Corrective Lenses

MTV Get Off the Air!

2012-01-26T12:37:00.000-08:00

"MTV Get Off the Air" by The Dead Kennedys.

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
By Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum

We all like to complain about the fact that MTV doesn't play music anymore, and this complaint inevitably turns into a nostalgic reverie of the good old days of the music video channel - whether our idea of the good old days is best exemplified by Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson, Motley Crue, "120 Minutes" or "Yo! MTV Raps!"

But let's be honest, we all had a love-hate relationship with MTV, didn't we? (Notice I used the past tense. I assume everyone hates it today, even the people who watch "Jersey Shore.") Sure, MTV was exciting when we first saw it - I can remember how exciting it was for me when my family first got cable - but soon, for every song on the channel we loved there were at least three we hated. Many times, the only thing that kept us watching was the hope that the next video would be something we liked, instead of the garbage we were currently watching. But watch it we did. As awful as it was, MTV was new and young and irreverent and a peek into a world you wanted desperately to join, if only so that you could make fun of Winger.

I don't know if Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum were thinking about this mix of emotions when they decided to organize this book as an oral history, but it was a good choice. This could have been a business history, or a breathless hagiography of musical celebrities. Instead, it's a gossipy bitch-fest of people taking credit for other people's work and blaming each other for their failures. It's a really fun read.

Now, maybe the story of the "music video revolution" deserves something more thorough than I Want My MTV. A more traditional historical or journalistic approach could set the record straight on a lot of issues. For one thing, it would have corrected Marks' and Tannenbaum's many interviewees who conflate the decline of music on MTV with the decline of the music industry, as if file-sharing had nothing to do with it. And when the book, which is organized in a very rough chronological order, gets to the PMRC campaign, I Want My MTV can't really do much except tell us more about the Tom Petty video that first got Tipper Gore so upset.

But the oral history approach is good for smaller stories like this. For example, Marks and Tannenbaum track down a lot of the models and struggling young actresses who appeared as nameless, uncredited eye candy in the videos that made stars of the men in those videos. Often, they have something interesting to say. Even Tawny Kitaen comes off pretty well. And oral history presents a good way to deliver conflicting memories about events, letting the reader try to sort out important historical mysteries, like whether the singer of Missing Persons was truly discovered having sex with an MTV executive in his office.

More to the point, oral history is perfect for gossip, and gossip is what this book is all about. We get stories about sex, drugs and a bit of rock 'n' roll. Mostly sex and drugs, though. A lot of celebrity sightings, of course. And lots of stories about terrible, terrible videos. If you watched MTV in its musical heyday, this book may make you wax nostalgic over videos you hated back in the day.

"Stuffin' Martha's Muffin" by Mojo Nixon and Skip Roper.

Law School Band Names, Part II

2011-11-28T10:51:00.000-08:00

In my first semester of law school, after reading the famous 18th century property case Pierson v. Post (you know, the one with the two fox hunters chasing after the "noxious beast" in the "wasteland" of Brooklyn), I kept myself sane by pretending the dissenting judge's Latin phrase "Nil nisi bonum mortuis" was an album title for a black metal band. I think I even drew a mock-up of what the album cover would look like. I am now in my last semester of law school, but the band names keep coming. For Bar review, I think I will consult Part I of this list as often as I crack my BarBri books.

PART II

Blackacre / Whiteacre / Greenacre

The Bluebook Cheaters

Conservatorship of Bones (189 Cal. App. 3d 1010)

The Constable Has Blundered ( People v. Defore, 242 N.Y. 13, 21, 150 N.E. 585, 587 (1926) (Cardozo, J.).) / The Blundering Constables

Ex Parte

The Exclusionary Rule

False Confessions

Fair Use

Famous Marks

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

Hotchpot

Hot Pursuit

In Rem

Knock-and-Announce Rule

Miranda Warning

Nil Nisi Bonum Mortuis

Noisy Withdrawal

The Phantom Gain

Prior Art

Search and Seizure

Stop and Frisk

Strict Liability

Strict Scrutiny

The String Cites

Usufructuary

Ouija Board, Ouija Board

2011-10-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

That's me with all the hair, sitting on the side steps at the Church, circa 1990. Note the sign in the window.

My friend Lisa Hix recently published a great history of the Ouija board on the Collectors Weekly website, and this reminded me of an experience I had a great many years ago. I don't think I have written the story in full before this blog post, but I have told it to friends many times on dark and stormy nights.

First, I'll set the scene. In my last year at the University of California Santa Cruz, I lived in a large house that had been converted to a residence just a couple of years earlier. Before that, it had been used as a Four Square Gospel Church, with one of those congregations where people speak in tongues. The sanctuary was our living room. I suppose it was rather small for a church sanctuary, but it was very large for a living room - especially a living room for a bunch of college students. The sun came in through semi-opaque church windows, two of which were made of glass bricks arranged in the shape of a cross. There were still a couple of pews used like benches against the wall. It was strange and spooky, but it was 1990, I was a Goth-damaged 20-year-old, and I loved it at first sight. A friend and I rented it and gathered friends and strangers to fill the rooms. Most of us shared a similar fascination with the place. One roommate, Peter, got ahold of a "BEWARE OF DOG" sign, rearranged the letters and put it up in a window as "BEWARE OF GOD." We lit Santeria candles, played Bauhaus and Skinny Puppy on the stereo and felt right at home.

Looking back on it now, an awful lot of strange and awful things happened to those of us who lived in "the Church" (as we always called it) and our friends over the course of the year I lived there - even after accounting for the college-years factor and the Santa Cruz factor. And they began after I was rooting around in a shed in the backyard and found an old Ouija board.

Soon after moving in, another roommate, Tristan, developed a habit of inviting girls over to try out his own Ouija board by candlelight. I can't comment on how it went with the girls, but he had amazing success with the board. I remember several of us sitting around the table one night, half-believing it when we placed our fingers on the heart-shaped indicator, and we appeared to converse with the kindly spirit of a dead boy who told us his name was Trad, and that he spoke to the living by approaching a place he called Lake Happy.

One day, I was looking in the backyard, and I noticed a small shed attached to the house. I looked inside and found some cans of paint I assumed belonged to the landlord, some old plates and silverware, and oddly, a Ouija board in its box. I brought it inside and Tristan decided to give it a try that night, just to see if it offered anything different from his own board. It did. Several of us sat around the board and we all noticed immediately that the indicator moved much more quickly and jaggedly than did the one on Tristan's set. We soon started conversing with a spirit who called himself "J." Something about J struck us as not right, as though he were toying with us. We tried to get rid of him so we could talk to Trad again. But after the board told us Trad was speaking, we quickly got the sense that something was wrong. "This isn't Trad, is it?" we asked the board. After a while, it responded, "No." It was J. He wouldn't go away.

We continued with this kind of thing over the next several nights, and the pattern remained the same: We could talk only to J on the board from the shed, and he would often pretend to be someone else or otherwise manipulate us. Meanwhile, Tristan would continue to use his own board, where the experience was gentler, and there was no J. But it seemed to be slowly changing for the worse. The indicator spent more and more time in aimless spinning, and it was getting harder and harder to reach Trad. It was around this time that Peter met one of the students who had lived in the church the year before us. He ran into her on the bus one day and asked if she knew anything about a Ouija board in the shed. She said, "Don't mess with that. Bad juju," and got off the bus.

One night soon after that, we reached Trad on Tristan's board, and we asked him about J. With gentle nudges toward letters on the board, Trad told us that J was a liar. "Don't talk to J. He is evil," he said. "How do we get rid of him?" we asked. "It's the board," Trad said. "What should we do with the board?" we asked. The response was quick: "Burn it."

It was around midnight, but we grabbed the board and all of us piled into a couple of cars and drove out to Natural Bridges State Beach. There, on a rock overlooking Monterey Bay, we dropped the board in a steel garbage can and set it on fire. I may have forgotten something in the many years since this happened, but I feel confident in saying we didn't use lighter fluid or anything but a match and maybe some crumpled paper to get the fire started. And yet the flame that came out of that garbage can looked like the Ouija board had been soaked in gasoline.

We left, more than a little freaked out, but also relieved. Most of us immediately gave up trying to contact spirits. As my roommate Zack said at the time, showing his characteristic combination of wisdom and humility, "If a spirit can go anywhere and talk to anyone, and all it wants to do is hang out with a bunch of kids like us, it's probably not worth talking to." But Peter was curious about what happened, and one day he tracked down the student who had called the board "bad juju." He told her about our experience in only the broadest of terms, but he pressed her for details. "Oh, we put it in the shed because we had too many bad experiences with it," she said. "There was a spirit who would try to manipulate us, mess with our relationships, things like that. We called him J the Liar."

I still don't know what to think about this experience. I am a rational person and I am sure that there is a rational explanation for how Ouija boards work, but I can't come up with a satisfying one to make sense of why the previous tenants also knew J. I suppose Peter could have made up his conversations with the "bad juju" woman, but I don't think he did. I can tell you I have not tried a Ouija board since.

Bonus fun link: Here's a link to a song I wrote about my time in the Church.

Me and all my hair, playing my old Gibson Explorer in the sanctuary, circa 1991.

Freedom of/from Expression

2011-10-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Freedom of Expression(R)
By Kembrew McLeod

I wish I knew how to render the title of this book properly on this blog. It's Freedom of Expression, followed by the familiar "R" in a circle that designates "all rights reserved." (In fact, even the cover of the book itself doesn't get it quite right, as you can see to the left.) The title comes from a prank pulled by communications professor Kembrew McLeod. Disturbed by the ways in which the growing power of intellectual property laws (trademark, patent, copyright) appear to be stifling communication and innovation, rather than promoting them (which is supposed to be their purpose), McLeod thought he'd see if he could register "Freedom of Expression" with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. To his surprise, the government granted the trademark. This meant that McLeod could potentially threaten legal action against other people who used the phrase "freedom of expression."

It's not often when you're reading about legal matters that you come across a writer with a puckish sense of humor like this - or at least it's not often that the writer can show it. Legal writing emphasizes being precise and avoiding ambiguity, which to all too many legal writers means being dull. It could be that McLeod has a leg up on writing passionately and entertainingly about these issues simply because he's not a law school professor or a judge. The legal writer's response to this would be: "Entertaining and passionate" are nice, but the law requires a more balanced and nuanced approach. There are good arguments on both sides." ... See why it's more fun to read McLeod?

McLeod, a longtime hip-hop fan, first grew interested in these issues through the controversy surrounding sampling. He ably shows how the intellectual property system drove sampling underground, where the music industry could not control it. There was a window of opportunity in the late '80s and early '90s where the music industry and lawmakers could have come up with a different system: We could have legalized sampling through a compulsory licensing regime with reasonable fees paid to the copyright holders. This might have even provided a steady revenue stream for a music industry that needs one today. Instead, we have a system where licensing fees are so expensive that musicians simply don't use sampling, or don't pay the copyright holders when they do ... and hope no one ever catches them. (Does this sound like another spot of bother the recording industry got itself into over the past 12 years? Want a hint? Think of a name that rhymes with "yapster.")

The sampling saga is probably familiar to many Corrective Lenses readers, but sampling is just a small part of what McLeod is getting at here. A similar dynamic operates in all areas of intellectual property law. In one section of Freedom of Expression, McLeod traces the history of the familiar "Happy Birthday" song to show how our folk music traditions (in which melodies and lyrics are part of a cultural commons, free to be used by anyone, in any way) are often incompatible with a legal system that puts bright lines around rightsholders and everyone else. While this situation presents problems for our cultural landscape, it also has disturbing implications for science and our democracy.

If you're interested in these issues - and you should be - but you don't want to wade through a lot of legalese, McLeod provides a good place to start.

Free the Speech

2011-09-21T19:28:00.000-07:00

Some developments that are likely familiar to you, submitted in sequence for your consideration:

(1) Facebook's new design is pissing people off. Every Facebook redesign pisses people off, but this change has confused and alienated people more than any Facebook redesign I've seen.

(2) Google Plus hasn't yet taken off. Most of my friends aren't on it yet, and the ones that are on it appear to be more active on Facebook. (But this may change.)

(3) After basically running all the competition out of business, Netflix has really pissed people off with its recent changes.

(4) Yahoo's e-mail service was accused of censoring users' e-mails about protests on Wall Street.

Do you see a pattern? I'm sure there is one. I think that we have boxed ourselves into a situation where private industry controls our communications, and we are discovering that we don't like it. Meanwhile:

(5) The United States Postal Service is in serious financial trouble, and President Obama backs proposals to save money by ending Saturday delivery.

I was going to suggest that all these items are connected in that they point out the problems of monopoly, but then I remembered that the Postal Service doesn't have a monopoly. Part of what's hurting the Postal Service is that it must compete with UPS and FedEx, while at the same time working under a government mandate that it must deliver to every address in the country, and do other things that are not profitable. Hell, it's the organization that's going to have to look at thousands of envelopes with the ugly name "Qwikster" on them every day! Give those postal carriers some sympathy!
.

The Carnival is Over

2011-09-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

When you've got a baby, you're going to spend a lot of time singing. You can sing all the lullabies you remember, and then you find the kid is still awake. So, you start scraping your brainpan for any song you might have up there. This can have strange results. Once, when my oldest wasn't even 2 yet, he was sad because he didn't get to the window in time to see the garbage truck go by; he started singing, "Why she had to go / I don't know, she wouldn't say ..." He ended up learning "Cruel to Be Kind" and "Surrender" before he knew how to write his name. And how was I supposed to explain "Surrender" to him once he was old enough to understand the words?

With our second, I keep returning to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' covers album, Kicking Against the Pricks. I don't know why, exactly. Pricks is a weird, apparently deeply personal mix of blues songs, folk songs, a Velvet Underground cover and a lot of ballads that appear to be included just to give Cave a chance to remake himself as a singer instead of the Goth spazz he was in the Birthday Party. There are some great singalongs here: "Long Black Veil," "Running Scared," "By the Time I Get to Phoenix,""Long Time Man." All of these are fun songs, and almost certainly inappropriate for a youngster. ("Long Time Man" is especially troubling, as it is the lament of a man who is lonely ... because he murdered his wife.) Recently, I found a double CD compilation called Original Seeds, and it has original versions of a lot of these songs. But the one the baby likes best, I think, is "The Carnival is Over,"which is not on the compilation. I've been singing this song in the shower or wherever occasionally for more than 20 years, but it's only been in the past few months that I've had to think about the lyrics. That's how I found the two video links above.

"Carnival" was a huge hit for Australian folk-pop act the Seekers in 1965. (It's not to be confused with the song of the same title by Dead Can Dance, no matter how much you might want to lump that act together with Nick Cave.) Its tune came from a 19th Century Russian folk song, and apparently also shows up in a Dutch hymn. One line of the lyrics which I've never understood goes like this: "The carnival is over for Pierrot and Columbine." A little more Googling reveals that Pierrot and Columbine are stock characters from 16th Century Commedia dell'Arte.

The Seekers had a number of hits, but "Carnival" became something of a theme song for them, and, the infallible Wikipedia tells me, they began a tradition of closing their concerts with it. Somehow after that, it became an Australian tradition of sorts to close all kinds of ceremonies by playing the song.

So, I guess it's a pretty safe song to sing to an infant. That's nice to learn. All these years, I've thought it was a strangely moving love song from the point of view of a carny seducing a local girl the night before he leaves town.

Chronic Fatigue

2011-08-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

There are lots of great writers out there, but I keep reading Jonathan Lethem, whose best books are, on average, no more than three-fourths-great, or something. Why do I do this? Could it be that a three-fourths-great novel is in some ways more interesting than a fully great novel?

I really liked Motherless Brooklyn and Gun, With Occasional Music, but it was a little hard to take them seriously because they often seemed more like experiments in genre fiction than like novels. (Plus, Gun had talking kangaroos.) I liked You Don't Love Me Yet, although it at times seemed more like a fictionalized argument about the notions of authorship and plagiarism than a novel. (Again, there was a kangaroo in that one.) And I loved the first half of The Fortress of Solitude, where Lethem nailed teen geek culture and racial relations and a boy's coming-of-age and boys' friendship and so many other subjects, all with compelling characters and wonderful writing. But then I was completely turned off by the overwrought second half.

I picked up Chronic City at a used bookstore a while back, and I finally got around to reading it. My co-blogger, Hella, had started it, but couldn't get into it. I finished it in one weekend. And once again, I had the Lethem experience: I got absorbed in the writing, I got wrapped up in the characters, I got intrigued by the themes, I puzzled over the occasional sci-fi or fantastical elements. (All of which is pretty impressive, I gotta say, considering that most of the novel is about people either going to fancy dinner parties or hanging out at a rock critic's apartment, smoking pot and talking.) And then I got to the end and I got angry. Why did I read all that, if Lethem was just going to end it that way? Why did I let him do this to me? Will I let him do it again? Yeah, probably.

Chronic City is the story of Chase Insteadman (the names in this novel are something to behold), who lives off the residuals from an '80s sitcom he starred in as a boy. He is recognized everywhere in New York for that role, and also for being the fiance of astronaut Janice Turnbull, who is currently trapped aboard a doomed space station. Chase strikes up an unlikely friendship with Perkus Tooth, a cynical, paranoiac former rock critic who had some fame in the '90s when he would plaster the city with posters bearing his strange pop-cultural theories. (Shades of Camden Joy ... BTW: Really? There's no Wikipedia page for Camden Joy? Second BTW: I just looked up his page on Facebook, and there's a photo of him with a big dog. In Chronic City, Perkus eventually shares an apartment with a big dog. Hmm...) Through Perkus, Chase becomes friends with Richard Abneg, a former radical turned city functionary, and becomes lovers with Oona Laszlo, who makes her living as a ghostwriter. Together and apart, the strange group deal with: Janice's troubles, as reported in long letters written from space; an escaped tiger who is destroying unprestigious New York City buildings (and who may or may not actually be an animal); the machinations of the sinister city government; an eerie cloud that hangs over lower Manhattan (this appears to be a reference to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, but they have been transformed into a vague symbol of existential dread); and the implications of a popular virtual reality game. Mostly, they smoke a lot of pot and talk about what's real and what's illusion.

Honestly, it looks horrible when I try to summarize it. Let's just say I was interested in the characters, and intrigued by the metaphysical ideas, and that was enough for me. I would love to go into detail about the twists that bothered me, but that would entail major spoilers. Anyway, by the time I got to them, I was already hooked. In the days since I finished Chronic City my anger and disappointment have faded a lot. I'm left instead with my memories of the characters and their philosophical musings. These are fond memories.

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

2011-07-28T14:57:00.000-07:00

Twin Peaks-inspired art, with working wooden gears, by Paul Chatem.

After a couple of beers, I have been known to spout my pet theory that Twin Peaks invented the '90s. By "invented," I mean that the famously bizarre TV show:

(1) predicted, influenced, or perhaps even begat many of the trends that shaped that decade: the sudden importance of the Pacific Northwest (grunge, Microsoft); retro fashions; a certain strain of conspiracy theory mixed with the occult (typified by The X-Files, which was the most direct descendant of Twin Peaks on television); and

(2) in a more vague but recognizable form, predicted the course of political and cultural change in the decade; that is, it opened with a burst of promise and quickly devolved into the same old crap.

But I don't know if I believe this anymore. In fact, though you can draw a line connecting Twin Peaks to The X-Files, or Northern Exposure, The Gilmore Girls, Psych, or to Moby, or to the photography of Jennifer Hale (you will want to click that link), you'd be hard-pressed to find anything that's really like it today. You'll find a room with red velvet curtains, or an awkward line about donuts or coffee. That's it.

I've been watching Twin Peaks again recently and, as always, I'm captivated by it, excited, delighted and then frustrated, disturbed and disappointed by it. I love the pilot and the remaining episodes of that short first season, but then I keep watching, trying to find the moment when it starts to fall apart, when its quirk turns into shtick. Does it jump the shark when Nadine awakes from her suicide attempt with super-strength and the belief that she's a teenager again? (Ugh!) Or is it earlier than that? Perhaps it's as early as Laura Palmer's funeral, when whiny Bobby causes a scene and then Leland jumps on top of the casket. Or the scene after that, when Shelly laughingly re-enacts Leland's behavior for a couple of customers at the Double R Diner? (Shelly is awful, but I have trouble believing that she would make fun of a father's grief over his murdered daughter - the tone is all wrong.) The depressing answer I have settled on is that the seeds of the show's downfall lay within it from the beginning. Same thing with the '90s, I guess.

Ten years after Twin Peaks, David Lynch tried to create a new TV series, but he couldn't sell it to a network. Instead, he took the footage he had shot and assembled its varied storylines into the feature film Mulholland Drive. I found that movie frustrating and almost incoherent when I first saw it, but in the years since then it has stuck with me in a way that few movies have. Sometimes I wonder what Twin Peaks would have been like had Lynch done the same thing. Perhaps the result would have been a silly murder mystery with supernatural overtones, no better than the Twin Peaks prequel Fire, Walk With Me (which is pretty bad). Perhaps it would have been brilliant. But you know what? I watch those first episodes and I still love them just the way they are.

Pie Quest 2011

2011-06-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

I grew up in California, but my parents come from Kentucky and the highlight of every holiday was when someone in the family broke out the recipes for Southern treats like pecan pie, chess pie and Derby pie. Yes, I love pie. Ten years ago, my friends Phil and Dan and I began Pie Quest, an epic journey in which we set out to tirelessly and selflessly explore the eateries of San Francisco in search of the best berry pie. Well, maybe not "tirelessly." Pie Quest kind of fell apart after a few months as we realized we were gaining more weight than knowledge. Anyway, you couldn't turn around in San Francisco without hitting a galette, but pie was hard to come by in those days.

Today, I live in the Twin Cities, where pie gets more respect. My lovely co-blogger and I recently checked out the Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis and were happy with the slices we got there. The Birchwood features local and organic produce, with a lot of vegetarian and vegan options. It has a very casual feel, with counter service and outdoor seating for summer days and nights. This was my first visit, but I was impressed, especially with the tofu sandwich Ella got. Better still were the pies. I had a cherry rhubarb - not as sweet as your usual strawberry-rhubarb mix. It had a good, somewhat substantial crust. Hella had a black bottom coconut cream pie - an unusual choice for her, as she's not a big coconut fan. Her risky choice was rewarded. The chocolate in the crust went nicely with the coconut, and the creaminess softened the bits of shredded coconut nicely. I'm not sure how chocolate and coconut could possibly be local ingredients for a Minneapolis cafe, but I'm not complaining.

Sedarisaurus Rex

2011-06-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

When I worked at a Portland, Oregon, bookstore in the mid-90s, I sold a lot of copies of David Sedaris' then-new Barrel Fever. At that store, any book by an NPR contributor would sell pretty well, but Sedaris was the champ. When times were slow, I'd read the merchandise, being careful not to leave pages dog-eared or the covers smudged with fingerprints, and I decided to see what all the fuss was about with Sedaris. I didn't quite get it. The fiction stories were funny, with a distinctly dark sense of humor, but they were ultimately silly and forgettable. The standout stories were the autobiographical ones - especially the ones that touched on his family. One of six kids raised by a couple of characters who didn't quite know what to do with them, Sedaris had a lot of material to draw from here, and he milked that for all he could in his next book, Naked, which gets my vote for the best in his catalog, and the subsequent Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and When You Are Engulfed in Flames. (Some of his Christmas-themed stories were collected for Holidays on Ice.) All of these are at times hilarious, bizarre and poignant - often at the same time. Once, before bed, I read a chapter in Me Talk Pretty One Day about Sedaris' sister Amy, and could not get to sleep afterward because I couldn't stop laughing. The key to his charm in these books, I think, is that Sedaris tempers his natural weirdness, his delight in disgusting things, and his acerbic wit with sentimentality and touches of regret. At the same time, all that weirdness keeps the sentimentality from getting too sweet or the regret too maudlin.

Some have criticized Sedaris for not being entirely truthful in these nonfiction books. I think there's some force to their arguments, but ultimately I don't believe that a guy who fudges details when writing humorously about the events of his childhood is committing the same sin as a journalist who makes up stories or a "memoirist" who makes up his stay in a drug rehab center. There is, however, a problem with Sedaris' form of autobiographical writing, and it simply boils down to this: Eventually, the writer runs out of good stories.

This has been happening to Sedaris for a while. After Naked, he continued to explore the same ground, and it's hard to tell his later books apart. Meanwhile, there are increasing signs that Sedaris is getting uncomfortable revealing everything about himself and his family. There's a great story in one of those books (either Me Talk or Dress Your Family - again, I can't tell them apart in my mind) in which one of his now grown-up sisters tells her famous author brother a story about her life and he immediately begins writing notes. She expresses shock that he is using her personal story as fodder for his writing career, and he replies, "It's not as if you're using it." Recalling this conversation later, Sedaris is disgusted with himself. But he's put himself in this position. In When You Are Engulfed, Sedaris writes about his quiet panic that his long-term monogamous relationship is a kind of slow death. He must have known that his boyfriend was going to read it. How does that change the dynamics of his writing? How does that change the dynamics of the relationship? If it changes the relationship, will that give him the material for another story?

And so, Sedaris' latest, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, is a return to fiction writing. In this case, it's fables starring anthropomorphized animals. But don't expect Aesop. Instead, it's stories about hypochondriac lab rats and self-pitying bears. Each one, read alone, is pretty funny. But read more than one and they just seem like stories about irritating people - people who happen to be furry. The dark humor is there - is it ever - but I didn't find the stories poignant or particularly memorable.

Would Sedaris have run out of steam if he'd stuck with fiction all along? What if he'd written autobiographical stories that were thinly veiled as fiction? Would I feel the same? More to the point: Would NPR have hired Sedaris to read his fiction on the air, even if it wasn't really fiction? Would all those listeners have paid attention and then rushed to bookstores to buy the guy's books if they didn't think the story they heard was true? I don't know. But I do know that Sedaris is only 54. Traditionally, that age is when you start writing your autobiography, not when you find that you've exhausted it and you struggle to come up with something else to say.

