Hungry Inferno

Wislawa Szymborska Dies

2012-02-03T07:09:00.000-08:00

R.I.P.

My Name in Digital Lights

2012-02-01T09:13:00.001-08:00

I forgot to pimp this sooner, but here's my latest review on Three Percent. It's not a positive review, which means it was fun to write.

Book Geek -- 3 Quick Thoughts on Bulgakov

2012-02-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

1.
It was nice to read that Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, my favorite book, was voted second most essential by the Russian people, behind War and Peace and above Crime and Punishment, two books most people outside of Russia have heard of even if they have not read them. Bulgakov’s book has the distinction of being a book that many outside of Russia have neither heard of nor read, though perhaps that is a bit unfair—there’s a cult around The Master and Margarita, one to which I gleefully belong. And it is vastly read in comparison to many other Russian writers who barely penetrate the global consciousness due largely to lack of translation. I might make the case that their appeal is limited, though that’s a discussion I do not wish to make at this time. We can debate this over drinks if you are of the mind.

2.
I am a diseased man. I have bought my seventeenth (eighteenth?) copy of The Master and Margarita. I bought it during a snowstorm a week and a half back. I was killing time at Europa Bookstore looking over Bolaño books in Spanish, many of which I own, one of which, Amuleto, I read. I didn’t notice the Russian section at first, but my eye eventually stumbled on Bulgakov’s name (in Russian, hard to decipher) and his masterwork. I snagged the copy and added it to the Bulgakov shelf in my library. I will never read this book in Russian. Neither will I read it in Portuguese or Spanish, though I have copies in those languages. I will never read the Bulgakov short stories in Italian that also sit on my shelf. I may not read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of The Master and Margarita either, even though I have it. P & V are a brand of sorts, and while I love what they have done to Dostoyevsky, I am not so anxious to see their rendering of Bulgakov. Still, it is my belief that one should read many translations of a favorite literary work to gain deeper perspective, so maybe I will give their version a whirl. For the record, I am a strong endorser of the Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor version. Vintage published it in the '90s along with helpful endnotes and an afterword by Ellendea Proffer.

3.
I can’t explain why I love the book. I could go into the story, the satirical elements, the background, the technique, but fuck it. You can get that and more here http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/ But I will say this: most people are geeks about something. Political geeks, history geeks, sport geeks, or good ol’ fashioned sci-fi geeks. I am a book geek. I have a lot of books that I consider favorites, but for whatever reason I have decided to be extra geeky about The Master and Margarita. As I said, I am a diseased man (name the book where I stole that line and you’ll qualify as a geek too).

Epler (and me) on Bolaño: Read Amulet

2012-01-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a great interview with Barbara Epler from New Directions, my favorite press (next to Dalkey and Open Letter and Vintage) on the subject of Roberto Bolaño. Bolaño has been on my mind less these days, only because his last few books did not wow me (I'm thinking of Monsieur Pain, The Return, and Antwerp), not that they are bad books, but, alas, they are not Distant Star or 2666. Unfair indeed, but after so many great books in a row, it's hard to expect anything less than a masterpiece from Bolaño. This interview did reignite some interest.

A great part of this interview comes when Epler gives a shout out to Amulet, an overlooked gem in Bolaño's collection. In a lot of ways, it's my favorite of his books, maybe because it is the first one I read. I usually recommend Distant Star or The Savage Detectives to Bolaño neophytes, but I really ought to pimp Amulet a bit more. It is shorter than 2666, equally as compelling as By Night in Chile, and full of a strange kind of tenderness and mystery. It is the book I reread when in Mexico City. And then I reread it in Spanish (as best I could). Check it out.

Spreading (the word about) Dubravka Ugresic

2012-01-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

This year, I received two copies of Dubravka Ugresic’s novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg for Christmas, one from my father and one from my cousin, Marissa. Marissa bought it for me because she pulled my name in our family’s annual grab bag; my father bought it for me because he feels compelled to buy me gifts, what with me being his son and all. They were both looking at the same list I provided, a list full of book titles and some desired CDs (I still buy CDs). Part of me assumes that they each chose the book for its odd title and, subsequently, the right to say, “Vince, you have weird taste in books.”

That they both bought the same book bothered me not a whit. My father apologized; Marissa offered to return the book and get me a different one. I told them not to worry. One is a hardback and the other a trade sized paperback, so they are, to me, different. Thus, both are worth owning. (I am sick, I know. I like owning multiple copies of books. At last count I have about sixteen copies of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, two of them in languages I cannot read.) My wife suggested I add one copy to the pile of books and old literary journals I am supposed to be giving to my local book store, The Armadillo’s Pillow. This seemed like a fine idea, but I then promised the book to my friend, Eric. This, I decided, was the best option. I will be giving away a book to a friend, but not just any book. I will give away a book translated from Croatian, written by an “obscure” author. I am doing my part to spread the word about world literature and Ugresic herself.

