It was some years back, the last time I saw Alex Chilton. We miraculously bumped into each other one autumn evening in New York, he in a Memphis Minnie T-shirt, with take-out Thai, en route to his hotel. He invited me along to watch the World Series on TV, and I immediately discarded whatever flimsy obligation I may have had. We watched baseball, talked and laughed, especially about his current residence — he was living in, get this, a tent […]
“It gets so hard in times like now to hold on” – Alex Chilton
Alex Chilton died yesterday. For 59 years he gave the world some of the most perfect pop songs ever known. It’s one of the great crimes of humanity that not enough people listened. I’m not very good at writing goodbyes to people I only knew through their art, but Ben Greenman is, and he wrote something at Moistworks.
Long Distance Information, Give me Memphis, Tennessee
Willie Mitchell passed away yesterday, making that two giants of Memphis music gone in less than one year, counting Jim Dickinson’s passing last August. I’ve always had something of an obsession with music from Memphis. How could you not? I truly believe that if you juxtaposed American music with the Old Testament, the golden age of Memphis could be looked at as Exodus, out of bondage and into the wild world at large. From Sun to Stax, I think no […]
Bites: Henry Miller in LA, Bolaño was a Reader, Frost Sent Christmas Cards, Art Basel is on, Idiots, and More
When I think of Henry Miller, Paris, Brooklyn, and Big Sur come to mind, not Los Angeles. The Rumpus changes that. You are probably going to like this Justin Taylor guy. Roberto Bolaño read an awful lot. Serbian experimental writer Milorad Pavić has passed away. Jonathan Lethem calls Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood “a supreme literary stunt” at The Millions. At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen says of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, “doesn’t do much except make a publishing event […]