The now ubiquitous spoiler—that horizontal fin typically perched on the trunks of sports cars—goes way back, back before the elevated brake lights that now decorate them on every third Honda you get behind on Lake Street. In the early days of Gran Turismo racing in Europe, about forty years ago, the spoiler was the solution … Read more
The great news is that Pete is going to be a dad—the first in my little circle of friends. For no good reason at all, my little gang seems to have put off having kids. Even though Pete, Ben, Don, and I have all joked about being deaf to the ticking of the biological clock, … Read more
Now that E.L. Doctorow has been elevated to that rare pantheon of not-dead white writers worth reading, it will be worth checking out what has made him transcend the solipsistic excesses of Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and his ilk. World’s Fair, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate were compulsively readable literature—and we have to thank Doctorow’s novel … Read more
A twelve-year, twenty-five-volume project to reprint every Charlie Brown cartoon ever made? Good grief. Well, even if you’re sick to death of the civic-boosting Schulz statues dotting (or blighting) St. Paul, this first volume provides a good opportunity to reassess Sparky Schulz’s work without the commercializing excesses that have gotten in the way. Despite repeated … Read more
As documented by Legs McNeil in Please Kill Me, the definitive chronicle of the early punk era, Deborah Harry and Joey Ramone were good people—two of the few CBGB’s scenesters at the time who refrained from pretending not to care about success, while stabbing each other in the back to achieve it. Even at the … Read more
Hard-bop innovator Eric Alexander is always refining and reworking his vivacious sax styling, but remains true to his biggest influences—Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson, and many of the original bebop pioneers. In 1991, at the tender age of 22, his rep blossomed after he placed second to Joshua Redman at the prestigious Thelonious Monk Inter- national … Read more
Either childrens’ books have been getting progress-ively smarter recently, or our reading level has … Er. Let’s start again. Children’s books have been getting progressively smarter recently, what with the literary sophistication to be found in writers like Philip Pullman, Lemony Snicket, and, many would argue, J.K. Rowling. Hard Times is aimed at younger readers, … Read more
Close your eyes during a Leon Redbone concert and you might imagine yourself on a rickety old back porch off the Louisiana bayou, sometime early last century, with banjoes strumming and an eccentric crooning to the harvest moon. Redbone has been crafting his unique blend of back-porch ragtime jazz and blues since the early seventies, … Read more
It’s 1979, and President Jimmy Carter is trying his damnedest. So are some of the finest new bands to emerge since the British invasion. Elvis Costello has just released Armed Forces, Talking Heads have offered up Fear of Music, and Neil Young has turned out Rust Never Sleeps. Yet Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks beats … Read more
Kristin Hersh has long been one of our favorite songwriters from the post-punk flowering of the eighties, and we’re excited to see this new trio of hers, which promises to take full advantage of her ability to create full-on and ferocious rock (her solo and Throwing Muses work often strove for a more fragile beauty). … Read more