From the Top just wrapped a live taping in Salem, MA in the bravely eclectic confines of the Peabody Essex Museum. Our program featured the usual array of greatly gifted young musicians in addition to PEM’s own composer-in-residence, the newly eminent conductor/composer/pianist Matt Aucoin. Each of our guests chose a work from PEM’s massive collection …
I’m a huge Megan Abbott fan. I’ve read all her published work, starting with her L.A. Noir classics, including The Song Is You, my personal fave in the genre/pantheon, Chandler, Cain et alia be damned. I just finished reading her latest, The Fever, befitting her recent mise en scene: the complex and contorted psychology of …
in my present bingeread of the work of Madison Smartt Bell, i’ve just read his first set of short stories, read as autobiography (Princeton life, Hoboken skids), but of a more spiritual, intuitive voice than Henry Miller, especially noteworthy for the title story, told from the specifically informed consciousness of an expert soundman (one of …
getting the band back together: I will be joining Pablo Ziegler, composer and pianist of many years for Astor Piazzolla’s New Tango Quintet, touring his fantastic two-piano arrangements of his own works and famous tunes by Piazzolla. We needed to find two pianos to rehearse, and so Irene Wlodarski of Steinway reserved a studio at …
Continuing my binge-reading of the works of Madison Smartt Bell with another of his early novels, Waiting For the End of the World, a deep gaze into the spiritual abyss that was New York City in the early 80’s: domestic terrorism lurking omnipotent, Satanism, even some Dickensian instances of Spontaneous Human Combustion. This book makes …
Just finished reading Madison Smartt Bell‘s debut novel, The Washington Square Ensemble. it was thanks to Stona Fitch and Concord Free Press that I became aware of Smartt Bell’s work through his latest volume of short stories, Zig Zag Wanderer. I found his prose style addictive, his habitation of new voices compelling. I’ve collected all …