Ugresic deserves a wide readership. I am happy to promote her whenever I can. Why does she deserve such a wide readership? I could argue that such an honor is due to the misfortunes she experienced in the early 90s when her country began to splinter. Not a nationalist, Ugresic was labeled a witch and an enemy of the homeland. Subsequently, her professional life took some major hits and she went into exile in Amsterdam. Since then, she has proven herself to be an impressive fiction writer, but, more so, one of the most engaging and important cultural critics working today.

Evidence of this last claim is ample in her latest book, Karaoke Culture, a collection of essays as it were, though the book revolves around its first entry, the title essay. That “Karaoke Culture” the essay and Karaoke Culture the book work as indictments of our global campaign to champion mediocrity is implicit in the title. We are shifting our concerns away form the real and toward the imitation. This idea may offend those who feel we are living in advanced times of connectivity. Surely this modern era of smartphones and American Idol (or Bulgarian Idol... read the book and you'll see what I mean) is superior to those eras past, right?

I am not saying otherwise. I don’t think Ugresic is, either. Like all good cultural critics (Neil Postman comes to mind), Ugresic is merely pointing out something that many will overlook: the costs of an advancing society. The costs are often worth paying (I’m willing to accept a certain level of pollution if it means I don’t have to ride a horse to get around town), but there are always more people ready to proclaim that our brave new world is comprised solely of improvements. In such a rapidly changing environment, we need Ugresic (especially now that Postman is dead); we need commentators willing to scrutinize the culture and report on what they see, both positive and negative. More so, we need these thinkers to disseminate their arguments in an entertaining manner. To often the best ideas have been mired in academic jargon, much to the detriment of the collective culture. Ugresic’s prose skips the Ph.D. codes and remains some of the most interesting out there. Even via translation, her work is never murky and more times than not raises a smile.

I have read only two of Ugresic’s fictional works. I loved what she was doing in Lend me Your Character and The Ministry of Pain as much as the non-fiction she wrote in Karaoke Culture and the overlooked Thank You for Not Reading, though if I had to choose I might say that he real strength is as an essayist. Nevertheless, I am very excited to begin Baba Yaga Laid and Egg and am happy to give a book to a friend in the hope that it spreads the word about this fantastic writer.

RIP Hitch

2011-12-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

One of his last pieces for Vanity Fair discusses the ineffectual axiom “What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger” which, of course, is hogwash.

Some great photos in this slideshow as well.

Victor Pelevin's The Hall of the Singing Caryatids

2011-12-08T17:12:00.000-08:00

My review on Three Percent. Pelevin's the real deal -- one of the stronger voices in contemporary fiction. Check it out.

Happt Birthday, Joe

2011-12-08T08:21:00.001-08:00

Exhuming Neruda

2011-12-07T07:42:00.000-08:00

The thick plottens.

PS: I always thought it fitting that Neruda, such a dirty boy, died at the age of 69.

Dubravka Ugrešić Interview

2011-11-30T08:07:00.000-08:00

“We do live in infantile times, mothers increasingly look like their daughters, and they, mothers and daughters, both behave like little girls. Fathers compete with their sons. We all try to stay young until we die. Nobody wants to be lumped in the 'old jerks' category anymore. That’s why the world, or the richest and 'luckiest' part of it, resembles a kindergarten.”

From this fantastic interview with Dubravka Ugrešić.

5 Terrible Songs for the Xmas Season

2011-11-21T13:34:00.000-08:00

I indulged in a slight rant recently about my disdain for Christmas music, especially when it is played BEFORE Thanksgiving, which, as any sensible person knows, is an unpardonable sin against humanity. Why are we so goddamn anxious to oust November from the calendar? Every year it seems that the gap between Halloween—that fantastic holiday of horror movie marathons and pop-up stores enticing women to embrace their inner slut—and Christmas is getting smaller.

“Well,” asked a bemused barista at Starbucks, “what have you got against Christmas music?”

A fair question to which I can only offer answers that will further perpetuate the idea that I am a “Scrooge,” a Christmas euphemism for “asshole.”

Rather than launch a diatribe against the holiday itself, I will reserve this space to discuss my five least favorite Christmas songs and my reasons for disliking them. I wish to state that there is no intent on the part of the author to convince you, humble reader, that there is anything wrong with Christmas or the music that accompanies it. Nonetheless, there are some pretty obnoxious tunes we are made to endure each year and they need to go the hell away.

“Little Saint Nick” – The Beach Boys

Easily the worst of them all. To start, I am not a huge Beach Boys fan. There is material I do respect (Pet Sounds), some of which I even enjoy, but this song is not even close to good. The lyric “Christmas comes each time this year,” delivered in that descending low register vocal by what seems to be a very bored Beach Boy, is the pinnacle of inane. If only Brian Wilson had composed a song for the IRS he could’ve written “taxes are due on April fifteenth” using the same melody. Why not—both lyrics do nothing more than provide information we already know. Lazy.

“Santa Baby” – pick one

Be it by Ertha Kitt, Madonna, Brittney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls, Natalie Merchant, Shakira, Macy Gray, Mae West, or Miss Piggy, the song is rotten to the core—nothing more than a celebration of crass materialism and a sad testament to how little the women’s movement has accomplished. Yes, ladies, keep singing this song about shaking your ass for diamonds. You're doing a great job telling women of all ages that they can’t get those sparkly things without cock teasing a fat, overworked man who only wants to bring smiles to the faces of good little children. Sad.