Blogger problems fixed?

2011-06-03T08:51:00.001-07:00

Well, now it appears that everything's fixed and those comments that had been lost are back.

Blogger problems

2011-05-13T16:48:00.001-07:00

Oy, Blogger's been down over the past day and now it appears to have lost the comments to my last post. (Really, Rich. This isn't me just trying to censor your argument about "iconic.")

Iconoclastic Attack on Iconic Iconography of an Icon

2011-05-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

From an article headlined "Who pulled the trigger?" :

Who shot Osama?
He's out there somewhere, an instant icon in the annals of American conflict, the ultimate big-game hunter. But an enigma, too, his identity cloaked for now, and maybe forever.

Copy editors tend to have pet peeves when it comes to common expressions. Mine was the overuse of "icon" or "iconic." Sometime around the turn of the millennium, the word became a trendy substitute for "symbol" or "symbolic." It was easy to see why newspaper headline writers would use it: "Icon" fits in one column in a large type size, but "symbol" does not. But the word is not confined to the (shrinking) world of daily newspaper headlines. I see it often in headlines for articles online, where space is less of a problem, and in the articles themselves. I've heard it often on TV or radio and in conversation.

As I see it, the problem with "icon" is that the word implies an image, and it should only be used in the context of an image. In the newspaper article I quoted above, it strikes me as inappropriate to use "icon" about an unknown person whose likeness the reader has never seen. (I'll leave aside the inappropriateness of publishing an entire newspaper article that does nothing but conjecture what kind of person this unknown soldier might be.)

Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary defines "icon" as:

1 : a usually pictorial representation :IMAGE
2 [Late Greek eikon, from Greek]: a conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians
3 : an object of uncritical devotion : IDOL
4 : EMBLEM. SYMBOL
5 a: a sign (as a word or graphic symbol) whose form suggests its meaning b: a graphic symbol on a computer display screen that usually suggests the type of object represented or the purpose of an available function

So, you can see that the farther you get from writing or talking about something visual, the less appropriate "icon" becomes.

Now, I know that the English language grows and changes over time. I know that copy editors can be irritatingly picky. But when you're writing about the iconic nature of a person or thing that's invisible, you're not helping anything. All you're doing is avoiding using perfectly good words like "symbolic" or "emblematic." The writer of this "Who pulled the trigger?" article probably enjoyed the sound of "instant icon in the annals of American conflict," but the phrase doesn't really mean anything here. If the White House does release photos of bin Laden's bullet-ridden corpse, that will be an "instant icon in the annals of American conflict."

Girls Who Wear Glasses

2011-05-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Bossypants
By Tina Fey

I've been a fan of Tina Fey since the SNL Weekend Update right after the 2000 elections, when she reported on the infamous phone call between Al Gore and George W. Bush about the Florida vote ("Well, you don't have to get snippy...") with a voice that began like a serious newscaster and soon slid into teenage gossip. She ended that part of the sketch by saying, "... and it was really hard for me, because I'm friends with both of them!"

Reading this amusing but slight little memoir, I was struck by how this ambivalence is a theme for her: Tina Fey really does try hard to have it both ways. (Go ahead and insert your own imitation Tina Fey blue joke here.)

As a star writer and performer in TV (SNL, 30 Rock) and movies (Mean Girls, Baby Mama), she gets a book deal to publish a memoir in which she portrays herself as a dork and downplays her fame. Sure, Fey mentions that 30 Rock has won a hell of a lot of Emmys, but she repeatedly mentions that its ratings are not good. She makes a gag out of saying that the only reason NBC has kept the show around this long is that the executives like Alec Baldwin.

But let's pause for a moment to remember that 30 Rock credits her in its opening by saying "Created by Tina Fey" and the show stars Fey as Liz Lemon, a character who is a thinly veiled version of herself during her years as head writer on SNL. Obviously, someone thought she was well-known enough to merit her own show - and that was before her famous Sarah Palin impersonation. True, she's no U.S. Senator, but as ex-SNL people go, she's quite well known.

I don't mean to knock her by pointing this out. I think this balance between famous person and average person is a big part of her appeal. The fact that she's Tina Fey, TV and movie star, is softened by the fact that she's also (sort of) the messy Liz Lemon; the fact that she's a high-powered NYC working woman is softened by the fact that she's also a mother who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania; the fact that half the guys in the media world have a crush on her is softened by the fact that she's no fashion model. On top of all that, she's a doting mother who loves to make vagina jokes. She's a boss, but also someone who makes fun of her bossiness by titling her book Bossypants. It's not an easy balance: the more she writes about what it's like to work in TV, the less relatable she becomes; but the more she writes about changing diapers, the less remarkable she seems. Still, when she recounts the difficulties of juggling these seemingly contradictory roles, her struggles will mostly seem familiar - especially, I think, to women of a certain socioeconomic-educational background. (There is one point near the end of the book where Fey writes a special thank-you to any man reading. It made me feel a little embarrassed.)

There are times in Bossypants when all this line-straddling gets on my nerves. Most importantly, I wish she would commit to writing either a joke book or a personal memoir. Fey begins the book by talking about her childhood and mentions that her famous scar comes from when a stranger slashed her face as a child, but then she doesn't tell us any more about the incident. Instead she tells us how irritating it is when people ask her about it. Sorry, lady: It's your autobiography. If you didn't want to talk about it, you shouldn't have brought it up. After her recollections of doing improv in Chicago, she's suddenly married and going on her honeymoon. Hey, where did this husband come from? She mentions that she met him while doing improv, but gives no details of their courtship or wedding. Is this going to be an autobiography, a memoir or a David Sedaris-style collection of personal essays? (Speaking of Sedaris, Tina Fey is Greek, too. Unless she's German. Apparently, she's both.) She may be famous for being a writer, but no one said she was a writer of books. Zing! Ow!

She could be, though. I mean, in a brief chapter about her failed effort to breast-feed her infant daughter she writes, "I chose to breast-feed and it was an amazing time in my life. It really changed me as a woman, and it was the most gratifying thing I've ever done." Here she puts an asterisk, which leads to this footnote: "Except for several very satisfying work-related things." The sarcastic, two-sentence paragraph says a lot about the way women turn motherhood into a competition with each other, and the footnote says multitudes about the pressures on women to be perfect mothers at the same time they're proving themselves in the workforce. This is good stuff. I think Fey is really one of the great feminist commentators today because of - not in spite of - the fact that she's funny. So, maybe she'll write a great book some day. Maybe after 30 Rock comes to an end. In the meantime, Bossypants is a fun gift to give to a young mother on Mother's Day.

Rumors of the Album's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerrated

2011-04-25T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is the entire text of an e-mail an editor recently sent to me and the other the critics at a paper where we write about music:

Some show I saw recently, two teens talking:

College girl: "How old is he?"
Other college girl: "I don't know...pretty old. He has a landline and uses words like 'album.'"

Pls. try to avoid using the word. I hate to ask, but there we are. In our rocking chairs.
Sometimes "latest release" or "self-titled debut" works, etc.

I understand what my editor meant - young music fans these days are more likely to download songs one at a time, rather than one album at a time. The album as I grew up knowing it - a collection of 12 or so songs that comprise a single work of somewhere between 30 minutes and 75 minutes in length - is no longer a necessary part of the consumer's relationship with music. People have been saying this for years, at least since iTunes Music Store came along and started selling songs for 99 cents.

I think it's been 10 years since the first time I read an article putting forth this idea. That means the article I read back then was probably saying that the Strokes' Is This It? was not really necessary; they could have released "Last Nite" as an MP3 single and waited to release "Someday" and "Take It Or Leave It" when they were good and ready. Ten years later, the big record labels have been decimated, iTunes Music Store has become the No. 1 retailer of music, there are myriad other ways to hear or possess individual songs, and yet the album is still the standard by which we measure music. The hype about the Strokes this year was that the boys were back together and were releasing ... a new album!

Whether it's magazines or websites, blogs or radio shows, if you are an artist and you want media attention, you still have to release an album. Maybe you release it online only with no CD, just vinyl (with a digital download code), maybe you release it on the archaic cassette format, maybe you release it on a CD that's included with a newspaper. (Speaking of archaic formats...) But you still release a group of songs that together clock in at somewhere between 30 and 75 minutes, a measure defined by the minimum you would expect from a vinyl LP and the maximum capacity of an audio CD. And you still call it an album.

The guys in the always forward-thinking Radiohead were saying after In Rainbows that they would not release albums anymore. But this spring we had King of Limbs, a proper album. (Well, proper in format anyway.) It, too, was tied in with the release of a newspaper. (Ahem!) Why did Radiohead do that? Is this a failure of imagination? If so, who is failing here? The press? The recording industry? The artists? The fans? All of them? I don't know. Maybe the album hangs on because it has more power than its critics would like to admit.

No one reads novels anymore, we're told, but that doesn't mean the short story has risen in status. To the contrary, it's still the case that a writer isn't really taken seriously until her or she publishes a novel. When you do a bigger project, you tell the world that you are worthy of being taken seriously. I think that's what's lurking behind the persistence of the album. We want the artist to commit to his or her art before we commit to the artist.

But what do I know? I still have a landline.

Law School Band Names, Part I

2011-04-06T10:22:00.000-07:00

When I started law school almost three years ago, I thought I was going to have to leave music behind. But even today, when I walk into a large room, the first thing I think is, "Where would you set up a P.A. in this place?" I'm still the same rock geek I always was - I just don't have as much time for it as I used to. So, this is how I've made it this far through law school with my sanity relatively intact: Whenever I read or hear a legal term that sounds like a band name, I write it down on this list. I like to look at it and imagine what kind of a band would pick each name.

Abuse of Discretion
Actual Malice
Arbitrary and Capricious
Bulge Jurisdiction
The But-For Test
The Confrontation Clause
Corpus Delicti
Dead Hand Control / The Dead Hand
Dead Man's Statute
Dragnet Clause
Ejusdem Generis
Enfeoffment With Livery of Seisin
The Erie Doctrine / The Eerie Doctrine
Fee Simple
Ferae Naturae
The Firefighters Rule
The Fleeting Expletives
Force Majeure
Inducement and Innuendo
Inter Alia
Justice Black
Lady Gag Order
The Libel-Proof Plaintiffs
Lord Advocate / Lord Magistrate
Lost Volume Seller
Mens Rea
The Miller Test
Moral Turpitude
The Next Friend
Parade of Horribles
Peerless / The Good Ship Peerless
Per Curiam
Pig in the Parlor
The Prior Restraints/Prior Restraint
Perfect Tender Rule
The Reasonable Persons
The Rescue Doctrine
Replevin for a Cow
Rose of Aberlone
The Rule in Shelley's Case
Rule of Doubt
Seisin
The Slippery Slopes
Special Damages
Strict Scrutiny
Sweat of the Brow
Sweat Protection
Testatrix
Tertium Quid
Thin Skull Rule
Time Place and Manner
Void v. Voidable
Wrath of Scalia

Would Calorie Labeling Prevent People from Buying the KFC Double Down?

2011-03-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

As part of an ongoing series about combating childhood obesity, the online magazine Slate.com recently published an interesting article about the FDA's forthcoming proposals for chain restaurants to post the calorie content of the food they sell. Author Nicholas Bagley argues that the practice won't put a dent in America's obesity epidemic. His proof: New York and Seattle have already put such regulations in place, and they haven't had much impact. He points to a number of studies that suggest that consumers either don't notice nutritional information labels or, if they do notice them, don't know how to or don't care to use them to make healthier food choices.

To Bagley, the calorie-count regulations are guided by "the principle that giving people the right information will help them make good decisions." But, he writes, studies show such mandatory disclosure requirements often fail. "Inundated by information they can't understand and don't have time to process, people routinely ignore mandatory disclosures," Bagley writes. "And they'll ignore calorie counts, too."

Bagley has an unusual and thought-provoking take on the issue, but his basic premise should not surprise anyone. Without the regulations, chain restaurants fail to provide their customers with the information that their food is bad for them - this is true. But many chain restaurants actually advertise their food as being bad for people. This, for some customers, and for some products, is a selling point. Check out the Arizona chain that names its restaurants the Heart-Attack Grill. (It was recently in the news after its spokesman, 575-pound Blair River, dropped dead at age 29.)

OK, the Heart-Attack Grill is an extreme example, but just check out KFC's breadless Double Down, a concoction of bacon and cheese pinned between two pieces of chicken. It was introduced last year in a storm of hype that declared, "This product is so meaty, there's no room for a bun!" and "Don't just feed your hunger ... crush it!" KFC marketed the quasi-sandwich to young men by such tactics as hiring female college students to strut around campus wearing sweatpants with a Double Down logos on their butts. And it worked, soon there was a huge amount of buzz around the sandwich, leading up to the product launch last April. There was actually a countdown clock on the KFC website leading up the day the Double Down would first be available.

The Double Down packs 610 calories and a whopping 1,770 milligrams of sodium. But look at McDonald's Double Quarter-Pounder With Cheese: It clocks in at 740 calories and 1,380 milligrams of sodium. It's arguably just as unhealthful a meal, but McDonald's did not market the Double Quarter-Pounder as a symbol of gluttony. KFC did that with the Double Down, and the company was rewarded with tons of free advertising in the form of blog posts, reviews and word of mouth.

So, what about these studies that Bagley mentions? I took a look at this 2009 study he cites, which looked at receipts and surveys from 1,156 adults at fast food restaurants in low-income communities in New York, where calorie counts are posted. The researchers then compared these results to survey results taken in Newark, New Jersey, where calorie counts are not posted. The researchers found that 27.7 percent of the respondents said that the calorie postings helped them to make better informed decisions. In spite of this, the researchers found no reduction in the number of calories purchased at the restaurants after the posting law went into effect. You would think that after posting calorie counts, 27.7 percent of customers would choose lower-calorie options and the researchers would see some kind of corresponding drop in calories purchase, but they did not. This suggests that at least 27.7 of customers saw the calorie numbers and either didn't know how to use them or consciously ignored them.

If the government wants to get serious about fighting obesity, the first of these two possibilities suggests the need for greater education about nutrition. The second of these two possibilities is more problematic. The government can require chain restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus, but what can it do if customers don't care? If a guy walks into a KFC because he saw an ad for the Double Down, a calorie count on the menu is not going to stop him: He wants the Double Down because it is absurdly high in calories and sodium.

This is getting off the subject of food law, but to better understand what is going on, I would like to see studies of the health warnings on cigarettes. Cigarette smoking has apparently declined over the past 40 years. But how quickly did it change? How much of the decline was due to the health warnings, and how much was because of smoking bans in public areas? And how much was simply because smoking has become much less socially acceptable? Perhaps it will just take time before people begin to see something like the Double Down as an embarrassing habit rather than a thrilling form of culinary recreation.

Goonies are Good Enough

2011-03-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

A Visit From the Goon Squad
By Jennifer Egan

In The Keep, Jennifer Egan alternated points of view between a couple of related characters at different points in time to tell a story that's just a little bit fantastical. In A Visit From the Goon Squad, each chapter switches points of view from among many characters in different places and time period. The places include New York, San Francisco, Arizona, Naples, Kenya and some unnamed tropical regime lorded over by a genocidal general. The time period ranges from the early 1970s to sometime in the 2020s or beyond.
The characters are all related to each other in some way, although sometimes by several degrees of separation. Among them are a recovering drug addict or a drunk or two, a couple of womanizers, a couple of suicidal types, a kleptomaniac, a doctor, a musician or two, music industry types, a movie star, a publicist, a dictator, a couple of kids and more. The chapters are told in first person, second person, third person, in present tense and past tense, with a smidgen of future, too. One chapter is told in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. (It works much better than I thought it would.) And the central story ... well, I just finished reading it, and I'm still trying to figure out what the connecting story is. I really liked almost all of it, but I don't know if I just read a novel or a bunch of short stories.

Maybe it's just because I had previously read Chapter 3, "Ask Me If I Care," when it was excerpted in the New Yorker, but I kept trying to see this as the connecting thread for all the characters. In fact, it connects only a few of them. The chapter concerns the Flaming Dildos, a teenage punk band in San Francisco in 1979. From the vantage point of Rhea, a friend of the band, the story is one of everyone wanting someone who wants someone else. Mostly, everyone wants the charismatic slide-guitar player Scotty, the beautiful half-Chinese Jocelyn or the rich white-girl Alice. Jocelyn begins having an affair with a much older man, the successful record executive Lou. In other chapters we learn that Lou will later be a mentor to Bennie, the Flaming Dildos' bass player, who will later be a successful record executive himself. Bennie is not a key character in this chapter, but most of the stories are related to Bennie's later life, or that of his long-time assistant, Sasha. Keep reading and we'll find out what became of most of the rest of the Flaming Dildos, too.

All the time-shifting gets especially jarring in Chapter 4, "Safari," which concerns an African vacation Lou takes in the early '70s with his daughter Charlie and his son Rolph. The events of the story are relatively straightforward - the group goes on safari, they interact in weird ways, a guy gets attacked by a lion. But the chapter seems to be infected with some kind of temporal disorientation. (Did I mention that the guy who gets attacked by the lion is named Chronos?) Get a load of this paragraph:

The warrior smiles at Charlie. He's nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But he's seen enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child. Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He'll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema; the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions). He'll marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where he'll invent a scanning device that becomes a standard issue for crowd security. He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather's hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight.

Wait ... who are we talking about again, and when? As you might have guessed from my review so far, we do end up meeting Lulu later in the book, but this paragraph is essentially a quick digression. When I first read it, I thought it was something Egan should have edited out. But by the time I finished the chapter, I saw that this kind of temporal shifting is the whole point of the chapter. By the time I finished the book, I had come to think this disorientation is the major connecting theme. I'm still figuring that out. The title of the book holds a clue. I thought at first it must refer to the Elvis Costello song "Goon Squad," and perhaps the Flaming Dildos would change their name to the Goon Squad or something. But no, there's no mention of goon squads anywhere in the novel. There are, however, a couple of moments when a character uses an odd expression: "Time is a goon."

Suggestions for Blurbs to Adorn the Inside of Dove Chocolate Wrappers

2011-03-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

My embarrassing, overprivileged person's complaint of the day: My lovely wife recently got me a bag of Dove dark chocolate candies, and they are delicious; however, I am very disappointed in the quality of the little blurbs the Dove people printed on the inside of the candies' foil wrappers. "Indulge your sense of adventure" - what is that supposed to mean? Is it really so adventurous to eat a piece of chocolate? For that matter, If I can read the blurb I have already opened the candy. Do I need more encouragement to eat it? How about this one: "All you need is love. But a little chocolate doesn't hurt." What is that? Seriously, are you begging Tina Fey to make fun of you with that one?
Come on, if you submitted these blurbs to Good Earth Tea's Tea Tag Contest, those hippies would not dignify you with a response.

Here are some suggestions for better chocolate wrapper blurbs:

Great Gatsby video game

2011-02-22T19:00:00.001-08:00

I am not much a video game player, but I got a kick out of this one. Or at least the idea of it:
http://greatgatsbygame.com/

Lactation Nation

2011-02-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

Every couple of weeks it seems there is another news article about how we in America are making our children obese. On alternate weeks, we get stories about the benefits of prolonged breast feeding. It was only a matter of time before a story came along that combined both. This blog post, by Jennifer LaRue Huget, from the Washington Post’s online site, reports on a new study that finds a correlation between childhood obesity and weaning babies before the recommended 6 months.

Like a lot of people, I find news articles about nutrition frustrating and anxiety-provoking - and never more so than when the articles are about nutrition for children. The breast-feeding stories are even more difficult for me - and I'm a man! If you've raised a baby and tried to keep it on breast milk for the pediatrician-recommended six months (even if, like me, your role has been no more than to occasionally have to warm up a bottle and feed it to the little one), you know how difficult it can be. My mother is a pediatrician and used to be on the board of the American Academy of Pediatrics, where she helped come up with widely cited recommendations about these things. And even she admits that some of the recommendations for prolonged breast feeding (up to age 2!) are unrealistic and unworkable in most women's lives.

For my Food Law class, I'm supposed to look up a food-related story and investigate it further. So, I looked up the study Huget was writing about. I found it at the website of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. You can find a summary and link to the pdf here.

The article is quite clear in its conclusion, and it appears that Huget characterized it correctly. But note a couple of things here: The study group was "among infants who were never breastfed or who stopped breastfeeding before 4 months of age" AND who were introduced to solid food before the age of 4 months. These babies were six times more likely to be obese at age 3. That's significant. But that's also a very select group. What about the babies who were breast fed for 5 months? What about the babies who started eating solid food at 5 months? And, if a child is obese at age 3, does that mean he or she will be obese throughout life? When my son was an infant, we often had to supplement breast milk with formula. That would apparently take him out of consideration for this study.

Looking a little further: Huget refers to the recommended 6 months of breast feeding as "current U.S. guidelines." I have found some government sites that mention the benefits of breast feeding, but as far as guidelines, everything I've found cites the American Academy of Pediatrics. (For instance, here on the website of the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development.)

Obviously, the government doesn’t regulate breast feeding or the introduction of solid foods to infants. But the government recommends breast feeding, and requires employers to accommodate their employees who need to pump. These are relatively recent developments. They came about because of studies like the one Huget was talking about. Government agencies listened to the scientists, and parents paid attention to reporters like Huget. It's good to wade through some of the anxiety and confusion of nutrition stories and realize that they're often doing a lot of good.

Wanna Grow Up to Be a Debaser!

2011-02-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

33 1/3: The Pixies' Doolittle
By Ben Sisario

Many years ago, I read a couple of quotes I had come across by two songwriters I admired, and I've been puzzling over them ever since. Both struck me as true, but they are mutually exclusive. The first was by Lou Reed, who said something to the effect of: "If it's open to multiple interpretations, it's bad writing." The other was by Charles Thompson (a.k.a. Black Francis, a.k.a. Frank Black) of the Pixies. He said that he thought it was silly that people were always asking him about the meaning of Pixies lyrics. Thompson said his words were just things he put together because they sounded cool, and when he sang them over loud, noisy rock 'n' roll, you couldn't really pick them out anyway.

Reed's songwriting approach has been the same throughout his career. Thompson's has changed a bit in his solo career, and now as leader of the reunited Pixies. But, judging by this entry in the 33 1/3 series of small books about great albums, what hasn't changed is his way of talking about songwriting. He still talks about his songs (his Pixies songs, at least) the way nice people accept compliments about the dish they brought for the potluck: "Oh, this old thing? Well, I just threw in a little of this and a little of that."

Is Thompson being falsely modest because it's polite? Politeness doesn't seem to be his strong point. Remember that, back in 1993, the other Pixies learned that the band had broken up when Thompson announced it on the radio. A Spin reporter reviewed one of his early solo albums by writing simply, "Scary monster, super creep." See also the reunion documentary loudQUIETloud, where Thompson cuts through a band discussion of drummer Dave Lovering's drug problems by saying bluntly, "Rehab and therapy."

But if Thompson is not being falsely modest, that means he really doesn't think his lyrics are interesting. And that means he thinks we're kind of dopes if we spend any time thinking about what he meant by "If man is 5, the devil is 6, and if the devil is 6 then God is 7."

Oh well, Lou Reed thinks we're all dopes, too.

This is one of the better 33 1/3 books I've read. Ben Sisario, a widely-published critic and journalist (he has a cool blog here), spent a couple of days driving around with Thompson, asking him about the album. As usual, Thompson is open and honest, but not particularly interested in talking about the meanings of the songs.

Interviews and a history of the album make up the first half of the small book. The second half is a song-by-song analysis of the album. Sisario gets into what chords Thompson and Joey Santiago were playing, and even what kind of mixing console producer Gil Norton was using. He also gets into -- you guessed it! -- the meanings of the lyrics. For instance, in "Monkey Gone to Heaven," there's an underwater guy (Neptune?) who gets killed by sludge from New York and New Jersey. In "Mr. Grieves," we hear about "Neptuna's only daughter." Then there's "Wave of Mutilation," about driving into the ocean. There are also biblical references and recurring images of environmental catastrophe, sex and death. But then, there's also "Crackity Jones," which is just about a crazy guy that Thompson briefly had as a roommate in Puerto Rico. (The line about "Paco Picapiedre" is just the roommate talking about Fred Flinstone, who is known as "Pablo Picapiedre" in Spanish translations of the show.)

So, maybe Thompson doesn't think his lyrics are all that important, but he gave us a lot to work with. Those songs hold up to scrutiny, and Sisario does a great job with them.

Freedom of Choice

2011-01-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

Freedom
By Jonathan Franzen

In The Corrections, Franzen was writing about a family of characters who represented socioculturalpoliticalepicurialwhatever trends in the United States circa ... I don't know. I remember that the title referred to a "market correction," in which the stock market tanked, but whatever the slump was, it has since been dwarfed by the great recession we've been in since the last year of George W. Bush's administration. Here again Franzen returns to the theme of America in decline. Bush and Sept. 11 and Iraq play background roles, and there are some parts of the novel that deal with the real estate boom. There's even a bit about the subsequent bust near the end. And the title plays on what is perhaps the most valued and abused word and concept in America today. But the specific historical details don't really matter so much. This is a novel about the courtship and long marriage of Walter and Patty Berglund, about their children Joey and Jessica, and about Walter's college roommate, Richard Katz. Franzen's strength - and he's very strong about it - is in building these characters.

Where the novel picks up the story, Walter and Patty are living in St. Paul, where I live, and Walter works as a lawyer at the Nature Conservancy, where I've been doing a legal internship. Walter and Richard meet at Macalester College, which is about five blocks from my house.

