Where is Greil Marcus' column moving to?

A short podcast (twelve minutes) of Scott talking to Marcus about Phil Spector's Christmas album.

http://greilmarcus.net/2014/12/19/a-christmas-gift-for-you/

Amazing photo of Spector and Marcus in 1967.

http://greilmsandbox.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/jbjhficg.jpg?w=700

look at those cuffs!

At the risk of obviousness, Phil and cuffs just go together naturally.

his lucinda williams 'thing' is still mad creepy imo

Real Life Rock Top 10 (06/11)

1. Gareth Liddiard, Strange Tourist (ATP)

The film critic Mick LaSalle, in the San Francisco Chronicle, recently answered a reader’s query as to why Never Let Me Go—the film about an English boarding school attended exclusively by boys and girls destined to be harvested for their organs—failed to receive an Oscar nomination as one of the ten best films of the year. “…a movie’s chances go down if viewers feel like killing themselves after an hour,” LaSalle replied. Strange Tourist is like that: over an hour’s worth of a man sitting in a room, hitting notes on an acoustic guitar, meandering through tales of one defeat after another, with alcohol leaving tracks on the songs like a snail. But Liddiard leads the Drones, who with far more drama, dynamism, and fury can also make you feel like killing yourself, or anyway wishing the world would end, or wondering if, in one symbolically complete event at a time—a school shooting here, a successful Republican filibuster there, a new Lucinda Williams album on the horizon—it hasn’t already. Here, in a quiet, artless, shamed, constricted way, a person emerges: a fictional construction, someone without a flicker of belief or, for that matter, interest in redemption, cure, or another life, against all odds, especially across the more than sixteen minutes of “The Radicalisation Of D,” the final track, he makes you want to know what happens next.

lol that's his best Lucinda zing though

pretty darn funny if you ask me.

Better say before committing the rest of this post: loved the interview.

Marcus has always had a bizarre penchant for random assassination attempts on innocuous acts: Lucinda Williams, Ry Cooder, The Roches. Who exactly has ever been forced to listen to these groups?

Somebody should have laughed in his face when Marcus felt the need to bring in Alexis de Toqueville to attack America (the band!) in Mystery Train. About twenty years later Harold Bloom felt the need to invoke George Eliot to explain why he didn't like MTV Raps. People make fun of Bloom for this kind of thing. Marcus remains untouched.

In a review of the autobiography of Keith Richards, Marcus felt the need to write this:

He (Richards) explains the mystery of a technique he learned from the guitarist Ry Cooder, and, though he doesn’t say so, understood in ways Cooder never has and never will

Yeah, that will show all those people who think Ry Cooder is better than the Rolling Stones!

my least favorite marcus moment is the bit in mystery train where he tries to explain why he likes randy newman by comparing him to ray davies (who he mostly doesn't like). he doesn't come right out and say it, but the argument he makes comes dangerously close to "randy newman is better because he writes about america, and america is cool and scary and mysterious, not dull and bland like england."

A few months ago, Scott posted Marcus's abstention from the '89 poll over Public Enemy. He added a footnote the other day, two letters to the editor, one attacking Marcus and one lauding him. The attack is from Armond White, and it's actually pretty good.

https://gmfootnotes.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/70/

don't feel like i'm really qualified to evaluate who's right and who's wrong there (probably no one tbh; armond doesn't really address the problems with PE, but then marcus didn't really spell out what the problems were either), but it is striking how much better a writer armond was back then.

from a decade ago, for april fools' day, one of greil's weirdest pieces ever:

http://greilmarcus.net/2015/04/01/former-president-george-w-bush-dead-at-72-110304/

it read strangely at the time, and seems downright bizarre today.

jesus that's really twisted, he kills off the entire Bush clan except for Barb and big George.

I remember his dueling President Gore/President Bush fantasias in 2000.

I liked it then, still do. It's so straightforward; to me, the mood seems more sad than angry.

x-post: yeah, the ones at the end of his clinton book? i remember one of them has clinton staging his disappearance post-impeachment, then living out his days disguised as a small-town lawyer, listening to 90s bob dylan.

"Jeb Bush died just two weeks after being mauled by gators at a Central Florida fund raiser"

This should be something:

http://greilmarcus.net/2015/04/05/coming-soon-rock-a-hula-clarified/

Looking forward.

the suspense builds...

Haven't had a chance to read it, but part I is up.

http://greilmarcus.net/2015/04/07/rock-a-hula-clarified-pt-1-0671/

Oh, this is where his Real Life Top 10 is...

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/delayed-reaction

In latest one, he disagrees with Caramanica of the NY Times re Lana Del Ray. Not sure he has analyzed Caramanica's approach, the way most would. He also mentions old faves Peru Ubu and Van Morrison and isn't as hard on that Seabrook book as I thought he might be.

Here are some more

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/tag/real-life-rock-top-10

I don't know if it's Caramanica's thing so much as a major newspaper thing.

