Just when I thought Greil Marcus has lost his touch he comes up with this

Mick Jagger’s theme song for Slow Horses is the best Rolling Stones related music since “Start Me Up” in 1981

“What was once the promise that food could be a source of knowledge, culture, and joy now feels more like the pressure that every meal must be the best one, that the risk of trying something unvetted — once the whole point — is too great.” www.eater.com/food-culture...

“More than any single institution, the Claremont faction has generated a philosophy for Trump’s second administration, and its ongoing attempt to radically redefine America.” www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/1...

Disturbing. This young man is profoundly troubled - lost. Not sure why his book was published let alone reviewed at length in the NYT. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/b...

Would you read a book of loosely linked essays and stories about NYC during the early 1980s? Let me know markcoleman57.medium.com/my-im-modest...

Living in the USA is so dark right now I wish Gary Indiana was still around to write one of his “untrue crime novels” about what we’re all going through markcoleman57.medium.com/against-nost...

When I went to elementary school in the 1960s we had civil defense drills every month but nuclear war seems less threatening than active shooters, I can’t imagine being a kid today

what gets lost in this mostly spot-on essay is the gap between crankiness and nuanced criticism. Like so much public discourse these days reviews don’t have to be a binary: positive or negative www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Lurker is an astonishing movie, totally original take on the sick twisted bond between celebrities and their retinues

No mention of Sonic Youth's "Catholic Block" but otherwise an original look at the Church of Rome's cultural influence during the 1980s. alternate title: The *Other* Religious Right www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Proud to announce The Prospector is part of this week’s Memoir Monday roundup. Check out editor Sari Botton’s Memoirland Substack. It’s a treasure chest of personal essays.The Prospector was my first friend and mentor in NYC; he mastered the lost art of urban scavenging. medium.com/@markcoleman...

HB Andy Warhol who would’ve turned 97 today. Celebrate accordingly but don’t get too excited markcoleman57.medium.com/andy-me-livi...

“His main gig and true calling, his métier, was scavenging. Jeff was a garbage broker, a speculator in recyclables, a trash tout. He picked investments out of the staggering array of flotsam and jetsam left to rot in the city streets.” markcoleman57.medium.com/the-prospect...

I was never a metalhead but this review of the Ozzy/Randy Rhoads Tribute album was always one of my favorites. “You can’t kill rock & roll” web.archive.org/web/20060828...

“Madness loves the flat, pure telling, which the sane cannot abide. This was the power Plath had discovered – towering, revolving, in brass feathers and fire. It was not that she really flew. It was that she had gone underground but did not stay there.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us…” - Joan Didion

Honored to be included in this week’s Memoir Monday, curated by savvy editor Sari Botton. Link to essay about my big teenage misadventure in replies. Thanks!

aka why I’ve always avoided high school reunions medium.com/@markcoleman...

“We have children, some of us, in order to be fully ourselves, then we discover a mystery beyond all that, of how hard it is to be responsible for somebody else.” www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

“Absent from most of the new TV novels is an older literature’s icy confidence that what we’re reading is independent from — or even superior to — the entertainment business” www.nplusonemag.com/issue-50/rev... LIST 01%2F06%2F2020

Interviewing Brian Wilson in 1986, while he worked on his first solo album, was a peak experience. He was warm, cogent and funny. When I asked about the other Beach Boys, who toured without him that summer, he said “Mike Love is an asshole!” I didn’t quote him on that. Thank you for all the music

Here's a shorter yet more detailed - and juicier - version of a story I published a couple years ago, about Catholic high school in the 1970s; maybe you had to be there? Or maybe be glad you weren't... medium.com/@markcoleman...

Paul Krugman nails it: “Musk’s only mistake was in underestimating the depths of Trump’s lack of principles, imagining that he was the kind of corrupt politician who stays bought, as opposed to a guy who always breaks his promises the moment it seems expedient to do so.”

never step into a pissing match between two skunks, as my dad used to say

If Gary Indiana never wrote that one “important” book, then his oeuvre is something better than important: it’s alive. The pulsing, document of a city and a way of life that are forgotten or fading fast, told in an utterly original voice. @Longreads.com medium.com/@markcoleman...

