from the I’m Not Dancing EP
Produced by Micachu
on Greco-Roman
Nas Floats East With “Lahore State Of Mind”
from Jaubi’s 7″ Single
Zohaib Hassan Khan – sarangi
Kashif Ali Dhani – tabla
Qammar Vicky Abbas – cajon
on Jaubi & Astigmatic Records
Elvin Takes Lead In Coltrane’s “One Up, One Down”
John Coltrane, tenor saxophone / soprano saxophone McCoy Tyner, piano Jimmy Garrison, double bass Elvin Jones, drums
Free Jazz Hip-House From Makaya McCraven: “McCraven on the Mic”
Twenty-one Years After: Poems
1
Forty eight days now–
since you fell into my arms as the sun rose:
final pieta
I can still feel your weight
as it changed.
Spring now, and yet
my heart is still entangled
in bare winter branches–
a lifetime’s worth:
piercing yet beginning
to bloom in the light
of you still. [Read more…]
John Coltrane’s Propulsive “Nature Boy”
on Impluse!
Hank Cherry calls “Nature Boy” the standout track on BDoA. Read his review of Both Directions at Once here
House-Pop From Ian Poolely: “Kids Play”
from What I Do
on Pooledmusic
Radiant New Work From Wild Nothing: “Letting Go”
from the forthcoming release, Indigo (due out 31 August)
Home Of The Porno Burrito
by Jonathan Gold
July 19, 2006
One of the reviews that won Jonathan Gold his 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism
Today’s subject: the potato taco or, to be more specific, the wonderment of civilization that is the potato taco at El Atacor #11, a taquería chain’s grungy outpost on the fringes of Glassell Park. You have, no doubt, tasted a potato taco, perhaps the basic model of the starch bomb tricked out with chopped onion and a bit of salsa, or perhaps one of the fancy examples of the breed, cooked with the roasted-chile mixture called rajas or embellished with all manner of sautéed vegetables. [Read more…]
The Year I Ate Pico Boulevard
by Jonathan Gold
September 23, 1998
Jonathan gold famously ate his way down Pico Boulevard and wrote about it in this 1998 story for L.A. Weekly.
For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school. [Read more…]
Jonathan Gold, On Art
Perhaps Jonathan Gold’s final contribution to criticism was not on food, but art. Check out this wonderful piece in Artillery Magazine, where Gold and Artillery’s Editor-in-Chief, Tulsa Kinney, walk the streets of LA exploring galleries — and food, naturally. Gold does indeed compare food to art, and amongst other small but resonant gems, when asked by Kinney “if he sees a correlation between food and art, he pauses, ‘They both turn to shit the next day?’ Then more seriously, again, a question to an answer, “They are both ways of looking at the world?’”
Thank you, Artillery, for this last glimpse into the heart and mind of a most soulful and truly beautiful man.
On The Beloved Jonathan Gold
by Ruth Reichl
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times
Jonathan reveled in flouting the rules. In the ’80s, when I first met him, he cheerfully drove around without a driver’s license. He wore what he wanted — in the early years his constant costume was a slightly too small black motorcycle jacket — lived where he wanted, and spent his time indulging in the pursuits that interested him. Those included music of all kinds, a voracious appetite for books, and a deep interest in art of the weirdest sort. (If you haven’t heard the chicken story, ask me some time.) [Read more…]
Los Angeles Loses Its Greatest Living Writer, Jonathan Gold
by Andrea Chang
Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times
Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times restaurant critic who richly chronicled the city’s vast culinary landscape and made its food understandable and approachable to legions of fans, has died. He was 57.
Gold died of pancreatic cancer at St. Vincent Medical Center on Saturday evening, according to his wife, Times arts and entertainment editor Laurie Ochoa. The disease was diagnosed in early July. [Read more…]
Jim James Gets His Neil Young On With “No Secrets”
from Uniform Distortion
on ATO Records
Under The Silver Lake Is A Twisted Love Letter To Hollywood
“Jesus and the Brides of Dracula. Hipster pirate. Topless bird-lover. Paddleboat stalking. Literally barking mad women. Hobo king with a cardboard crown.” The notes that I scrawled while watching Under The Silver Lake at its North American Premiere at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival look like the scribbles of a madman. That madman is writer/director David Robert Mitchell, who won wild praise for his art-house horror hit It Follows, and now has returned with a wildly ambitious, unapologetically bizarre, and intriguingly polarizing stoner-noir. [Read more…]
Textural New Work From Body/Head: “You Don’t Need”
Kim Gordon and Bill Nace from The Switch
on Matador
Sonic Dust Unhanded From The Gods: John Coletrane’s “Slow Blues”
From Both Directions At Once: The Lost Album
Recorded in the Van Gelder Studio, New Jersey. March 6, 1963.
Featuring "The Classic Quartet" John Coltrane — tenor saxophone / soprano saxophone McCoy Tyner — piano Jimmy Garrison — double bass Elvin Jones — drums ♦ on Impulse! Records
Skipping New Work From Disclosure: “Ultimatum”
on Island Records
Recoupment Through Roses: A Word With Artist and Activist Amitis Motevalli
Amitis Motevalli’s Golestan Revisited project, now in its exhibition phase, has several aims. One is to perform a revisionist botanical history to “decolonize the roses.” Motevalli explained to me that the flowers originated in an area of the world now described partly as Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Iran, where she was born. Ancient Persia’s flowers could be described as successful plant emissaries of cultural exchange during a period of trading along the Silk Road. But Motevalli questions the way these plants were collected, specifically during the era of The Crusades, and the reasons they were cultivated. She sees the flowers as having been forcibly taken, because in their journeys to Europe and widespread adoption as symbols in art, literature and culture, they were hybridized and their offspring renamed, their cultural histories and their poetries erased. [Read more…]
The Agency Of Imagination In Olivier Babinet’s Swagger
In the 2016 film Swagger (newly out on Mubi), by Parisian filmmaker Olivier Babinet, an undercurrent of fictionalized plotlines pulls the story through the surface of reality. As a storyteller, Babinet has developed a potent strategy to render the lives of children and teenagers—who recall events with exaggeration and fervent emotion—by building out their imaginative tales. His approach presents a novel documentary methodology, one that can truly illuminate the way we depict the world. [Read more…]