Posts by author
Rick Moody
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A Shoe-Seller Speaks
I met Lauren (whose last name we are suppressing here) at a writing workshop in Provincetown almost fifteen years ago. She was shy, funny, brilliant, and very, very talented, and she dressed like one of those kids who had been…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #26: The Cessation of Miracles
The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team.
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The Rumpus Interview with Quest for Kindness
Quest for Kindness seemed, to me, like career suicide, but in a warm and self-sacrificing way.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #25: 100% Nepotism
It’s the Internet, where I am plying my trade here, and it’s meant to be the Wild West—unregulated, unruly, unpredictable.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #24: A Magician of the Highest Degree
The millennium is not very old, it’s true, and yet today is the day on which I feel obliged to anoint a best song of the millennium, and to risk open debate on the subject, even though I recognize that…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #23: The Tragedy of Consciousness
Recently, I’ve been digging again through the wilds of the CD Baby site, where no print run is too small and no approach to music is too individual, and in this regard I have found a lot of great work…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #22: Son of Interactive Playlist
Rick Moody shares the music he’s listening to now thanks to suggestions shared by others.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #21: On William Basinski
William Basinski was born in Texas in 1958, and, after a childhood playing wind instruments, he became in the early-eighties a composer of ambient and minimalist compositions.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #20: Who’s Afraid of Serious Music?
Once, many years ago, I was at an artist’s colony in New Hampshire, The MacDowell Colony. I could never spend much time at MacDowell without suffering with paralyzing loneliness, and this visit was no exception.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #19: One Recent Example of Talent
“Talent” is from the Greek for a certain weight of gold, because, I suppose, people who had a lot of it seemed to be metaphorically wealthy. Here’s one example I encountered recently:
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Swinging Modern Sounds #18: Some Questions About the Tradition
Johnny Cash’s late covers are superior to their original recordings, but are they traditional?
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Swinging Modern Sounds #17: Higher Love
Recently, I was given an assignment by Rumpus film critic and friend Ryan Boudinot to write about one of those pieces of music that is so execrable, so thoroughly gangrenous, that it’s nearly impossible to figure out why anyone would…