The timing of Here Come the Warm Jets could hardly have been more auspicious: besides the mounting friction within Roxy Music, the three main streams within rock & roll were teetering on the brink of artistic bankruptcy; Here Come the Warm Jets served eviction notices on them all. Blues-based guitar rock (cf. Led Zeppelin), progressive [...]
Having had some time to simmer down a bit, I’m a lot less hot under the collar about Michiko Kakutani’s “Texts Without Context” than I was last week. I still think it’s riddled with deplorably sloppy thinking; and in that, I still think it’s entirely characteristic of her work as a critic. But there are [...]
Ah, the joys of serial writing! In yesterday’s post, I referred to the title of Michiko Kakutani’s recent NYTimes essay incorrectly—not once, but four times. (Don’t bother to look back: I’ve “silently amended” the error.) I’d credited her with writing “Texts without Contexts”; the actual title of the essay uses the singular “context.” Now to [...]
I’ve realized recently that I can be something of a reactionary against “reactionaries.” I suppose I’m a left-reactionary, though reactionary against both right- and left-reactionaries. Quite a “meta-” situation, to be sure: precisely the kind of thing Michiko Kakutani loathes. As many of my readers will be aware, Kakutani has been at it again; her [...]