Celebrating Community
Sonic revival. Concert performances by Sonic Youth were glorious things—transcendent, intoxicating, very nearly overwhelming. Sound systems and synapses couldn’t always handle them but the energy transference was reliably powerful. The band played what is commonly referred to as its last show on the WIlliamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn on August 12, 2011. They actually went on to play already scheduled festivals […]
Archival recordings are tricky to think about critically, in no small part because the contents of any artists archives are always interesting and desirable to fans, and that fan enthusiasm makes criticism irrelevant for most of the people who would even consider buying them. And reader, I am one of those fans—as one example, Miles Davis’ album In a Silent […]
Studs Terkel’s 1974 book Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do is a lot of things: a landmark oral history, a monument to conversation, a snapshot of labor across classes and collars at a particular unsettled moment in American history. It’s also a testament to how little things change. Working […]
Review of “J.C. Leyendecker: American Imagist,” by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler Review by Michael Quinn What are you wearing as you read this? A shirt from Under Armour? Leggings from Lululemon? Sneakers? Flip-flops? A hundred years ago, the world was different, and we dressed differently. But it was around this time that advertising first started to get […]