listeners.

The Misread City at Festival of Books

2011-04-28T15:13:00.000-07:00

THIS weekend your humble blogger will be around the LA Times Festival of Books at USC... That is, if I don't accidentally end up at UCLA.

I'll be there both days, and on Sunday at 3 p.m. will moderate a panel on authors with backgrounds in music. The panel -- I don't name these things, folks, is called "A New Chord: From Stage to Page."

My three panelist:

Nathan Larson was lead guitarist for Shudder to Think - one of the key bands on Dischord Records -- and has since written the scores to the films Boys Don't Cry, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Messenger. His novel, The Dewey Decimal System (Akashic), is tense, taught and set in a post-apocalyptic New York: It's been compared to Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and the work of Philip K. Dick.

Rob Roberge is a longtime L.A. writer and musician; he plays guitar in punk pioneers The Urinals. The short stories in Working Backwards From the Worst Moment of My Life are often fragmented or defined by wild leaps. Steve Almond calls him "a modern master of the down-and-out-that-just-got-worse." He's also working on a memoir about his life in music: Excerpt here.

Kristin Hersh is known to many readers of The Misread City for her years in Throwing Muses, one of the key bands of the '80s alternative movement. (They played my alma mater the weekend I was a prospective student, in 1987, so they will always have a place in my heart.) Her memoir, Rat Girl, is based on diaries she took as a teenager and the year, as a bohemian musician, she was diagnosed bipolar.

Like her songs, Hersh's book is so vivid in its imagery it can be uncomfortable at times. "But Rat Girl is also a startlingly funny and touching memoir... a gripping journey into mental chaos and out the other side."

On that inspiring note... See you all at UCLA; er, I mean, USC!

Cameron Carpenter, Classical Wild Man

2011-04-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

THE young organist Cameron Carpenter is a thinker, a talker, a rebel and a nearly androgynous figure in white jeans -- I think of him as a cross between '50s Glenn Gould and '70s David Bowie. He makes other classical iconoclasts I know -- Jeremy, for instance -- seem middle of the road.

I spoke to Carpenter for the Los Angeles Times Influences column, which I am taking over for a while. When I told him I wanted him to talk about artists who've shaped him who don't play his chosen instrument, he said he was happy to stray from the organ, which he thinks is in the grip of a new kind of orthodoxy and conservatism. “I’m all about taking things out of the organ,” he says, “and the organ out of things.”

My interview with the be-sequined Carpenter, who is a very physical performer and feels more connection to silent-movie players than church organists, is HERE.

Here is Mark Swed's review from what sounds like a completely insane show in a church last spring.

Carpenter plays a recital of Brahms pieces next Sunday, May 8, at Disney Hall.

Composer Peter Lieberson, RIP

2011-04-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

IT"S easy to recall the rude good health with which Peter Lieberson, a serene and gracious Santa Fe-based composer who was in town for a new piece with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, greeted me in 2005.

Peter Lieberson, 1946-2011

We spoke about the poetry of Neruda -- the inspiration for his latest piece -- his range of classical influences, the music of jazz pianist Bill Evans, his interest in Buddhism and his father Goddard's leadership of Columbia Records. The composer's wife, the heavenly mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, came to the door to say a brief but loving hello to him. Here, I thought at the time, is a handsome, cool guy with a searching mind and a wife of unparalleled talent -- he seemed to have it made.

In just over a year, Lorraine had died from breast cancer. Peter would soon be diagnosed with cancer himself, and he passed away Saturday in Tel Aviv, where he was undergoing treatment for lymphoma. He was 64.

HERE is my piece from the LA Times, just before the 2005 world premiere of "Neruda Songs." And here is an excerpt from my story:

Over lunch in an artist's suite at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Lieberson describes himself as a kind of conscientious objector in the wars that have long wracked the classical music world.

Pablo Neruda

"This is a battle that no longer needs to be fought," he says, describing the still-smoldering fight between academic 12-tone composers and the minimalists and other mavericks who oppose them. "There was something to it; there were a lot of people hurt in the '60s and '70s. But I don't think it's necessary to keep re-creating the struggle."

Rarely does an interview subject make the impression on me that Peter Lieberson did. I'm not the only one who will miss him.

Conference for Aspiring Musicians

2011-04-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

NEXT week ASCAP will hold a conference dedicated to beginning and mid-career musicians and songwriters: The I Create Music Expo, held at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel, will school them in the business side of things and in staying afloat during a very tough time in the industry. It's an especially tough time for aesthetes and introverts: The current climate requires a strong degree of self-promotion.

