Spirituality has long haunted the music of guitarist John McLaughlin.  But its a different kind of spirituality than commonly accepted.  Serenity is replaced by driven purpose sometime almost furious in its speed and direction. The organic is overcome by the electric. The enlightened sense of  “taking it as it comes” …

[Read more →]

Storytelling has mysterious, unmeasurable power and storytellers have expended a lot of that power trying to explain it to us. Let me try. Hearing a story is a way of organizing the brain and stimulating thought. Formulating a story is an exercise in ordering thought, making associations and generally “thinking…

[Read more →]

In the failed-males-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre of storytelling,  sub-genres abound. The latest variation takes its cues from our on-going economic conditions; guys lose their jobs and go into free fall as does Matthew in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets.

Sam Lipsyte’s take on this theme finds Milo Burke (this is…

[Read more →]

Eight years past Up Past Two Lips, composer-saxophonist Henry Threadgill continues to pare down his carnival of sound into something that’s more than a sideshow but less the three-rings his Very Very Circus bands once performed. Composition, as always in Threadgill’s music, is important and one can’t help but think…

[Read more →]

In the beginning, Robert Crumb’s work was all parody and cartoonish variation. Over the decades, he has breathed form into his illustration, bringing detail and something, at times, approaching realism while maintaining his characteristic style prickly-male legs and ponderous female thighs. The Book of Genesis Illustrated is his longest, most ambitious creation…

[Read more →]

Disfarmer is Bill Frisell’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of 26 short, impressionistic pieces inspired by the photos of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), an Arkansas photographer who captured both place and time in his starkly-lit portraits.  Disfarmer’s revealing black-and-white portraits of country and small-town folk, posed without background, are perfectly reflected…

[Read more →]

There’s a comic quality and grounds for parody in even the most classic literature. In Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak proves himself  adept at discovering and exploiting these  cartoonish characteristics. But while the laughs in his collection are literate, what he parodies are the comics, everything from  Peanuts to Superman.

Masterpiece Comics would be a one-joke…

[Read more →]

Radiolarians III is out and I haven’t even finished with II? These guys are killing me.

No, really. They always have, ever since Boston’s Accurate Records sent me a copy of Notes From the Underground back in the early ‘90s. The coming together of groove and free improvisational directions—with the emphasis on the…

[Read more →]

Said of the 1960s, it’s also true of the 1980s: If you remember them you weren’t there. Reasons to forget? You worked and partied too long and hard and did too many drugs to maintain the rigorous schedule. You’ve repressed the embarrassing struggle to appear above your socio-economic status. And…

[Read more →]

The second greatest honor in America is to be accepted as a regular in your local bar. The first is to be granted free drinks on a regular basis by your favorite bartender. It took me over a year to be accepted as a regular at the sea-side hang that…

[Read more →]