Winds of Magic (7): Presidency of the Absurd
By:
The owl and the pussycat went to jail, for something the piggy-wig said. They sat for a while with no hope of a trial, and paper bags over their heads, Till a man with dark […]
Read This PostAuthor: James Parker
James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Winds of Magic (6): Anarchy in the UK
By:
Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s […]
Read This PostSteve Coogan
By:
As the trickster-philosopher Tony Wilson in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People STEVE COOGAN (born 1965) was jaunty, vulnerable, inspired, and frequently full of shit. It was a part only he could have played. When […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (5): Pants afire
By:
If your father presided over a blood-drinking sex cult whose membership also included the mailman, the doctor, the town drunk, and representatives of the local judiciary; if you ran with wolves as a young person, […]
Read This PostFlann O’Brien
By:
The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not enough for the ages, gassed off his libido in puffs of […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (4): “We see you, Lee. We see you.”
By:
Sprezzatura. If there’s a word guaranteed henceforth to discomfit the editors of The New Republic, that’ll be it. For it was under this romantic alias that Lee Siegel, TNR’s television critic, made some now-notorious appearances […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (3): Oral or Anal?
By:
The first thing to be said about the concept of the “oral history,” as it applies to rock biography, is that Sigmund Freud — damn him! — has triumphed again. For what purer display of […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (2): The Real Peter Pan
By:
On January 16, 2004, outside the California courthouse where he had just been arraigned on seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering an “intoxicating agent with intent to commit a felony,” Michael […]
Read This PostWinds of Magic (1): Dark Chocolate
By:
Director Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has many fine qualities, but they founder and die away to nothing on the eerie smoothness of his leading man’s chin. Johnny Depp may be beautiful, but […]
Read This PostHubert Selby Jr.
By:
John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for […]
Read This PostMervyn Peake
By:
The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, […]
Read This PostDez Cadena
By:
In the endless metamorphoses of Black Flag, it fell to DEZ CADENA (born 1961), son of a West Coast jazz producer, to be the band’s third lead singer, and then its first second guitarist. To […]
Read This PostMorrissey
By:
HiLobrow.com was recently drugged, blindfolded and pushed through a series of strangely booming rooms en route to an exclusive listening party for the new MORRISSEY (born 1959) album. And still we managed to take notes! […]
Read This PostEdward Lear
By:
Absurdity’s great-uncle; Freudian punchline, with all those noses of yours (a procession of disappointed phalli); exploder-in-chief of the grand Victorian beard (you filled it with birds)… we salute you, EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888). You did to […]
Read This Post