June 2011
7 posts
Future Days
Yesterday, I spoke with Ryuichi Sakamoto about one my very favorite bands, Yellow Magic Orchestra. Thanks to the Internet’s own yellow magic, our conversation is already available for the trolls.
And for you, too.
Have you heard Yellow Magic Orchestra? They just might be the best pop group ever.
Now, if you’re the kind of reader who’s suspicious of such shameless hyperbole...
Lay It as It Plays
I wrote about John Darnielle and his fabulous Mountain Goats for SF Weekly:
“I’ll tell you a very funny story,” John Darnielle says. This is probably not the first funny story he’s told today. Nor will it be the last. Today is a publicity day for Darnielle. When it’s over, he will have talked to more than a dozen members of the music press. And tomorrow, he will...
I Was Born This Way
Lacking sentience.
With bits of afterbirth clinging to my skull.
A superstar.
—ANDREW STOUT About | Journalism | Tumblr | Twitter
'Nixon' in China, and Dubuque, Too
For The Atlantic online, I went behind the scenes at the Met Opera as they prepared to transmit John Adams’ Nixon in China to thousands of cinemas around the world:
On February 21, 1972, when Richard Nixon visited China, the technology used to beam the welcoming party around the planet and back to the United States was state-of-the-art. Nixon made sure of it. As the presidential plane,...
The Dark Art of Posthumous Music
In the latest SF Weekly, I write about the record industry’s morbid beginnings. And the new Michael Jackson album:
Money and death were on Thomas Edison’s mind in April 1878. Money, as usual, because Edison was the Gilded Age’s favorite boffin. And death, because he had just invented the phonograph. That spring, he explained his new gadget to the Washington Post as if it were the antidote...
Miranda July Talks
And I listen, for The Economist online. Special thanks to Roxanne for her time and help in preparing for this interview.
Ten years ago Miranda July was riding the L-Train through Chicago when she started thinking about a character she called “Richard”. She soon felt this character drawing her to the cusp of an entirely new emotional world, one more subtle than the wilfully strange...
