Winds of Magic (9): Endless Rhapsody

By: James Parker

If Queen had not existed, it would by no means have been necessary to invent them. Sweaty old 1973, the year of their debut album (the campily Tolkien-rocking Queen) was also the year of Elton […]

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Winds of Magic (8): The wild poet

By: James Parker

In December 1984 a small but memorable press conference was held in an English pub. It had just been announced that Ted Hughes was to be the new Poet Laureate, and a media reception had […]

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Winds of Magic (6): Anarchy in the UK

By: James Parker

Fiction being (if you’re doing it right) a slower and more ponderous process than journalism, it’s generally the novelists who arrive last at an epochal scene. In Britain, the publication this year of Ian McEwan’s […]

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Winds of Magic (5): Pants afire

By: James Parker

If your father presided over a blood-drinking sex cult whose membership also included the mailman, the doctor, the town drunk, and representatives of the local judiciary; if you ran with wolves as a young person, […]

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Winds of Magic (3): Oral or Anal?

By: James Parker

The first thing to be said about the concept of the “oral history,” as it applies to rock biography, is that Sigmund Freud — damn him! — has triumphed again. For what purer display of […]

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Winds of Magic (2): The Real Peter Pan

By: James Parker

On January 16, 2004, outside the California courthouse where he had just been arraigned on seven counts of child molestation and two counts of administering an “intoxicating agent with intent to commit a felony,” Michael […]

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Winds of Magic (1): Dark Chocolate

By: James Parker

Director Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has many fine qualities, but they founder and die away to nothing on the eerie smoothness of his leading man’s chin. Johnny Depp may be beautiful, but […]

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