HERE is my story from The Hollywood Reporter. It's only online for subscribers, but that may change this week. (Here's the conference website.)

Speakers, panelists and so on range from hacks to middle or the roaders to eccentric talents like Van Dyke Parks and Pharrell Williams.

My story, which includes an interview with diminutive songwriter Paul Williams, who currently heads the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers begins this way:

Music and song- writing typically attract idealists who love melody, harmony and the creative process. Navigating the business, however, requires pragmatism and discipline, and in these unstable times, striking the right balance can be a challenge.

Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere" on DVD

2011-04-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

EVERYTHING was nicely lined up -- and then the sky started falling.

“The week before the filming was about to start,” Sofia Coppola recounts, “the studio changed the deal, and it fell through. And my dad came to the rescue; our French distributor got involved… But it was really nerve-wracking. It’s stressful enough, already, making your first film.” Who needs a funding disaster on top of it?

Luckily, the nightmare that preceded Coppola’s debut, The Virgin Suicides, did not repeat itself with, her latest, the ethereal, intimate Somewhere, which comes out on DVD today.

The new film, about a reckless, disoriented actor (Stephen Dorff) who drifts through life at the Chateau Marmont before a restorative visit from his 11-year-old daughter, went much more smoothly.

“It often requires a star actor,” the film’s producer Roman Coppola (and the director’s brother) says of funding for indies. “But in Sofia’s case, she has an identity and a fan-base and a cachet. So there’s a core group of people she’s worked with before, and there was a lot of loyalty.” (It didn’t hurt, of course, that Roman and Sofia co-own American Zoetrope, the San Francisco-based studio founded by their father, Francis Ford Coppola.)

“I think it’s always a challenge, especially if you don’t have a huge star,” Sofia Coppola says. “But luckily I have strong relationships with our French distributor and our Japanese distributor.” Foreign presales – along with initial funding from Zoetrope -- gave her money to get the production going, and she later landed Focus, who had distributed Lost in Translation.

Securing early financing overseas was a natural strategy for this film: “It has more of the pacing and feeling of European films,” she says. “So it made sense that we started with a French distributor because it’s more connected to their film history.”

Says producer G. Mac Brown: “I normally do rather large budget features, filled with complexities, stress and ego. Somewhere was the opposite. From the beginning, Sofia's wish was to have the most intimate and pure film making process possible. There was no studio, no boss, no distractions. It was a dream.”

For all the deserved praise earned by Elle Fanning, who plays the visiting daughter, the heart of the movie is Dorff, a longtime friend of Coppola’s and someone who came to mind very early in the film’s conception. “The starting point was this portrait of an actor,” named Johnny Marco, who’s had an international hit with a generic action film called Berlin Agenda.

“I felt like he had been really successful doing some movie he didn’t care about,” she says. “So he wasn’t feeling that good about himself as an artist. He’d had his success but was indulging – so his life was out of balance.”

Getting a bigger name – Dorff is probably best known for Blade, from 1998 despite a more than respectable career that also includes Backbeat and Public Enemies -- would have allowed her to draw a larger budget, but she was dedicated to him playing the lead role.

After the sumptuousness of Marie Antoinette, this one is pretty stripped down: Many of the shots comprise either Dorff alone in the hotel or Dorff with Fanning. “My starting point is always to try to make it as small and low-budget as possible so we can keep creative freedom -- and get it made. Everybody says it’s harder and harder to get unusual movies made.”

“Sofia’s film is kind of an anomaly,” says Roman Coppola, who points out that it’s taken two decades to get the adaptation of On the Road, directed by Walter Salles and produced by Frances Ford Coppola, ready for the camera. “It’s a very tricky climate,” he says, “and it’s a matter of finding partners who are in sync with you.”

“It’s rare – and I think it shows,” in his sister’s new film, he continues. “There’s a lightness. The mood in which a film is made imbues itself into the movie. There wasn’t tearing your hair out the night before.”

The soul of an artist is rarely entirely smooth, and Coppola says she had moments of doubt. “It’s always stressful, waiting to hear from financers, or from actors. I’m sure there were things I blocked out, like childbirth. We needed to forge ahead.”

Overall she says, “Every time I start a movie it’s scary because I’m doing something I haven’t done before. But now I have enough experience to know you get through it. It always looks like it won’t come together. But it does.”