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” – Dinah Shore & Buddy Clark

Again, frequently covered by the likes of Dean Martin and, recently, Will Farrell with Zoey Deschanel, this is a song about date rape. Merry Xmas!

“Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time” – Paul McCartney

Suggesting that Ringo might not have been the weakest link in the Beatles chain, this up-tempo stab at creating a Christmas classic tells me that the best holiday songs have already been written, as has the best material McCartney will ever compose, which was his contributions to the white album, “Ohla Di Obla Da” notwithstanding. In fact, “Ohla Di Obla Da” can best be viewed as an indication of what Paul would end up writing: really, really shitty songs that strive to be joyous and end up sounding forced and empty. The culmination of those efforts is surely this saccharine Christmas abomination.

“Step Into Christmas” – Elton John

Another on the list of aging (read: increasingly irrelevant) rockers penning Xmas duds, we have this 1973 song. Actually, Elton John was still making interesting records in the 70s, so really he has no excuse. I suppose Elton never shied away from camp, so it should come as no surprise that he would record this unapologetically cloying ditty. Thankfully it doesn’t find a lot of air time these days, though my family loves Elton, meaning that, for me, there is no escape.

Not E-Reading Kafka

2011-11-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think the whole E-reading thing is no big deal. It’s the message not the medium, right?

Today I thought about Kafka and The Metamorphosis, which led me to this link and the whole damn book published online for free. I admit that it’s nice to know that I can read Kafka anywhere, so long as that anywhere includes a computer with web access. Still, I read with trepidation.

Of course, I didn’t make it too far. A long stretch of reading on a computer screen is just no damn fun. And yeah, the Kindle and Nook may boast lighting that simulates a book’s page, but I have to ask why I would want a simulation of an experience. Clearly the real thing is better.

I know the arguments: the E-readers are portable and environmentally friendly. Well, let’s look at those points.

First: portability is overrated. Yes, a Kindle allows you to carry many canonical works of literature (most for free!) in one device. And yes, best sellers, beach reads, and other forms of “light” entertainment are perhaps well suited to an E-reader (god knows I’m not wasting my shelf space on Danielle Steel), but what does such portability and wide access really do for us as readers? Assuming many readers are like me, they might be tempted to see what else is available on their slick gadgets. As Jerry Seinfeld said regarding men and television, we’re not so concerned with what’s on as much as what else is on. We like to surf and our advanced technologies encourage this. We have scores of channels on cable, an infinite amount of websites online, and hundreds of books on our Kindles. Faced with such an expanse, it’s hard to commit to one thing. (Who doesn’t surf the web with many tabs open?) I own upwards of four to five thousand books. I try to commit to one at a time, but when I am at home I’ll often pick up a different book than the one I am supposedly reading. There’s always something else catching my eye. I try to reserve one book for home reading (currently, Vilnius Poker), another for train reading (usually poetry), and, of course, there are the books I am forced to read (texts for school) and the ones I agreed to read (for reviews). Even I, a professed book lover who rejects the E-reader, have a hard time reading just one book. Imagine a hundred in the palm of my hand.

When people speak of plane rides or trips out of town, whether for work or pleasure, they praise the E-Book as a means of carrying multiple texts with them. To me, this symbolizes the above mentioned lack of commitment. Some books require patience and attention. Perhaps these are not the books people take with them on vacation (though the last time I went on a trip I took with me, and finished, My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk... and this was in Vegas!), but I don’t wish to dismiss even so-called light reading as something to skim and toss away. A good book— which I define as any worth reading as defined by you and you alone— deserves better treatment than it gets from the Kindle and its users. Good books require commitment and respect. You take the time to pick out the clothing you will wear; you should also take some time to pick the right book.

Also, it seems that the E-reader makes books into an abstraction. They become illusory, digital, and transitory. Press a button and the book is gone. I cannot abide this. I like my books to take up space and have weight. One may argue that the content remains the same, and this is indeed true, but let’s take another quick look at Kafka online. The link is fine; the site is the standard black on white and the translation is fair (with links to others—I admit, a good feature). But I miss what my paper copy has: history. The smell of that used edition is gone. The cover art is also nowhere to found. Both of those things helped make the book more than a mere collection of words on paper. My copy of The Metamorphosis is an artifact. It was published at a specific time within a specific era. The art looks dated, which I like. To me, it is evidence of the past. It evinces the prevailing attitude of the era regarding Kafka and his masterpiece. It seems to ignore (or miss) the humor of the book and centers on the phantasmagorical. It is an imperfect creation, but it has personality. The E-version is fine in a sense, but antiseptic. Reading it online I miss the context my paper copy provides. The E-version might not make me consider the debates surrounding Kafka— humorist or depressive—and I will certainly not get the sense of history. One of the 20th century's great writers is thus reduced to the same standing as any jerk with a blog. (Ahem.)

