On The Rolling Stones, In Order
The reputation of Satanic Majesties has been utterly revised since the mid-Eighties and it's now generally thought of as one of the Stones' strongest. Not their best album, but arguably their most influential on bands that matter from that period onwards.
And Black and Blue is super-lazy sounding; "Fool to Cry" is terrible. Why they didn't stick "Slave" on it, I have no idea.
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On Bob Dylan, "Duquesne Whistle"
It is driving me crazy that the video doesn't bother to RESOLVE ITS NARRATIVE. Is it because Bob only showed up for fifteen minutes and his footage is him walking right down the street to his limo? How hard would it have been for them to film Dylan and his freak/loser posse coming across the guy on the ground, picking him up, dusting him off, and then integrating him into the gang as they're all shot from behind disappearing into the horizon? EASY.
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On Maureen Dowd, Cub Reporter
None of the writers you've mentioned at the top of the piece had "salad days" per se, they were either well-connected or groomed from the start for the positions they currently inhabit, merit or no. But, either, way, no way that Santa Claus quote wasn't made up or, at the very least, prodded and massaged: if that had come out in 2010, Dowd would have been out the back door in a week.
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On A Takedown of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial
Brody's piece begs the question of the German tendency to memorialize IN LIEU OF remembrance. There's a reason those stones look so cold. Fun Fact: the anti-graffiti coating on the memorial is by the company that created Zyklon-B, so if you spray "Never Forget" on one of the slabs, it wipes right off.
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On A Takedown of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial
Isn't that a photo of Berghain?
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On The 40-Year-Old Reversion
@Matt I believe Amy Sohn is more of an Open City sort of girl.
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On Eric B. & Rakim's 'Paid In Full' At 25
Rakim and Biggie are really the bookends of the Golden Age of Hip-Hop. Rakim was the instigator of the trend in which everything was metaphorized, including the track itself, and although he wasn't a particularly political rapper, this gave political rappers the tools they needed to tell their story -- the ghetto represented a microcosm, the dealer a reaction to social realities. Biggie stripped the metaphor from this: a drug deal was just a drug deal, albeit one with a compellingly tight narrative, charismatically rapped. Biggie was one of the greats but, along with the sampling shutdown, pretty much caulked the casket on my preferred era of the music.
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On Gerhard Richter Is A Famous Painter Of Expensive Paintings
Re racism and "whiteness": "It's not the same thing to differentiate German and Dutch identities--especially in an art historical context"..and so on...
Um, you might want to keep in mind that Richter was born into what would become East Germany, during the 1930's. He made it to West Germany in the early 1960's, as a fully-formed adult. You don't think that the concept of "whiteness" was a socially malleable one a few times during his art career?
Richter is admittedly a tough nut to crack for American audiences who are primarily familiar with him through Kim Gordon's tastes. You need to know a bit about German painting and a bit about German non-painting and more than a bit about German history. His ouvré is EXTREMELY art-historical, even as it is consistently socially engaged. Calling his early (and not only early) work "representational" is sort of like calling a horse a table because you can put a saddle on it. I guess those who would consider him a safe artist have never seen his Baader-Meinhof paintings.
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On On the Other Hand, Never Write a Book
Why are there not pawprints all over that letter?
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On The Man Behind The Brilliant Media Hoax Of "I, Libertine"
There have been a few pieces on Jean Shepherd recently and they all claim that no-one remembers Jean Shepherd.