A classic John T. Edge column from the OA archive.
One of the only places the Allman Brothers really felt at home was at Mama Louise Hudson’s soul food restaurant in Macon, Georgia.
The artist works in a style he calls “romantic realism.” In his paintings people are twenty pounds thinner and twenty years younger, often surrounded by heavenly light, riding exotic animals, or framed by mountain ranges. This willingness to flout the laws of space and time and his largely unflappable good nature have allowed Cowan to form relationships with the kind of people who will pay for a portrait of themselves with a lion, at the mast of a ship, or gliding through a Venetian dreamscape.
But those are facts, and “facts” are exactly what I don’t want to know, inasmuch as they will inevitably get in the way of the little fictions I’ve enjoyed telling myself during my walks for most of the last twenty-five years.
Micro-memoirs from our Spring 2017 issue.
My mother seined the waters of our childhoods. She gathered everything into the nets of her fingers: schoolwork, artwork, mementos. My mother did not recycle. Nor did she dispose. She was indisposed to it. Gathered now, it seems a kind of evidence, but of what?
“I didn’t do any research,” Luther Dickinson said with a grin as he opened the door to his room at the Washington Square Park Hotel. Dickinson was in New York for a show that evening at Rockwood Music Hall, and he had agreed to talk with me about a question I’d become obsessed with: Did blues slide guitar evolve from the Hawaiian steel guitar or from the African instrument usually claimed as its ancestor?
His songs have been recorded by the Dead Milkmen, Yo La Tengo, Pearl Jam, Beck, and Tom Waits. Kurt Cobain was often photographed wearing one of his Hi, How Are You t-shirts. David Byrne sang his praises, Bill T. Jones choreographed a ballet to his music, and Matt Groening said he was his favorite songwriter. According to Bowie, “Daniel Johnston is an American treasure.”