Anyway, this is a rambling, multi-generational story, with different sections of the novel picking up the Berglunds' stories at different points in time, from different perspectives - first we see them from the point of view of some nosy and not very kind neighbors, then we hear from Peggy in a first-person section, later we see things from Walter's perspective in a third-person section, and from Joey, and from Richard. (Jessica gets short shrift.) New characters pop up here and there, stick around for a while and then disappear from the story one way or another. Some of these digressions work better than others. (I thought the long section where Joey is working for a corrupt Iraq contractor seemed a little forced, a little T.C. Boyle-esque, in its political aspirations.)

What kept me reading was that I really wanted to find out what happened with these characters. And the remarkable thing about this is that none of them seems especially likable. Walter may be the least selfish, most good-hearted among them, but he spends much of the novel being cranky. Franzen basically skips over the months or years in his characters' lives when they are genuinely happy. But somehow he gets us to stick with them. I think that's part of the reason he titled the book Freedom: We sometimes think we will be happier if we are free from our families, but often that freedom feels more like being lost.

Expressway to Yr. Idols

2011-01-18T09:12:00.000-08:00

Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
By David Browne

I was on vacation with my family when my mother saw this book, read the back cover and said in disbelief, "This says these guys influenced Sofia Coppola and all these people!" She had never heard of Sonic Youth (though my sister and I had an SY poster on the wall of our shared bathroom when we were living at home), but she had heard of Sofia Coppola.

This is a very solid, engaging and, I think, well-researched biography of one of the influential band. But one thing it does extraordinarily well is to put Sonic Youth in context. And that context includes a lot of celebrity cameos. Some of them I knew to expect. (Sonic Youth introduced Geffen Records to Nirvana.) Some of them I didn't. (Kim Gordon's high school boyfriend in California was Danny Elfman!) As for Coppola, she worked with Kim Gordon on a clothing line, and she shot a video for the band's "Mildred Pierce." Kim gave Coppola a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel The Virgin Suicides, and Coppola decided she wanted to direct it as her first film. It turns out that Sonic Youth also found a skateboard video director, Spike Jonze, and brought him onboard to direct a music video. Soon, they introduced him to Coppola and the two ended up getting married for a while. (The young husband in Lost in Translation is based on Jonze.)

Is this all just gossip? Yes and no. The celebrity angle is important because in some cases, these people might not have become celebrities without Sonic Youth's help. As Michael Azerrad notes in his excellent Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, one of Sonic Youth's most important talents was a flair for networking. Browne expands on that point, showing how the band operated as a kind of nexus between the underground and the mainstream, helping artists like Nirvana and the painter Raymond Pettibon cross over to wider audiences. And Browne points out that Sonic Youth's music, too, was something of a balancing act: Though their early '80s material was a far cry from the pop and new wave on the radio at the time, it was much more identifiably "rock" than anything by their friends in New York's no wave scene. If you were seeking adventurous sounds, but you weren't ready for Glenn Branca, the Swans or Lydia Lunch, you could still get a kick out of "Death Valley '69." Maybe that would be a gateway to other, more challenging music.

Of course, this in-between position became more strained in the '90s, when Nirvana ushered in the alt-rock years. Geffen hoped that Sonic Youth could reap the benefits of the boom they'd help create, and it seems that Sonic Youth thought maybe they could, too. In hindsight, it seems obvious that even the band's most accessible records such as "Kool Thing" were too weird for the wider public and would never be hits. At the time, it wasn't so clear. Browne does a good job of showing how Sonic Youth's level-headed attitude helped them survive the hype and the subsequent disappointment, and to keep carrying on making great and challenging music into the 21st century.

What the Heck? An Interview with Dale E. Basye

2011-01-10T14:37:00.000-08:00

Dale E. Basye is the author of Heck, a series of darkly funny (and punny) books for kids. The first of these, Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, tells the story of Milton and Marlo Fauster, a good-natured, 10-year-old nerd and his shoplifting Goth 13-year-old sister, who are killed in a marshmallow explosion and are sent to a Dante's Inferno-like afterlife where they are doomed to stay until the end of time, or until they turn 18, whichever comes first. The books are proving quite popular among weird kids everywhere and there's reportedly a movie in pre-production. Oscar-winner Juan Jose Campanella ("The Secret in Their Eyes") has been named as possible director.

Dale is also an old friend of mine from my early days at the San Francisco Chronicle. After he moved to Portland, Oregon, and helped start up a bi-weekly newspaper called Tonic, he convinced me to move up there to work at the paper's tiny offices downwind from the Gardenburger factory.

I didn't know you wrote fiction - other than that column you used to write in Tonic all those years ago. How long have you been at it?

I had a couple of columns in Tonic: Portland's High Fidelity News and Entertainment. One was Chatter, the lite-news/gossip column which was a total pain to compile. I mean, I just didn't care what party Thomas Lauderdale was at or that Gus Van Sant was working on an album about golf. There isn't technology sensitive enough to register my interest in stuff like that. Tangent was the other column I did for Tonic which began as a way to cover up the fact that we habitually didn't sell enough ads to fill up the paper. It was, as the name implies, a forum for randomness. Like the "Arboretum is Murder" protest piece, Jesus: The Board Game, or the guy that licked Portland streets and assessed them as if they were rare vintages of wine. So that was one foray into fiction, or at least parody. Before that, when I was a copy grunt at theSan Francisco Chronicle (may it rest in pieces), I would occasionally do club or book reviews, but I was deadly bored of the usual format employed, so I would, instead, use the subject matter as a springboard to write about stuff that I really wanted to write about. Usually shamelessly decorated anecdotes and musings. That was pretty much my MO when writing for Willamette Week as well, where I was film critic for two years. Or when I went skydiving for a story (a story that happened to be about skydiving). Or the time I convinced the staff to do heroin in Scotland and review the movie Trainspotting for me. But, all of that not withstanding, my first foray into fiction was in the late 90s when I entered the world of advertising. It's very similar to writing literary fiction, in that you have a message and you have an audience and you try to connect the two with a certain voice and angle. It's kind of like role playing, only less kinky. You assume a persona and adopt a tone. Some of the writing I'm most proud of from those days is the work I did for Nike, in that I am the least athletic person on earth. Even Stephen Hawking is more physically active than I. And the fact that I could wrangle the Nike "tone" and convey any semblance of passion for athletics was astounding! In terms of "true" fiction, Heck was my first attempt. I had written a couple of bad screenplays before, but Heck was my first book and, in a way, always will be.

How did you start work on Heck?

I started from a crouching position, then moved along the edge of the room stealthily until the moment was ripe, then sprang upon my unsuspecting subject matter with Shark Week-esque zeal. Actually, Heck began after I had written a short film called "Stain" for director Paul Harrod, an amazing art director who had worked for years at Will Vinton Studios, now Laika. We had enjoyed working together and he had an idea about doing a VH1 Behind the Music-style short focusing on Satan. So I immersed myself in all things Hell, and one of my ideas was Heck: a kidified Hell for children that Satan created as a tax dodge. The short didn't pan out, but that nugget stuck with me. Concurrently, I was reading a lot to my young son, Ogden, and was intrigued by how "dark" youth literature had become. A lot of authors were getting away with an awful lot! And, as advertising had punctured a small hole in my soul, I was interested in doing something truly creative and only mildly ruinous in terms of its general effect on society at large. So I started putting the flesh on Heck's bones, so to speak, until it developed into a story. Initially I wrote it as a pilot for a TV show as part of a contest for Bravo. It's been years so I'm beginning to think that I didn't win. After a bit, I turned the teleplay or whatever it was attempting to be into a novel. And that novel was Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go.

How did you get the deal to publish it?

Every summer the Willamette Writers Group (a regional support group for recovering authors) holds a big conference at some terrible airport hotel. It doesn't matter which because they are always the same. Despite the terrible hotels, the conferences are quite useful. It's nice to rub patched-elbows with other writers from time to time. But, by far, the most fascinating aspect of these conferences is the pitch sessions, where they bring in live, exotic editors from real publishing houses and-for 60 bucks or so-you get 15 minutes to pitch your book idea and get real-time feedback. So I thought this would be a great experience. You know: "Hey, this is my idea...oh, you hate it? Well, can you tell me how, exactly, you hate it? Great. I appreciate your constructive feedback and, before I leave, can I have my heart back? The one you ripped beating from my chest?" I didn't have enough money to attend the conference-I still don't, really-so I volunteered: helping pass out Xeroxes at workshops and things like that. I signed up to pitch Diane Landolf from Random House Children's Books a couple of book ideas I had. Since I become almost fatally awkward when put in these kind of situations-sweating profusely, blanking out completely, laughing inappropriately-I wrote out my pitch, like a movie trailer ("In an underworld rife with corruption, one boy had the courage to...") and recorded it on my iPod. Can I write brand names in this interview? No? OK, my portable eJuke device then. I listened to my voice, an especially painful experience, over and over while riding my bike that week. So by the time I was ready for my pitch, I had my spiel down pat. It was like an out-of-body experience, watching myself deliver the goods. So Diane, who seemed about 14 at the time, was all smiles and seemed generally interested. Of the two ideas, she thought Heck was the most interesting. She gave me her card and told me to contact her when I had finished the manuscript. Afterward, I thought "She was nice, how she turned me down so sweetly, pretending to be genuinely interested in my book ideas." But since she seemed to respond to Heck, I developed it further. Then one amazing day, I get an email from her, telling me that my pitch was the best she had heard at the conference (my apologies to all of the other attendees of the 2005 Willamette Writers Conference who pitched book ideas to Diane Landolf and happen to be reading this) and wanted to know when she could expect it. I was stunned. I not only soiled myself, but also the person working next to me, such was my surprise. So I hustled to finish the manuscript and sent it to her while there was still some interest. It was a fairy tale outcome, actually, only this fairy tale ended with Diane going, "Um, nice story, only there's no ending." So I wrote an actual ending (it still had a kind of cliffhanger TV denouement) and Diane liked it so I finally got my precious contract: for two books, no less.

Did you know beforehand what age group you would be writing for?

Kind of. I read books that were sort of in the ballpark—or at least the overflow parking lot of—the audience I was assuming Heck was intended. But this was all undiscovered country for me. It still is, actually. I'm not really talented enough to go "I am writing for a nine year-old boy from Pasadena with freckles and a lazy eye who has more than two unicorn T-shirts." I just kind of write for me. It helps that I'm sort of, well, arrested. The Thomas Pynchon of poop jokes. Whenever I write the Heck books, I always tend to write them as if they were for teens, then-in the editing process-they get softened somewhat so that they are appropriate for especially precocious 9-12 year-olds. Though this age group still seems a bit young to me, considering the language and the themes I use. But the publishing world is very regimented in this way, as it is all about shelf space. My very, very first draft of Heck had Marlo, um, becoming a woman in Heck. That was probably the very first thing I changed.

What kind of concerns did you (or your publisher) have about writing for 9-13-year-olds? I noticed that you have a lot of gross-out stuff but you don't really have any swearing or overt sexuality.

I was rather surprised at how bold Random House was in regards to my books, especially my editor Diane. Whenever I write, I will put in things that I know go way too far so that, in the revision stages, I can see where the "line" is I'm not supposed to cross. Much to my surprise, most of the things I think don't have a chance in Heck of making it to the final version, actually get through! Lately, though, I notice that a lot of the adult stuff-not necessarily adult in theme but scenes involving mostly adults-get cut, but that's mainly because my readers want characters their own age to relate to, and a lot of the adult stuff gets in the way of the action. I still fold in as much as I can because I find it personally amusing, or think it helps to create more of an oppressive atmosphere over all. Overt sexuality doesn't really figure in the Heck cosmology anyhow, but it wouldn't be appropriate for tweens (a word I abhor). Swearing less so, but I don't go there mainly because no one in Heck really swears. Principal Bubb, Heck's Principal of Darkness, is a ghastly, horrid, irredeemable creature, but she won't tolerate a potty mouth.

What do you think kids in this age group want out of a novel? What do you think they get out of Heck?

Kids are like adults only they don't have to shave quite as much. But they want a book to facilitate escape—just like us— a portal to another world where they can lose themselves. Kids want something much more plot-driven, though. The story has to move. They love the humor of Heck, but I was surprised at how some kids, especially the spooky kids, really connected with the characters and the adventure-aspects of the story. They take the ridiculousness almost as seriously as I do. My readers also appreciate that I don't talk/write down to them: that I use words they have to occasionally look up (heck, so do I sometimes) and that I can introduce them to dead historical figures that they more than likely would never have encountered, at least not at this age, such as Richard Nixon and Lizzie Borden.

I'm interested in the cosmology of Heck: It's obviously inspired by Dante's Inferno, so that suggests a Christian view, but there's also Anubis and the River Styx. Mostly, there's a view of the afterlife as a cosmic bureaucracy. You even refer to a Galactic Order Department, which suggests that God is some kind of government agency. How did you develop that idea?

Wow, that's like a breathless Miley Cyrus Show string of questions! Concerning the cosmology of Heck, I basically take whatever belief system I can get my hands on and smash it up (ooh-ooh-woo-ooh), then assemble a collage of sorts to create this fantasy world: like a ransom note cut of every possible notion of the afterlife. That way no one can get offended (well, I've found that most anyone can be offended if they really want to be) because I'm making fun of everything, which is kind of like making fun of nothing, parody-wise. And, in terms of G.O.D., if there truly is a master plan, it would have to be vaguely Swiss in its precision, in the sense of a clockwork bureaucracy. Plus my idea of Hell would have to be some dismal, ironically soulless institution: like Dante's Department of Motor Vehicles.

Have you taken any flak from religious groups who don't like this view?

Right when Heck came out, some fundamentalist web site in Texas damned (or darned as the case may be) the book. Though, after scanning the entries, I realize that they were all literally judging the book by its lurid cover. Some of the Amazon reviews savage it in ways so visceral and puzzling that my pride assumes it's because of its theme. I can't really look at reviews anymore, as I have yet to develop the emotional calluses necessary. Even good reviews give me the willies sometime. A local book store tried to get me some school appearances, but couldn't in that area because of the book's title. Luckily, a more progressive district was only a stone's throw away, though one should never throw stones at people in glass aphorisms. Or something like that. Overall, I've been rather surprised there hasn't been more outcry. I could use the publicity! Plus the books burn so smoothly, that I would love it if some reactionary group bought thousands of copies and staged high-profile burnings! But seriously, I would think that even the most staunch fundamentalist would appreciate the fact that a book published by a major publisher is even dealing with some of these religious subjects. And my references, both historic and spiritual, actually build a child's knowledge and awareness of religious figures and various belief systems, which I would think these people would appreciate. And I can think of no better vehicle than humor to deliver some of these dark themes. Speaking of Texas, the very first Heck Book Club was established in, of all places, Humble, Texas!

You have published three Heck books so far, and I think you said you're working on the fifth already. How far ahead is your planning on the series?

Yes, Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck came out this May and seems to be the favorite with the series' fans, which is a relief as it is the longest and I feared the series was suffering from that nagging "bloat" that plagues so many book properties. The fourth, Fibble: The Fourth Circle of Heck, has been finished for a while and comes out in May. Currently, I am working on the second draft of Snivel: The Fifth Circle of Heck, and am contracted for one more. Ultimately, I see Heck as a nine part series, considering there are nine circles of Heck. I'm pretty confident that Random House will let me write all nine so that I can finish the story's meta story arc and, in true Dante style, ultimately emerge from this dark (comedic) wood of error!

In the Air Tonight

2010-11-18T18:14:00.000-08:00

Three different conversations I had recently made me think about the relationship of listeners to the people who make the music.

1. So, there was this silly Internet campaign to try to raise $1 million to get Weezer to break up. A friend of mine wrote about it on the Huffington Post. On his Facebook page, I wrote that I don't understand why people hate Weezer so much. I mean, I don't really care about them, but if you consider that their competition is Linkin Park and Nickelback, Weezer doesn't seem so bad. His other friends scoffed, rightly pointing out that "not as bad as Nickelback" is praise so faint as to be scathing criticism. But there's something else going on with the Weezerhate. The people who hate Weezer today are people who loved Weezer's first album and especially the cult favorite Pinkerton. As a caller to the radio show "Sound Opinions" put it, Weezer 2.0 embarrasses everyone who ever loved those albums.

2. My son was watching Nickelodeon when a commercial came on advertising the Sony XBox video game system. There was a distinctive herky-jerky guitar riff in the commercial that I instantly recognized as the work of Gang of Four. I put something about it on Facebook, and soon I got into an interesting discussion with friends and friends of friends. You see, we're all tired of arguing over whether putting a punk song in a TV ad is "selling out." That battle has been lost. But this wasn't just any punk song, this was Gang of Four, a band whose lyrics were unmistakable as critiques of consumerism and capitalism. The song in this commercial, "Natural's Not In It," begins with the words, "The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure," and here it was, selling a leisure product. The commercial was aired on Nickelodeon, but the music was aimed at the parents of the kids who watch that channel. Whoever chose that particular song was practically daring 40-somethings to get angry about it.

3. I read this article about Phil Collins and had an interesting conversation about it. I went to high school in the mid-'80s, and so I heard enough Phil Collins to give me hives. But when I hear that wonderful "This American Life" episode where Starlee Kine talks to Collins about "Against All Odds," I saw that he seems like a decent guy. I especially liked the part where Kine asks him which he would rather have: (1) A horrible breakup, but to have written the hit song "Against All Odds" about it; or (2) to have had the relationship work, but to have never written the song. He doesn't hesitate to answer that he would rather have had the relationship last. I thought that was touching. But that didn't prepare me for the depths of self-loathing and self-pity that Collins lays bare in this Rolling Stone article. There's one part where he says, "I only recorded the songs once, it's the radio that plays them over and over!" A reviewer for Entertainment Weekly once wrote, "Even Phil Collins must know we all grow weary of Phil Collins." It turns out, he knows this all too well. In the article we learn that when he met his current girlfriend he asked her to call him Philip, because he is sick of being Phil Collins. He tells the interviewer about his thoughts of suicide, and he's gone so far as to think of the method he'd use.

Who owns the music? We know who owns the copyrights, or who can legitimately claim to have made the music, but we still feel a sense of ownership over the music we love. When the artists who created this music go on to make music we don't like, we feel personally betrayed. When they sell the music to a commercial, we feel like someone is selling part of our souls. But it can cut the other way: When the public gets sick of an artist's music, the artist feels personally rejected.

Go Giants! Orange and Black Chili

2010-11-07T12:49:00.000-08:00

I'm not a sports fan, but I sometimes enjoy watching baseball. More than that, I enjoy baseball fans. The things people talk about when they talk about football - the foolishness of making that play last night, who's going to be traded, who's a draft pick, what team is threatening to move out of town - I really don't have any interest in all that. But when people talk about baseball, they talk about philosophical issues like the virtues of pitching versus the virtues of hitting. I can get into that. They also, famously, get into weird statistical analysis, which I find hilarious. And they almost always talk about going to games with their dads and sitting there together for hours in the sun, waiting for something to happen. (This waiting for something to happen, of course, is what people point to when they say they don't like baseball.) I feel like I learn something about my friends when they talk about baseball that I wouldn't learn if they were talking about football or basketball. I don't feel like I have to follow the games themselves, I just listen to my friends talk about it.

This October, as the San Francisco Giants made their way through the playoffs, I got a kick out of following all my S.F. friends' Giants-related status updates on Facebook. They would post links to stories and videos, and it was through these that I started to learn about the quirky characters on the team. I love quirky characters. And I learned about the ways Giants fans were honoring these characters: One player inspired fans to wear fake beards, another inspired people to comically throw around the expression "F- yeah!", still another inspired fans to wear panda hats. I got a kick out of it. After the team got into the World Series, a new angle developed - San Francisco's resentment of the national media's East Coast bias. Now, that's a subject I can sink my teeth into. The Giants' opponents in the series were the Texas Rangers, a team that used to be owned by George W. Bush. Bush was perhaps the most hated man in San Francisco, and in his eight years as president, he never visited the city - unusual for a president, even a Republican one. In the final games of the Series, in Texas, Bush was sitting right behind home plate. When the Giants won the Series last week, I was surprised to find myself getting emotional about it.

But speaking of sinking my teeth into things, I made this chili for a cookoff fundraiser at my law school a couple of weeks ago. I called it Go Giants! Orange and Black Chili. It didn't win the cookoff (vegetarian chilies usually don't), but I got a lot of compliments. If you're not a Giants fan, you can always call it Pumpkin Chili and serve it in the late fall.

Go Giants! Orange and Black Chili
(Adapted from a recipe I found in some giveaway at Lund's)

2 lb. pumpkin, peeled, seeded and diced into 1/2-inch cubes
1 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1-3 garlic cloves, minced
1 Tbsp (or so) of chipotles, chopped. (We emptied a can of chipotles in adobo in a Ziploc bag and keep it in the freezer so we can break off some when we need it.)
1 14-oz. can of diced tomatoes
1 14-oz. can of crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
1 cup apple cider
4 Tbsp. of chili powder
1 tsp kosher salt
2 cans of black beans, rinsed and drained.

Heat oil in a large, heavy pan over medium heat. Add onions, garlic and chipotles. Cover and stir occasionally until soft, about 10 minutes.
Add pumpkin, tomatoes, water, apple cider, chili powder, salt. Stir. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer until the pumpkin is tender, about 30 minutes. Add beans, cover and continue to simmer about 15 minutes.

Writing about Writing about Writing about a Film - Ebert v. O'Hehir

2010-10-11T11:23:00.000-07:00

What is a review for? Is it just a consumer guide, to let readers know whether they should spend their money on a given book, album, movie, or other item? Or is it to place a work in context with the culture that created it? Or is it just an easy way for a publisher to attract both an audience and the advertisers who wish to reach that audience? I answer all these either/or questions with an enthusiastic "Yes."

I have a fondness for the cultural context approach - I love the idea that we can find some valuable insight into our culture and politics by looking closely at a Judd Apatow movie or something, but this approach leads to lazy liberal-arts majors b.s.-ing their ways through life. (And I don't mean just Chuck Klosterman.) The consumer-guide approach strikes me as simplistic, especially in the case of a review of movies, books or music. Enjoying a movie is such a subjective thing that it's impossible for a critic to tell a reader with any certainty that she is going to like it as much as the critic did. And I, for one, often read reviews of movies I never had any intention of seeing. At the same time, I think the consumer guide approach is more admirable in a way than the cultural-context approach. It's more humble - the reviewer doesn't try to make himself or herself the center of the story, and tries to keep the audience's interests foremost. It's more honest, too. It says, here's what you need to know.

A recent exchange between movie critics Roger Ebert and Andrew O'Hehir highlights these different approaches. Ebert, of course, is the famous former host of "At the Movies" and sort of the dean of American newspaper movie critics. O'Hehir is a writer who's been kicking around San Francisco for awhile, and now has the top movie critic chair at Salon. Reviewing the horse racing movie "Secretariat," O'Hehir wrote a somewhat over-the-top critique of the movie as a kind of Republican fantasy of America with some vaguely and not-so-vaguely racist undertones. His headline read, "'Secretariat': A Gorgeous, Creepy American Myth." Ebert read the review and found it "insane." Ebert isn't totally adverse to finding political allegory in a movie, but he's basically a "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" critic. Hell, his "At the Movies" may have invented "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" movie criticism. He found O'Hehir's review to be an absurd overreach and wrote about it on his blog, in a post titled "Secretariat Was Not a Christian." O'Hehir then responded to Ebert's blog post, basically saying, Look man, I'm not making this stuff up. I really like the way O'Hehir points out that a movie doesn't have to be all sloganeering in order to be labeled as propaganda, it can be a political work just because it portrays a certain way of living as "normal."

I think that's an important point. A friend who works in the movie business once told me that he used to watch "Leave it to Beaver" and think that his family wasn't happy like the Cleavers because his family wasn't white like the Cleavers. The producers of "Leave it to Beaver," I'm sure, had no intention of making propaganda, but they did.

I think O'Hehir and Ebert are both right, but I'm leaning toward O'Hehir. I haven't seen the movie, and I really have no interest in it. But I felt like I learned something from his review that I would not have learned from a more straightforward critique of the film on its merits.

So Hologramatic - David Bowie's Lyrics Part Two

2010-09-30T13:51:00.000-07:00

"Starman" and "TVC 15"

One of my favorite Bowie songs is "Starman" from the Ziggy Stardust album. It tells the story of a space alien who talks to young people through pop radio, telling them he'd love to come to Earth and meet them, but he's afraid he'd blow everyone's minds. I always get the sense that the radio listeners aren't the ones the alien is worried about. By virtue of listening to the right music at the right time, they are the select few who can understand him, and he is the otherworldly being who understands them. Space aliens and astronauts turn up repeatedly throughout Bowie's career and "Starman" is what I usually think of when I think of Bowie's lyrics. Essentially, it's the story of a pop star who can only be understood by people who are fabulous. It's partly a coded gay message: All you lonely gay kids, there's someone who understands you. But that doesn't explain the entire appeal. If it did, Ziggy Stardust would have been no more popular than, say, Jobriath. It isn't just gay kids who need to hear that someone understands them; it's every kid, and everyone who was ever a kid. Morrissey has been doing a similar trick for the past 25 years. But Morrissey's songs are always about Morrissey, in one way or another. Bowie hides behind characters and sings about all kinds of things.

Take "TVC 15." This is a song about a guy and his television. The song was recorded for Bowie's infamously drug-addled sessions for the Station to Station album, which was recently re-released, and coincided with the appearance of his aloof, aristocratic, quasi-fascist character The Thin White Duke. Yeah, this may have been the most chaotic period in Bowie's life, and yet he was writing about a guy who sits at home watching TV and neglecting his girlfriend. Maybe at the time it seemed more futuristic: This particular television, the model TVC 15, is "hologramatic." Today, this could simply be one of the plasma-screen 3-D televisions that are starting to enter the market today. Or maybe we should think of the TVC 15 as a virtual reality game on a computer. Either way, despite the '70s boogie in the music, the lyrics are totally 2010. "I give my complete attention to a very good friend of mine," he sings, meaning the TVC 15. "I brought my baby home, she sat around forlorn," because he's more interested and immersed in the television. When she leaves, he dreams that some day they'll be together, both living inside the TVC 15.

