March 14, 2016 In Memoriam You Can Still Hear It By Brian Cullman George Martin, 1926–2016. In the summer of 1971, I got a lift to Marblehead, Massachusetts, to audition for George Martin. It wasn’t my idea. I wasn’t ready; musically I was barely ambulatory, but my friend Dick Shapiro had dropped out of school a few months earlier and landed a gig with a mobile recording service who’d set up shop in an old house on the Cape to record Seatrain. George Martin was producing, and had agreed to see me. When Martin walked in, he filled the room. He was trim and neatly pressed, gracious, with just a hint of malice behind his poise, like an assistant principal making a surprise visit to the classroom. I got the sense that he’d rather be sharpening pencils. Read More
February 18, 2016 In Memoriam All Is Vanity: Part 2 By Alex Abramovich and Emily Barton Denise Matthews—aka Vanity—died this week, at the age of fifty-seven. In memoriam, we’re sharing this ’06 exchange from the late, lamented Moistworks, the music blog founded by James Morris and more or less edited by Alex Abramovich. Read Part 1 here. From: Emily Barton To: Alex Abramovich Date: 6/2/2006 Subject: Down on my knees Read More
February 17, 2016 In Memoriam All Is Vanity: Part 1 By Alex Abramovich and Emily Barton Denise Matthews—aka Vanity—died this week, at the age of fifty-seven. In memoriam, we’re sharing this ’06 exchange from the late, lamented Moistworks, the music blog founded by James Morris and more or less edited by Alex Abramovich. From: Alex AbramovichTo: Emily BartonDate: 6/1/2006Subject: Hello, Nasty Read More
January 14, 2016 In Memoriam C. D. Wright, 1949–2016 By Dan Piepenbring C. D. Wright. Photo via Copper Canyon Press The poet C. D. Wright died unexpectedly this week at the age of sixty-seven, in Providence, Rhode Island. “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free,” Wright once said, “and declare them so”; poetry was “the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine.” Over the course of more than a dozen books, she “found a way,” as The New Yorker put it, “to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle.” Wright’s poem “Our Dust,” which might double as a kind of eulogy—“I made / simple music / out of sticks and string … I / agreed to be the poet of one life, / one death alone”—appeared in the Winter 1988 issue of The Paris Review, and is reprinted in full below. It was later collected in her book Steal Away. You can watch her read it aloud here. Read More
January 11, 2016 In Memoriam Queen Bitch By Alex Abramovich A still from the “Blackstar” video. Two days ago, Ben Greenman got a post up on The New Yorker’s Web site: THE BEAUTIFUL MEANINGLESSNESS OF DAVID BOWIE, the headline read. “His new album, Blackstar, embraces nonsense, and that makes it prime Bowie.” That was on Saturday. This morning, the meaning snapped into place like a bear trap: released on Friday—Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday—Blackstar is a threnody, composed by the artist himself. Read More
December 1, 2015 In Memoriam Christopher Middleton, 1926–2015 By Dan Piepenbring Christopher Middleton We’ve received word that the poet Christopher Middleton has passed away at eighty-nine. Guy Davenport called him “an incomparable stylist, a wry ironist, a philosopher of words. The only category in which he fits justly,” he added, “is that of poet.” The Review published Middleton throughout his career, beginning in our Summer–Fall 1960 issue, from which the poem below, “Edward Lear in February,” is taken. Read More