These Dreams of You

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He also is a former lover of Viv’s, from a brief affair that happened during Zan’s first and only real separation from her, sixteen months before Parker was born. That was the Nineties when Brown still was a British expat in L.A. about to abandon music journalism once and for all, given that he hadn’t understood anything about music since 1987 and therefore it couldn’t possibly be worth writing about anymore.

Since both Zan and Viv have agreed that their separation was more Zan’s fault, he’s bothered less by jealousy over the affair than what a wrong turn it represents for Viv, the other man having gone on to great fame and success and presumably not being $135,000 in debt and foreclosed on. Following his music reportage in the Seventies and Eighties, Brown increasingly spent the last quarter century writing about politics from a more and more radical perspective while also cultivating a persona at once elegant and swashbuckling, embedding himself with insurgents and revolutionaries from Berlin to Istanbul to Karachi. His celebrity is such that the University of London has created the J. Willkie Brown Chair, occupied at the moment by J. Willkie himself.