The song's kind of silly, perhaps, but it may be the inspiration for Gary Numan's "Cars" and all the other new wave/post-punk songs about people being alienated from each other by technology.

Mickey Mouse Has Grown Up a Cow: David Bowie's Lyrics, Part I

2010-09-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Mickey Mouse Has Grown Up a Cow:
David Bowie's Lyrics, Part I

When I was young I thought Bowie fans were silly. I remember being with some friends in high school when the video for "Loving the Alien" came on MTV and the girls flipped out over how brilliant Bowie was. "Look at that makeup! He's a genius" My friend Phil and I were unimpressed: "It's just makeup!" we said. "That was probably the director's idea, not his!"

But then a few years ago, a bunch of friends and I were at a dive karaoke bar and my friend Jaime got up to sing David Bowie's "Young Americans." She got up, excited to sing, "Allllll night! They were the young Americans!" but, as the other words to the song scrolled across the screen, she stood dumbfounded. So did the rest of us. Is that what he's singing? I had no idea!

Here is the final verse from "Young Americans," the one that ends with the band stopping and Bowie singing "break down and cry---yyyy:"

You ain't a pimp and you ain't a hustler
A pimp's got a Cadi and a lady got a Chrysler
Black's got respect, and white's got his soul train
Mama's got cramps, and look at your hands ache
(I heard the news today, oh boy)
I got a suite and you got defeat
Ain't there a man you can say no more?
And, ain't there a woman I can sock on the jaw?
And, ain't there a child I can hold without judging?
Ain't there a pen that will write before they die?
Ain't you proud that you've still got faces?
Ain't there one damn song that can make me
break down and cry?

Did you have any idea that's what he was singing? I didn't. Looking at those words on paper, I'm not sure I know even how he fits them into the meter of the song. Bowie is one of those unusual artists whose songs seem simple, but get more and more strange the closer you look at them. Part of that is simply because he spent the best years of his career loaded on enough drugs to incapacitate the U.S. Army. And part of it is because he's brilliant.

What is Bowie singing about in "Young Americans" anyway? That catchy chorus is about wanting "the young American," but the verses are largely about young Americans getting together and growing old. I think he's singing not so much about young Americans, as the young Americans who appear in American songs. "Young Americans" is self-consciously performed in an American style - modeled after the then-popular "Philly soul" sound. Bowie is giving us the big entertainment we want, but at the same time telling us it will never be enough to keep us from growing old, or to keep women from being beaten or parents from neglecting their children. And then there's that quote from the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" - sung only by his backup singers. What is going on there? Is he making fun of himself for throwing in the mundane details about cramps and aches? Or is he making fun of us for wanting escapist pop?

Sometimes you feel like a nut

2010-08-26T19:32:00.001-07:00

Do the words "partially de-fatted peanut flour" excite you like they do me? Because when I breezed through the Trader Joe's a couple of weeks ago, I spied this new product on the shelves and immediately placed it in my cart. My first thought was pancakes (more on that another time) but when I got to the check out, the friendly TJs employee mentioned making chocolate chip cookies and I knew, oh I knew, that this would be for my family.

So last weekend, for our block party, I had my initial run. I'll admit they were ugly little cookies, but they disappeared faster than these beauties. Furthermore, Will could see the wicked gleam in my eye that means I'm obsessed with getting a recipe correct.

I think I have it mastered, and friends, it's easier than the traditional chocolate chip cookie. There's no need to cream butter and sugar. Kitchen sink method works best. Dump it all in the mixer at once and let the mixer do the work. And you will be rewarded with an intensely nutty, soft, slightly crumbly, non-greasy delight. And if you suddenly find yourself pulling into TJs on the way home from work, saying to yourself "it really won't be that busy," well, I'm willing to take some of the blame.
Flourless Peanut Chocolate Chip Cookies

A bonus: you can confidently serve this to your gluten-intolerant friends to their delight. As if they could last that long.

2.5 Cups Partially de-fatted peanut flour
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temp
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 bag semisweet chocolate chips

Combine the first 5 ingredients in the mixing bowl. Don't bother sifting the peanut flour, it will be clumpy, just run the mixer on low for a minute and the grit of the sugars will break up the clumps of flour.

Dump in the butter, eggs, and vanilla. Mix until clumpy dough forms and no dry ingredients are on the bottom, it's hard to overmix, there's no gluten to make a tough cookie. Dough will be stiff. Add chocolate chips.

Roll dough into balls and flatten on cookie tray. They don't much rise or spread very much so you can pack more on the cookie sheet.

Bake at 375 degrees for 12 minutes, checking cookies after 10 minutes. They won't looked browned on top, but if you lift a corner of a cookie you will see slight browning on the bottom. Remove from oven and cool cookies on tray for 5 minutes, then move to a cooling rack. Or your mouth, because who are we kidding, you know you can't wait.

2010-08-11T07:39:00.000-07:00

Quick Quotes

"Hanging on Second Avenue
Eating chicken vindaloo
I just want to be with you
I just want to have something to do
Tonight, tonight, tonight"
- The Ramones, "I Just Wanna Have Something to Do"

“In the Romantic tradition, only Byron would have attempted the rhyme of ‘Second Avenue’ and “chicken vindaloo,” and Byron would have meant it for a joke. The Ramones don’t use the rhyme as a joke, but they don’t use it seriously, either. It’s fun. There is a place called Second Avenue and on it Indian restaurants serve chicken vindaloo. The lyric is straight reportage. That the two things rhyme is proof that the sense-data impinging on the self, if accurately reported, add up to a wholeness that gives a sensuous thrill. It takes more than guts to rhyme avenue and vindaloo, it takes a vulgar view of the universe.”

- Robert Pattison, from “The Triumph of Vulgarity,” 1987.

2010-08-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

Talking to Friends About Rob Sheffield

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran
By Rob Sheffield

1. Ella. I told Ella that Rob Sheffield writes compellingly about the differences in the way men and women experience music fandom. For instance, Sheffield writes, even if you can get a group of men to talk seriously about Duran Duran, the conversation is going to be along the lines of, "Which was the better side project, Power Station or Arcadia?" Women, on the other hand, will talk about their favorite videos, which Duran Duran member was their special favorite when they were young, etc. Ella said she thinks that's largely true, but she also feels that girls tend to fixate on the words and message of the song, while men are fixated on the individual components - the guitar riffs, the drum beat, etc. This ties in with the common observation that women are more song-oriented, while men tend to be more oriented to follow an artist's entire career - men are more likely than women to be completist collectors.

2. Phil. Sheffield doesn't write only about Duran Duran in this book. Mostly, he writes about girls, and his own history as a geeky music freak. As with "Love is a Mix Tape," his excellent memoir about his marriage to rock writer Renee Crist and her sudden death, Sheffield organizes this book into chapters, each of which is tied to a different song. The structure is necessarily looser here, because he's covering a wider span of time and a wider span of his life experience. When I wrote about "Love is a Mix Tape," I compared it to Calvin Trillin's hearbreaking memoir of his wife's death, "About Alice," and said it was like a combination of "About Alice" and "High Fidelity." "Talking to Girls About Duran Duran" is more like Chuck Klosterman meets David Sedaris. Sheffield's regard for his sisters is particularly Sedarisian. His habit of throwing around too many blanket statements and superlatives is particularly Klostermanian. His strong chapter on Paul McCartney - in which he likens Paul to a pushy but always competent Irish sister - is a particularly good synthesis of the two styles.

Anyway, the songs are mostly in chronological order, with each one representing a different year in the 1980s. This allows Sheffield to expound on the decade's music and our continuing fascination with it. And, of course, this means he writes a lot about new wave. This means trouble. "New wave" was meaningless even in 1980 - it was a term that people threw around when they were trying to avoid saying "punk rock." So, I mentioned to Phil that Sheffield writes that Hall and Oates were the only established band to successfully rebrand itself as new wave - going from blue-eyed soul like "Sara Smile" to peppy synth-pop like "Maneater." This set Phil off on a particularly good rant, the gist of which was: They weren't new wave, they were '80s pop. I also happened to mention that Sheffield refers to Huey Lewis and the News as the opposite of new wave. Phil's rant got even better. Now he made a strong case that the News were actually more new wave than Hall and Oates. After all, he pointed out, two News played on Elvis Costello's first album. If that's not new wave, what is?

3. Sara. My sister was a huge Durannie when she was in middle school, and so I was eager to talk to her about this book. She hates discussions about the difference between new wave and '80s pop, or country and rock, or whatever. But I mentioned the Power Station v. Arcadia argument to her and she immediately said, "Power Station, duh!"

That's funny because after Sheffield brings up that argument (without actually arguing it), he writes in the next paragraph, "If you're a guy, you probably read the last paragraph and are still saying to yourself, 'Of course Power Station was a better side project than Arcadia!'" My sister is definitely not a guy, so the fact that she said the same thing seems to call Sheffield's point into question. In fact, men and women talk about music in all kinds of ways. We talk about '80s music in all kinds of ways, too. I love talking to friends about music, and this book inspired some fun conversations.

2010-07-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

These Are the People in Your Neighborhood

Let the Great World Spin
By Colum McCann

When I was looking for something new to read, Ella suggested this book of intersecting short stories. (In fact, they intersect so much that I might as well call it a novel.) Ella's exact words were something like, "Why don't you read this one so we can talk about it." So I did. And I'm about halfway through it when one night I say to her, "Why do you think he wrote it this way? As short stories and not as a novel?" And Ella's exact words were, "Quit being a man." By which she meant two things: "Will, quit talking to me. I'm trying to sleep," and "This is not a question you can answer. It's not a problem you can solve. Better to ask, does it work this way?"

Anyway, the novel has won all sorts of prizes and Oprah Winfrey has a blurb on the paperback jacket, but don't let that put you off too much. Parts of the book work very well, and parts of it I kind of skimmed. Does the construction work? Sometimes. The way the stories intersect reflects the way the lives of the characters intersect. This is "a New York novel" the way Some Girls or The Velvet Underground and Nico is "a New York album," and a big theme at work here is the intersection of the lives of very different characters in New York. McCann has described it as "Whitmanesque." It reminded me more of Balzac.

The central organizing conceit (sort of) is a famous tightrope walk. In 1974, Phillippe Petit snuck onto the top of the then-incompleted World Trade Center and walked a steel cable he had fastened between the two towers, more than a thousand feet in the air. It was a remarkable achievement, and I highly recommend checking out the documentary Man on a Wire, which tells its story. According to an interview, McCann started out trying to retell this story when he started this novel. But the tightrope walker ends up being a small part of the book. Instead, the central figure is John Corrigan, a radical Catholic monk who grew up in Dublin but now lives in a New York tenement, where he gives coffee to the prostitutes as they work the streets. The pimps beat him up, but he continues doing it. Why? It's not clear. Everyone is mystified by it, including his brother, who narrates the first story and appears in several of the others.

Honestly, I would have been happy with a whole novel about Corrigan. He's a fascinating figure. But McCann also gives us stories about: a hooker who conscripts her daughter into the trade; a pair of young artists who dress like they live in the 1920s; a rich mother of a son who was killed in Vietnam; a poor mother who lost three sons; a group of early computer programmers helping to invent what would become the Internet; a barbershop assistant who photographs subway graffiti; a Central American refugee; and a modern-day young woman who was born in the slums but now lives in Arkansas. (I may have forgot one or two.) Do we need all these? No. But it's probably better to have a book with too many ideas than not enough.

2010-06-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

Rock 'n' Roll
Hoochie Coo
You Don't Love Me Yet
By Jonathan Lethem

When I'm not reading casebooks and statutes, I do read things other than rock histories and music memoirs. Sometimes I read novels, too. Like this one ... that, um, happens to be about a rock band.

In this case, the band is Monster Eyes, an L.A. band whose songwriter, Bedwin, is suffering from writers' block, and whose lead singer has kidnapped a kangaroo from the zoo. Lucinda, the bassist and the narrator of the novel, comes to the band's rescue when she starts working at a complaint line and begins feeding her favorite caller's words to the songwriter as fodder for song lyrics. She later meets the complainer in person and falls in love with him. When he hears the band singing his words, everything goes to hell.

You know Jonathan Lethem. He wrote "Gun, With Occasional Music," (sci-fi and hard-boiled detective fiction and "Motherless Brooklyn" (detective fiction) and "Fortress of Solitude" (comic books and R&B). It was perhaps inevitable that he would turn next to writing a novel about an alternative rock band. As such, it suffers from at least one of the usual problems with fiction about rock bands - namely, the readers can't know what the music sounds like. He provides some of the lyrics, but rock lyrics look kind of ridiculous when they're stripped of melody and guitars and drums. They only work in the context of a song.

Fortunately, Lethem doesn't write about the band in order to explore music. He is really interested in the notion of authorship and plagiarism. This, apparently, is a big thing for him. On his website, he explains,

"I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling."

In keeping with that idea, he has offered song lyrics, stories and even the whole "You Don't Love Me Yet," book for free (or for a nominal fee) for other artists to make into films or music. He posts some of their results here. It's part of a whole project revolving around the idea that no creation is not as original as we like to think it is. Everyone borrows from others.

This meshes nicely with things I've been learning about in my copyright and entertainment law classes.

Lethem is more interested in the issue from a writer's perspective. And all writers, as the saying goes, are betrayers, because they take things their loved ones have said or done privately and treat them as fodder for writing. From a legal standpoint, Lethem gets some things wrong. For one, the complainer says that he and Bedwin "collaborated" on the songs. In fact, Bedwin wrote the songs without even being aware of the complainer's existence. He thought the phrases came from Lucinda. To collaborate as joint authors, you have to do so knowingly. If anything, the songs are "derivative works," songs derived from the complainer's words. It's like reading the phrase "Four score and twenty years ago" and writing a song around it. And it's not clear that a short phrase or two - and Bedwin's songs apparently use no more than a phrase or two from the complainer - would be protected by copyright anyway. Lethem's website lists whole song lyrics and says that people are free to use them, and then he gives some song titles we're free to use. That's really cool of him. But he probably couldn't get away with copyrighting a song title like "Dirty Yellow Chair" even if he really wanted to. To do so would give him the exclusive right to the phrase "dirty yellow chair," and the rest of us would have to come up with some other way to refer to our soiled, blond furniture for sitting.

All this made me think of a song I wrote, "Popcorn for Breakfast." I took the title from my friend Rebecca, who said that she and her husband, Kevin, went to so many matinee movies that she wanted to write a book about their lives and call it "Popcorn for Breakfast." I liked the idea and wrote a song about rolling out of bed and into a movie theater. It had a silly, "Doo-doo-doo-doo" part that was fun to sing along with, and the song became a favorite with our audiences. Do you think Rebecca should get credit for co-writing the song?

2010-06-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

Photo by Robbie and Jim Mantooth. That's their van. They had just driven it off a ferry in Washington.

Get in the Van
Black Postcards: A Memoir
By Dean Wareham

Most rock memoirs I've read - and I've read a lot - are either turgidly written or ghost-written. But Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna, Dean & Britta) has written a memoir that's unusually straightforward and strangely detached.

The Harvard-educated Wareham writes quite well - at least on the level of each short paragraph. Whether he's honest or not, I can't say, but Wareham doesn't shy away from casting himself in some potentially embarrassing situations: doing drugs, cheating on his wife, pissing off his bandmates, even having a bout of premature ejaculation when visiting a hooker. But this is not a wallow in the sordid, like Motley Crue's "The Dirt." Mostly, it's a memoir about what it's like to be in a band - first an influential college rock band of the '80s that never really made it out of cult status and broke up before the alt-rock boom, then one of those sort-of mid-level alt-rock bands of the '90s. It's about the music business, friendship and romance and touring, but mostly it's about things ending - Galaxie 500, Luna, his marriage. There are even a couple of parts where he seems to be writing elegies for people (his brother, a friend) who turn out to be still alive.

I was never a huge fan of either Galaxie 500 or Luna, but I like them. I also like Dean & Britta's records together. When this book first came out, I blogged about Liz Phair's review of it in the New York Times, and how some other bloggers were reviewing her review. The paperback version I picked up has a blurb from that Phair review on its cover. Phair, of course, is a Wareham fan. Her one great(ish) album, "Exile in Guyville," ends with her looking out the window of an airplane while she's listening to her Walkman and pretending she's in a Galaxie 500 video. She would probably love this book no matter what. But I liked it, too. It was as self-indulgent as any memoir, but Wareham breezes through things quickly enough that he doesn't get goopy. All told, it has a very episodic feel, rather than a novelistic flow, but it kept me turning the pages.

You probably have to be into '80s and '90s indie rock to get anything out of this book. But there's some nearly universal stuff in here, too. In the chapters about Galaxie 500, Wareham writes movingly about how his friendship soured with bandmates Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang. "They weren't bad people. They were good people," he writes. And yet Wareham writes repeatedly about Damon as a control freak, and how the married Damon and Naomi voted as a bloc in the band's lopsided democracy. But he makes clear that the problem wasn't so much with Damon and Naomi as with the dynamic of being locked in a business relationship, touring and recording and practicing with the same people for months at a time. The main difference in the band dynamic with Luna was apparently the fact that, for most of its time together, Luna was just four guys in a van together, rather than one single guy and a married couple. Things in Luna apparently didn't get really tense until Britta Phillips joined the band and Wareham (who was by then married to someone else) started an affair with her. Wareham doesn't tell us much about Britta except that she's beautiful. He doesn't tell us a whole lot about his first wife, either. The lesson appears to be to watch out when you let girls into your boys' club.

I'm just kidding. I'm not sure what the lesson is. Wareham is not the kind of writer who would give us an easy, sentimental lesson we could take home. As I said, he seems more interested in how things end than in how they begin. But he has given us a good picture of what it was like to be in the music world in a couple of distinct periods - the pre-Nirvana rock underground and the post-Nirvana alt-rock boom (with a nod to the post-Napster industry bust). What he doesn't give us is passion. That's kind of refreshing in a music memoir, but it's a little disturbing in a musician. Especially in a musician who's a Harvard grad and presumably could have picked up a more lucrative or rewarding career elsewhere. Why did Wareham decide to devote his life to music? Is it just his detachment that makes it seem like he joined Galaxie 500 on a whim and stretched it into a career? Was he just slumming?

2010-05-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Ruling and Rocking:
An Interview with Josh Farrar, author of "Rules to Rock By"

When we were in middle school, my friend Josh Farrar and I were just getting started playing guitar and becoming lifelong music geeks. But today, middle school kids are starting bands, playing shows, making records, even going on tour. Josh’s new novel, “Rules to Rock By” explores that phenomenon through the character of Annabelle Cabrera, the 12-year-old daughter of indie rock royalty, who is herself a budding rock star. As the story begins, her family has left Brooklyn for a new home in Providence, Rhode Island. Annabelle has left behind not just her grandmother and her old middle school, but her band, Egg Mountain, one of the most popular kid bands in New York.

The book will be released in June by Walker Books for Young Readers, but Josh has been promoting it for months with a whole multimedia presentation built around the story, including online videos, a cool website and a CD soundtrack. The soundtrack features covers and original songs performed by Josh, Chris Daddio, Kevin March (Shudder to Think, Guided By Voices) and some really talented teenage musicians they found at a music education program. And the long-running indie rock band Deerhoof contributed a track too, after Josh told them that Annabelle worships bassist Satomi Matsuzaki.
Josh lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. I interviewed him via e-mail.

How did you get into writing YA fiction?

From 2000 to 2008, I worked as a producer of educational software in companies like LeapFrog and Scholastic. In my last two jobs doing that, I was on the periphery of children's publishing. Then I got laid off from Scholastic, and the next day I had an idea about a children's book focusing on music.

A common complaint about fiction that depicts the lives of teenagers is that the dialogue (or the narration, if it’s in first person) doesn’t sound like a teenager, it sounds like the adult who wrote it. How did you try to avoid that problem?

The glib answer: arrested development.
Seriously, though, I think the best writers of fiction for young people have a knack for entering the mindset of the age of their characters and audience. Kids are discerning readers, and they won't put up with fake-sounding dialogue or narration for very long. I wouldn't say that getting into the mind of a 12-year-old -- a 12-year-old girl, at that! -- was an easy thing for me, and it's for readers themselves to judge how successful I was in doing so. But I did workshop the novel for over a year, and a lot of my fellow writers helped me by supplying lots of notes saying things like "This sounds like a 37-year-old guy, not a middle-school girl!"

Were you interested in the kid band scene first, or did the story lead you to your interest in the scene?

In 2006, there was a great article in the NY Times Sunday Styles section on the Brooklyn kid-band scene. I clipped that article and held onto it. It captured my imagination because not only were these kids starting bands at a younger age than I (we!) had, but they were actually playing clubs and making records. It made me wonder what the experience was like for them. What would it be like to play a club as an 11-year-old, or tour Japan at 13? That article was the seed of the idea for me.

I remember a lot of us really getting into music in junior high, but I don’t remember any of us really starting bands until high school. Is this a new development among junior high kids?

Yep, a lot of kids seem to start younger now. Obviously, being into rock 'n' roll is not a mainstream thing for tween and teens to do in 2010. They're a subculture within a subculture. But tweens, and even younger kids, are starting bands all over the country. I'm not sure why – I secretly hope it's a punk response to Hannah Montana and the rest of the Disney multi-platform insanity – but ten years ago, there was one girls' rock 'n' roll camp in Portland, Oregon, called the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls. Now there are over two dozen; there's one in virtually every major metropolitan area in the United States!

Is this a case of kids growing up faster than they used to? Is that a bad thing?

There is no way that little kids rocking out is a bad thing. I'm totally into it. Some of the bands are really, really good. I love Smoosh, from Seattle; the NowhereNauts, from New York; and a band called Saffire from upstate New York.

Junior high is a difficult time for a lot of people because people are maturing at different times. Some people really still look and act like kids, and some people look more like teenagers. But you still can’t drive, you often still spend a lot of time with your parents and siblings. How did you get into that mind-set?

I'm not sure, really. I started to imagine a character, and then just naturally started empathizing with her situation. I wanted her to be a girl, both because I was inspired by all the tween girls who are forming bands, and because I wanted to get away from the boys-start-band story that's already been told a thousand times on VH-1. The more details I added to the character and her struggle, the easier it was to write in her voice. I didn't think, what would a 12-year-old do, so much as I thought, what would Annabelle do? I definitely lost the voice a lot while writing, but that's what second (and third and fourth and fifth) drafts are for.

Is there still something feminist about girls forming bands, or do you think that has changed since the riot grrl days?

I think that when a girl plays in a rock band (and doesn't just sing but also plays an instrument), it's still an inherently political act. That doesn't mean that the music or lyrics have to be political, or that the girl musicians are even necessarily aware of the gender politics involved. But if they do it long enough, somebody's going to patronizingly ask, "Oh, are you the singer? That's so cute." Or some boy is going to ask whether they can actually tune their guitar. This subject comes up in amusing fashion in this video conversation some filmmaker friends and I taped between Hunter Lombard (who plays on my record) and Jen Turner (of Here We Go Magic). I have no idea whether or not Hunter and Jen view themselves as feminists, per se, but being a woman in a band has definitely made their experience different from a boy's.

There is one chapter where Annabelle’s parents decided they are going to have “family time,” even though the father, especially, would rather stay in his home studio, mixing his album. Annabelle looks at her younger brother, who’s not getting enough attention and really acting up – and she says she feels the same way, but he’s brave enough to show it. She just retreats into music. I thought that was a really interesting insight. Do you think we become less honest as we get older? Do you think music is just escapism?

Actually, I think that her retreat into her creative life is a positive thing; music gives her an outlet to express her frustration at her parents' self-involvement. Her brother is too young to express himself that way, so he just runs around like a maniac. Her father, on the other hand, is so into his creative process that he ignores everyone around him. Annabelle's focus is narrow, but she's still holding onto her humanity.

I thought it was interesting that there's no talk of sex and barely a mention of romance. If you were writing a book set in high school instead of junior high, how would you do it differently?

This was my first experience writing in a girl's voice -- it was my first experience writing in any voice, to be honest, other than my own -- so it was a conscious decision to stay away not just from any whiff of sexuality, but also from romance. My book is not a Young Adult title, it's in the Middle-Grade category, in which it's totally OK not to delve into those areas. I am working on a YA novel now, about a 14-year-old girl (if I ever get to write a third book, it'll definitely be a guy narrator!), and I felt more comfortable getting into some light romance territory there. But the last thing I would call it is "racy." YA novelists can pretty much do anything they want now, and as a whole the titles are much more extreme than a typical adult novel, but at this point I don't want much to do with that.

Tell me about the accompanying CD. How did that idea come about?

From the beginning, I wanted to do a soundtrack. I was inspired by Damon Albarn's Gorrilaz. I thought it was cool that he created avatars who were supposedly the musicians in the band, but I wanted to take it a step further by actually writing a story for the fictional musicians. At first I thought I might be able to accomplish this with a picture book, and never dreamed that I'd write a full-length novel, but the picture book was a disaster, and the book just kept getting longer and longer, until it was a bona-fide middle-grade novel.

Where did you find the young musicians?

I auditioned about 30 kids at a summer arts organization called Creative Arts Program in Park Slope, Brooklyn in the summer of 2007. That's where I first heard Justine Skyers, who came in as an 11-year-old and sang a Christina Aguilera song a cappella. She completely blew my mind, and I recorded a few songs with her and a few other kids. When it was time to do the record, I got back in touch with her and her mom, and they were interested in giving it a shot.
I'm not playing in bands now, but I still record and write, and I'm definitely excited to do some gigs for Rules to Rock By. It'll be four of the kids who played on the record, plus me, and Kevin March, who used to play in Shudder to Think and Guided By Voices.

