You know the score

Son vaults ahead of father by joining the select grouping of music critics who have had diss songs aimed at them by aggrieved musicians.  

In this case, the wounded ones rather disingenuously claim that  "this song is about the modern American music critic, not about one single person, and any resemblance between the characters in this video and any persons, living or dead, is their own problem" - oh yeah, pull the other one, you start the video with screenshots of the measly score he gave your record. 

(Funnily enough I rather enjoyed the Callahan & Witscher record Think Differently). 

Still waiting for an inverted-tribute like this to happen to me, although I did get gently piss-took in this Saint Etienne advertisement, which delighted me (although I'd still rather have been in a Saint Et song like Joe Dilworth and Simon Price were)

Here's some new Kieran - a piece for Mixed Feelings on "Rollywood"  - TV soap operas and full-length movies made using Roblox.

Chip off the old Roblox

When I got my first piece in The New York Times - even though I'd done a bunch of things for UK newspapers by that point - it felt like an impossibly august place. Apart from anything else,  it was the first time I'd ever been edited (as opposed to having bits amputated from the piece without being consulted). And then there was the sight of it in the Arts & Leisure section, with that newsprint....  I was 27. 

Kieran Press-Reynolds, our son, just got his debut piece in The New York Times, aged 21. It went online today - the day before his graduation - and is in the paper edition Tuesday.   And we're in New York, our old home, for the ceremony, so able to pick up a physical copy. Where it bears the deliciously none-more-Times-y headline "Young Sonic Scofflaws Create Chaotic New Genre". Scofflaws!

I am proud, and impressed, and a little consternated, frankly. 21!

The piece is about a new music subculture that has sprung up around Roblox, a sandbox game. If you don't know what either of those things refers to, Kieran explains it very clearly.