Highbrows, lowbrows, nobrows, hilobrows.
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GUY DEBORD (1931-94) was a founder and key intellectual figure in the Situationist International, an avant-garde Marxist collective influential in postwar France, especially during the 1968 uprising in Paris. Debord’s book The Society of the […]
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A virtuoso pianist with a biting wit, OSCAR LEVANT (1906-72) was equally at home with Schoenberg’s atonalism and Gershwin’s jazzy rhapsodies, dated a series of Broadway chorus girls, acted alongside stars like Fred Astaire and […]
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His books were banned in America for decades, sparked a groundbreaking “obscenity as literature” debate, and were a seminal part of the sexual revolution. “This is not a book,” HENRY MILLER (1891-1980) wrote in Tropic […]
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For somebody who’s been batting out the hits for thirty years now, ANNIE LENNOX (born 1954) sure doesn’t make a big deal about it: she’s a consistent, reliable entertainer who sails wherever the winds of […]
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I confess: I have a personal stake in lauding LEMMY (born 1945), Hawkwind alumnus and Motörhead frontman, and celebrating his status as a hard-living, hard-playing stalwart of British rock. One of the first albums that […]
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HARRIET MONROE (1860-1936) was the original zinester. In 1912, at the age of 51, the former Chicago Tribune art editor and moderately successful poet (her “Columbian Ode” — “Columbia! Men beheld thee rise/A goddess from […]
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Even if Brooklyn-born JEANMICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-88) had never taken brush (or spraycan) to canvas (or wall, or door panel, or helmet), he would merit a berth in New York cultural history for producing K-Rob and […]
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Of all the hilo heroes of American music, only FRANK ZAPPA (1940-93) turned the scramble of the brainy and the base into an aesthetic practice so strident it counts as an ethical philosophy. The dialectic […]
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American philosopher SIDNEY HOOK (1902-89) enacted the key dilemmas of twentieth-century politics. Born in Brooklyn to Austrian Jewish parents, he attended City College of New York, the same “Harvard of the Proletariat” that would educate […]
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Led by MAURICE WHITE (born 1941), Earth, Wind & Fire were by far the most commercial cousins of the cosmic-jazz entity known as Sun Ra, lacking Funkadelic’s edge or Pharaoh Sanders’ experimentalism. Don’t be distracted […]
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With the profusion of anti-heroes on television in recent years, from Tony Soprano’s jolly murderer to House’s belittling a-hole pose and from Jack Bauer’s strident seriousness to Dexter’s huggable serial killer, it’s easy to forget […]
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They say that if you were in San Francisco in the summer of 1977 and went to a Filipino restaurant/club called the Mabuhay Gardens up on Broadway in North Beach by the strip clubs, you […]
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“My books (& stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes & I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are & how we look into the world, & world as […]
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The Clash was on the front lines of the punk revolution of the late 1970s, but bassist PAUL SIMONON (born 1955) shared some similarities with an iconic rebel of the previous generation. Like the Beatles’ […]
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Strictly speaking it’s Meltzer who’s the hilo hero, who inverted the language of academe in pursuit of the rock thrill, but here’s what puts Lester in the pantheon: he redefined monotony. The vicious monotony of […]
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