Pianist Myra Melford takes on more projects than the Army Corps of Engineers. Most of them are unusual, ambitious undertakings that involve a variety of cultural inspirations, a mix of artistic disciplines and media; innovative instrumentation, and distinguished instrumentalists.

There’s her five, sometimes six-piece ensemble Be Bread in which she plays…

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Are artists creating symbols and new representations of our technologically-enhanced culture? Certainly they’re employing technology to make art, in the form of computer generated images, synthesized audio and enhanced videos. But where are the symbols, even if made using traditional methods, for the way contemporary society shares, relates and communicates?…

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When Gil Scott-Heron died last May at the age of 62 nearly all the obituaries saluted him as “the Godfather of Rap.” It was a title he modestly denied when I interviewed him in 1995, shortly after his recording Spirits had come out. Poet, novelist, R&B musician and social activist, Scott-Heron…

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Jonathan Lethem’s last novel, Chronic City, is about an aging, self-conscious child star and pop culture icon, Chase Insteadman, who befriends a faded pop culture critic, Perkus Tooth. Tooth once wrote for Rolling Stone but now issues his judgments on paste-up broadside collages that range across genres and generations. He smokes…

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Poetry, in its way, seeks omniscience. And that, unless done without humbleness, is why some poetry, especially the academic sort, makes such dull company. Who wants to spend time with a know-it-all? That’s why the folksy, plain-spoken verse of Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver and their comrades is so…

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Just what the nemesis is in Philip Roth’s latest novel,  if there’s to be only one, isn’t clear. Polio? Certainly. But maybe it’s God. Or even our superstition and ignorance. Or life, as in mortal,  itself.

Or maybe it’s just playground instructor Bucky Cantor’s proclivity to take things too seriously, particularly…

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For many of us, the 1960s never ended. Tom Hayden takes that belief a step further. The ’60s continue…for everyone.

Hayden’s book, The Long Sixties, takes the political history of the ’60s and finds its legacy alive today in the social movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. He sees…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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