Okay, maybe you don’t give a damn about cover art and musty smells. Fine. And maybe you want to argue that the E-reader is better for the planet as it saves trees. True, but I might advise you to look into strip mining, specifically in regard to our constant need to be surrounded by electronics. All that energy consumption exacts a price. The future environmental concerns may very well center on strip mining and the green activists may launch campaigns asking us to shut off our computers, smart phones, TVs, iPods, and Kindles. When the day comes, I’ll have more than enough books at my disposal.

Rains Dogs and Bad as Me

2011-10-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

A nice piece on my favorite record, Rain Dogs by Tom Waits. Speaking of Waits, he has a new record out, Bad as Me, which I bought this weekend. My thoughts on this new CD… a mixed bag. Some songs are immediately striking, such as “Talking at the Same Time,” “Pay Me,” and “Kiss Me” (the ballads and slower songs definitely best the rockers on this record). While others grow on you—I’m thinking of “Chicago” but mostly the title track, an odd ditty that I’m learning to love. Others can be skipped. “Satisfied” is a nice rejoinder to the Rolling Stones and even name checks Jagger and Richards, all while Keith plays along on guitar, but the song is the very definition of filler. “Last Leaf” struck me as sad and poignant the first time I heard it, but annoyed me upon second listen. And every review I’ve read seems to love the song “All Hell Broke Luce” but I find it embarrassingly bad. That said, three dispensable tracks out of thirteen is not bad. The CD is a sold B, which still makes it better than most of what’s out there. But when I think back to the perfection of Rain Dogs and much of the Island era records, I have to admit that Tom’s best days are behind him.

Tom, I still love you, though. Never stop being you.

Blog Adultery (or: Increasing my Culpability)

2011-10-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

Today marks the first post of what may be many or few published over at www.TriQuarterly.org. You can read my blog post there as well as an assortment of poems whose publication I helped make happen (in a very small sense). Feel free to check out the cool bio and pic taken years ago by Xtop while hanging in the Bottoms of KC, MO.

I have always thought of this here blog as being a receptacle for my various obsessions, which, I admit, are of interest to me and maybe few others. I never sought a large audience or was dumb enough to think one existed. I have actually kept the blog a bit secret. If I do indeed post regularly to TriQuarterly then I will have to rethink the purpose of this site, as the blog I will write there is to be dedicated solely to poetry and thoughts of that nature. Also, I doubt I’ll curse as much over there. So if I am to reserve the poetic observations for TriQuarterly than this blog will be freed up to focus on half-informed political rants, furious opinions on the decline of contemporary music, and other business of equal importance. In other words: a typical blog.

Then again, now that I have an editor, I may come screaming back to blogspot full time.

All this dovetails nicely with my thoughts on Dubravka Ugresic’s new book, Karaoke Culture, which I am 80 some pages into and LOVING! While the book delights, I must admit to feeling guilty with each passing page. If we are living in the era of Karaoke Culture, I am as culpable as the next blogger (read: amateur critic/writer). More on this once I finish this book.

Melville: the Key to Understanding Occupy Wall Street (or: How Literature Can explain Everything)(or: Stick This in Your Dismissive Pipe and Smoke it)

2011-10-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Two great quotes from the best piece on the Occupy movement I’ve seen:

“The point of Occupy Wall Street — and the Occupy movements around the country — is to put a face to America’s dwindling middle class. There is no need to be any more specific than that. In fact, it seems that the less specific, less reasonable, and less demanding the protesters are, the more likely they are to unnerve those who actually have the power to make a change.”

“If Occupy Wall Street has any goal, it should be to have the same effect that great literature has — to unsettle. Let the pundits complain about vagueness, and let the reporters ask their condescending questions. (As an example, here’s one I heard put to a young man standing near me: “Is it true that you want to put all the bankers in jail?”) Let them tease, let them pacify, let them cajole, let them argue. But don’t move, Occupy Wall Street.”

Even if you have not read the Melville story (and you ought to), this should resonate and maybe pacify those all too willing to dismiss it outright.

David Foster Wallace and Truth v. Illusion

2011-10-11T12:32:00.000-07:00

All the hoopla over Jonathan Franzen outing David Foster Wallace for manufacturing some bits in his supposed nonfiction got me thinking about how little I care for the division between truth and illusion. A good story is a good story, period.

Okay, let me slow up—there’s an element of scumbaggery when a liar like James Frey makes a pile of cash off his bullshit drug addiction, though not because he wrote a book about it; it is because he preached to people about how they too can kick drugs that makes Frey a dick. Still David Foster Wallace’s essays do not lose steam simply because dialogue may have been, um, exaggerated.

But this led me back to his well known speech to the2005 graduates of Kenyon College. It remains my favorite piece of Wallace’s work, though that’s not saying much as I have not gotten through Infinite Jest.

I share with you, the (I’m guessing) indifferent.

WTF

2011-10-10T13:56:00.001-07:00

One of the few pleasures of working is the occasional conversation with a coworker that forever alters your thinking. It is rare, but I have had many such chin-wags at work that have been worthy of note. Not long ago, I actually spent a good half hour with one of my bosses explaining and expanding on the popular acronym, WTF. I explained that it was short for “What the fuck?” This seemed amusing to the guy, though he proposed WTF could stand for “Why the fuck?” I liked this. We then went on with other WTF possibilities, the best of which I will recount here.