Record Store Day 2011

2011-04-15T11:21:00.000-07:00

TOMORROW, Saturday, is dedicated to an endangered species that had an important role in raising yours truly: the humble record shop. Record Store Day was launched in 2007 to recognize and help preserve independent shops, which have taken a serious beating from the economy, predatory chains and the music's shift online.

The holiday includes various live events, sales, cookouts, and so on. (Check out that website and the ones run by your favorite store.) Here is a post by an old friend about Providence-area record stores.

Anyone who loves a record store -- and these days Amoeba Hollywood, Rockaway Records in Silverlake and Pasadena's Canterbury are some of my favorites -- knows that the experience of visiting one is much richer than calling up iTunes or dropping into a typical mall store. One of the key differences is the clerks at a good record store.

Two of the favorite pieces I've ever written are these two, about classical and pop music clerks. One of the stores I wrote about -- Tower Classical on Sunset, which had some of the spirit of an indie spirit despite being part of a chain -- has since closed.

I'll see you at the record store...

The Sitar and Abstract Art

2011-04-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

RECENTLY I spoke to Anoushka Shankar, daughter of sitar legend Ravi Shankar, about her influences across the artistic genres. Some of her answers did not surprise me -- she mentioned her father, saying, "Having taught me from my very first day playing the sitar, he's shaped my technique, style and sound." Others, like abstract painter Mark Rothko, were less obvious: She talked about the connection between color and spirit.

Anoushka is part of a The Disney Hall concert in honor of her father's 90th birthday; previously scheduled for next week, it has been postponed to September.

HERE is my piece on the younger Shankar -- half-sister to Norah Jones, by the way -- in today's LA Times.

British Sea Power invades the West Coast

2011-04-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

JUST a quick note to say that I remain convinced that British Sea Power is one of the best live bands from the dreary isle. Your humble blogger has caught the Brighton band on all three of its Los Angeles appearances -- two at Spaceland and now last night's at the Troubadour.

The goofy faux-military costumes are gone, but their blend of early '70s Bowie and early '80s is stronger than ever. The band's propulsive rhythms are matched by disciplined, precise guitar playing (except for in the proggy, overlong finale.) Every member of the group really pulls his/her weight. (Is the violinist, whose instrument seems tuned to the intonations from My Bloody Valentine's Loveless LP, a recent addition?)

Their best songs may still mostly be on their debut record, The Decline of British Sea Power, but the live show, I think, has just gotten better. Can't wait to see the lads again.

Here they are playing "Carrion."

USC Historian Discovers Witches (and Vampires)

2011-04-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

WHEN I heard that a USC professor had written a bestselling vampire novel I thought, This sounds like what the English call a train-jumper -- someone who latches onto a trend, half-heartedly and after the fact.

Boy was I wrong. Deborah Harkness is the real thing, and her novel, A Discovery of Witches, comes out of her scholarship on the shift from the supernatural medieval period to the rational, Newtonian Enlightenment. The book is set in contemporary Oxford, but has this -- and many other -- currents running through it.

HERE is my LA Times profile of Harkness, who is working on the second book of what's conceived as a trilogy. Lovers or Tolkien and Pullman, don't say nobody told you.

Her wine blog, Good Wine Under $20, worth checking out too.

Is Gen X an Afterthought?

2011-04-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

THE new issue of MOJO magazine has a cover story on the 25th anniversary of the Smiths' The Queen is Dead LP, an article on the 20th of Primal Scream's influential Screamadelica record, and another on a reunion tour by Mick Jones' Big Audio Dynamite.

It's a great issue, of course, of our favorite music magazine. But it also feels like the Gen X teenage years have now been fully commodified and sold back to us.

Perhaps the most rabid and persuasive generational warrior I know is SoCal-reared journalist Jeff Gordiner, who I've interviewed on subjects ranging from contemporary poetry to the Pavement reunion to the novels of Bret Eason Ellis.

Gordinier's book X Saves the World is well worth a look: HERE is my interview with Gordinier, who has recently stormed the New York Times Dining section with a batch of witty, intelligent stories including a memorable piece on veggie burgers.

Here's how my story begins:

These days, with a recession on the way, housing prices tanking, the Dow out of control and an unpopular war that won't seem to end, a lot of Americans are feeling uneasy and confused. Recent surveys show a majority think the nation is on what pollsters call "the wrong track."

