2012 is a year of Dickens anniversaries — a major one for him, and what’s turned out to be quite a significant one for me. It’s his bicentenary, of course, but it will also be 30 years since I first read Bleak House. I know that because I wrote an [...]
Sun Ra came into my orbit twice on the same day last week, once on a poster on a character’s wall in the TV series Treme and then as a track in a podcast from the The Heliocentrics’ drummer Malcolm Catto. I believe these coincidences should be taken seriously, and [...]
First it was the policeman who seemed to get younger every year. Then it was the conductors. Now it’s the opera singers. Or perhaps it’s not that they are getting younger, but that we can spot them sooner. Special schemes to nurture them are busting out all over: just a [...]
I can recall the first time I heard a song by Radiohead as vividly as I remember my first kiss and cigarette. It was ‘Paranoid Android’ on a rainy May day in 1997. I was on the school bus, aged 12, fat and depressed, heading home to eat eight chocolate [...]
You probably don’t need me to tell you that the Jam’s All Mod Cons is a rock classic. It regularly features in lists of the 100 greatest LPs. But what you do need to know is that, for most diehard Jam fans, it is not the band’s finest album. For [...]
On December 29th, a painting by American artist Clyfford Still was subjected toan unusual assault in a Denver museum. The target, ‘1957-J-No. 2’, is a typical example of Still’s abstract expressionism, a blocky patchwork of flat colour and punchy brushwork. What motivated Carmen Tisch to tear it from the wall, [...]
As a film critic, the two questions I put most effort into avoiding are ‘What is the best film ever made?’ and ‘What is your favourite film?’ Although “http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118147/”>When We Were Kings is one of the great sports documentaries, there is little chance that, were I ever forced to answer [...]
Talk about timing! There I was in New York last weekend for the final Broadway performance of the hugely successful Billy Elliot: The Musical, and just as Phyllida Lloyd’s Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady was about to open in the city. From a musical that takes a dim view of [...]
When I visited my first juke joint at the age of 23, my life was changed forever. That probably sounds like hyperbole, but it isn’t. Like a lot of juke joints, Green’s Lounge in South Memphis was a funky, down-home club in a low-slung building on the wrong side of [...]