Why to fuck? As in, why do I want to fuck? Possibly boredom, we decided, though more often a compelling reason is clear.

Where to fuck? A quandary for those far from home, and definitely of concern to young people still living with their parents.

Where the fuck? Oh, I ask myself this every day. Where the fuck did I leave my brain?

When to fuck? Indeed, this speaks to the question many of us ask ourselves. Is this the right time? Did I misread that signal?

Who the fuck? Better than Who to fuck, perhaps, though if that is your question maybe you are living a more interesting life than some of us, but still, who hasn’t wondered who the fuck is responsible for something?

Work to fuck. My favorite in many ways, as this sums up the reason why some of us clock in day after day at jobs we’d rather abandon. We work to make money to be able to spend on someone we wish to fuck. We work to maintain our fashions, cars, homes, and lifestyles, all so someone might find us attractive. (I sense a lot of homeless don’t get laid much.) So yes, work to fuck: that pretty much sums up 3/4s of the workforce as far as I can tell.

Wear to fuck. Less a statement on fashion and more an instruction that ought to accompany all condom purchases.

Worse than fuck. A bit abstract, and certainly relative, but still an interesting variation.

Will to fuck. I suppose many a long suffering spouse, lover, or otherwise charitable person has had to muster this.

The Unimproved End of Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

I am very sorry that Steve Jobs has died. I am usually sorry to hear of anyone dying, but before we all jump to canonize the man (too late) I would like to pause and consider his contribution to the world a little bit. Or maybe it’s what he symbolizes, or the inherent baggage that comes with his gizmos, that makes me somewhat uneasy.

When I heard of his death, and the immediate outpouring of devotion, I hesitated, as I often do in my quest to try to reason out why I don’t feel compelled to let the jerking knee do the talking. I was also reminded of two of my heroes: Henry David Thoreau and Neil Postman. Postman because he discussed the manner in which technology both gives to us and takes something away. It is, as he called it, a Faustian bargain. And Postman was right to quote Thoreau, who said: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." The iStuff is great and fun and all that, but has any of it made our lives better? Faster, sure. More interesting, okay on a superficial level. Easier? Certainly. But are we not beset by the same problems that we have always faced?

Let me back up.

In the '80s I was a metal kid and guitar geek. As such, I opposed the beat box and the electric drum machine. Someone asked if it ever occurred to me that once there was a man who opposed the electric guitar. After all, it must have seemed impure to their ears. A salient point, but I didn’t care. I was a kid, after all. Similarly, I understand that, as a 40 year old somewhat curmudgeonly bastard, I might be too rooted in my time, place, and traditions to truly give a damn about the iPod or the iPhone, just as that kid hearing me bitch about them won’t care about my complaints. To me the iPod and iPhone are plastic in the truest sense: fake, flimsy looking repositories of better things. I am perhaps obnoxious in my tendency to celebrate the artist, not the device (or the message, not the medium), but it makes sense to me. When people say Steve Job’s inventions changed their lives, I’m a bit baffled. Tom Waits, Shubert, Otis Redding, Trey Spruance, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, Eddie Van Halen, Charles Mingus, Paul Westerberg… these people changed my life with their music. The iPod and iTunes are just new ways of getting that music.

I don’t have an iPod and may never have one, not because I wish to be different (contrary to some opinion) but because I simply don’t need one. I like my CD collection. Were I more of a music geek I would have LPs and a turntable. I like art that takes up space. iPods, as revolutionary as they are (were?), are insidious devices that promote an unconscious acceptance of the immateriality of art. Sure, music has always been transitory in the sense that you can’t touch it. It is sound, pure and simple. Nevertheless, I grew up associating music with vinyl, then cassette tape, then the CD. I was not such a luddite that I stayed true to one device over another, but I did get a little annoyed when iPods and iTunes came along, mostly as these mediums seem so heartless. Okay, they are convenient, and sure they have helped a lot of artists get their music heard (I no longer have to risk buying what could be a mediocre album for one song!), but the physicality of LP/CD packaging has gone bye-bye. A lot of that packaging was what caused records and CDs to be so damned expensive, sure, but I was conditioned to think of music as being about, well, more than just music. Maybe this was wrong of me, but I always saw buying a record as an investment in an artist, not just their music but the art they wanted to promote as well. I cannot think of Led Zeppelin’s classic four symbols record without thinking of the gate fold illustration and the old hooded man atop that rocky mountain. Alice Cooper’s School’s Out is inextricable from the panties that held the LP. Ditto Sticky Fingers and the zipper album cover. Big Black understood this and littered their records with some fantastic liner notes, not to mention many dangerous artifacts.