For Jeff Gordinier, the author of the new book "X Saves the World" and an editor at large for Details magazine, it's actually kind of reassuring. "I find a strange degree of comfort in it," the writer said serenely at Pasadena's Pie 'n' Burger, a legendary diner near his hometown of San Marino. His Generation X origins, he said, make it hard for him to trust the good times.

And here is Jeff on his book:

The Beatles in Hamburg -- on Record

2011-03-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

OF the many great shows your humble blogger attended last year, one of the very finest was a performance by Bambi Kino, a kind of indie-rock supergroup formed to pay tribute to the Beatles ragged, rockabilly-loving years in Hamburg.

The show, at Echo Park's Taix, was full of so much energy and musical invention (Guided by Voices' guitarist Doug Gillard was especially inspired that night) it made The Misread City crave a document of this quartet's triumph. (Here for my earlier post on Bambi Kino and its mission.)

So I'm happy to report that this group -- made up of members of Catpower, GbV, Nada Surf and Maplewood -- has just released an album, recorded at Hamburg's Indra Club, that captures the spirit of its shows quite well. It's made up, of course, of the music the Beatles were playing in 1960 and '61 -- Chuck Berry's "Talking About You," Buddy Holly's "Crying Waiting Hoping," Johnny Kidd's "Shakin' All Over" -- played with the roughness and speed of the leather-jacketed Liverpudlians.

Rhythm guitartist/singer Mark Rozzo, a longtime friend of The Misread City, recently chronicled Hamburg's current scene for the New York Times magazine. Rozzo laughs at the irony of his band -- which sometimes plays as much as 60 songs a night and put on a marathon show at Taix -- putting out a succinct, 12-song LP.

Courtesy The New Yorker

"We didn't want to do any song that ever appeared on a Beatles studio album and we wanted to include a couple of numbers the Beatles were known to have performed but never recorded at all. Meaning, they were never used for auditions or BBC radio shows or were never bootlegged. Those would be 'Wild Cat,' by Gene Vincent, 'Ramrod,' a Duane Eddy instrumental they apparently used when they backed strippers, and 'Shakin' All Over,' by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, a big hit in the UK in 1960 that also happened to be Pete Best's audition number. They were almost certainly playing all of those numbers at the Indra Club in 1960. We also wanted to make sure everyone had a chance to sing a couple of numbers.

He calls the songs "all insanely fun" to play live.

"Specifically of the 12 on the album, I'd have to nominated 'Some Other Guy,' because it's our traditional lead-off number and just says so much about Bambi Kino as well as what the Beatles were about in the early days. 'Besame Mucho' is a riot to play; so much going on and it's all so goofy and it also totally rocks. Erik just nails the singing on that one. Maybe 'Ramrod,' because it's such a stomping instrumental and Doug does something amazing on it every time we play it. 'Shot of Rhythm and Blues' I like because that's one number where you see every single person in the club kind bobbing up and down, rocking out."

(Here they are, by the way, playing "Slow Down," a song not on the album.)

What's the future of Bambi Kino, Mark?

"The future is the past!" he says. "Let's see... we've got a residency lined up at Bowery Electric in New York for April and then a probable return to Hamburg at some point in 2011. There are more 50th anniversaries on the way, of course. One thing: I don't ever see us putting on suits and wigs and Beatle boots. But we'd like to keep this going for a couple of years and try to learn another 100 songs or so. "

Elizabeth Taylor's vs. The Hayes Code

2011-03-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

THE writer M.G. Lord, a longtime friend of The Misread City, has a wonderful, counter-intuitive piece on Elizabeth Taylor, especially the films Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Butterfield 8, in the brand-new issue of The Hollywood Reporter. For your humble blogger -- who belongs to a generation for whom Taylor was best-known for big hair and serial divorces -- the piece was an eye opener.

The story begin this way:

On June 10, 1966, Life magazine did one of its many cover stories on Elizabeth Taylor. Far from her usual smoldering beauty, she looked puffy, haggard, decades older than her 34 years. “Liz in a Shocker,” the headline proclaimed. “Her movie shatters the rules of censorship.”

The movie, of course, was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — a scorching drama adapted from Edward Albee’s acclaimed Broadway play. Its frank, gritty language brazenly violated the Production Code, rigid guidelines that had dictated the content of American movies since 1934.

Lord, of couse, is the author of the cultural study Forever Barbie, the Cold War memoir Astro Turf, and the upcoming How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. (She's also a die-hard, if not uncritical, fan of sf writer Robert Heinlein.)

