A feature in the March Downbeat on the classical influence in Brad Mehldau’s Highway Rider fails to mention one thing: his previous recording.  Conceived under producer Jon Brion, Largo was a turning point in Mehdau’s style,  showcasing different  instrumentation and styles.  Mehldau even plays vibes on a number of cuts.

Critics were quick to note…

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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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Making sense of the 1960s is a futile task. Rob Kirkpatrick doesn’t even try. His comprehensive 1969: The Year Everything Changed, offers an overwhelming  compendium of events in that cataclysmic year. The book’s thoroughness, without over-riding purpose, is apparently an attempt to find the year more influential than, say, 1968. Suggesting…

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You might be surprised by some of the role models that filth-happy movie maker John Waters includes in his book of influences. A few are staid, respectful even tasteful models such as Johnny Mathis.  On the other hand…

Waters admires Mathis because they’re opposites. Mathis is, “So mainstream. So popular. So…

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“I am the man who has best charted his inmost self.” Antonin Artaud quoted by Helen Weaver

Helen Weaver’s account of  her early days in Greenwich Village is misleadingly titled. Weaver, a new age author and translator nominated for a National Book Award in 1977 for her reading of Antonin Artaud,…

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Rereading Douglas Coupland’s  Generation X: Tales For An Accelerated Culture reminded this baby boomer how important and, in its way, groundbreaking the book was when published in 1991. Not that it received much attention, despite its title,  at release. No major reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The…

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In Daniel Johnston’s art, it’s all about the head. Big heads, hollowed-out heads, tiny heads, duck and cat and mouse heads, severed heads, devil heads, heads with one eye and heads with many eyes waving on tentacles. No matter how many characters and twisted setting pieces fill one of his…

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UPDATED (at end): Since the death of J.D. Salinger, there’s been scads of comment declaring his books as life-changers (or not) and plenty of speculation on what waits in his safe to be published or what might be made into a movie and even some of that personal, David Copperfield kind…

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The same old thing wasn’t going to cut it in the early 1970s. And just about anything recorded before Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, in other words before 1969, was the same old thing. That wasn’t going to grab the ears of the hip new audience Miles had attracted with his…

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There’s much to quibble over in Abram’s big, beautiful The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (the “man” in Kurtzman isn’t spelled out but drawn as  simplistic balloon-stick figure). Why include the complete “Superduperman” from Mad no. 4 (1953) instead of  samples from “Dragged Net!,” the parody of television’s cigarette-selling, L.A Cop promoting…

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