How did you get Deerhoof to contribute a song?

I went to All Tomorrow's Parties, a festival in the Catskills, last summer. ATP is so much fun, because there are only about 3,000 people there, it's in the middle of nowhere, and the bands all like to see each other's shows. I had wanted to get in touch with Deerhoof somehow, and I figured ATP might present the opportunity. I approached Satomi during the closing set by the Flaming Lips, and told her I'd written a book in which she briefly appeared. I think she might have thought I was a crazy person at first, but I think she decided to give me the benefit of the doubt. I asked her if I could send her the book. It took us a while to connect on email after that – their excellent soundman Deron Pulley, whom I'd met through a friend, helped nudge that process along a little – but once we did, they proved to be incredibly generous, both personally and artistically. We discussed a few ways to collaborate, and eventually they contributed their version of Liliput's "Hitch-Hike," which was fitting, given that Liliput was an all-female Swiss punk band from the 70s. Given that they're the only "guest act" on the record, the track fits alongside everything else really well.

Did you have Annabelle name her bass Satomi before or after you got Deerhoof involved?

Before. The book was 100% complete except for copy edits by the time Deerhoof got involved. I pursued a number of possible guests on the record, but Deerhoof was always the number one choice because they're in the book, and because I adore their music.

You promoted the book and soundtrack with YouTube videos and raised money on Kickstarter. Is this just part of the new reality for authors? Is that the best way to reach a young audience?

I'm not sure. Maybe ask me if and when the book is successful? I decided to make a high-quality trailer for the book as a way of making people aware of both the book and the soundtrack; before that, it was next to impossible to even describe to people just what I was up to.

Kickstarter is just a great organization, and I really needed the $5K I raised on Kickstarter to pay essential recording fees. Overall, that was only about 20% of the overall budget, but Kickstarter turned out to be much more than just a fundraising tool. It was a great way to keep interested people up to date about developments in the project, and it wound up inspiring some new, exciting ideas. I'm about to start working with a filmmaker friend on a script for a "Rules to Rock By" TV pilot, and I'm pretty sure her impetus to explore this possibility came from watching the videos I posted to Kickstarter supporters.

2010-05-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

We're a Happy Family
I Slept With Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir
By Mickey Leigh with Legs McNeil

When I was a teenager I went to a record store album-signing by the Ramones. They had a new album out - I think it was "Halfway to Sanity" - but I brought my copy of my favorite album at the time, "Rocket to Russia," and had them sign that. I remember feeling a little guilty about that - here, they were trying to sell the new album and I was only interested in something they had done 10 years earlier, with a different drummer. I had Marky Ramone sign his name over a picture of Tommy Ramone. I may have even been so self-centered as to think that my faux pas was the reason the Ramones looked so incredibly dour and ugly when I saw them up close. I took from the experience the lesson that when you go to an album- or book-signing, you have to buy the new release even if you're not really interested in it.

Today, after many years of documentary films and books and tell-all magazine articles, I know how deeply dysfunctional this band was, and I know that I couldn't have got a smile out of those guys no matter what I did. I think the lesson I should have learned - one I've had to learn many times since then - is that you don't want to get too close to your heroes.

This new book is a memoir about Joey Ramone, written by his younger brother, Mickey Leigh. The two were born in Queens, NY, four years apart. Joey was born Jeffry "Jeff" Hyman, and Mickey was Mitchel "Mitch" Hyman. Jeff was born with a teratoma - a kind of tumor that's actually a sort of partially-developed conjoined twin. Removing it caused neurological problems that affected Jeff for the rest of his life. Jeff grew into a freakishly tall and weird-looking boy and the neighborhood kids taunted him mercilessly, calling him "Geoffrey Giraffe." As a teenager, he started developing obsessive compulsive disorder and even paranoid schizophrenia. There were few good treatments for these conditions at the time, and so Jeff suffered, and made his mom suffer. Mitch, on the other hand was normal: athletic, popular, talented and an exceptionally good student. He found himself often having to stick up and defend his older brother. This was a reversal of the usual brotherly pattern, and Leigh paints it as resulting in a weird combination of deep closeness, resentment and neediness that would haunt the brothers' relationship until Joey died in 2001.

The title of the book sounds gossipy, but it's literally true: When the two were small kids and Mitch would have trouble sleeping, Jeff would invite him to join him in bed. It's a sweet image, and it remains with Leigh even as he recounts the bitter, alcohol-soaked battles the two would have years later. Much of this feuding is typical brotherly stuff, jealousy and rivalry exacerbated by Joey's OCD and paranoia, his celebrity and all its attendant problems of ego, envy and opportunistic hangers-on. And then again some of it is typical music industry stuff, exacerbated by the fact that Joey and Mickey were brothers.

In any case, Leigh and Legs McNeil tell the story through their own words and also through original and repurposed interviews with many of the people involved. (A lot of the stuff from the early days of the Ramones seems to be borrowed from McNeil's classic oral history of New York punk, "Please Kill Me.") But the family connection brings a perspective on the story I haven't seen before. Leigh remembers his brother before he was Joey Ramone, when he was a kid the neighborhood bullies taunted mercilessly, and he remembers him even before that, when he was a kind older brother. He remembers when a psychologist told his mom that Jeff was going to end up a "vegetable," unable to lead any kind of normal life. And he was there when his brother grew into a rock star.

That part of the story is deeply inspiring. But Leigh also reveals how even the rock star Joey Ramone continued to be bullied by one of those neighborhood toughs, John Cummings, who later took the name Johnny Ramone. Leigh was actually good friends with Johnny at one time, but his disgust with Johnny is one of the most powerful themes in the book. He also has some axes to grind with some other individuals, and to some extent you have to take those with a grain of salt. But overall, his book rings true to me. It made me respect Joey more in one way, but it also made me glad I didn't get any closer to the Ramones than I did that day at the record store.

2010-01-06T08:55:00.001-08:00

Punk's Not Read
Gimme Something Better: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day
By Jack Boulware & Silke Tudor

I grew up in San Francisco and I always felt like I was getting to the party too late. If some teenagers tried to put on a show in the park, some old hippie would say, "Oh, it's just like the Summer of Love!" If a 23-year-old put on a spoken word open mic, some old beatnik hanger-on would get up and talk about the time he met Jack Kerouac. Columnist Herb Caen was constantly looking back on the good ole days of the 1940s. I felt like I had missed punk rock, too. I was too young for the first wave, and by the time I was old enough to be interested in punk, the scene had largely degenerated into an excuse for racist skinheads to beat the crap out of everyone. I liked punk rock, but I was too much of a poser scaredy-cat to actually go to places like the Farm, which many people cite as the most violent and filthy club they've ever seen. And, wouldn't you know it, I was too old for the scene by the time Green Day came along.

In this book, former SF Weekly writers Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor put together an oral history of the Bay Area scene. Oral history allows the editors to get a broad overview of the scene over many years without seeming like pompous historians. It also allows them to use hilariously contradictory statements. My favorite is in the chapter about Flipper, where you have Krist Novoselic from Nirvana talking about how Flipper changed his life, and then a few lines later you have someone else saying, " I still think that they are the worst band on the planet."

Some of those quoted are my age, some and some of them were friends of friends. (One high school friend of mine lost his virginity to one of the widely-quoted women.) Much of the stupid Anarchist riot in Berkeley happened a block away from me when I spent a summer in the East Bay. But even if you didn't grow up with this stuff going on around you, you will recognize a lot of the bands and events and maybe get a lot out of this book. Pretty much everyone with any interest in punk read Maximum Rock&Roll at some point, right? Well, that magazine evolved out of a Berkeley radio show, and was published out of a San Francisco house. The kind of left-wing political correctness that typified MMR and hardcore in general for so long could perhaps only have come out of the Bay Area.

Still, the Bay Area tends to get glossed over in histories of punk. Boulware and Tudor point this out as one of their inspirations for putting the history together in this SF Chronicle story about the book. (In his decades of service as the lead rock critic of the biggest newspaper in the Bay Area, this story may represent the first time Joel Selvin has ever showed any interest in the local punk scene.) Why does the Bay Area get so little respect? Selvin can't be the only one to blame. The subtitle of this book suggests one big reason. The fun actually starts well before Dead Kennedys, who came along after the Avengers, the Nuns, Crime and the first wave of SF punk. And it ends with the death of MMR founder Tim Yo, several years after Green Day hit the big time. (The chapters on Fat Wreck Chords and Lookout Records actually go well into the first decade of the 21st Century, but never mind.) Of the innumerable other bands mentioned here, few made much impact beyond the Bay Area or the insular world of the punk underground. But Boulware and Tudor do a good job of showing how the environment created in the 70s and 80s built the foundation for a band like Green Day to come along and become, for better or worse, the biggest punk band in the world. And, in fact, after reading the sections about Green Day, it's nearly impossible not to be happy for their success.

2009-12-30T17:53:00.000-08:00

BRAAAAINS!
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

I bought this book at an airport bookstore this past summer (it was a pretty good bookstore, for an airport), but didn't get around to reading it before school started again. I took Copyright Law this fall, and we spent a lot of time going over the differences between derivative works, works of joint authorship and infringement, as those terms are described in the federal Copyright Act. The whole time, I was thinking of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and I couldn't wait until I had time to put down the casebooks and read it instead.

OK, some background. "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is, essentially, the Jane Austen classic with added zombie attacks, kung fu fighting and mildly risque jokes. As the droll text on the book jacket proclaims, it "transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read." That is a little upsetting to those of us for whom Austen is fun to read even without ninja attacks and reanimated corpses. But the combination is funny. And apparently it works for all those poor souls who can't make it through Austen au naturel: PPZ is a bestseller. I even saw it in the Young Adult section of a chain bookstore the other day, prominently displayed next to the "Twilight" books. PPZ has inspired a sequel, of sorts, "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" (published Fall 2009 by Quirk Classics, the same publisher as PPZ, but this time written by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters), as well as a prequel, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls" (forthcoming from Quirk and written by Steve Hockensmith). It has also apparently inspired a number of other literary mash-ups. For my birthday, my sister gave me a copy of "Mansfield Park and Mummies" by Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian, released by a different publisher. A quick look at Amazon also shows recently published zombiefied versions of "Huckleberry Finn," "The War of the Worlds" and "Robin Hood." That's not to mention a series called "The Undead World of Oz," nor the multiple retellings of P&P in which Mr. Darcy is a vampire.

Here's where copyright comes in, and you can just skip this paragraph and go on to the next if you want more zombie action. Copyright is an extremely controversial subject - especially on the Internet - but I'm not going to get into that stuff here. First, these novels I'm talking about are, legally speaking, derivative works. They are new works derived from the original work. When a copyright is in effect, the copyright holder has, among other rights, the exclusive right to derivative works based upon the protected work. That means that when Johnny Cash recorded a cover of U2's "One," he had to get a license. But whatever copyright Jane Austen might have had, it has long since expired. Her work is in the public domain. You can pretty much do whatever you want with it. Seth Grahame-Smith has a copyright too, but only to the extent that he created original contributions to P&P. Only individual expression is protectable by copyright law. Ideas are free. So, as long as you don't copy Grahame-Smith's wording, you can feel free to copy the idea of combining horror movie cliches with Jane Austen, or any other writer whose works are in the public domain. If the work is still under copyright - let's say it's "Twilight," and you combine it with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and publish it - you will get sued by the copyright holders. That's why the whole world of fan fiction is mostly an underground phenomenon.

PPZ and its progeny represent something new, I think. It's the literary equivalent of the mash-up or the remix. People have been long been writing mystery novels where Jane Austen or Edgar Allan Poe is the sleuth. And people have long been ripping off the classics. Half the romance novels on the shelves are based on either P&P or "Jane Eyre." But maybe that's not enough anymore. We live in an age when we can get instant access to all sorts of material. Why read a rip-off of "Jane Eyre" when we can find the original on Google Books?

Or maybe it's something more basic than that. Maybe we live in an age where people don't often read novels anymore. Publishers find it's easier to market memoirs, and readers have too many other distractions, be they TV or DVD, video games or Internet. If you're looking for a novel to read, you have, theoretically, 200 years' worth of choices. You really need a gimmick, and some name recognition to get you to buy. "Oh, I really should read Jane Austen before I die, but do I have to? Wait! Jane Austen with zombies and bawdy jokes? Sold!"

So, is PPZ worth it? Sure. If you've read the original you'll get a kick out of it, as long as you're not too much of a purist. If you haven't read the original, you probably know the story anyway from one of the movie adaptations or "Bridget Jones." But I wonder what all those teenage "Twilight" readers will make of it. Maybe reading a zombiefied classic is better than not reading a classic at all. Or is it?

2009-12-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

Race? In America? Never thought about it ...

Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture
By John Strausbaugh

This book has been sitting on my shelves for years unread. You see, the book professes to unlock the secrets of the history of American popular music through a study of blackface minstrelsy- and the cover art shows a white guy in blackface. I don't think I could carry this book around without at least attracting some dirty looks. So, I don't really want to carry it with me anywhere.

The blackface minstrel show was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in America for generations. Today, the idea is appalling to us. Strausbaugh points out that blackface has become a kind of taboo, and argues that this interferes with our understanding of our own history. Racism was obviously a big part of what was going on, but he points out that it was far from the only part. There were pro-slavery and anti-slavery minstrel songs. The so-called Jim Crow laws take their name from a popular early blackface minstrel song, but that doesn't mean that the song espoused segregation - or any overt political stance at all. There were even black minstrels who put on blackface. And, he points out that when the Wayans brothers put on whiteface drag for the movie "White Girls," they are continuing a related tradition - blacks putting on whiteface.

Strausbaugh notes that the history of performers donning blackface dates back to "Othello" and earlier, but he traces the American blackface minstrel tradition to the 1830s and 1840s in New York. The Scots, Irish and African Americans lived together more or less peacefully and equally at the bottom of the social ladder, Strausbaugh writes, until the Jackson Administration marked a huge political shift. Around that time, the government gave voting rights to all white men, not just landowners. Suddenly, even low-class white men had a stake in the system that blacks did not. That, he writes, was a turning point, where blacks became "the other" for working-class white Americans. This other has been a source of fascination ever since.

2009-08-01T12:43:00.000-07:00

Cash Cow Rancher

Bumping Into Geniuses
By Danny Goldberg

In his long career in the music industry, Danny Goldberg worked with Led Zeppelin, Stevie Nicks, Bonnie Raitt, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle, but he's probably best known for managing Nirvana once they signed with Geffen Records. Everett True's book on Nirvana contains a quote or two referring to Goldberg as one of the corporate creeps whose influence steered Kurt Cobain in his tragic direction And Goldberg was apparently very aware of this view when he wrote this memoir: he refers to True's book twice and spends a lot of energy disputing various claims. The chapter on Nirvana is twice the length of the next longest one in the book, and much of it is spent showing examples of how Cobain proved he was determined to be a star - clearly an effort to counter the perception of Nirvana as a true punk/indie band that was manipulated into the mainstream.

I think Goldberg's view is the right one, but he doesn't do himself any favors when he refers to punk's "DYI" (sic) ethic and incorrectly names one of Cobain's favorite bands "Vaseline" instead of the Vaselines. Of course, no one really expects a self-proclaimed hippie Baby Boomer to get all his details right when discussing punk and its progeny. Goldberg seems to have really cared about Cobain, and his guilt in not being able to help a friend is touching.

Not just in the Nirvana chapter, but throughout the book, Goldberg is self-deprecating and quick to give credit to others. That makes him likable as a narrator. And he'd better be a likable narrator because this a strangely episodic book. Things just kind of wander around until Goldberg begins working for Zeppelin, when the narrative coheres. The Zeppelin chapter is pretty good, in fact. But then it's back to little bits here and there that somehow don't quite add up to a full story. In the end, despite Goldberg's bemoaning how he was a bad friend to Cobain, or how sad he was about Warren Zevon's death (and the Zevon chapter is pretty good), I got the impression he didn't really know either of them that well. What's weirder: Goldberg doesn't actually talk about the music very much. He mostly just talks about how much he loves music in general.

The book title comes from a quote from famous Atlantic Records chief Ahmet Ertegun, who said the key to getting successful in the record industry was to walk around until you bump into a genius and then hold on and don't let go. It's meant to be a motto about forging long-term relationships with artists - something the record industry does less and less of as the business gets worse and worse - but the quote exposes a strangely parasitic view of the record industry, doesn't it? I mean, it portrays a record industry executive as, literally, a hanger-on.

2009-05-28T10:17:00.001-07:00

Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984
By Simon Reynolds

"Punk is infinitely more than a musical style." - Greil Marcus.

So, if punk was more than a musical style, is post-punk a musical style - encompassing Gang of Four, Wire and all the other bands who were inspired by punk's energy but who refused to be limited by its self-imposed musical constraints? Is post-punk a synonym for new wave? Or is post-punk just an historical term, meaning everything that came after the punk explosion of 1976-77? If so, when does post-punk end?

These questions were swirling through my head before and after I read Simon Reynolds' "Rip It Up and Start Again," which is supposedly the first book-length history of post-punk. (Though, if you've read Marcus, you'll find much that's familiar here.) Reynolds begins with PiL, moves on to the Slits, the Pop Group, Gang of Four and the Mekons, Devo and Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle, Depeche Mode, the Human League, Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow, the "New Pop" of ABC, Scritti Politti, Spandau Ballet and so on, and then on to Goth and the "Big Music" of Echo and the Bunnymen and U2, before hitting Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It's hard to see how Throbbing Gristle and Spandau Ballet could possibly belong in the same music book, but Reynolds makes a good case -- or, at least, a highly readable one.

In his hands, an examination of post-punk becomes a kind of intellectual history of musicians who followed various trajectories that were launched by the implosion of punk. This works well with some artists - John Lydon/Johnny Rotten obviously represents a break with punk that, both musically and intellectually, tracks well with the history of punk and its aftermath. Malcolm McLaren, the former Sex Pistols manager, is another obvious touchstone, as he moves on from punk to the African beats of Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow, still trying to subvert society for the sake of subverting it. (By the way, Reynolds' account of McLaren's manipulations of Bow Wow Wow shows that the manager is even more evil than you might have imagined.) Another great example is Green Gartside, of Scritti Politti, who spent years making manifestos about how he would deconstruct culture through pop, before finally having a hit single or two and essentially becoming just another pop star.

But other characters don't lend themselves to this analysis very well. Talking Heads had more in common musically with, say, Gang of Four, but Talking Heads were contemporaries of Television, the Ramones and the other NYC punk bands, and Talking Heads' essential sound was in place long before "Never Mind the Bollocks" came out. You can't really say that Talking Heads were following an intellectual trajectory launched by the end of punk rock. Maybe post-punk was following Talking Heads! Siouxsie and the Banshees show up in the Goth chapter as post-punkers who gave up on the intellectual pursuit of new music and decided what they really want is the star-worshipping system of old rock. Interesting shift there, but remember that the Banshees started during the punk explosion. Sid Vicious was a member of the Banshees before he joined the Sex Pistols! The Banshees may have been a band that moved from one musical ideology to another, but it makes just as much sense to see them as a band that changed as fashion dictated until they found a style and an audience that worked for them. (And I say that as someone who loves a lot of the Banshees' work.)

Reynolds neatly divides his history into one or two-year chunks, so that, for instance, 1982 becomes the year of New Pop, and it's all over by 1983. But pop culture is rarely so neat. If this book was all you had to go on, you might have thought the Clash broke up in 1978 instead of moving on to do their best work several years later. And, other than David Bowie, Reynolds hardly mentions any of the pre-punk acts that were still around in the early '80s, some of them having hit records and some of them - Peter Gabriel comes to mind - making good music. And, because a lot of UK bands didn't really hit in the US until a year after they hit in the UK, the timeline always seems a little off -- or, at least, it did to this American reader. Things get even messier when he tries to conform US bands to trends and fads ... excuse me, cultural movements that were -- let's face it -- creations of the UK weekly music press.

Still, I enjoyed reading "Rip It Up." I like a lot of the bands Reynolds writes about. And, in his hands at least, the ones I don't like are interesting to read about. Many of them, in fact, are more interesting to read about than to listen to. (Reynolds subtly admits this about Throbbing Gristle.) The problem with a lot of post-punk, to use the term in the intellectual sense, is that a lot of these artists were more interested in theories of pop culture than they were in music itself. Some of them professed to actually hate rock, or hate music altogether. I understand the need to kill your idols and to break with cliche, but a musician will run out of ideas quickly unless he or she has a deep love of music. That's probably why so many of these bands didn't last for more than a couple of albums. The most "rockist" of them all -- like U2 -- are the ones who had, or are still having, the longest careers.

2009-05-21T10:58:00.001-07:00

Star Trek: The Movies

First off, some business left over from the previous post.
I am not the only person to have noted the Star Trek/liberalism connection.
Liberal geeks have noticed it.
Conservative creeps have noticed it. Have they ever. In addition to the usual right wing paranoia about the United Nations (reflected in the Federation), they seem most disturbed by the idea that in the Star Trek vision of the future, money doesn't exist.
If you poke around on the Interwebs, you'll even find passionate explorations of the idea that Star Trek is liberal and Star Wars is conservative.

I may be stalling a bit here because I am reluctant to spend too much time with the Star Trek movies. They don't fit in with my theory very well, for one thing. For another, most of them are pretty bad. I haven't even seen some of them. OK, let's be quick.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) reintroduces the crew for Star Wars audiences just as Reagan and Thatcher are coming to power. Notice that the ugly new uniforms are decidedly militaristic. However, if I remember correctly, this movie introduces the idea that Star Fleet Academy is in San Francisco.
Wrath of Khan is a battle against genetically modified supersoldiers. (Anti-militarism?)
Skipping to Star Trek IV, we have the Enterprise saving the whales.
Star Trek V is about the search for God. That's liberalism in the '80s for you, stuck in new agey mode.
Star Trek VI (1991) is about the Klingons joining the Federation because the Klingon homeworld is losing its ozone layer.
Skipping to Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), we get the idea that the Federation is weak and making alliances with some really unsavory people who sit around getting fat and having plastic surgery. Note that this movie was coming out around the time of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and you will see a weakening of liberal resolve as the Enterprise crew grows suspicious of its own cherished institutions.
Star Trek: Nemesis was on TV last night, and that was the first time I had seen it. Actually, I couldn't make it through the whole thing. It seemed to be about Captain Picard feuding with Billy Corgan and Nosferatu.

The best thing about the new Star Trek movie is that it looks like a movie, and not like a glorified TV show. At the same time, there's a lot of fun to be had for longtime fans. I really enjoyed it. But, as my friend Phil Galante points out, this movie version of James T. Kirk resembles George W. Bush more than he does JFK. He's a cocky son of a war hero who wastes his life until people who worked with his father pick him out of obscurity and groom him for a leadership role. In attempting to create a lovable rogue, J.J. Abrams and company go too far and make Kirk a selfish jerk who becomes a leader simply because it is his destiny, and goes about ruling from his gut rather than his brain. I like what Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker: Kirk goes from dirty blond to redhead and back over the course of the movie, but he's a natural dickhead underneath. Still, there is Spock getting us to sympathize with the outsider and the ethnic minority.

Recently, Salon published an essay arguing that President Obama is Spock. Maureen Dowd, being Maureen Dowd, wrote the same thing a few days later. Maybe the success of the new movie at this particular time, and the attendant resurrection of the franchise, represents a resurgence of liberalism. I'd like to think so. I'm just a little worried about the captain.

2009-05-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

Star Trek, what the heck.

Star Trek, the franchise, is about many things, but I like to think of it as "Liberals in Space."

Yeah, just what you need, right? Another blog post full of both Star Trek hype and political musings. Well, bear with me for a few minutes. I think this is worth it. First, the TV shows:

The original series (1966-69 - The Johnson Years): Kirk is not just Kennedyesque - he's Kennedy in space. (Thanks to my friend Zack Stentz for putting this idea in my head many years ago.) The bridge of the Enterprise looks like a model U.N., arranged in a circle, with a black woman with an African name, a Russian, an Asian, a Scot, a Vulcan and ... a bunch of white Americans. You'll notice that Uhura has an earpiece in her ear, like she's listening to the simultaneous translations at the General Assembly.
All this is set against the backdrop of a cold war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. We don't know much about the Klingons - just that they're swarthy and wear gray and sometimes have Leninesque facial hair. The two sides occasionally get into a shooting war, but mostly they do things like try to poison each other's food (thank goodness those tribbles ate it first!) and fight proxy wars with less-developed planets. The Prime Directive - don't interfere with less-developed worlds - gets mentioned, but the show supports an interventionist philosophy. Spock struggles with his Vulcan uptightness as he learns to be human. And notice how many episodes are about alien worlds that have modeled their cultures on European or American history. Everyone wants to be like us, right? Note: First TV interracial kiss. (Kirk and Uhura are forced to, so maybe it doesn't count.)

The Animated Series (1973-1974 - The Watergate Years): The animated Star Trek was apparently made by, and possibly for, people on drugs. That was liberals in the 1970s.

The Next Generation (1987-1994 - Tail End of Reagan Era to Beginning of Clinton Era): TNG is all about identity politics. Data must learn what it means to be human. Worf must learn what it means to be Klingon. Dr. Crusher must grapple with being a widow and a single mother. And then there's Deanna Troi always talking about everyone's feelings ("Captainnn, I sense a greaaaat sadness..."). The bridge is still a model U.N., but now everything's beige, like a pre-iMac PC. The captain is a dignified Shakespearean who knows better than to beam down to dangerous planets along with his first officer and a red shirted guy. The worst bad guys are the hyper-conformist Borg, who assimilate cultures and individuals instead of celebrating their diversity. Runner up: the Ferengi, who are nasty hyper-capitalists.

