By: Greg Rowland

FATS WALLER (1904-43) lives in some impossible space between Paganini, St. Augustine, and James Brown. Tracks like “Handful of Keys” show Fats challenging Art Tatum in sublime stride-piano ostentation. But Waller was also fearlessly upfront […]

By: Peggy Nelson

JIMMY STEWART (1908-97) endlessly reprised Everyman… yet his most iconic films are perfect set pieces of horror. Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, supposedly a Christmas classic, is a vicious exposé of the underpinnings of capitalism. […]

By: Matthew Battles

Is Call of the Wild truly feral? Or merely fascist?

By: Matthew Battles

They’ve always been with us

By: Mimi Lipson

Look at the way people describe JOEY RAMONE’s (1951-2001) voice: “bleat,” “snarl,” “hiccup.” Would they say the same about Ronnie Spector? His voice was honest, plangent… it was bliss. He left us too soon, yes, […]

By: Tor Aarestad

Although other rock frontmen had been strange before MARK MOTHERSBAUGH (born 1950), none had been so aggressively strange or so brazenly uncool. Devo was the soundtrack of a life spent stumbling on uneven pavement, knocking […]

By: Joshua Glenn

A year ago this month, I identified a generational cohort of Americans and Western Europeans: the New Gods. Born between 1914 and 1923, the New Gods are — to translate my periodization into the middlebrow-speak […]

By: Jason Grote

Parisian composer ERIK SATIE (1866-1925) was the great-grandaddy of ambient music, the distant progenitor of Musak and smooth jazz. In 1902, Satie and friends introduced what they called “Furniture Music” in a Paris Gallery — […]

By: HILOBROW

Happy Birthday, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. More Hilo birthdays. MAY 17 Parisian composer ERIK SATIE (1866-1925) was the great-grandaddy of ambient music, the distant progenitor of Musak and […]

By: Mimi Lipson

STUDS TERKEL (1912–2008): shovel-ready and irony free. Fifty years from now, who will remind our grandchildren what a progressive looks like? And without another Federal Writer’s Project, who’ll collect oral histories from the survivors of […]

By: Mimi Lipson

We’ve fallen out of touch with TORI SPELLING (born 1973) lately. We haven’t read her best-selling autobiography or seen any of her three reality shows, but never mind. We’ll always have 90210. Her casting as […]

By: David Smay

Without question, YVONNE CRAIG (born 1937) had the coolest TV credits of the Sixties: Batman, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, 77 Sunset Strip, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Wild Wild West. Even knowing that she was a […]

By: David Smay

Though CHESTER BROWN (born 1960) is still creating vital work, nothing’s ever going to match the jolt of subversive glee we got upon seeing Ronald Reagan topple into an immeasurable vat of shit, get stuck […]

By: Mimi Lipson

JONATHAN RICHMAN (born 1951) sings to us exactly as we speak to ourselves. And besides, without him poor Affection would sit there standing in the corner, saying to itself, “I wish someone would give me […]

By: Peggy Nelson

L. FRANK BAUM (1856–1919) is best known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and wrote 13 sequels. Which seems like a lot until you realize that the series was dwarfed by the number of other […]