Greil and his pet peeves

I'm on a personal boycott at the moment, but you can all vent your spleen directly now:

http://greilmarcus.net/2016/02/10/new-feature-ask-greil/

hmm, i am not sure what i'd ask greil
apparently his real life rock column is moving over to pitchfork!

Ask him if it's true his mother's really a dolphin. I guarantee he'll respond.

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9810-the-first-time/

you beat me by 2 seconds...

that "i hate the internet" book better be good because I am sold on it

also, this is great

The last scene in "45 Years" is exactly as he describes it. Incredible.

It's his best bit in some time, compensating for his poorly reasoned Hillary defense.

Not sure, but I think ILM's other J.D. might have an "Ask Greil" up about Spielberg's Lincoln film.

haha, yep, guilty as charged. i also liked greil's riff on the rolling stones ("they can't even imitate themselves.")

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9895-i-need-to-scream-what-it-means-to-be-a-fan/

Had not seen that Corvette ad with the caption "baby, that was much too fast. 1958-2016"

His take on Parquet Courts is entertaining

he's right about the track he singled out

yep

A common complaint about Marcus, probably all over this thread, is that his reactions to things sometimes have little connection to the things themselves. If you want to compare his famous description (in Mystery Train) of the Dick Cavett show with Little Richard and John Simon to the actual show, someone provided an online link to the whole episode in an "Ask Greil."

http://www.shoutfactorytv.com/the-dick-cavett-show/rock-icons-december-30-1970-little-richard/566a100b69702d083a210900

Marcus: "I'm much too afraid to watch it right now to see what I might have gotten wrong--or worse, made up."

https://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil/

His explanation is inexcusable, especially since he opened his freakin’ book with that anecdote. I guess no one back then thought a tape would ever come back to bite them in the ass.

Yeah, I watched that Cavett clip to compare it with Marcus' description in his book. Nowhere does Little Richard spew out the litany of song titles that Marcus quotes; it's hard to understand how Marcus could've gotten that out of what he saw in 1970. This brings to mind something I read at Geoffrey Pullum's blog Language Log about approximate quotation by journalists (Maureen Dowd gets caught changing and rearranging), here.

The Ask Greil column seems to be running on fumes.

09/07/16
Do you see any musician of the younger generation, about which in 40 years still will be written, similar as today about Bob Dylan, Elvis or The Beatles?
–
No way to know.

Posted Feb. 29, 2016; greeted with some ridicule the couple of times I quoted it during the election.

Anyone nominated by either the Democratic or Republican party has a chance to win. Each candidate would start with a floor of about 40%, which is to say that within the 20% the candidates have to play with, anything can happen. Trump, like any Republican, would be helped by the voter-suppression laws in place in many swing states run by Republicans. The Democratic nominee could self-combust, be deligitimized by endless and scurrilous attacks, or even, given some unpredictable health, personal, or legal surprise, be forced to leave the race. In a presidential election, Nate Silver will prepare careful and accurate guides to what should happen, what is most likely to happen, but not what will happen: anything can happen. Add to this the disbelief on both sides that Trump could actually win, which energizes his followers and confirms his claims to outsider status, and add to that the fact that in many circles, particularly among better educated and better-off people, and particularly on the coasts, there are plenty of people who are attracted to Trump, who are secretly thrilled by the current of nihilism he is riding and the specter of destruction he embodies, but are keeping their mouths shut.

The bit about the coasts very wrong. Otherwise, pretty close to dead-on.

i thought about that comment by greil a lot -- i wish none of it had turned out to be true, but most of it was.

agreed

yep.

Unrelated-

LA Review of Books interviewed Greil re Dylan's Nobel Prize

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bob-dylans-nobel-prize/#!

More Greil on Dylan, guest op-ed from October

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/bob-dylan-master-of-change.html?_r=0

Plus in Pitchfork

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9965-masters-of-reality-how-bob-dylan-randy-newman-and-john-oliver-make-us-face-ourselves/

Post-election stuff in both "Ask Greil" and the new "Real Life."

http://greilmarcus.net/ask-greil/ (Third letter from the top.)

http://pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/9975-a-historical-shudder-special-election-edition/

Too soon. Right now I’m waiting for him to die before taking office.

looks like jill stein voter vic perry is unimpressed

6. From an academic conference at Yale: We’re used to Donald Trump punctuating his pronouncements with a quick “OK?” as if to simultaneously block any disagreement and reassure himself that he’s right. There’s a match in the habit of self-consciously hip younger academics presenting papers at a conference, reflexively hitting “right” at the end of declarative sentences, but in a manner that makes you hear a comma, not a question mark: a way of certifying the assumption that everyone present shares a certain set of opinions and terms of discourse. Right—it’s not an aggressive pronouncement but a congratulation of both the speaker and the audience for the truth that they already agree and that no fundamental preconceptions will be challenged. In other words, they and Trump are speaking the same language.

pitchfork.com/features/greil-marcus-real-life-rock-top-10/10024-how-protesting-babies-can-say-what-they-mean/