Deep Space Nine (1993-99 - the Gingrich Years): Still a lot of identity politics going on, but there's a lot more complexity to it this time. We get to know the Ferengi a little better, as . There's a whole lot about religious identity and intractable foreign conflicts. There's also a lot of conspiracy and internal intrigue - even a C.I.A.-like secret agency within the Federation that will do the dirty work when needed. The captain is an aloof Shakespearean, but he's not above going to war when he has to. He just doesn't feel good about it. Note: First TV lesbian kiss. (But you know, Dax is part man, so maybe it doesn't count.)

Voyager (1995-2001 - Late Clinton Era to Bush 43): The Liberals in Space have literally lost their way. Marooned in a distant quadrant of the universe, the Starship Voyager must make its way home. Captain Janeway struggles to maintain Federation values in a world that doesn't recognize them. Meanwhile, half her ship is made up of rebels who thought the Federation wasn't tough enough on the Cardassians and so took to fighting on their own. There's still more about identity politics, but this time the minorities are mostly more conflicted about their heritage. There's a half-Klingon, but she kind of hates her Klingon self. We learn more about the Borg, this time through Seven of Nine and her improbably tight-fitting uniform. The Vulcan on board - a black Vulcan, this time - is, we learn, something of a space Buddhist. There's also a Kirk-like rogue who loves 20th century American pop culture and is always getting into trouble. This time he's in a non-leading role on the starship - when he's not in the brig. Is "Voyager" telling us that Americans have to take a back seat?

Enterprise (2001-2005: The Neocon Years): The prequel series begins with an attack on American soil by a Klingon. Humans are frustrated by the snobbish Vulcans (read: Old Europe) trying to hold them back. We meet a new group of bad guys whose belief system is mysterious. They're called the Suliban (read: Taliban). Odd how this show was in development before 9/11. The woman in the improbably form-fitting outfit this time is a Vulcan, but she comes to believe the humans are on the right path. Yeah, just like Old Europe would decide the U.S.A. was doing the right thing. Anyway, it didn't work out very well. "Enterprise" ended up being cancelled after ratings dropped off. Yeah, the neocons didn't work out so well, either.

Later this week, I'll try to take on the movies.

2009-04-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

2009-03-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

'80s Movie time

I'm enjoying spring break, although I might note that it was -1 outside when I woke up this morning, and that hardly seems like spring to me. I'm going to try to do some fun reading in the next week, but in the mean time let me talk about the Netflix movie I watched last night.

Diner

You might remember "Diner," the 1982 film written and directed by Barry Levinson. I half-remembered it, mostly for the scene where Mickey Rourke puts his pecker in a popcorn bag. (What can I say? I was probably 13 when I saw "Diner" the first time.) The movie has come up in conversation from time to time over the years, especially after Rourke was nominated for an Oscar. A lot of people seem to remember "Diner" as a charming story about a bunch of young guys who aren't quite ready to grow up. It was an influential movie in a way (I'll bet Judd Apatow has seen it more than once), and it launched the careers not only of Rourke, but also Kevin Bacon, Ellen Barkin, Paul Reiser and Steve Guttenberg (!), most of whom would be stars for the next decade or more. And, more personally and more vaguely, there were many times as a young man when I was hanging out in a diner with a bunch of guys and I felt that we were all, subliminally or not, acting out parts of the movie. I decided to check it out again.

I wasn't charmed. Mostly, I had a hard time getting around the blatant sexism of the characters. Part of that can be explained away by the setting: 1959 Baltimore. But the movie seems nearly oblivious to the problem. While it spends a lot of effort showing how the characters are ambivalent about settling down, it doesn't really question their assumptions. It's too sentimental about its characters to recognize that their friendships with each other don't redeem their less honorable characteristics. For that matter, I wasn't all that impressed with the quality of their friendships. Check out how when several of them get thrown in jail after the heavy-drinking Fen (Kevin Bacon) tears down a church's nativity scene. Eventually, most of the men's dads bail them out. The freed ones express disbelief that Fen's dad is going to leave him in the jail overnight, but they don't do anything about it.

But back to the sexism. The movie opens with a dance party scene where a drunken Fen has sold the rights to dance with his date for $5. Smooth operator Boogie (Rourke) manages to talk said date into driving home with Fen anyway. Later we learn that Guttenberg's character, Eddie, is going to get married to Elyse. Famously, we never see Elyse, though IMDB says she was played by Levinson's sister. I say "famously" because, if I remember correctly, there are several questions in the original Trivial Pursuit game that hinge on the fact that you never get to see Elyse. Interesting parallel there, because in the movie, Eddie makes the marriage contingent on Elyse passing a trivia quiz about the Colts football team. She eventually fails the quiz by two points, but Eddie decides to let her pass anyway. I guess that's supposed to show that he really loves her.

For most of the film, the only married character in the boys club is Shrevie (Daniel Stern), who has Ellen Barkin at home, but would rather hang out with Steve Guttenberg. That should tell you something about him. Barkin's Beth is totally browbeaten by Shrevie's yelling. (Proper filing of his record collection is a particular concern, and I can almost empathize with that. But not really.) Poor Beth doesn't know who she is anymore, doesn't know if she's pretty (Ellen Barkin, bearer of the cutest crooked smile in movies!) or worthy of respect. Late in the movie, when her old flame Boogie suggests an affair, she's ready to go with him right away. When it turns out that he only wanted her so that he could win a bet, she says, "Well, I guess you had enough respect for me to not go through with it, so that says something." Yeah, it says something. It also says something that you didn't kick him in the balls, Beth.

Also considering matrimony is Billy (Tim Daly), who has fallen in love with, and knocked up, Barbara (Kathryn Dowling), a career woman at a TV station. She does not want to get married, and he can't understand why. Interestingly, this makes Billy the most sympathetic member of the boys club. At least he gives some thought to what's going on inside a woman's head.

That said, I don't understand why Levinson had to make Billy a closet piano genius. It's bad enough that Boogie is supposed to be a law student but never seems to crack a book. But it really irked me that Eddie and Billy are supposed to have been best friends since at least middle school, but Eddie is taken completely by surprise by his friend's talent when a drunken Billy commandeers the piano at a strip club. "You really made my night," the stripper later tells him. Yeah, because these guys are just so swell.

The final scene of the movie is at Eddie and Elyse's wedding. Elyse, with her back turned so we can't see her face, has thrown the bouquet and all the young women in attendance are reaching for it. The flowers bounce above their hands in slow motion for a long time before the bouquet finally plops down on the table in front of the diner boys. They look up with quizzical looks on their faces and the picture freezes, turns to black-and-white, rubbing in a sense of nostalgia.

But the bouquet that's landing on the table for these guys isn't necessarily marriage. It's growing up, wising up, realizing that there's something else in the world besides themselves and their adolescent obsessions. Sometimes, I'm nostalgic for those days when it seemed I had all the time in the world to sit around diners and b.s. with male friends. But I'm not nostalgic for the times that I was a jerk.

2009-02-15T16:46:00.000-08:00

25 Things about 15 Albums, or Something: A Blog Post, Not a Chain Letter

The "25 Things" chain letter thing on Facebook keeps generating new spinoffs. I got one recently called "15 Albums That Changed My Life." I couldn't let that go without thinking up my own. Writing this list, I saw a theme: books leading to music, music leading to books and movies, music leading to other music. The albums that changed my life were albums that led me to other things

1. The Beatles - "The Red Album" - I'm a song lover. So, of course my fan story begins with the Beatles. In my case, it started with "The Red Album," the compilation covering 1962-1966. But you know, it's almost embarrassing to talk about loving the Beatles. Who doesn't love the Beatles?

2. Psychedelic Furs - "Talk Talk Talk." I wrote about this album for one of those "Desert Island Discs" articles a couple of years ago. See the article here, and scroll down until you see the name of the album. "Talk Talk Talk" opened up a new world to me.

3. Led Zeppelin - "Houses of the Holy." There's a pretty straight line from reading Tolkien to listening to Zeppelin. And there's a very clear line from reading all of "The Lord of the Rings" to obsessively buying all the Zeppelin albums in order. And there's a pretty straight line from buying all the Zepp albums in order to buying all the Nick Cave. You can read more about my Led Zeppelin collecting days here.

4. The Cramps - "Bad Music for Bad People." The Cramps were a great live band. Lux Interior, who died recently, was the wildest, weirdest, funniest frontman I ever saw. I will never forget some of the crazy things I saw him do. But there was more to the Cramps on record. If you liked punk rock, there was punk rock in there. If you liked death rock, there was death rock in there. But once you were there, the Cramps pointed you to old psychedelia, novelty records, exotica, proto-punk, rockabilly, surf music, obscure R&B, country music. This compilation of Cramps singles was my starting point.

5. Guided By Voices - "Bee Thousand." The first time I heard it, I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. But I kept listening and found that it's full of unforgettable songs. Eventually, I learned to love all that homemade tape hiss. "Bee Thousand" taught me that making music is first and foremost about entertaining myself. The music I made on my little four-track was just as relevant to me as were my Zeppelin albums.

6. Nirvana - "Nevermind." I'm sick of hearing about this album, sick of the canonization of Kurt, but I will never forget the feeling of hearing "Teen Spirit" coming out of a pickup truck one day in Santa Cruz. That band I had seen opening for Dinosaur Jr. not long before. That album I had reviewed for the paper. Right there, coming out of the window of some truck. I'll never forget the feeling of reading an interview with the band and thinking, these guys sound like people I know. It's hard to explain to people today how unexpected those feelings were in those days.

7. "Golden Throats." This was a compilation of pop songs released by celebrities, things like an elderly Mae West singing "Twist and Shout." Best were William Shatner's "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and "Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man." You think the Beatles and Dylan were psychedelic? They have nothing on Shatner's versions. This album helped get me started in my lifelong love of wonderfully weird music.

8. My Bloody Valentine - "Loveless." It's hard for me to say why I love this album so much. If I were going to write down a set of rules of what makes for music I like (good lyrics, concise songwriting, etc.), "Loveless" would break just about all of them. Rock critics and publicists love to say any new band with swirly noises sounds like MBV, but I've never found anyone who really sounds more than a little like MBV. And I've tried. Lord, how I've tried over the nearly 18 years since this album came out. Even when Japancakes made an album covering "Loveless" in its entirety, it didn't really sound like MBV. The website Pandora supposedly uses a musicological formula to find music similar to what you'll like. They call it the Music Genome Project, or something like that. But the artists it finds who are supposed to sound like MBV are just about uniformly lame.

9. Elvis Presley - "The Top 10 Hits." I started listening to this album the way I started listening to "Golden Throats." I thought it was a cheap laugh, some American kitsch. But Elvis stopped being a joke at some point. Elvis was a tragedy.

10. The Kinks - "Give the People What They Want." This is the Kinks in their arena-rock mode, after Van Halen and the Pretenders started covering Ray Davies songs and renewed interest in the band. It's not a good album, really, but it was the first one I had. The lyrics to "Destroyer" referenced "Lola," which pointed me back to the early stuff. And the song "Better Things" is Ray's simple but beautiful attempt to cheer up a songwriter friend. ("Here's hoping all your verses rhyme / And the very best of choruses.") Even at age 11, I understood that this friend was actually Ray himself. I will always owe a debt to this album for leading me to the '60s Kinks.

11. The Pretenders - "The Pretenders." I love punk rock's "anyone can do it," " you don't have to be a musical genius" mentality. But the best punk bands were the ones that could really play and could really write songs. Forget about Chrissie for a minute and listen to the band. This was one of the first albums I ever bought and is still one of my favorites.

12. The Aislers Set - "Terrible Things Happen." This album is a drunken haze in the Mission District. Begging your fake friends for a whiskey because your only real friend moved to Portland. Memories of your trip to Europe, when you thought you had a friend in London and you were afraid of the homeless people you met. The echoing reverb is the fog in the air and the fog in your head. Amy Linton's voice sounds like she has a cold, and it's the cold of someone who rides bikes in the foggy summer night and shares her breath with people on MUNI in the morning.

13. Sonic Youth - "Evol." My friend Josh was an R.E.M. fanatic. He read interviews with Peter Buck in Forced Exposure or wherever, and he would go out and buy whatever album Buck recommended. Buck was raving about Sonic Youth. I got Josh to tape it for me. The vinyl version of "Evol" had a locked groove at the end of "Expressway to Yr. Skull," so it would just skip and skip and skip until the sound became soothing.

14. "The Velvet Underground & Nico." I grew up watching "The Monkees," "Batman," "The Addams Family," all the TV reruns of the decade of pop. A song like "I'll Be Your Mirror" is very '60s, but there's something weird going on. Nico's voice is a little off, the lyrics aren't quite as sweet as you think they are at first. Before the album's over, you've had "Venus in Furs," "Heroin," even "Black Angel's Death Song," which sounds like Sonic Youth. As other people have pointed out, you can draw a line from any one of these songs to whole branches of the next 40 years of alt-rock. And I like that. But I also like that you can draw a line in the other direction, back to the Monkees, if you want.

15. "Ramones Mania." This is the album I would listen to to get myself pumped up before playing a show, going to a show, going to band practice. It's the ridiculous punk songs, the sweet love songs, the what they hell were they thinking songs. It's the Ramones, da bruddas, the gang in their matching outfits, even when you know it's a fiction. They're a happy family. It's rock 'n' roll.

2009-01-11T18:34:00.000-08:00

The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz

A couple of months ago, my Civil Pro group was meeting to play this computer legal game as a class assignment. Its complicated scoring process reminded me of hit points and 10-sided dice and I turned to the 20-something guy next to me and asked, "Did you play Dungeons & Dragons as a kid?" He scoffed, "No!" and asked, "Why?" "Never mind," I said. "I've already revealed enough about my geeky past."

So, maybe the kids stopped playing it a long time ago, I don't know. But I did when I was in middle school - me and every geek I knew. (At least one of my friends still plays: My college roommate is a TV writer in Hollywood and he goes to a monthly D&D game with other writers "for networking purposes.")

Anyway, the reason I'm talking about all this is that the main character of this Pullitzer Prize-winning novel is the type of geek that we all knew and feared we'd grow up into. He's the Comic Store Guy from the Simpsons, the 40-Year-Old Virgin, the geek who reminds you why "geek" is still a pejorative term no matter what Wired magazine tries to tell you. The novel is packed full of references (DC and Marvel comics, D&D, sci-fi books and movies from "The Matrix" to "A Warlord of Mars," and I felt somehow embarrassed to catch as many as I did. It's also packed full of Dominican history, Spanish language and things I wasn't as familiar with, but it made me feel I understood.

I don't know if anyone without a geeky past (and/or present) is going to get as much as I did out of this novel, but if I could get through the Spanish and Dominican stuff, I imagine a more socially adept person than I could get through the geek-language stuff. Really, it's a wonderful book.

2008-12-29T08:30:00.000-08:00

The Camille Paglia Drinking Game

Break Blow Burn
Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems

While I was reading casebooks all fall, I kept this compilation of great poems in my downstairs bathroom so that I would have a chance every now and then to read something culturally enriching and unrelated to my studies. It even came in handy once in school when I was able to refer my literature-loving professor of property law to a William Blake poem, "The Chimney Sweeper," when we were discussing a famous 200-year-old case about a chimney sweeper's boy who found a valuable jewel.

There are a lot of great poems in here of course, but the draw is supposed to be Camille Paglia's essay examining each one. Or, because I don't know how many people who buy this book are actually going to read all of her obtuse academic rants, it would probably be more accurate to saw that the draw is Camille Paglia's brand on each one. The blurb on the back of the book calls Paglia "America's most provocative intellectual," but I think she's really better described as "America's most famous intellectual." She loves the media spotlight, and she loves to give little signals that she's not an ivory tower dweller. Read her columns in Salon, or see her other media appearances and you can make a drinking game out of her signals. She likes Madonna, drink! She doesn't like feminists, drink! She's a Democrat, but she thinks liberals are elitist snobs, drink! She likes Sarah Palin ... No, don't drink to that one. Just wonder how far Paglia can go with this knee-jerk contrarianism.

I won't say that Paglia is wrong to find that Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is "one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman," or that Frank O'Hara's "A Mexican Guitar" is a "pagan prayer to exuberant carnality." But Paglia's thoughts tell you more about Paglia than they do about the poem. Paglia surely knows that many people would be offended by her qualifier about Plath, and Paglia clearly relishes the opportunity to argue with those people. Paglia also could find a "pagan prayer to exuberant carnality" in Hallmark card if she wanted to.

2008-12-19T10:49:00.000-08:00

Time of the Season

I haven't been posting in a while, figuring that my loyal readers aren't interested in my thoughts about the casebooks I'm reading. You're welcome.
The only other book-length thing I've finished reading since moving across the country this summer has been "Deep Blues" by Robert Palmer. That's Palmer, the late rock critic and historian who did the PBS special on the history of rock n roll 10 or 12 years ago. Not to be confused with Robert Palmer, the late singer of "Addicted to Love" and Power Station fame.
I remember reading an interview with Nirvana from when they were just starting to get famous, and Krist talked about meeting Bono. Bono, then just a few years out from his Rattle & Hum phase, was trying to get the Nirvana guys to listen to the blues. Krist said it was really annoying, and it bummed him out because when he was a kid he thought U2's "War" was such a cool album.
See, that's how I felt about the blues for a long time. I was tired of Baby Boomers trying to make me worship their heroes, and so I was reluctant to listen to the artists who inspired them. There was always a lot of mediocre blues around, and I thought I knew what blues sounded like. It wasn't until much later that I started listening to Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters and realized I only knew what Stevie Ray Vaughan sounded like.
And, of course, it was just a couple of years after that Nirvana interview that we saw Krist on MTV playing bass while Kurt sang a heart-wrenching version of a Leadbelly song.
So, yeah. The book is good. It's from the late '70s, so some of it is a little dated. But it has some good interview material, and some really good insight. For instance, Palmer explores some of the West African musical traditions that may have had an influence on the blues. They all put a great emphasis on very subtle shadings of pitch, which manifests itself in the bent and flatted notes of the blues.

2008-06-28T18:59:00.000-07:00

The Wizard of Mozz

Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance
By Johnny Rogan

When I went to get my hair cut just before my wedding I told the hair stylist that I wanted to look like Morrissey. That this was 2004, not 1984 should tell you something about what Morrissey and the Smiths have meant to me over the years. Also, inspired by the Smiths when I was in college, I somehow convinced my friends to join me in a pact which gave our clique the nickname The Celibate Club. And I can hardly tell you what it meant to me, as a teenager and even beyond, to hear "I Know It's Over," and the part where Morrissey sings, "If you're so clever then why are you on your own tonight?" OK, I can try to tell you: It was like Morrissey knew me better than I knew myself -- and he was making fun of me in front of thousands of his fans.

Maybe it was that feeling that kept me from reading "The Severed Alliance" for so long. The book came out in the early '90s and it hasn't been out of print since. It's also often listed as one of the best rock bios of all time, or at least that's what I read online somewhere. In his introduction, Rogan says that it will be the first of a series of books that will cover Morrissey and Marr's respective solo careers. (Given that this book is mostly the story of the Smiths, this is the story of a solid alliance, not a severed one. He might have saved the title for the other books.) So far, he has come out with one book about solo Morrissey, and I wonder what kind of demand there is for a book about even a great guitarist like Johnny Marr.

It is amazingly, overwhelmingly researched. At one point, Rogan lists what movies Steven Morrissey saw during a Christmas break some time before the Smiths began. He also interviews the singer's school friends and teachers and gives a brief history of the schools. A lot of this is overkill and I admit I skimmed through some of the early chapters, but some of it proves relevant later -- for instance, in the genesis of songs like "The Headmaster Ritual" and "Rusholme Ruffians." A long examination of the infamous Moors Murdereress Myra Hindley later proves valuable in understanding the song "Suffer Little Children."

I couldn't wait until he got to the Smiths story. But once he got there, the plot was strangely familiar: Band gets together, writes some good songs, plays some good shows, builds a following, gets a record deal, things start moving too quickly, poor management decisions (in Morrissey and Marr's case, having no permanent manager at all for most of the Smiths' career) interfere, drugs become a problem, egos get in the way, someone starts to taken advantage of, someone gets tired and quits, the band considers carrying on without him before deciding to pack it in.

Really? A band with as unusual a persona as the Smiths has the same story as every other band? I guess I'm not surprised, but I sort of wonder why I bothered to read the book.

2008-06-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

The Books Glut

So, my wife and kid and I are getting ready to make a big cross-country move, and we got a couple of estimates from moving companies. I've paid movers to move me across town and I've done the U-Haul thing more times than I care to count, but I've never paid movers to move me across the country. Apparently, they all charge by weight. One moving guy pointed to our bookshelves and said we could easily shave $500 off our bill by paring down our books and music collections.

This presents an interesting problem. Always before, I've packed up my things with size in mind: How can I fit more stuff in one box? Books, CDs, LPs -- these were practically perfect for this kind of move. They fit tightly into moving boxes -- so tightly that a regular, file-size box full of books is almost too heavy to lift. But now I'm trying to avoid heaviness. And so it was that Ella and I found ourselves getting rid of hundreds of books in a bid to save ourselves money.

First stop: Green Apple. This is a wonderful old used book store. For selection, comfort and claustrophobia inducement, it is unparalleled. Since the unfortunate closing of Black Oak Books, it's also pretty much the only place I know of on this side of town that will buy books.

I've sold stuff there enough times in the past that I thought I had a halfway decent idea of what they'd take and what they wouldn't, so we didn't take everything there. We took about four bags, and left the rest in the car. They took maybe one and half bags' worth and gave us $75. Not bad, I guess. Always before I had taken credit instead of cash.

So, we left Green Apple with $75, two and a half bags in our hands, and four more bags and two boxes in the car. Where to next? We thought we'd go to our YMCA, where for months now they've been holding a book sale: $1 for a paperback, $2 for a hardcover. So we go in there and ask if we can drop off some books. They say sure. We drop 'em off, go back to the car for the boxes and then a manager comes up and says, please stop. They've got too many books, and it's not worth it to them. So, I take the last two boxes back to the car.

Mind you, there are some pretty damn good books in those bags we were dumping at the Y. Many of them I had been carting around from place to place since college. From Santa Cruz to San Francisco. From one apartment to another in San Francisco. To Portland. To Baton Rouge. Back to San Francisco and from place to place in San Francisco again. These books were physical representations of my identity as much the art on my walls and the music in my collection and the clothes in my closet. No, more so: I had spent hours alone, reading these books and many more hours thinking about them, dropping quotes into conversation, putting into practice ideas that they gave me (even if that only meant searching out records listed in the 1996 "Spin Alternative Rock Record Guide"). To have them rejected was embarrassing, even a little insulting.

Well, not really. My point is that I wonder how much we, as a culture, value books when we can't even give them away.

Will all that change when we've got our entire libraries on our Kindles? Or read them on iPod Nano screens or cell phones? Will future generations read at all?

2008-06-11T09:11:00.001-07:00

Rock is Dead They Say; Long Live Rock

Rock On
By Dan Kennedy

Now here's a great setup for a book-length personal essay: A lifelong slacker music fan finally gets his dream job at Atlantic Records, the historic home to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, et al. He's got a fancy office and a secretary and he's making good money coming up with things like an idea for a Fat Joe TV commercial, and sitting in on meetings about how to tie in a Jewel song about not selling out with a new ladies' razor product launch. And here's the kicker: He lands the job just as the music industry is falling apart.

That's the story behind "Rock On." The best parts of the book give a glimpse of the weird world of the music industry in what may be its death throes. Kennedy is a funny guy, and his image of himself as an outsider gives him a unique perspective.

Unfortunately, that perspective is far too often trained squarely on himself and how awkward he feels. It's kind of funny to read about him going on a shopping spree for expensive picture frames to put on his desk -- which he then fills with snapshots of college friends he hasn't seen in years -- because he thinks that's what he's supposed to do as a successful guy with an office. But there's just way too much of that kind of thing. I mean, that's the kind of stuff he'd come up with if he got a nice job at an insurance office.

Kangaroo Boxing

2008-05-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

Kangaroo Boxing

Gun, with Occasional Music
By Jonathan Lethem

Who decides which books go into which genre? A few years ago, I saw the spoken-word performer and writer Maggie Estep reading at The Booksmith from her novel "Hex," which a jacket blurb described as "horse noir." To be more specific, it was a murder mystery set in the world of horse racing. At the reading, Estep said when she was writing it, she didn't know about the conventions of the mystery genre, so she didn't know to, for instance, have the murder take place in the first chapter. But once the book got to the publishers, the company decided to market it as a mystery. Now, it's just the first in a series of "Ruby Murphy mysteries," named after the heroine. I haven't read the others, but I assume they adhere more to the conventions, for good or ill.

I thought of Estep when I was reading "Gun, with Occasional Music." The first novel by the prolific Jonathan Lethem. Like his later "Motherless Brooklyn," which I blogged about last year, this novel is a noir-ish murder mystery with a twist. In the case of "Motherless," the twist was that the narrator had Tourette's. In this case, it's a lot more twisted than that.

"Gun, with Occasional Music," tells the story of Conrad Metcalf, an ex-cop private investigator with a drug problem who is trying to figure out who killeda urologist named Maynard Stanhunt. Just a few weeks before, Stanhunt had hired Metcalf to keep tabs on his wife. Metcalf quit when Dr. Stanhunt asked him to rough her up.

So far, so noir, right?

How about this? In his investigation, Metcalf is menaced by an artificially evolved kangaroo with a gun and a likewise artificially aged infant, or babyhead, with an attitude problem. He's also run afoul of the inquisitor's office, who keep docking him points on his karma. If he gets down to zero, he'll be "frozen," or put into suspended animation, for years. His drugs, a custom mix of Forgettol, Addictol and something else, are provided free by the government. Radio and television news are now all abstract, meaning that the news is represented musically. The novel's title is quite literal: There's a gun, and it plays music meant to be appropriate to whatever situation it finds itself in.

