"Creative Destruction" Announcement

GANG, yesterday the Los Angeles news/media website LA Observed made the first public announcement of the book that grows out of my Salon series. Here it is.

The book's working title is Creative Destruction: How the 21st Century is Killing the Creative Class, and Why It Matters.

There's a lot up on the LAObs post, so I'll leave that to explain the project. (Here are links to individual parts of the creative class series as well as my interview on Studio 360 With Kurt Andersen.)

I should add that the photo of yours truly was taken by Steven Dewall, a photographer I've long been acquainted with who will have at least an occasional presence here on The Misread City.

Please stay tuned.

The Long Shadow of John Cage

ONE hundred years ago today, a child was born in Los Angeles who would go on to... well, what exactly was Cage's impact anyway? I've been trying to figure that out since I studied experimental music at Wesleyan two decades ago.

Whatever it is, part of what interests me about Cage is how his influence -- ideas like indeterminacy, his reworking of certain Asian ideas including the Tao, prepared instruments that extended the innovations of Henry Cowell -- reached outside classical or experimental music. He even inspired, albeit briefly, the Beatles.

In this story, from Sunday's LA Times, I speak to a wide range of artists, including Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields and Mac from Superchunk, about the composer's long reach.

Here's what performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who knew Cage a bit in New York in the '50s, told me about him:

His presence was peculiar – unlike anyone else’s. He was always either smiling and laughing – or extremely serious. Nothing in between.

Remembering David Foster Wallace

DAVID Foster Wallace's life was brilliant, tormented, and short -- cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own -- an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work -- I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of our generation.

D.T. Max's Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, gets into the novelist's life and death, as well as the ideas that animated him and his times. The tale comes across as a classic generational journey between theory and irony on one hand and sincerity and... something else on the other.

HERE is my long Q+A with Max, on Salon.

Let me put in a plug, by the way, for a lively, recent anthology of work about DFW, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which includes pieces by novelists Don De Lillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, etc., as well as DFW's editor at Little, Brown.

I also asked Max a question we did not have room for on the Salon interview. Here it is:

ST: What kind of long-term impact do we expect Wallace will have? My guess is that he opened the door to a certain kind of literary voice: Would we have gotten Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's empire without him? Anything else, generationally, culturally, or otherwise? Where do we see his influence?


DTM: Wallace definitely broadened the idea of what the "literary" could be in American fiction both in terms of the sentence and the novel itself. How many young writers today pattern themselves after him? But I think literary styles change and what is of the moment today is going to be passe tomorrow. in some ways we are already seeing a backlash. Where DFW continues to grow stornger is in what you might call almost-literary writing, on the web, on blogs, in journals, where he liberated a generation to write more the way they thought.

Frenchman at Neutra's House

RECENTLY I was invited to architect Richard Neutra's old house in Silver Lake to check out the "intervention" by the French artist Xavier Veilhan, who created a number of sculptures to refer to the pioneering modernist's life and work.

The press events and opening were quite groovy -- movie stars, French people, music by a member of the French band Air.

Los Angeles' Silver Lake, of course, is arguably the best neighborhood in the country for modernist domestic architecture. (That's even if you don't count Silverlake Wine and Rockaway Records.)

Here is my story. The work is up for a few more weeks. And in my years of paying attention, Neutra's VDL House -- still not perfect -- has never looked better.

Indie Rockers Finding Second Wind

IT seems, sometimes, that every awful band from the past is back together again for a lame-ass shed tour. And it's also started to seem, at least since the heavenly Go-Betweens reunion of about a decade ago, that some of the groups reuniting were not only good, they were better -- or close to it -- the second time around.


How can both of these things be true at the same time? It took me 2,000 words to figure it out.

For a story that just went up on Salon, I look at the awfulness alongside four bands that never had time to go bad -- Spain, the Feelies, Mission of Burma and the dBs -- and are now back in force.

And I try to make sense of the whole never-say-die phenomenon. Why did bands used to break up when the time was right, but then began staying together for years, or getting back together, over and over again?

Lovers of Spain, the LA "slowcore" band of '90s fame, should be aware of their August 28 show at the Bootleg Theater.

Wondering: Who are your favorite -- and least favorite -- reunited bands?

Spain mach 2, Photo Steven Dewall

Classical Music on the Radio

NOT long ago I got to hang out at the Hollywood Bowl in the middle of the day -- which was a decadent pleasure in itself -- while talking to Brian Lauritzen, the KUSC deejay who has come to dominate classical broadcasting in town.

Brian is still young yet, but he has several decades of commitment to both music and public radio, and he has a deep feeling for the sometimes complex role that music can play in people's lives. I enjoyed his utter lack of cynicism and hope LA doesn't destroy his low-key southern charm.

Brian just started his broadcasting of Bowl concerts, which will continue for another couple of months.

Here's my story. See ya at the Hollywood Bowl.

Hollywood Novelist Bruce Wagner

A FEW years back I spent some time at the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge with Bruce Wagner, who was much more at home there than I was. (He grew up nearby and has spent his career as a writer skewering Hollywood.)

Wagner has a new novel, Dead Stars, out, and returns to his main subject, the excesses of the movie world and its network of agents, moneymen, wannabes and so on.

When he and I spoke, Wagner had just put out a book called Memorial, which was a bit of a departure for him, as it examined the world of high design. Here's what I wrote:

His new book, "Memorial," is about a lot of things -- broken families, weasel lawyers, the wonders of India, the inexplicability of fate. But one of its most persistent and intriguing subjects is the world of architecture, or more specifically, architectural hype.

Here is my profile of the fashionably bald Hollywood novelist Bruce Wagner.