By: Brian Berger

A multifaceted composer and critic.

By: Anthony Miller

He hated middlebrow and appreciated madness.

By: Anthony Miller

The first scholar to take avant-garde film that seriously.

By: Anthony Miller

He elevated intertextuality to a literary theology.

By: Franklin Bruno

His is an unwieldy and rarely screened oeuvre.

By: Jerrold Freitag

He took down Rick Santorum and started the It Gets Better project.

By: Devin McKinney

For him jazz was never simply music, it was life.

By: Brian Berger

He made paradoxic human music of despair.

By: Brian Berger

A critic indifferent to current pressures and public opinion

By: Mark Kingwell

The first man to say “fuck” on the airwaves of the BBC.

By: Joshua Glenn

Unfairly criticized as a cultural mandarin, he defended joy.

By: Lucy Sante

In American humor, she discerned “a deep-lying mood of dis­severance.”

By: Tim Carmody

He tried to explain both new modes of being and new social structures.

By: Mark Kingwell

Reason itself becomes the monster.

By: Joshua Glenn

He began as a critic of Middlebrow, but was suborned by it.