Now that's a sci-fi novel, right?

"Gun, with Occasional Music" succeeds in either genre, I think. I really liked it. But I imagine hardcore SF freaks wouldn't care too much for all the plot, and mystery readers would think all the sci-fi stuff is ridiculous.

So, who decided that it was "literary fiction"? Was it by default? How did Lethem end up being able to go on and write "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude" and the rest, without being consigned to a mystery imprint or a sci-fi press?

2008-05-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

Quite, rather

Thank you, Jeeves
By P.G. Wodehouse

I had never read one of the Wooster and Jeeves books before reading this one, but I was just a couple of pages in before it felt as familiar as ... well, a Warner Brothers cartoon, I guess. Basically, the novel is a farce, one in a series in which the rich, youngish Bertie Wooster gets into all sorts of ridiculous situations and is rescued by the exquisitely cool head of his butler, Jeeves. It's narrated by Wooster, who's hilariously self-aggrandizing even when he's making an ass of himself. His narration has a good deal of 1920s slang, and in general is so breezy that he abbreviates "circumstances" as "circs." At one point, he even abbreviates the four-letter word "spot," as in "really put me on the s."

A lot of the fun comes from Wooster's futile attempts to stay cool in increasingly absurd situations, and in Jeeves' inability to get worked up over anything. It's all very English and quite old-fashioned, but quite fun.

Like I said, I haven't read any others, but I imagine this is not the novel to start with in the series. For one thing, it alludes to past adventures of Wooster and Jeeves (which, for all I know, may not have appeared in other books). But it also has a lot of references to Wooster's admiration for a troupe of what Jeeves is polite enough to refer to as "negroid" minstrels. And, um, Wooster spends practically the entire second half of the book in blackface. There's charming old-fashioned comedy to be found in much of the book, but some old-fashioned things aren't charming anymore.

2008-05-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

Break out the Liner Notes!
It's lyrics time at Corrective Lenses

I was just listening to the Go-Betweens' "16 Lovers Lane" album today and remarking to myself for the hundredth time what an extraordinary song is "Dive For Your Memory."

A brief rundown, the Go-Betweens were founded in Brisbane, Australia, in the early '80s by singer-songwriters Grant MacLennan and Robert Forster. They later moved to London to make a play for a bigger audience, but eventually returned home. As the decade progressed, they turned into one of the most interesting songwriting teams of the era, if not of all pop history. They never really had a hit, but "Streets of Your Town" got some play on MTV's "120 Minutes" and "Cattle and Cane" is considered something of a national treasure in Australia. The band broke up at the end of the decade, but reunited in 2000, when members of Sleater-Kinney helped them to record "The Friends of Rachel Worth." After a few more Go-Betweens records, MacLennan died from a heart attack in 2006.

Both MacLennan and Forster had a very distinct singing and songwriting style, and yet they complemented each other more than you would imagine. MacLennan's songs are more melodic and wistful, his lyrics more impressionistic and his singing voice mellower and more conventional (but perhaps more beautiful). Forster's songs are a little more edgy, his lyrics more specific and his voice is usually found doing a kind of Lou Reed-style talk-singing. If you get tired of one style, the next song will be in the other style. I'm not sure I would like them as much if it was all one or the other, although both songwriters did put out good solo records as well.

"Dive For Your Memory" is a Forster song, and he delivers it in his usual metrosexual accent. Over a lush backdrop of guitar, bass, drums and clarinet, with a slow melody played on an electric guitar, he muses:

"If the cliffs were any closer
If the water wasn't so bad
I'd dive for your memory
On the rocks and sand"

So, in other words, he's so broken up about his breakup that he feels he'd commit suicide, if only he didn't have to walk so far, or if only he could land in peaceful water where he might not actually die or get cold. He goes on:

"When I hear you say that we had no chance
I would dive for your memory
We stood that chance"

I just love that. He doesn't say, "It was just one of those things" or "Everything I do I do for you" or "You were always on my mind." He says, we stood that chance. Hey, it might have worked if we had tried harder. For instance, if I had been willing to do things like walk a few yards to the cliffs and face cold water.

2008-05-15T15:13:00.000-07:00

Correct This

The Twenty-Seventh City
By Jonathan Franzen

Franzen is now famous as the author of "The Corrections," and as the guy who got selected for Oprah's book club and then had his invitation to appear on her TV show revoked after he told a reporter that the selection made him feel uneasy. "The Twenty-Seventh City" is his first novel, and it shows a lot of the themes he would return to later: families unravelling, cities gentrifying, otherwise reasonable people making stupid mistakes due to lust, etc.

But I think this novel is a mess. It's well over 400 pages, and I can't tell you how many times I put it down intending to just give up on it. To say I couldn't put it down is no great compliment: I just wanted to figure out how a good writer could go so wrong, and see if he could redeem himself by the end. No, he couldn't.

To summarize: The novel tells the story of the Probst family of St. Louis, MO, in the Reagan years, as they fight and run away from home and cheat on each other and so on. Fine stuff to write a Great American Novel about, right? But it also tells the story of S. Jammu, a young American-born Indian who is recruited from the Bombay Police to be chief of police in St. Louis. Does that strike you as believable, that a U.S. police force would recruit an officer from India to be its chief? OK, how about this? Jammu is actually part of a conspiracy to buy up downtown property and clean up the city so that it can be reincorporated into the county and ... oh, who cares? The point is, she and her associates plant bugs in the homes and offices of prominent local citizens and find ways to mess with their lives so as to get them into "the State" where they can be manipulated into doing what the conspiracy wants. And the conspiracy is also not above murder, blackmail, seduction and kidnapping to get what it wants.

And what does it want? I admit I was skipping a lot of pages by the end there, but I really don't know. There's something about Jammu's past as an undercover Marxist agent, but her motives don't appear to have anything to do with the class struggle. She's happy to screw the poor folks downtown out of their homes.

On top of this problem with credibility, Franzen has a habit of burying the action; something big will happen and he'll turn away. Or he'll pick it up halfway through. Near the end of the novel ...

SPOILER ALERT!

... someone apparently shoots Jammu, but we don't find out for sure who it was, or if she lives, or even if it really was Jammu. I got the sense that Franzen was trying to avoid thriller cliches, but he really just avoided thrills.

And one more thing: I'm still not clear why merging the city and county would be a bad thing. The characters in the novel aren't either.

This blogger liked the novel better than I did, but he's confused by it too.

2008-04-14T15:46:00.000-07:00

Some Candy Talking
An interview with Kim Wong Keltner.

Kim Wong Keltner is the author of three books, "The Dim Sum of All Things," "Buddha Baby" and the new "I Want Candy." She's also a longtime friend of mine. I asked her a few questions about her work.

Could you tell me a little about your books and how you got started with Avon?

When I started writing my first book, "The Dim Sum of All Things," I never thought there'd be more. I just focused on the task at hand. Being a nobody, I knew the first book was sort of all or nothing. Believe it or not I used to think of our Chem teacher, Doc Ellis, when he'd say about tests, "This is your chance to shine." I know that's kind of ridiculous. So everything I thought I knew went into the first book - every Chinese word or custom. Which, of course, brings us to the second book, "Buddha Baby," which was a little tougher to write because I thought I'd used all my good jokes already. Plus, I had a 1-year-old, which made for no sleep. But in a lot of ways the second book was better, because I don't think a person becomes a worse writer with time, you get better. That said, I think "I Want Candy" is the book I was always meant to write. Of all the stuff that's been sifting around in my head for years, the stories in "I Want Candy" have stayed with me the longest. As for Avon, they bought my first book, and I've just stayed with them.

In "I Want Candy" there's a lot of material that's very specific not only to junior high and 1983, but very much to San Francisco. (My favorite S.F. bit was when someone says "moded.") How did you research the setting, and why was it important to you to set this story in San Francisco in 1983?

Hey! The "moded" thing was a last minute addition in the second round of editing, so I'm glad you noticed! The more I started thinking about 1983, words like "moded," and "W.P.O.D." kept popping up in my mind. In New York, I don't think my editors understood "moded" but I think they were giving me the benefit of the doubt. As far as research goes, I thought I'd go visit the old places, but then I stopped and decided to write it all from memory first, and then I could fact-check later. I didn't want any modern ideas coming through since hindsight is 20/20. I wanted the authentic, lame thoughts of a 14-year-old in 1983 even if it seemed stupid now. I wanted to set the story in San Francisco in 1983 because that time is so very gone and I wanted to treat readers to going back to that time without it being too goopy and nostalgic. I don't think anyone remembers before there were VCRs, home computers, and cellphones. Time was slower, but still messed up. F--ed up, but in slow motion?

There's a running joke about "Are You There God? It's Me, Mei-Ling," and the publicity material talks about "Judy Bloom meets Amy Tan." Also, a lot about cautionary-tale after-school specials. Were you consciously modeling your story on things you read or saw at that age?

Yeah, I think this was my personal after-school special. I wanted to walk that line between knowing you're at risk for stuff but wanting to do it anyway. Like, "Don't talk to strangers," and "Hmmm, why not? If I'm not supposed to, it's probably pretty good."

"I Want Candy" is darker than your other books. There's death and danger and ghosts, also a lot of voyeurism and sex. Kind of heavy stuff for a 14-year-old protagonist. Was it important to you to not sugarcoat that time of life?

I think all that stuff is already in the life of a 14-year-old. As for voyeurism and sex, how else are you supposed to find out anything? I've gotten a lot of criticism which surprises me - people writing things like "Don't let your kid read this book. It might give them ideas!" News flash: they have these ideas already. This book seems to have hit a nerve in people's fear place, as if I've invented creepy pervs and loneliness. I say, don't shoot the messenger. I very much didn't want to sugarcoat early teenhood. People especially don't want to go anywhere near masturbation. And maybe they don't want to think their Chinese food is actually cooked by hardworking individuals.

Candace's story is about Asian American identity in some ways, but it struck me as more about urban 14-year-old girl identity. I mean, the concerns she has - mean friends, neglectful parents, fear of/fascination with sex, etc. - aren't really specific to any ethnic group. Do you agree?

Yes, I agree. One aspect that caught me by surprise is questions of class. Like I said, about people not wanting to know the people behind their cheap Chinese food, I think readers - who are mostly, let's face it, better off financially than Candace's family - feel uncomfortable with her "situation." They might think these things are happening to her because she's poor or lives in a bad neighborhood, but equally appalling things are going on in Sea Cliff, which is something I tried to point to with Ruby being her richer friend.

Bear with me for a couple of sentences here: I was having this conversation with my sister, who is a therapist in the East Bay and works with a lot of teenagers, and she was saying that she thinks it's way harder to be a teenager now than it was when we were young. She thinks the online gossip, the pressures to be thin and to have sex are worse than anything we had. But I remember friends (my sister included) getting into some risky stuff when I was a teenager. What do you think? Would Candace have had an easier time in 2008 than in 1983?

Believe it or not, some kids are still living pretty sheltered lives in 2008. I think this is a hard question to answer because it depends on one's family circumstances. Parents are more aware now, and in 1983 we were still free to roam the streets, which is where all sorts of interesting things had a chance to happen. Now you can't just go trick-or-treating all night with your merry band of friends. Maybe if Candace were 14 in 2008 she'd rebel even further because of the tight lockdown on kids. Or maybe she'd be stuck in Kumon math tutoring, and posting erotic pictures of her feet on the Internet. I don't know. But sexuality is going to pop up somewhere, don't you think? Kids ain't stupid. Weren't then and aren't now. As a parent now, I don't think burying one's head in the sand can do much good. So let the criticisms of "I Want Candy" come. The bad comments hurt, but I know I've told the truth with this book. It took unwavering commitment to honesty to write "I Want Candy." If it helps just one kid feel less alone, then f-- all those a--holes on amazon who seem to hate my guts. They're afraid. And by the end of the book I don't think Candace is afraid anymore.

2008-04-11T17:24:00.000-07:00

Decimated
The Tenth Man
By Graham Greene

This is a very short novel adapted from a film treatment. The front of my edition of the book is filled with several pages of Greene's notes for treatments he wrote during the war: One was later turned into the novel "Our Man in Havana." I'm not quite sure why the publisher chose to include it here, but "The Tenth Man" is cinematic the way "Havana" is, in the sense that its premise is very well lined out and its action is rather broad.

So, the premise: During WWII, a group of 30 French prisoners is told by their Nazi guards that every tenth man will be shot in the morning, and it's up to the prisoners to decide who. They draw straws, and when a wealthy lawyer draws a losing number, in a stroke of cowardice he sells it to a poor Parisian in return for all the lawyer's property, including his old country home. The Parisian figures this will be a good thing to leave to his mother and sister, and so he accepts.

Flash forward to the end of the war, and the lawyer, Chavel, is now penniless. He is so ashamed of his cowardice that he doesn't want to contact any of his old business associates, lest he be forced to explain how he ended up losing everything. He finds himself back at his old country house, where he picks up work as a servant, working for the sister of the dead Parisian. She is consumed with hatred of the lawyer who cost her brother his life, so Chavel does not reveal his true identity. And, of course, he falls in love with her.

And then one day, a man comes along claiming to be Chavel ...

"The Tenth Man" is a fun read, though rather slight. Some of the most interesting aspects of the novel are the themes around the edges. The gentleman's cowardice and the proletariat's noble self-sacrifice, for instance, give a lot to work with. It's not as simple as "rich man bad, poor man good": The Parisian's sister, who is one of the beneficiaries of the deal, doesn't support his decision. She'd rather have her brother back than all the money in the world. She hardly knows what to do with the old house. Chavel finds her and her mother living in it like squatters, fully expecting to be turned out any day, when the true owner returns.

This plays into another theme, one about bravery and cowardice. The Parisian surely takes his fate with more dignity than does Chavel, but, if his sister doesn't want the house, has he simply wasted his life? Can his action be called bravery if he has?

2008-04-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

Phair Enough

I don't want this to turn into a '90s rock blog (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should probably skip this post and wait for my upcoming high-culture posts, but thought I should mention, in case you haven't seen it yet, that Liz Phair reviewed the new book by Dean Wareham for the New York Times Book Review on Sunday. The review was sort of a rave. In fact, Idolator said it reaffirmed her 'Blow Job Queen' status. (If you don't know that this is referring to Phair's notorious song "Flower," once again, just wait for the next post. I promise I'll be more erudite next time around.) The music blog site also points out that Phair namechecked Wareham's old band Galaxie 500 in "Stratford on Guy."

For now, let me just tell you about seeing Phair play the Great American Music Hall in 1993, when "Exile in Guyville" had just come out. There was already a little backlash against her in the press, much of it having to do with Phair having some pitch problems on stage. (I know. It was a weird thing to talk about back then, too.) But Phair sounded good, or good by indie rock standards. And when it came time to sing "Flower," she took a deep breath to compose herself and then sang it a capella, solo, in a simple, childish melody. Today, I can imagine any number of horrible pop starlets (latter-day Phair among them) singing that song as a slutty come-on, but at the time what she did was a very brave thing to do.

2008-04-01T20:25:00.000-07:00

Nirvana
By Everett True

Yes, this is a story we all know, a story that has been told many times. If you were young in the early '90s, you probably have your own Nirvana story. But there is probably no one better situated to tell the story of the unlikely success and unhappy fate of the band.

Everett True was the pen name of one Jerry Thackray when he started writing for the British music weekly Melody Maker in 1988. (He had previously worked at the rival New Musical Express under the name The Legend! with an exclamation point like that.) Melody Maker soon sent him to Seattle to report on Sub Pop Records and the burgeoning grunge explosion which was exemplified by Soundgarden and Mudhoney.

Sub Pop's famous hype machine took full advantage of the attention, and True's self-hype machine kicked in too. He even managed to get Sub Pop to put out a single of him singing under the name The Legend! (He already held the honor of having a previous single as the first release by the UK's Creation Records.) Soon, there was a grunge craze sweeping Britain, and to a lesser extent, the United States. And True was happy to take credit for it.

So, as the grunge scene developed further, and Nirvana went from being just another Melvins wannabe act to being the great Northwest hope, True was uniquely situated to report the news. And, as a journalist with no great compunctions about making himself a part of the story, he was also uniquely situated to influence events. Yes, it was he who introduced Kurt Cobain to Courtney Love.

Love ends up dominating much of the story of this book, as she dominates every situation she forces herself into. And, though True was once a close friend of hers, she does not come off well here. (Ella says: "When has she ever come off well?")

There's a good amount of backstage detail and dishy dirt in Nirvana, but the book doesn't hold together. It often seems that True can't decide if he's writing a critical history, a memoir or an oral history, so he splits the difference. He also has a bad habit of putting in footnotes every time someone references another act of the period. The footnotes allow him to put in his snarky or reverent comments on the act in question, but they are distracting and often unnecessary. Many of them are excuses for True to snipe at other accounts of the Nirvana story, especially Michael Azzerad's "Come As You Are" and Charles Cross' "Heavier Than Heaven." But, whatever their faults, those books have a narrative cohesion True's lacks.

Still, I knew the story before I picked up the book, and I imagine most readers will be in more or less the same boat. I'm not sure why I felt I needed to read abou Nirvana again -- I can't remember the last time I listened to them -- but I wanted to see True's unique perspective on the story. For that, a memoir would have been a better choice.

2008-03-25T20:12:00.000-07:00

The Yiddish Policemen's Union
By Michael Chabon

The premise behind this novel by the prize-winning author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" and "The Final Solution" is so high concept it's practically a sci-fi novel. Instead, it's a detective novel.

The story takes place around the turn of the millennium in the Sitka District of Alaska, a semi-autonomous region inhabited by Jews after the fall of the fledgling state of Israel in 1948. Yeah. Chabon also throws in a few asides here and there to add to this alternate history: the Third Russian Republic, an independent Manchuria, the Cuban War. Even a mention of a late first lady Marilyn Monroe Kennedy!

But those are just asides. The bulk of his portrayal of Sitka comes in its Yiddish terminology (a gun is a sholem, a cop is a shammes) its unexpected clashes between Jewish and Tlingit Indian cultures. And, of course, there are different kinds of Jews: orthodox and ultra-orthodox and reformed and agnostic, refugees from Israel and European Holocaust survivors and rich Jews from the mainland (called "mexicans" because they're from the south of Alaska) and the early Sitka Jewish settlers ("polar bears" or "the frozen chosen").

All this background gets very complicated and it's a very impressive piece of work on
Chabon's part. But the actual plot is a fairly formulaic detective story with some religious elements. Maybe that's to be expected: Chabon is famous for toying with boyish genre fiction.

Still, the backdrop kind of overwhelms everything else in the novel, and I'm not sure it all works. If this had been marketed as a detective novel, or an alternative history sci-fi novel, I probably would not have read it. But it was uncomfortable to have to skip over Yiddish words I didn't understand and wade through all the alt-history just to read a story that otherwise would be beach or airplane reading.

I enjoyed it, but it does seem a little overdone.

2008-03-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

The Painted Veil
M. Somerset Maugham

A well-received movie of this book came out a couple of years ago, but I haven't seen it yet. It was apparently the third time this between-the-wars story was made into a film. It's easy to see why: romance, exotic location, betrayal, danger ... No, actually, it's not that easy to see why filmmakers thought this novel would make a good movie. It's all internal, the story of a frivolous woman who is forced to look within herself for the first time, and her husband, who looks within himself way too much. That said, I really liked it.
The novel concerns Kitty, a London society girl who has impulsively married Walter, a pathologically reserved bacteriologist who lives in Hong Kong, and is, as the story begins, having an affair. To punish her, in fact possibly to kill her, Walter takes her with him to a small Chinese village undergoing a deadly cholera epidemic. While there, Kitty begins working with a group of nuns who take care of the poor children of the village. She finds herself simultaneously drawn to the nuns and alienated by their reserve. They represent a kind of woman she knows she could never be, but more than that, she finds herself for the first time in her life unable to get by on her charm and good looks.

2008-02-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

On the Mats
The Replacements: All Over But The Shouting
By Jim Walsh

Jim Walsh is a musician and music critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He was a bandleader in Minneapolis in the early '80s when a new band raised the bar (and drank itself under the bar) for everybody else on the local scene -- and, before too long, on the national scene as well. He collects his and other fans' memories about the 'Mats in an enlightening, entertaining and even occasionally moving oral history.

I spoke with him over the phone in January before he was headed out here to Northern California for a combination book/music tour. Despite having a bad cold, he was charming, friendly, smart and generous with his time. We spoke about being a fan and being a friend, and how songs can help you.

Your book opens with Billie Joe from Green Day talking about seeing the Replacements, and how it changed his life. I was at that show, too.

So you were at that show at the Fillmore. What did you think of that show?

To tell you the truth, I remember it more as one of those nights people talk about, where the band was too drunk and sloppy. And it kind of turned me off them for a long time.

Right. I think that's a lot of people's story, too. I think they could have been off putting. I think the book gets at that too. One thing is they were incredibly loud. And if you weren't used to that kind of volume, I can see how that would just blow your doors and you wouldn't be able to recognize the songs. But I think that people who only saw them one or two times and they just have one experience to judge them, that's legit, but they were a very multi-hued and multifaceted rock band. So Billie Joe and your experience, that's sort of the perfect dichotomy there. He had his life changed and you sort of shrugged. That's the epitome of the Replacements right there.

I did get into the records later, and now I love them.

And I think those are the things that remain. I mean I think those records really do tell the tale, to some degree. Someone was interviewing me earlier today and they said "I sense that you don't think that their records live up to their live legacy," and I was like, I don’t think that at all. I mean, I love those records.

So, how did you get started with this book?

A couple different people have asked me to write a book on the Replacements over the years, and I had always said no. I was busy with other things and I didn’t want to live in the past, etcetera, etcetera. And then this guy contacted me, a local publisher and I kind of felt like, frankly, I keep saying this, friends of ours have died. My friend and neighbor Karl Mueller from Soul Asylum died, and I think that shook me and it shook a lot of people in town. I wanted to make sure that some of these stories got put down for posterity, because for a while there it seemed like people were dropping like flies. And you don’t know who’s going to be next. And I wanted a version of it done. Even if it’s only my version. Starting from South Minneapolis and going on from there. I think other books will be written on them and I look forward to reading them, but I just want to make sure that some of these voices are intact before we all kick.

How did you decide to do it as an oral history?

I think there’s a narrative. And I do think it has an arc and all that, as any good story does. But I did not want to simply write: “Paul Westerberg strapped on his Les Paul. Tommy Stinson slung his…” That would have been just ridiculous and foreign to what that band was all about. They were certainly all about myth, but they were much more about “Anyone can do it” and they were certainly goofing on themselves and taking the piss out of themselves. That’s why their fans love them. Their fans are some of the smartest, or they think they’re some of the smartest (laughs) rock or art or culture people in the world. They’re very persnickety. All I’m saying is I wouldn’t have wanted to read that as a fan. I don’t think I could stomach that. I wanted it to be a jumble of voices that left you kind of scratching your head at some point, and sort of irritated. Sort of messy, much like the band itself. But I think it works.

It’s a very ‘80s story, isn’t it? I mean, the way the fans and the town are such a part of the story of the band.

I actually do think that just because there were a lot of scenes. In every scene people grew very attached to bands, just as they do now. This band was a band that didn’t languish very long. They weren’t just a local band, they were gunning for the stars. And that was a very intoxicating thing to be a part of and to root for, too.

It’s funny because I was out doing some East Coast stuff for the book and I was out at a bar one night and I was talking to these kids, these glam rock kids and they loved the Replacements and they were very sharp. They were very much Village hipsters. And all they wanted to talk about was, as they said, pre-Internet bands. And they used it almost like the term “punk rock.” And I was like, wow, this is a real thing. So the attraction to all of these bands that had nothing to do with this technology that we’re all so adept at now was a big attraction to kids in their early 20s now, I think. And I remember being that way about underground bands from the '60s. Bands that didn’t quite make it.

And I could just see these kids, they were just hungry for a time where things were more visceral, or not as easily accessible. The whole romance of bands riding around in bands. You know now, you and I get on the computer at night and say, "Hey Will, here’s this new band, you want this?"

But at the same time, it’s so much easier now!

Absolutely. No question. It’s never been better. Well, you gotta qualify that … I certainly have romance with vinyl and stuff like that. But I love the idea of being able to exchange ideas with someone in Sweden about the Replacements.

Back to the making of the book: Why did you decide to do it without the cooperation of Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson?

Paul and I, we’ve been friends for years. And we’d been talking facetiously about the idea of me doing a book. Never seriously, just sort of half-assed. And as a couple of people approached me about it, I’d call him and then we’d put it off for a couple of years. And then this guy approached me about it and as I told you, about people dying, I thought it was time to do it. And he said he didn’t want to be part of it because he didn’t want to live in the past, and regurgitate it. And also, as he said, “Unauthorized sells better than authorized.” Which I thought was cool because, you know, he was looking out for me.

I initially said that I didn’t want to do it if he wasn’t going to be involved, which certainly meant that Tommy wasn’t going to be involved. And I just went, well, forget it I’m not going to do it. Let somebody else do it. And Paul said, “Wait a minute. There’s a ton of interviews with me out there.” And I said, I’ll think about it. So I thought about it for acouple of days. I talked to my wife and she said you’d have fun doing it. And I dug around my basement and l looked at some stuff that I hadn’t read in 20 years and I thought this would be cool in book form.

As soon as I knew it would be a juxtaposition of the past with the present, past quotes from guys with the band, and reviews. Once I knew how that would work I thought it would be a very cool collage.

Were you ever surprised by the stories people told you?

All the time. Almost every time out. It would be the same as if you were doing the book. Because it’s such a personal experience. That was the thrill of it. You know, I got to … this band I love, who has meant so much to me, I got to just call up (fans) and say, hey, tell me a story. And that was the really, really fun part of it. And I could have kept doing that for another year. They might have got a little repetitive (laughs) but I don’t know. I’ve heard stories since that would have made it into the book and would have been good. But nothing that made me go, "God! That needed to be in the book!" They were all of the same ilk, that spoke to their genius or their insanity. The only stories that I didn’t include were the ones that I thought were dull, or boiler plate drunken stupid, or didn’t illuminate anything further.

