Thirteen Songs That Prove Lou Reed Was a Literary Master
Reed brought an informed, sophisticated writer’s eye to the kinds of underworlds he observed, and his sense of language was as keen as a journalist’s.
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Bird Lives: On Stanley Crouch’s Kansas City Lightning
I submit that the kind of place Parker holds within jazz tradition is a little like what you would get if you mixed Beethoven with Jimi Hendrix. He was a game changer.
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Lou Reed, Sonic Contrarian
Most of the personal tributes I’ve seen don’t just talk about how great a musician Lou Reed was but how his fine, fine music literally changed their lives.
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The Life that Develops In-Between: On Elizabeth Graver’s The End of the Point
Unless you’re kicking it with the Compsons or Buendias, say, it usually takes a little bit of readerly patience to get through a multigenerational family story. One has to be on one’s game, in terms of care and attention. Nobody wants to spend several hundred pages with a bunch of allegorical figures sitting around the dinner table and passing each other the salt.
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Nevermind Nostalgia: Twenty Years After Nirvana
Hearing that Nirvana’s Nevermind was 20 years old was kind of like seeing an old drinking buddy turn to Jesus in his autumn years. I was happy for him and everything, but I missed the old days when we shared the fortress of solitude.
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Mythology, Men, and Coonskin Caps: On Michael Wallis’s David Crockett
Wallis knows full well that the icon is not the man in full, nor should it be. The issue with a biography like this is that the legend is so much of the story that debunking myths means the subject loses some of what makes him unique. David Crockett was romanticized in the same way that classic film stars, athletes, and politicians are, and for a similar reason — the legend is inextricably entwined with the actual human being. Not only is there no urgency to demystify, there’s almost no reason to. Sometimes the legend and the person are inextricable for perfectly good reasons.
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The Canon Guard: Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence
Harold Bloom is not so much the judicious patriarch or brazen egomaniac as he is a grandmother - endlessly harried, fiercely loving, and relentlessly worried about the future of his brood.
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Ecstatic Truth: Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams
You don’t have to question Herzog’s honesty in watching his films, though you might start to question his sanity.
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Eye of the Beholder: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Critical reaction to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life has been decidedly garrulous. A vast majority of reviewers have invoked some kind of "higher" culture to signify the elusive mood or feeling it evokes.
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Panache to Burn: Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22
Though we have just now learned that Hitch is dying, delving into his memoir many things are apparent, not the least of which the fact that the man has done some living. If anyone has the right to consider his time not wasted, it's him.
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