This week I'm working as a guest editor at the Reporter and I'm proud to have had a (very) small role in the latest issue. Despite my involvement, there's a lot of good stuff -- smart review of The Kennedys, which sounds like a disaster, sharp profile of new boss of Lifetime -- in there this week.

And just up on the site today, Friday, a smart story on the rise of the Telenovela that I helped edit.

Novelist Jonathan Kellerman

2011-03-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

AFTER many years as a child psychologist, and more than a decade of rejection slips for his literary endeavors, Jonathan Kellerman discovered a Ross MacDonald novel at a going-out-of-business sale.

Photo by Blake Little

That was about 30 years ago, and this week, Kellerman publishes the latest in his series of Alex Delaware crime thrillers. This one, Mystery, starts with the leveling of an old hotel in Beverly Hills and ventures into Internet prostitution and a whole nasty cast of characters.

I have an interview with Kellerman in today's LA Times in which he talks about his early years, his struggle to get published, his new book, how he stays so productive, and a family that includes authors Faye Kellerman and Aliza and Jesse Kellerman.

Kellerman pere was pleasantly suprised by his success, saying that the movies he likes don't make money. "I don't have commercial tastes."

The author also has a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book, With Strings Attached, on his other passion: vintage guitars. He's played since he was a teenager, and these days concentrates mostly on classical guitar, especially Bach.

Finally, several people I spoke to called Jesse Kellerman, a playwright and thriller writer of a more explicitly literary bent than his parents, the most talented of the bunch. Jesse, who is in his early 30s and lives in San Diego, said he gets tired of these comparisons. "But if I didn't want to listen to them," he told me, "I would have gone to law school."

Elizabeth Taylor in Big Sur

2011-03-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

IT'S hardly a great movie, and it seems quite square and timid in its embrace of what we now know as "the '60s" -- art, bohemia, individualism. But I'll never forget Elizabeth Taylor's role in The Sandpiper and those great shots of the Big Sur Coast -- perhaps this blog's favorite West Coast locale.

Liz plays a free-spirited singled mother, with raffish friends, and nearly bursts out every scene.

Richard Burton (as the headmaster of an Episcopalian boarding school) is great too.

Here is a bit on the film.

Rest in Peace, Elizabeth Taylor.

Remembering Jazz Guitarist Lenny Breau

2011-03-23T14:36:00.000-07:00

COULD one of the most inventive and technically gifted jazz guitarist of the last half century be an obscure Canadian raised by country musicians? That's what I often think listening to the mighty Lenny Breau.

Readers of this blog know that we try to uncover West Coast culture overlooked by the rest of the nation's media and critical establishment, and Breau was an overlooked West Coast artist par excellence.

Breau’s first professional recordings, The Hallmark Sessions, with their mix of fingerstyle jazz and Spanish guitar, were made 50 years ago (more on that excellent starting point later.) Much of his career took place in California, as well as his untimely end: He was found mysteriously drowned in a swimming pool -- shades of a less posh Sunset Boulevard -- in Los Angeles in 1984; he was only 43. The cause of death may've been drug-related, it may have been strangulation: In any case, it remains unsolved.

As a young man, Breau had gigged a bit in Canada – The Hallmark Sessions featured Levon Helm and Rick Danko of The Band as his rhythm section -- but he was discovered for the wider world by Chet Atkins, an early influence. Breau never entirely lost the twang in his playing, but his style was expanded in a vast and emotionally complex way by the innovations of pianists Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock: He shared their abstract, post-bop approach and blended it with a technical precision that recalls the great Tal Farlow. (Breau and Farlow have a very fine live album, Chance Meeting, that's easy to find online; Breau and Atkins recorded an album together that never made it to CD; here they play "Sweet George Brown" -- you can hear Lenny's wild harmonics.)

So why haven't you heard of him? Despite two decades as a serious jazz fan, I had barely heard of Breau until music writer Ted Gioia turned me on to him, and he's not listed in many record guides and jazz histories. Here are my speculations.

First of all, Breau was Canadian, which puts him at a tangent to a jazz tradition that tends to be centered in New York and several other East Coast cities. (Here is a very young Lenny on a Canadian TV show.)

The fact that he moved to LA -- perhaps the most critically maligned and misunderstood jazz center in history -- didn't help. He had limited connections to the fervor (and critical press) in New York. (And with a few exceptions, such as periods when Wes Montgomery and George Benson were popular, jazz guitar exists at a tangent to the jazz tradition as well, though that’s another post.)