You were in a band at the time the Replacements were starting out. Were you ever jealous of them?

I can honestly say that I was not. I don’t know what it is about me … I play basketball and I’m competitive there but I really do like to see my friends do well. I just really do. I just think it’s cool. And I know music and art and writing etcetera, etcetera is a really cutthroat thing, but my whole thing is really about the songs and their songs really lifted me. It’s like everybody says about Paul’s songs, he helped me. He helped me. How could I be competitive with that? That’s like you’re being competitive with your best self.

2008-02-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

Roundup time

I've fallen behind on my blogging, so let's catch up.

Bittmania:
Last week, I made Tempeh Chili With Black Beans. Tempeh is made from fermented soybeans that are pressed together. It's not as processed as tofu, and some people will say it's better for you, but I've never had much luck cooking with tempeh. Tempeh has a subtle nutty flavor, but when I put it in a stir-fry, it always comes out kind of bland and unappealing.
Bittman's chili recipe calls for the tempeh to be crumbled, and it ends up resembling the black beans in texture. The recipe calls for roasted garlic and chipotles, so it has a very nice smoky flavor that complements the tempeh. The recipe called for radishes, but I didn't have any, and I don't really care for radishes anyway. I used carrots. I liked it a lot.

Nabokovamania:
Just read "Laughter in the Dark," which is set in Berlin, where Nabokov lived first after his family fled the Bolsheviks. The book was written in 1938, although it's set sometime before that. Politics don't play much part in the story, but it's hard to ignore what was happening in Germany at the time.
The novel tells the story of Albinus, a rich art critic who leaves his wife for Margot, a working class beauty half his age. She is a run of the mill gold digger until an old lover, Rex, re-enters the picture. Charming, but cruel, Rex convinces Albinus that he's gay and begins hanging around the new couple, carrying on his affair with Margot right under Albinus' nose -- literally, after Albinus is blinded in an accident.
Nabokov lays it on a little thick in that last part of the book. It's a bit much to believe, And Albinus' downward trajectory is too relentless and self-induced to have the ring of real tragedy. But the characters are well-drawn. Rex, especially, is an interesting villain. Readers of "Lolita" may think of him as a young Quilty.

Doommania:
"The World Without Us," by Alan Weisman, seeks to answer this question: What would happen to life on the planet if humans were to disappear? I don't know about you, but this is the kind of thing I think about all the time, so I was really excited to read this book. It springs from a couple of articles Weisman wrote for Discovery magazine, one of which focussed on what has happened to the abandoned region around Chernobyl. It's a fascinating subject, but it does often have the feel of a magazine article that has been padded out to book length. And Weisman keeps stumbling over the central flaw in his premise: Anything which wipes out all human beings at once is also going to wipe out an awful lot of other species at the same time.

2008-02-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

Fake it till you make it
The Year of Living Biblically
By A.J. Jacobs

A.J. Jacobs is a staff writer for Esquire magazine and has started a sideline for himself as a stunt journalist. He published a book called "The Know It All" in which he documents his feat of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A-Z. In "The Year of Living Biblically," his latest, he spends a year trying to follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible.

It doesn't take long for him to see how ridiculous the idea is. He gets a posse of religious advisers, both Christian and Jewish to help him and finds that no one agrees on which rules are the most important, when to take something as figurative and when to take it as literal, or just about anything else. No one even seems to agree on how many rules there are. Most Christians, for instance, believe that Jesus' sacrifice means the Jewish dietary laws are no longer in force -- and just about all the other ones are now redundant too. And of course, the Jews have a whole other set of rules in the Talmud which are supposedly based on the Biblical rules.

Jacobs is Jewish, but comes from a secular background. In fact, he considers himself entirely agnostic as the year begins. But he spends most of the year trying to follow Jewish interpretations of the Bible. What he sort of forgets is that every religious Jew is already trying to do the same thing. And what he soon realizes is that everyone -- even the ultra-Orthodox -- picks and chooses from the innumerable rules and regulations in the Bible.

Some of these rules are sensible ("Thou shalt not kill") and some of them are silly (Jacobs ends up wearing all white for a year), and some of them are so bizarre he can't follow them (break a cow's neck at the site of an unsolved crime? -- attention TV crime show writers!), and many of them are hilarious.

By the end of the year, Jacobs has become not exactly religious, but no longer agnostic. He attributes some of this transformation to practice -- the daily routines of religion have, through cognitive dissonance, convinced him that he believes in what he's doing. But he also finds a comfort that he doesn't expect to find.

It would be a short and kind of boring book if that's all there was to it, but Jacobs keeps a breezy men's magazine style throughout. Like a good journalist, he interviews various experts and has them do the exposition and historical analysis. It's a book about a serious subject that doesn't take itself too seriously.

2008-02-06T20:58:00.000-08:00

Bittmania

So, Ella and I have been using Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything for a while. I really like the simplicity of the recipes and the unpretentiousness of Bittman's writing. But of course, I couldn't use much of the book. Now he's come out with How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Ella and I are going to eat our way through it.

Tonight: Pearl Couscous Gratin with Pesto and Goat Cheese, and Sweet Crumble Topping (with pears). The gratin was quite good, and it was interesting to have a couscous dish that holds together. We didn't have any cream, Ella used milk, and we had to use pesto in a jar. It would be better to make a bunch of pesto in the summer and then freeze it for use in the winter in this dish. It's a good meal for a cold night.

The crumble is a oatmeal-almond topping for whatever fruit you want. (It also has brown sugar and orange zest and coriander!) We had a bunch of Bosc pears, which hold their shape. They don't cook uniformly, though. Ella added some crystallized ginger, which went very nicely. Overall, pears are a nice match with the topping, as their mellow flavor and texture contrast well with the crunchiness of the oats and almonds.

2008-01-31T21:13:00.000-08:00

The Awakening
By Kate Chopin

I don't want my thousands of loyal readers to think that I'm not reading anything these days. I've been caught up with some other projects lately. Soon, I'll have some exciting new things to post here on the blog.

In the mean time, I did recently finish reading "The Awakening," a turn-of-the-20th-Century feminist classic of sorts.

To tell you the truth, I found it a little boring. I mean, it's about a bourgeois wife who is bored with a society that doesn't leave her much to do. She ends up falling in love with a young guy, and at length, she realizes that she can't just run off with him without bringing shame upon her family or something, so she kills herself. If you've seen an Ibsen play, you know the story.

2008-01-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

Rock Out!

The Dark Stuff
By Nick Kent

On one level, The Dark Stuff is just a rehash of rock journalist Nick Kent's old clips, with a little updating here and there, until it's passable as a collection of short profiles of key figures in rock. On another, it's a manifesto about what makes real rock 'n' roll.

As the former, it's a pretty sloppy piece of work. The edition I read says it's "updated with new material," but the old material does not appear to be updated, only added to. See, for instance, the two chapters about Iggy Pop, with their overlapping biographical details. See also Kent's misspelling of Jim Osterberg's last name in the old chapter. And then there's the Johnny Cash chapter, in which we're told that "In 1967 he drove two separate cars off the high cliff at his Tennessee home and crashed them both into the sea." Hmm... What sea might that have been?

As the latter, though, The Dark Stuff is a pretty convincing book and a fun read. We start off with Mr. Pop/Osterberg (him again), who gives a brief, smart, sort of bitter introduction. "As for 'today's music industry' and its bedmate 'music journalism,'" Iggy writes, "I just don't care anymore. How could I?"

What he's referring to is a lack of authenticity in today's popular music. I'd like to think he and Kent are overstating the problem. I'd like to point out that the earlier generations of rock 'n' rollers were often not as authentic as they pretended to be. But then I read these profiles of lost boys (Brian Wilson, Roky Erickson, Syd Barrett, Brian Jones), walking disasters (Jerry Lee Lewis, Guns N' Roses, the Stones, Lou Reed in the 1970s, Shane McGowan) and completely antisocial, doomed characters (Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain) -- not to mention the incomparable freaks (Miles Davis, Prince), and I start to think that the only music worth hearing is made by people who are either certifiably insane, or killing themselves, or both.

Profiles of Elvis Costello, Morrissey and Neil Young don't exactly fit the pattern, but they prove the point anyway. Costello's chapter begins with him in his frantic "angry young man" days and then catches up with him when he has less to prove, but seems just as pissed off. (Elvis on working with Paul McCartney: "You take an opinion poll on Paul McCartney and you'll find that almost all music critics dislike him and almost all musc fans think he's great. I mean, compared to who is Paul McCartney not any good? Compared to the Inspiral fuckin' Carpets?") Morrissey is, well, he's not quite up there with the freaky likes of Miles Davis and Prince, but what the hell else is Morrissey going to do with his life if he's not going to be a pop star?

And Neil Young is like a one-man argument for the old saying that you have to suffer for your art, if you're going to make anything worthwhile. Oh, and the fact that you can't get too Indeed, he seems to have survived through dumb luck more than anything else, while all around him his friends and associates (Charles Manson and Rick James among them) were destroying their bodies and/or their minds with drugs.

2008-01-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

The World Has Gone Mad

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
By Marjane Satrapi

The movie "Persepolis" started playing here recently, which reminded me that I had this graphic novel on my shelf. (Interesting thing: It's a giveaway book from bookcrossing.com, which is sort of a system through which you can register your books, then leave them somewhere for someone else to find. Later, you can look online and see where your book ended up. Theoretically, anyway.)

Persepolis is an autobiographical story about growing up in Tehran during the Iranian revolution, the early years of the Islamic regime and the beginnings of the Iran-Iraq war. I love stories that juxtapose a childhood with world-historical events, and this one does a good job of it. For instance: Satrapi tells us about friends and family members leaving the country to escape the troubles. When one friend leaves, she realizes she has a crush on him.

But the troubles get much more severe and closer to home. A beloved uncle is arrested and killed by the government. Satrapi and her mother are harrassed by the regime's religious thugs. An Iraqi Scud missile hits the house next door and she sees a friend's dead body.

As an American, it's enlightening and probably important to see depictions of everyday life in Iran. It's interesting to see how kids still behave like kids -- disobeying and ridiculing their teachers, finding ways around the rules, etc. And it's refreshing (as well as depressing and scary) to see how the educated urban middle class can get stuck, wondering where all these religious fanatics came from and how they took over the country. There are a couple of times when Satrapi's family sees someone they knew before the religion now in full beard or chador, passing him or herself off as a deeply religious person now that it is politically advantageous to do so.

That doesn't seem alien at all to an American.

Oh, if you're wondering: The photo is of the old Replacements house in Minneapolis, the one pictured on the cover of "Let it Be."

2008-01-05T13:37:00.000-08:00

All You Need is Hate Mail

Take a look at the vitriol coming my way from readers of sdreader.com. Read the comments. What kind of response do you think I'd get if I had said anything really negative about the band?

The best hate mail I ever got was in response to a review I wrote about a death-metal compilation, and it was several pages of screed comparing me to Hitler and suggesting that I was both a gay man and the possessor of a clitoris. Go figure. All of this hand-scribbled on lined binder paper by two (probably) teenage boys, one of whom signed his name "Carcass." Totally awesome. I kept it for years.

The biggest response I ever got was after I wrote a preview of a Rick Springfield show, and used the occasion to proffer my theory that "Jessie's Girl" is a very cleverly crafted and thinly veiled song about homosexual obsession. ("And he's watching her with those eyes / And he's loving her with that body, I just know it!") I was actually giving Springfield a lot of credit for his songwriting skills, but, from the response I got you would have thought I had said that he kicked kittens for sport.

2007-12-29T14:12:00.000-08:00

Bowie and Brooklyn

Motherless Brooklyn
by Jonathan Lethem

33 1/3: Low
By Hugo Wilcken

OK, so, two very different books here. The first I've listed is the one that probably made the reputation of Jonathan Lethem, who's one of the most famous of the recent Brooklyn writers movement. Is there such a movement? I don't know, maybe I made it up. I heard someone or other on the radio talking about how the writers in Brooklyn all seem to know each other.

Anyway, I read Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude" a couple of years ago, and I thought the first half was brilliant. I mean, I just loved it. And the second half sucked. Really hated it. I tried to read his "Men and Cartoons," because I liked the parts of "Fortress" where he wrote about comic books, but I couldn't make it through that book. And then Ella read his rock 'n' roll novel and said it was pretty bad. Somehow or other we ended up buying this one and Ella read it and suggested I read it.

I liked it a lot. It's the story of Lionel Essrog, a sort of private detective who has Tourette's syndrome. Yeah, it's a potentially disastrous concept for a novel, but Lethem makes it work by keeping the story moving along like a good detective story should. You know, I can even see Lethem making a series out of this character and getting the things made into movies, or at least TV screenplays for PBS' "Mystery!" if PBS weren't so anglophilic.

Speaking of anglophilia, the next book I'm going to talk about is from the 33 1/3 series, and it's about David Bowie's "Low" album. I got this one for my birthday and really enjoyed it, even though I don't own the album, and probably haven't heard it in 20 years.

You know that story about how Paul McCartney read a review of the Who's new single, which was "I Can See For Miles," and, though he hadn't heard the song yet, the description of it inspired him to go to the studio and record "Helter Skelter"? I don't know if I believe it -- I mean, McCartney got test pressings of all kinds of records before they were officially released, didn't he? But I've always liked that story. Good music writing makes you want to create good music, or at least to experience it. And this is good music writing.

True, the book's supposed to be about "Low," but Wilcken writes chapters about Bowie's previous album, "Station to Station," and Bowie's work on Iggy Pop's "The Idiot," but that's cool. It makes sense, the way he does it. And all the quotes appear to come from secondary sources, but Wilcken does appear to effectively weigh the credibility of each version of events.

There's still the thing that has always bugged me about Bowie: Like Madonna, he often gets credited with innovation where what he's actually doing is very savvily picking new trends to follow. But Wilcken quotes Brian Eno: "Some people say that Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me."

2007-12-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

Shifting Code

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
By Vladimir Nabokov

Sometimes, people speak one language at home and another one at work or school. Sometimes the language difference requires them to change cultures too, so much so that they act almost like different people. My friend Ken tells me that anthropoligists call this kind of phenomenon "code shifting."

Nabokov grew up speaking Russian, later learned French and finally became perhaps the greatest writer of his generation in English. It hardly seems fair, does it?

The premise of this novel is that it is a biography of the recently deceased novelist Sebastian Knight, by his unnamed half-brother. Knight's assistant, a Mr. Goodman, has previously published his own biography. It proved quite popular, and, the half-brother claims, quite misguided, misinformed and poorly written.

Knight, it turns out is the English name that the novelist took as an adult. His actual family name is Russian. Sebastian's mother, a difficult personality, leaves his father, and the father later marries another woman and moves to France. This union produces the much younger half-brother. While the boys are still young, the father -- in, if I may say so, a very Russian development --dies in a duel defending the honor of his estranged and divorced first wife. I'm forgetting now exactly when it happens, but somewhere around here, the mother dies as well. Soon after that, Sebastian goes off to school in England, leaving his half-brother and stepmother behind in France, and trying to reinvent himself as an Englishman.

There's a really interesting scene early in the novel where the half-brother goes through Sebastian's papers, following the dead's wishes by burning his personal correspondence. He sees a woman's handwriting on a page and realizes that the language is Russian. The flames devour the page before he can read more than a few words. Later, he comes to believe that a doomed love affair with a difficult Russian woman ended up ruining Sebastian's short life. The Oedipal implications go unspoken, but it's clear that this search for a lost Russian is more than a search for a lost Russian, if you know what I mean.

Everyone knows what "Lolita" is about, but the joy of that novel is in its language. I wouldn't say that "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" is as good as "Lolita," but its language has much of the more famous novel's playfulness. I really got a kick out of it.

2007-11-10T09:56:00.000-08:00

Macheezmo Mouse

The Honorary Consul
By Graham Greene

So, my Graham Greene kick continues. This one is from 1973, so it's fairly late in his career (although he kept writing almost up until his death in 1994). Like "The Quiet American" and "The Heart of the Matter" and many others I haven't got to yet, this one is steeped in international intrigue and exotic locales. And, like many of Greene's works, it's also full of a very Catholic view of guilt and morality.

The Honorary Consul of the title is one Charley Fortnum, an aging alcoholic and Anglo-Argentine agriculturalist with an essentially meaningless title bestowed upon him by the British Foreign Office. His only cares in life are his Range Rover (which he calls Fortnum's Pride) and maintaining "the proper measure," by which he means the perfect level of drunkeness. And then he falls in love with a prostitute named Clara and takes her home as his wife.

His wife is having an affair with a doctor, Henry Plarr, who serves as the primary point of view in the novel. Plarr is the son of an Englishman who was taken as a political prisoner in Paraguay, and a Paraguayan mother who spends her days eating eclairs in Buenos Aires. Actually, Plarr (or maybe it's Greene) spends way too much time obsessing over the eclairs, I think. It seems he has little use for a woman if he is not attracted to her.

Anyway, the story gets going when Fortnum is accidentally kidnapped by some Paraguayan rebels who were trying to nab the American ambassador in order to score a prisoner exchange. As it turns out, the rebels are led by two childhood friends of Plarr's, and he has given them some help -- out of a sense of loyalty, and also in the hope that they might win the release of his father, if he is still alive. When the rebels call in the doctor, he tells them that their unconscious prisoner is not the ambassador at all, but then Fortnum wakes up and recognizes Plarr. That's when things start getting complicated.

Much of the novel is stuck in the long wait for the rebels' deadline, a lull which allows Greene to explore questions of religion (one of the rebels is a lapsed priest) and guilt. It gets a little tedious at times, to tell you the truth. I preferred the more active parts of the novel. Even in those parts, Greene has a lot to say about the Argentine sense of machismo. Plarr finds it silly, but in the end it becomes clear that he's suffering from a version of it himself.

Oh, by the way Macheezmo Mouse was the name of a chain of not-really-very-good "healthy" "Mexican" restaurants in Portland when I lived there. Portland was big on the cutesy names for restaurants.

2007-11-01T20:22:00.000-07:00

Haven't we met?
The Risk Pool
By Richard Russo

I bought this book a year or two ago and somehow did not get around to reading it until now. I think I scanned the jacket blurb and thought I had read it already. It is, after all, set in Mohawk, New York, the same setting for "Mohawk," Russo's first novel. Some of the action takes place at the Mohawk Grill, which is a prime location for "Mohawk." Wikipedia says there are two Mohawks in New York. I've never been to either, but I'm sure you could probably switch names with Bath, N.Y., which is the setting for Russo's "Nobody's Fool," or the titular Maine town of Russo's "Empire Falls," and it wouldn't matter too much. All are decaying Northeast towns where industry has dried up, the rich people have run off with the money to sunny Florida, and the working-class people are left behind to slowly wither away.
Oh, here's where I should mention that Russo's novels are frequently hilarious.
Anyway, like many of Russo's novels, this one features a lovable scallywag of a father. In this case, it's Sam Hall, a World War II vet who came back from Europe with the firm conviction that the world owed him a lifetime of boozing, gambling and whoring. Why he's so lovable, it's hard to say. The story is told in first person by Sam's son, Ned, and Ned loves the old rascal -- even as a kid he has a hard time taking personally all the pain Sam has out him through since running out on Ned and his mother.
"The Risk Pool" shares most of Russo's faults, if you want to call them that: It goes on too long in many places, not a whole lot happens, and the narrator does not have much insight into the interior life of the women characters. But it also shares the strengths of Russo's other novels: It's funny and touching, and its characters seem entirely real.

2007-10-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Moon, June

I sing to my son at least once a day when I'm getting him ready for naptime or bedtime, and now that he's a big talker, I find I have to watch what I'm singing because he just may sing it back to me. Of course, my wife and I sing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and all that, but naptime and bedtime prep can go on for an hour or more sometimes, and we've got to keep singing with whatever pops in our heads.

Lately, Henry's fond of singing "Awful Bliss" by Guided By Voices, which makes me proud, but also surprised. I didn't realize I was singing it that often, nor that this short little ballad from "Bee Thousand" was as catchy as it is. Once or twice, Henry has even requested "Sweet Jane." (Although he gets bored while I'm in the middle of the long Lou Reed talk-singing verses.) I do improvise a little on the last verse, in the part where it goes: "You'll even find some evil mothers who'll tell you that everything is just dirt."

Ella and I both have been singing him "Surrender," by Cheap Trick since before he was born. It's great, in a way: "Mommy's all right, Daddy's all right, they just seem a little weird." But we have to stick with the cleaned up line "I had heard the WACs recruited old maids for the war, but Mommy isn't one of those, I've known her all these years" instead of the original version, which makes more sense: "I had heard the WACs recruited old maids, dykes and whores ..." And then there's that line about "Just the other day I heard of soldiers falling off some Indonesian junk that's going around." I don't know how to spin that one.

And then there's another old standby of ours: "Cruel to be Kind," by Nick Lowe. It's not only a great song, it's appropriate -- sometimes Henry really doesn't want to go to nap, but I have to be cruel to be kind and make him go to sleep. The words are mostly pretty simple and not inappropriate for a 2-year-old, but the concept is iffy: "You say your love is bona fide / but that don't coincide with the things that you do / And when I ask you to be nice / You say, you got to be cruel to be kind." The song doesn't exactly endorse the sentiment, but it repeats it. Is that an idea I want my kid to internalize?

2007-10-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

We are all doomed
Elizabeth Costello
By J.M. Coetzee

This is Coetzee's first novel after winning the Nobel Prize for the amazing "Disgrace," and so what else would he write about? It begins with an author, the titular Elizabeth Costello, going to a school in America to accept a prize. Like Coetzee, she lives in Australia. Like Coetzee, she is a recluse. Like Coetzee, she doesn't really want to have to go anywhere to accept a prize. (Apparently, he didn't show up either of the two times he received the Booker Prize.)
Anyway, the novel is organized around a few lectures that Costello either gives or listens to. This allows Coetzee to explore a number of topics: animal rights, the future of the novel, religion, the ancient Greeks, the role of the novelist when confronting evil.
If this all sounds a little too much to you, well join the club. I managed to read almost all of it, but by the time I got to the epilogue, which for some reason is set in 1603, I had no idea of what was going on anymore.

2007-10-09T15:36:00.000-07:00

Why I Hate Blogs

OK, I don't really hate blogs. But I do hate a lot of things about them. For instance: Few bloggers do their own reporting. Instead, they're commenting on things that were reported in the "MSM." (I really hate that term.) And, all too frequently, they simply comment on the comments of other bloggers. Is this really the future of journalism? People these days know Nicole Richie's diet history but can't name their own congressional representative, and yet we're supposed to be applauding the "democratization" of journalism?
Ah, thank you. Now please read and enjoy while this blogger comments on something another blogger said about something another writer wrote in Vanity Fair magazine.
You can see the articles in question here:

Christopher Hitchens' sad elegy about a dead soldier he never met, who went to Iraq largely because Hitchens convinced him to:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/hitchens200711?currentPage=1

Dennis Perrin's sneering post on Huffington Post about Hitchens' "sewage":

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-perrin/hitchens-weeps_b_67561.html

I don't really want to defend Hitchens, who is, anyway, perfectly capable of defending himself. But since I just reviewed his "God is Not Great," I thought I'd jump in. "God is Not Great," by the way, is dedicated to Hitchens' pal Ian McEwan, whose novel "Saturday," which I wrote about on this blog some time ago. I read that novel as partly an allegorical argument for the invasion of Iraq. McEwan makes an interesting case -- but in his novel, the (petty) tyrant is dispatched by his protagonist, the very erudite and noble neurologist Dr. Henry Perowne, who then patches up the villain in his operating room. There may have been Dr. Henry Perownes in the Iraq war, but alas, they were not the people in charge of the whole misadventure.

Let me just say from the outset that I disagreed with Hitchens' stance on the invasion of Iraq. He was very good at arguing for the many reasons one should have wished to see an end to Saddam Hussein's reign. But I could not follow his leap of logic that, therefore, the best thing to do would be for the United States and Britain to invade Iraq without any clear provocation. I can't say that I ever had any insight into the question of WMDs or ethnic tensions in the Middle East or anything like that -- I just felt, and still feel, that invading another country without a clear provocation is wrong. I also felt that it was obvious as early as 2002 that the gang controlling the White House was not to be trusted.

Others may have disagreed with me on the first point. But why someone as smart as Hitchens or Thomas Friedman could not see the second point puzzles me.

Still, I see no reason to believe that Hitchens and Friedman were insincere in their belief. I doubt that their stance was motivated by financial considerations, as Perrin argues about Hitchens -- there are far easier and more lucrative ways of selling out. And neither of these reporters is the kind of reporter who will say whatever the White House wants him to say in order to keep his access to highly-placed sources.

And here's the kicker: I seriously doubt that the words of Friedman or Hitchens played any role whatsoever in the deliberations within the White House over launching this invasion. For one thing, as we now know, there was precious little deliberating going on at the White House over this misadventure. Remember what Bush said after millions and millions of people all over the world marched in protest of the upcoming war? He said: "I don't listen to focus groups." (Cheney's inner circle doesn't count as a "focus group," I guess.)

So, the way I see it, what Perrin and his ilk are doing is just gloating. Nyah-nyah! Your little experiment failed! Nyah-nyah! I knew it would! And that hardly seems respectful to the dead, either.

But then, who can tell? My post came out nastier than I thought it would. Maybe Perrin didn't mean it that harshly when he said Hitchens' work was sewage. Even Hitchens admits in the Vanity Fair piece that he may have been more of a war booster than he realized.

Anyway, let's stop debating how we got in this war and figure out how we're going to get out.