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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Hubert Selby Jr.

By: James Parker

John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for […]

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Mervyn Peake

By: James Parker

The castle of consciousness, turret and coign, too huge for the human head, where stalk the battlements, robed and forbidding, the super-intelligent dead, has terrible deeps and horrible heights, and walls that are wondrous thick, […]

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Dez Cadena

By: James Parker

In the endless metamorphoses of Black Flag, it fell to DEZ CADENA (born 1961), son of a West Coast jazz producer, to be the band’s third lead singer, and then its first second guitarist. To […]

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Morrissey

By: James Parker

HiLobrow.com was recently drugged, blindfolded and pushed through a series of strangely booming rooms en route to an exclusive listening party for the new MORRISSEY (born 1959) album. And still we managed to take notes! […]

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Edward Lear

By: James Parker

Absurdity’s great-uncle; Freudian punchline, with all those noses of yours (a procession of disappointed phalli); exploder-in-chief of the grand Victorian beard (you filled it with birds)… we salute you, EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888). You did to […]

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THE SKY, CRACKED

By: James Parker

IT’S TOO HEAVY METAL to be available online, but the cover story of the new Revolver is a killer. Atlanta’s Mastodon have just released their masterpiece, Crack The Skye, and the band’s dense mythological Jethro-Tull-with-plasma-cannons […]

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