Maybe all of this is inconsequential, or at least of less importance than the music itself, right? After all, my bitching about the loss of packaging is the snob’s equivalent to boy band worship and record sales based on a haircut. Perhaps, but I also recall John Zorn’s classic band, Naked City. Zorn was so frustrated with domestic record companies who refused to print his CDs with specifically selected cover art that he had to sign with overseas labels. Eventually, he started his own label. Why? It would have been so much easier to live with different cover art. Well, to Zorn, and a lot of artists, the cover art is important to the overall experience. I respect and appreciate that. When I pull out those Naked City CDs, I look over the strange, violent images that come with the music. It creates, for me, a complete experience. Another hero, Trey Spruance, consistently puts out CDs that are beautifully packaged with stunning illustrations, photos, and, often, cryptic philosophical texts that essentially lend to the mystery of his increasingly mysterious band, Secret Chiefs 3. The pictorial and textual accompaniment is, in my mind, essential. I would not have the same feeling about his creation were I to simply download it from iTunes.

But none of this is Jobs's fault. I blame the music industry more for shitting on artists and ruining things. Painfully myopic to the point of arrogance, they failed to take into consideration what 21st century realties meant for their business. Unwilling to adapt quickly, they were on the verge of going the way of the dinosaur. (One would have thought the publishing industry would have seen this as a cautionary tale, but I digress.) No, Job’s inventions did not ruin the music industry, but the ubiquity of the iPod has made me take pause. To me, Jobs was the ringleader in a circus that often makes me feel comfortable. He represented speed rather than substance; ease over experience. The iPod and iTunes seem content to treat music as something easily digestible and disposable, not worthy of serious consideration. Music, and all good art, requires a certain level of dedication. I am all for slowing down when approaching a good record or a good book or a good movie or a good painting. I don’t want to see a world where the instant availability of art fosters a lack of critical skills and evaluation. Jobs, for all the good he did, also helped create a culture that treats music as an easily found, easily abandoned, just-add-water commodity. I like committing to records when I bring them with me on car trips. I carefully choose a CD and stick with it. I don’t know that I would do that if I had an iPod. I’d likely flip in search of something else. What else? Doesn’t matter. We crave variety above all else. We just want to know what else is out there and don’t focus on what is in front of us. This is a quality I do not admire about myself. The iPod celebrates this.

The iPhone seems like a good idea. Why not have one device that allows you to make calls, surf the net, and… what else does it do? Oh, right… play games. Okay, sure. Sounds nice, but life changing? And the problem with this device, and so many others from the Apple factories, is their short shelf life. Sure I’ve had my laptop for years, but the newer, faster, slimmer ones make mine seem quaint. I can’t completely champion a man who promotes his gadgets as rest stops toward a better model. Pardon my cynicism and damn near paranoia, but it seems like a plot to separate me from my money. There’s a sucker born every minute, said P.T. Barnum. Well, in the 21st century the suckers are born every nanosecond. And they line up for days to get the new model.

Again, Jobs is perhaps less to blame than the industries that failed to see the writing on the digital walls. Nevertheless, he did say some things that annoyed me. He seemed all too prickish when he stated that no one reads anymore and then decided to save publishing with iBooks. I believe my exact words were: fuck you, zombie-nerd; I hope you get strangled by your mock turtleneck. But now I see past such ire. Jobs was indeed a visionary and his technological tinkering have introduced some interesting gadgets to our lives, even mine. Still, in the end he succumbed to cancer, proving that no matter how far we advance and how many portable gizmos we create, we still decline into frail shadows of ourselves until we die. No app for that.

Take Down the Man

2011-10-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

http://occupywallst.org/

Nobel Season

2011-09-29T07:36:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year when baseball fans ready themselves for the World Series (and when my family says “next year” forlornly), when football fans get excited for the coming Sundays and Mondays, and when us book geeks look toward the Nobel Prize for literature with predictions, condemnations, and nominations of our own that will be completely ignored.

Adonis is heavily favored this year, though that rarely means much. I’d love to see Ernesto Cardenal get it, but his odds are not so hot. (Shameless plug: Adonis and Cardenal were both reviewed by lil' ol' me over at Three Percent. Thanks for indulging me.) Haruki Murakami is a favorite of mine, but I don’t think his work is what the Nobel folks favor. Tomas Tranströmer has earned it, if you ask me. Ditto Antonio Lobo Antunes. I’ve long wanted to read Mircea Cărtărescu, so maybe a medal will make me dust off my copy of Nostalgia. I read Amoz Oz for the first time this year and was impressed. I’d not mind him snagging the honor. Oh, I have to put in a bid for Adam Zagajewski, who, though from Poland, is a local, not to mention a fantastic writer. And did I actually see Pelevin’s name on the list? Wow. I’ve read a few of his bizarre stories and would be happy to see him win, though that would be something of an upset.

If Joyce Carol Oates wins, I’d be surprised. I’m not a big Phillip Roth fan, but there are many who are aching for him to win. And dear lord, if Bob Dylan wins I’m going to have to have a word with the Swedes.

Last, I have to say, as I do each year, that Nicanor Parra needs to have his name on the list. I don’t see him on Ladbrokes, which is a giant shame. Perhaps his antipoetry is too conversational and fun for the Nobel judges. (Read these and these for yourself and decide. I assure you you'll have no greater fun with poetry today.) A tragedy, as Parra might not be around much longer and thus would join another South American, Borges, who got snubbed by the Swedes, proving that the whole thing is so relative it matters not a whit.

