The Misread City

THE other day I spoke to the former leader of what may've been the greatest band of the '90s -- Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. Their m...

WHEN I sat down with all four members of the Shins around the time their Chutes Too Narrow album came out, I was already a big fan of the b...

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...

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 t...

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 hav...

ONE of our favorite places, here at The Misread City, is Portland, Ore., and as much as we love the walkable neighborhoods, the groovy coffe...

The Believer's Music Issue, out this summer, has a substantial interview with Robert Forster, co-founder of one of my all-time favorite...

FIRST of all, I'm awfully pleased that one of my favorite working bands -- the Austin/ Portland combo Spoon -- has been voted the decad...

We seem to be in the grip of a full-scale beer renaissance here in LA. It's taken a while to get here -- as beer expert Hallie Beaune ...

TODAY one of the most innovative and intriguing writers in the english language marks her 80th birthday. there aren't many novelists wh...

YESTERDAY would have been the 40st birthday of elliott smith, perhaps the finest songwriter of my generation, and a musician who killed him...

SOMEHOW, without quite knowing it, i wrote two brief pieces on ursula le guin, and both have recently gone up. the first is mostly an exten...

ONE of the greatest thrills of my professional life was the chance to interview the novelist ursula le guin last summer at her home in  port...