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 [...]
Changes in the format and delivery of music—in both technology and packaging—would seem to have spelled the death of context for contemporary popular music, liner notes being only one element of that context. Our music has become much more a part of our multitasking lifestyle, only rarely indulged in as the sole focus of our [...]
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 [...]
[Gentle Reader: I'll be without Internet access for the next few days; blog posts are cued up and ready to publish until I'm back, but I'll likely not be able to respond to Comments as quickly as usual. I'll look forward to reading all when I'm back on line Thursday, March 18.--Kevin] I wrote [...]
Monday brought the news that the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin has acquired the papers, and a selection of the library, belonging to the late David Foster Wallace. David was on the faculty of Pomona College, where I teach, from 2002 until his death in the fall of [...]