Second, he was a serious drug addict, with a special taste for heroin. This derailed his career at certain key points.

Third, he was not particularly interested in free jazz or fusion, but in the more contemplative and impressionistic sound world of Bill Evans. St. Bill is very influential today, but to some tastemakers and musicians, he was out of step with jazz history.

But any music fan who listens to The Hallmark Sessions – made by a fresh-faced young man of 20 -- will hear his melodic gift and harmonic daring. This early recording, lost for decades, shows his range: country/western songs (“Cannonball Rag”), Spanish and Brazilian classical guitar (“Taranta”), and jazz standards (“I’ll Remember April.”) That last song has dizzying spiral runs and a Rollins-like sardonic tone that does not trash the song’s frisky beauty. It was the song that convinced me of the guitarist’s genius: No matter how fast or non-linear his playing gets, it nearly always serves an emotional or narrative purpose.

Here musicians from Benson to Metheny to the Police's Andy Summers talk about Breau.

It’s both a cause and effect of Breau’s elusiveness that his work has had trouble staying in print. But a label, Art of Life, was formed in the ‘90s with the primary purpose of reissuing his music. (And the Living Room sessions, recorded in '78 and also released posthumously) should perhaps be second on your list. There is a post-Coltrane side to Breau, some of which you can hear on this one, including his intricate take on McCoy Tyner's "Visions.")

By the end of his life, the handsome lad from Canada had come to resemble, in some photographs, a demonic, beret-wearing Frenchman, and his musical choices were not consistently strong. But Breau’s is a career that every jazz lover or guitar enthusiast should be grateful for.

LA Band Spain, and a Celebrity Fan

2011-03-18T10:10:00.000-07:00

THE other night I was lucky enough to catch a short, hypnotic set by Spain, the Los Angeles "slowcore" band that's now back together and starting to appear in low-key shows around town. (The last time I saw them they played at tiny but wonderful Origami Vinyl in Echo Park.)

In any case, the show itself was both completely gripping and without any surprising jolts: Mellow songs with a brooding shimmer, the ghost of country music evident in some of the chord changes, incisive guitar lines, and about evenly split between darkly romantic songs from the band's '90s heyday and new songs including "I'm Still Free," recently released as a single. (We were especially impressed with "I Lied" the band's last song, "Untitled #1," from its first album, though it made us wonder how much better the song would be if it had a real name.)

The Misread City is a longtime fan of this group -- here is some of what I've said before about this band, headed by Josh Haden -- so we were delighted to see that despite the poor showing of this barely publicized gig, one of the great arbiters of Southland music was rocking to the show in dark overcoat: Actor Jack Black.

Black, of course, is married to one of Haden's musical sisters -- they are all descended from great jazz bassist Charlie Haden -- so maybe this was family obligation. But somehow I don't think so.

Your humble blogger has far too good manners to approach a Hollywood celebrity who has strayed into a public place, but his appearance made us recall his peerless role in High Fidelity, one of the great rock music films ever made.

In this scene, Black's character Barry gives a clueless customer a brisk musical lesson, and continues on the record-shop owner played by John Cusack. As you can tell from this clip, Black's taste is quite exacting: A major vote of confidence indeed for the band Spain.

One note: Silver Lake's The Satellite, where the show was held seems to be quite similar to Spaceland, the club it replaced. This is no complaint: The place falls into the if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it category. Long may it thrive, under whatever name.

Long Beach Opera on the Edge

2011-03-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

WHEN you do what I do, you hear a lot of arts advocates and administrators talk about "reaching out," finding "new audiences," "making connections," and so on, and it gets tiresome. In part that's because it seems so calculated, in part because it usually means watering down programming to make it safer and more familiar.

LBO's next opera: Philip Glass's "Akhnaten"

But Andreas Mitisek, the Austrian conductor who runs Long Beach Opera, has revived the fortunes of the once- struggling little company by redoubling his commitment to its avant-garde point of view. Whether he's putting on opera in swimming pools or furniture stores, or offering premieres of new and challenging work, he's found -- and grown -- and audience that will follow him.

One of his goals, ironically, is to make audiences uncomfortable. “The very first time I suggested doing opera in parking garage, there was some eyebrow raising,” he says of “The Diary of Ann Frank.” “But the response shows it was the right place for the right piece.”

HERE is my piece from Sunday's LA Times on this remarkable group's past and future.