Tag
Music & Sound
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Boss Poet
Little has changed since Bruce Springsteen explained the origin of his song “Thunder Road” to a seething crowd at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19, 1978. “There was this Robert Mitchum movie, and it was about these moonshine runners down south,” he said, running a hand through his hair and leaning…
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How to Buy a Guitar in Chicago
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. In its still relatively new location on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago’s Northcenter neighborhood, the Chicago Music Exchange immediately dazzles visitors with row upon row of guitars mounted on the walls. Chandeliers drip from the high ceilings, lending a tone of…
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Lending an Ear
It’s 2006 in Iowa City. Two women sit at opposite ends of a library table, fingers arched over their keyboards. A moment’s pause, then they begin—an étude on the voice for four hands. The reading room is so quiet that the clacking of their keyboards easily fills the room, but neither of these women is…
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Michael Nyman At 70
When asked to name a “minimalist” composer, most would say Philip Glass. Steve Reich, John Adams, and Terry Riley resonate with those a bit more familiar with classical music. Yet few know that it was the English composer Michael Nyman who coined the term in a 1968 piece he wrote while working as a music critic and…
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Bigmouth Strikes Again
I never expected Morrissey to be a hopeless romantic. But then again, I never expected that I would be one, too. As a struggling queer growing up a generation after the moody singer, I relied on our shared disdain for conventionality and lack of imagination. The misunderstanding and abuse inflicted on him by dumb, unloving…
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Cassandra, Retiring
I spent a good portion of 2010 playing the Cassandra, mongering doom and gloom about the heat death of the alternative comics universe.1 Despite some important works—chief among them James Sturm’s Market Day, Chris Ware’s Lint (an entry in his ongoing Rusty Brown), and Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s remarkable miniseries, Daytripper—ominous signs seemed unmistakable:…
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Characters of Concealment
In his 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult,” Jonathan Franzen identified William Gass as a prominent member of a group including the likes of William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and John Barth that Franzen had once, but no longer, aspired to join. This “canon of intellectual, socially edgy, white-male American fiction writers … shared the postmodern…
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Churches of Vinyl: Archive and Authenticity in the Pop Music Novel
The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, one of whose key locations is an East Bay record store in 2004 specializing in used jazz, soul, and R&B vinyl records—invites consideration of what Rick Moody has recently observed is the surprisingly ubiquitous presence, in recent literary fiction,…
