The Misread City

I JUST finished a very intriguing Louis Menand piece on culture critic Dwight Macdonald and the notion of middlebrow. (For those Easterners ...

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 s...

THE Ferus Gallery is probably the most famous gallery in the history of Los Angeles – the site of Warhol’s first-ever solo show, obscenity ...

LIKE a lot of people, I knew the reputation of Eyes on the Prize , the famous documentary about the civil rights movement in the Deep South ...

NOT long ago, I attended a lively discussion at LA's Book Soup about the origins and demise of cool. Ted Gioia , the author of "...

IF laurie anderson was a parisian-born octo-genarian theater pioneer she might be rachel rosenthal. for rosenthal -- to whom many figures o...

ONE of the fascinating things about literature -- especially popular literature -- is the way it tracks the contours of the society that pro...

This blog has held two recent polls, which i've been meaning to report back on. the first was on "best audrey hepburn film." ...

MORE proof that my taste hasn't changed much since i was 20 is tomorrow's LAT piece on miles davis's "kind of blue" re...

It's been a very hard year or so for major writers -- we lost norman mailer near the end of 07, david foster wallace last year and now, ...

....here is a piece i wrote for my good friend david daley, who is an editor at the Louisville paper and runs the cool fiction site "f...