Best writing from KOK since My Struggle. He’s BACK harpers.org/archive/2025...

Cleaning out files I found pics of my St Marks Place apt in 1986; exiting front-door with police escort, frolicking on the roof

Ignore the literary clickbait and post the obscure novel no one else is reading today

You came of age during the 1970s when: shredding documents inevitably reminds you of Nixon & Watergate

Preach it! ww.nytimes.com/2025/05/11/o...

happy 80th birthday Richard Meltzer! medium.com/@markcoleman...

“Reading reviews by the late author Gary Indiana during the second half of the 1980s, I figured the guy was a lunatic…once again, it took the death of an author for me to realize how much I’d missed by not keeping up” medium.com/@markcoleman...

“Reading reviews by the late author Gary Indiana during the second half of the 1980s, I figured the guy was a lunatic…once again, it took the death of an author for me to realize how much I’d missed by not keeping up” medium.com/@markcoleman...

Trump watched Escape From Alcatraz this weekend: A) “we don’t make movies like this anymore - why” B) “wait Alcatraz is closed?” C) “get me the phone”

“Some people, of course, take a kind of pleasure in repudiating their own past. Some, whether they wish to or not, live long enough to become negations or caricatures.” And some don’t. harpers.org/archive/2022...

Reader’s Digest (Ronald Reagan’s favorite magazine) had a crowd-sourced feature called My Most Unforgettable Character. Here’s my belated submission markcoleman57.medium.com/nyc-summer-1...

Lester Bangs died April 30 1982. He wrote about rock & roll in visceral prose that perfectly captured the 1970s. When I started writing for The Village Voice later in ‘82 editor Robert Christgau still had a pink phone message slip from Lester tacked above his desk, dated the day before he died. RIP

Barnes built a wonderful collection: 67 Cézannes, 59 Matisses, plus Picasso, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Bonnard, all those topless Renoirs. He controlled everything about his foundation, from the exact hanging of the works to the conditions and numbers of entry. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

you’d think billionaires have more pressing things to do than post on group chats but apparently not www.semafor.com/article/04/2...

“Rereading my teen diaries, I have the impression of someone driving a car repeatedly over a cliff, seeing how often they can walk away alive. There weren’t many adults who were looking out for me, but Andy felt like one of them.” granta.com/burning-mao/

Gary Indiana’s unfinished novel, partially told as a sort of oral history - fascinating granta.com/remission-in...

It doesn’t seem like the end of the world, really,’ he said. No, I agreed. It wasn’t the end of the world yet. ‘Any day now,’ Gary said. granta.com/los-angeles-...

roast chicken surrounded by vegetables from an open air market across the village square at a random bistro in Provence

Do people actually follow Bill Maher, hang on his pronouncements? He’s gone from smug to insufferable, that wasted barstool genius you quietly edge away from, if not avoid entirely

Remember when “reinventing yourself” was a thing? Alternately do people still lead double lives in the big city? medium.com/@markcoleman...

I had spilled aguardiente on the ground and drunk in homage to the tutelary god-mountain Rasuwillca; after then scattering coca leaves on the ground I tried, through an interpreter, to explain to the dozens and dozens of comuneros…that the laws of Peru prohibit murder granta.com/the-story-of...

RIP Mario Vargas Llosa, master storyteller; even in translation his prose and voice transported you to new worlds - a friend confiding their wildest experiences

RIP John Peck aka The Mad Peck inventor of comic record reviews also artist, DJ, rock critic, record collector

Before tasting menu endurance tests, wine pairings, reservation bribery apps or taco trucks and halal carts, eating in NYC could be an inexpensive adventure, if you knew where to look Cheap Eats in Pre-Foodie NYC medium.com/new-york-voi...