Some Sung Heroes: Unwound's Leaves Turn Inside You

2011-09-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

In my former life I reviewed CDs for a little known website called Night Times. I got this gig by penning slap-dash reviews of books and records on Amazon.com, all of which were so smart-assed I cringe at the thought of them. The editor of Night Times saw one of these reviews and emailed me, inviting me to expand it for her site. The rest is non-history.

One of the first CDs I reviewed for Night Times was Leaves Turn Inside of You, the 2001 masterpiece by Unwound. I was anxious to tell the world about what a great record this was. I wanted to celebrate something this ambitious that managed to not tip too far into that listener alienating style Radiohead was selling as “experimental.” I hoped that everyone would run out and buy the double CD and make the band deservedly famous. Oh how young I was!

Ten years later I am revisiting the record. Guess what? It still sounds amazing. The overdubbed, trebly guitar and whispery, ghostlike vocals of Justin Trosper; the underrated percussion of Sara Lund; the punk bass calmed to prog-rock proportions of Vern Rumsey; the mellotron, the cello, the droning two minute trance that starts the whole thing off! And that’s just the techie stuff. The themes, if any can be found, are eerie, for lack of a better description. Ghosts, demons, October, and December all figure prominently in the lyrics and their shadowy chill infects the whole damn vibe of this thing. The one mention of summer is in the song “Summer Freeze” which pretty much gives you an idea of what’s going on. Everything sunny and warm is rendered frozen and desolate.

But this is not a gloomy record. Sure, some of the songs are downbeat, and I will forever associate this record with 9/11, as I spent much of that Tuesday watching footage of the falling twin towers on a TV with the sound off as Leaves Turn Inside You played on the stereo. The song “Radio Gra” – a lurching instrumental— provided the perfect soundtrack for that inexplicable, surreal day. But there are oddly bright moments peppered throughout the two discs. In fact, the before mentioned demons sing love songs on of the more upbeat tunes. (Well, as upbeat as one might expect from this record.) While some of the lyrics are thankfully obscured (“trouble with the truth is double” is a pretty bad line), there are some fine moments, like when Trosper spits: “It’s every bastard for himself!/ The last century hasn’t ended yet!” It’s apocalyptic without succumbing to cheap, teen-age diary lyricism. I can’t claim to understand everything going on in this song, “Off This Century,” but, like most of the mood of the record, the doom is suggested as much by the minor keys as the odd lyric that bubbles up from the mix. The end result is, as I called it in my initial review, an ideal record for a four day rain storm.

And that is why I am revisiting this record today. Not because it is the ten year anniversary, though that is occasion enough. I am dusting off Leaves Turn Inside You because fall is here and this record feels like fall. It is the record I listen to when the leaves turn, fall, and die. It is not music to listen to while driving with the top down. It is a piece of art that exists in a specific time and place. Fall is my favorite time of the year perhaps because it is so brief, at least here in Chicago. Summer lingers and winter comes too quickly. They are rude guests whereas fall shows up, stays for a bit, and departs before you’d like, leaving you wanting more. Now that it's here, I’m happy for many reasons, high among them being the rekindling of my love for Unwound’s final record, one of the only from the early aughts that still sounds compelling.

Bookshop Crusader

2011-09-15T07:33:00.000-07:00

Chad Post has good comments on a good article from the New Yorker regarding the decline of indie bookshops and the fight to keep them alive. I will give credit where credit is due: bookstore owners are not always the smartest of businessmen, and they may have played a part in their demise, but unlike the record industry I think book buyers are more loyal to the printed page and less enamored with flickering gadgets. Or maybe I am speaking for myself. Maybe I am naïve in believing that dedicated cadre of booklovers is out there ready to take on the Kindles and Nooks and preserve our beloved indie shops.

Sigh. I am all too aware that I might be a member of a dying breed or, at best, an ineffectual minority. I like books. I like the physical weight of them and I like the stores that pack their strained shelves with them. I can find a lot of books by browsing Amazon and reading online reviews, blog, and journals, but the thrill of happening upon a book in a store—a book for which I was not searching; a book that appeared before me—is not matched by the expanse of the net. This is how I found Bulgakov, Donoso, Calvino, Loy, and countless other favorites.

Here in the Chi we have a few indie shops left worth fight for. The Seminary Co-op is perhaps my favorite, with Powell’s on 57th being a close 2nd. As for price, there’s no beating Chandler’s (aka: Bookman’s Corner), and it has the additional charm of John, the owner. And then there’s Keith’s great Selected Works which has greatly improved since it moved to the Fine Arts Building. I was a bit skeptical of the decision at first, but I must admit I love this shop more than ever since it relocated out of Lakeview. Plus it has Hodge the cat, a friendly albeit intimidating feline known to pounce on customers from time to time. So I do my part and patronize these bookstores with a sense of purpose, knowing that I may be fighting an unwinnable battle. Oh well, we all need a cause, right?

Walt Whitman is Good for You

2011-09-13T19:05:00.001-07:00

The greatest of American poets and a goddamn life saver.

