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JAMES PARKER
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GIFT GUIDE 2012
"Every night and every morn," wrote William Blake one afternoon in 1803, "some to misery are born."
They Ain't Heavy, They're the Kirkwood Brothers
As half-assed a form as it can be, the rock-band oral history is a folk form nonetheless, with a great claim to authenticity.
Finding out what makes the Meat Puppets tick with a new oral history
Finding out what makes the Meat Puppets tick with a new oral history
Philip is a punk rocker
"A smash of glass and a rumble of boots/Electric trains and a ripped-up phonebooth/Paint-spattered walls and the cry of a tomcat/Lights going out, and a kick in the balls." These lines are not by Philip Larkin, of course — they're by Paul Weller.
Masters of reality
The literature on Black Sabbath — already extensive — will continue to grow, as we try, try, try again to wrap our poor noggins around the irreducibly cosmic fact of this band.
Write the Lightning
Write the Lightning
Write the lightning
That the biggest metal band in metal history should be called METALLICA — it's just so frigging metal .
Everything fell apart
"Readers of this book will be disappointed," declares Andrew Earles, rather sternly, in the introduction to his Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock (Voyageur Press), "if they hope to be rewarded with the gritty details of any band member's drug use."
Les is more
Depression: the mind grapples — the culture grapples — to frame it. Serotonin hiccup? Existential banana-skin? Anger blow-back? Fall from grace?
All God's creatures get nailed in Life
"Of the millions of known species of life on earth, more than 90 percent have no backbone." Well, that explains a few things.
Men are from Martin Amis, women are from . . . ?
As Under-Secretary of the Ted Hughes Rough Riders (Boston Chapter), I have been delighted by two recent developments.
Cooking with Mailer in two new memoirs
So after all the roarings and the thumpings and the garlands and the scandals, after all the sex and the jazz and the fires on the moon and the women’s-libbers howling for his blood and the glass bouncing off Gore Vidal’s head, the old lion ends his days in comfortable domesticity on the crooked fingertip of Cape Cod, nibbling teriyaki-infused oatmeal and reading baseball statistics on the crapper.
Jack Pendarvis's not quite mot juste
John Gardner, the great teacher and novelist who wrote approximately 413 books before annihilating himself on a motorcycle in 1982, was very big on vocabulary.
Nick Cave’s bad Bunny
When I interviewed Nick Cave for the Phoenix three years ago and he told me — drolly, languidly, literarily — that his next writing project was about “a sexually incontinent hand-cream salesman” on the south coast of England, I assumed he was taking the piss.
Top Gear hits heavy traffic
The big question with Top Gear, the popular British consumer-car show (in perpetual reruns on BBC America), is this: will it succeed in denting my colossal lack of curiosity about cars?
Zack Snyder is a cheerful dude who's mounting one of the most perilous assaults on pop culture.
"Every movie I've made, starting with Dawn of the Dead, has been, like, death threats."
Sexual politics have never been more — perhaps because there's so much sex in politics. A sexpert sorts us out.
Breathe deep, politics fans. What is that odor?
Two Boston poets use their art for the good of the tribe
What if a poem had the power to heal loneliness?
Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.
Juliana Hatfield is still standing. How a hometown guitar hero dodged the bullet, and then wrote a book about it
Evening slants in over the spires of Harvard, and Juliana Hatfield is watching me across the table.
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