Here’s a thrilling collection of home recordings, from the 1950s and ’60s, by Nick Drake’s mother. h/t Trouble/WFMU
Author Archive
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue
I don’t know if it’s as simple as being back in New York after the better part of a year away, but for whatever reason I woke up this morning with Rodgers and Hart on the brain. I know I’ve evangelized their cinema showcase Words and Music (1948) for years, and have probably already subjected [...]
Time capsule: “Sketch for Summer 2003″
Download “Sketch for Summer 2003″ When we were packing up to move to Abu Dhabi I put most of my hard media music — records, CDs, cassettes — into storage. I did grab one tall spindle of burn CDs, though, and threw it into the pile of stuff we shipped overseas. It turns out that [...]
Thank you, Internet
A couple clips, recommended by my kids, to make you grateful the Internet exists. (h/t Anna) (h/t Molly) (h/t Charlie)
The hillbilly minimalism of Henry Flynt
I’ve been on a Henry Flynt kick again lately, spurred on this time by the reissue of Graduation, a collection of pieces recorded between 1975 and 1979 for an album that was ultimately shelved until 2001. Give the title track a listen: I first ran into Flynt’s stuff a few years back when I was [...]
The zen of Yellow Submarine
When we had our first kid — lo, these almost nineteen years ago — we learned pretty quickly that most media produced for children in this era is toxic to adults. Nickelodeon shows, Disney Channel, inane computer animated features or, worse, live action films of dogs with computer animated mouths. No thanks. When other parents [...]
The original underground superstar
Late last week Taylor Mead — the Lower East Side legend widely heralded (by himself and others) as the original underground film star — passed away in Colorado at age 88. From the Times obituary: Mr. Mead was the quintessential Downtown figure. He read his poems in a Bowery bar, walked as many as 80 [...]
The rise of Basquiat
So I came across these gorgeous Tseng Kwong Chi photos of Basquiat, Warhol, and Haring the other day and they just rubbed a little salt in my wound of having missed the big Basquiat blockbuster at Gagosian this spring. In case you missed it too, here’s the rather staid official gallery walk-through followed by funnier [...]
Twitter recommendations
Back in February 2012, when I was still on my prolonged hiatus from this here site, my lovely friend Lisa Parrish posted a list called “Things that are supposedly great that I didn’t like at all.” As a rule, I wasn’t even commenting at that point, but she almost dragged me out of lurker status [...]