My Name in Lights: "Poem"

2011-09-10T06:38:00.000-07:00

Because I could not think of what to title the poem, I called it "Poem." If Frank O'Hara could do it, why can't I? Aside from that influence, I wrote the poem after Andre Breton, who wrote a better poem that inspired mine. Anyway, click here and scroll way down, just past halfway, and you'll find my "Poem."

Threat From Above

2011-08-22T12:42:00.001-07:00

Manstarch?

2011-08-16T07:12:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure what to think of Nicholson Baker. I read Vox, that dirty little book, and ignored The Fermata after Xtop told me to skip it. But both of those sound tame compared to the newest offering by Mr. Baker. I mean, just read this and see what I mean.

I must say that Baker has proven to be a top notch essayist. I am sure he is a better novelist than I know, but I suppose I’m just too amused by neologisms like sackshot and slutslot to give House of Holes much of a chance.

Revisiting Bukowski

2011-08-15T11:33:00.000-07:00

At 20 I started reading Bukowski. Oddly, I think it was Scott Ian from Anthrax who mentioned his book Women that got me interested. Go figure. And then the Chili Peppers, who I was very much into around the Mother’s Milk era, name-checked him. So his name floated into my suburban head and I, being curious about writers not available at Waldenbooks, ventured to this exciting new store called Barnes and Nobel to see if they had Women. They did. A quick flip through the first few pages yielded the words “masturbate” and “drinking.” I knew I was in for something fun.

And that is the thing about Bukowski: he is fun. Okay, his books are very crude, definitely male-centric reads, and yeah the whole drinking-and-whoring-and-gambling thing wears on the more you read, but in recent days I have come to appreciate Buk’s clear, direct style all over again. Wading through Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara, and Elena Shvarts made for nice weekend reading, and I like the complexity of these figures—especially the outrageous Mayakovsky—but a Sunday meeting with other poetry readers from TriQuarterly got me thinking about what matters most to me in poetry.

Let’s back up.

I spent the afternoon at the track. From there I had to haul ass back to the city to get to the bar where the poetry meeting was taking place. I mentioned to the others that I was having a Bukowski day: the track, the booze, the poetry. It fell on deaf ears, and I think that has to do with the fact that most poets I know dislike Buk. He’s as far from the MFA course as you can get. His brand of simple, uncluttered lines doesn’t appeal to those anguishing over better metaphor and smashing their lines into form. I get that and I can see why there’s no love for Hank in academia, but I always feel compelled to defend the guy, partially because he was so important to me in my early 20s, and also because of the two best lessons he taught me, lessons that I think more aspiring writers ought to remember:

1. Anyone can talk about being a writer, but it takes dedication and effort. Love or hate what he produced, Bukowski wrote nightly for years. He did not write a brilliant poem each one of those nights, but he worked at it steadily and penned many books—a few of them pretty great. He always disdained those more interested in going to readings and workshops and parties, the “gutless” academic writers who imagined they were owed something for playing it safe, and the eager young poets who felt their potential was enough. Potential and aptitude are important, but they are useless without effort. Buk knew he had to try harder and so he did.

2. Style is everything. Well, almost. But to Buk, it was the most important thing. To do something with style was more important to him than to do it according to the rules. Know the rules and break them well, he might have said. Authentic voice, or staying true to your vision, will ultimately carry one further than following trends and reducing your own ideas into facsimiles of someone else’s dull writing. Of course, the emulators are assured some recognition, but if you’re in it for recognition you have already lost.

So I keep all that in mind today, the day after I saw more than a few poems slaughtered, skipped, and dismissed. Sure, some were fair to middling, but I can’t help but think of Hank and what he might have thought about the whole affair. Anyway, his work, even the bad stuff, is enough to keep me at this ridiculous game.

Nick Laird on Poetry Apps

2011-08-03T12:20:00.001-07:00

I think I agree with this, but what else did you expect?

I Assume This is Meant to be Ironic

2011-07-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

As boring as writers writing on writing can be, essays bemoaning them are worse.

Borders to go Bye Bye

2011-07-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

I have mixed feeling about this. While I’m inclined to blame the slow-to-catch-up publishing industry, big chain bookstores themselves have made some blunders that have contributed to their epic fail. Part of me hopes this will make more room for the brick and mortar/mom-n-pop stores of old that have decreased significantly in the last, oh, fifteen years thanks to places like Borders (and Amazon, I know). Sadly, I don’t think that’ll happen.

So while Borders represented what was wrong with our big big big consumerist culture, I was never opposed to Borders or Barnes and Noble. I lamented that these mega stores meant shrinking indie shops, but I was thrilled to know that lots of books were within reach. And I would have killed for a place like Borders in my suburb when I was growing up. Sadly, I was forced to make do with Waldenbooks. I didn’t even have the internet to fall back on.

Speaking of the internet: are they to blame? Perhaps, but I’m also happy to live in an era where I can easily research authors I might never have heard of by patronizing Borders. Even in their heyday I might not have discovered Dubravka Ugresic or Raul Zurita by wandering through a mega store’s shelves. So I’m not about to blast the net either. American provincialism? Maybe. The demands of commerce and the reality of consumer tastes? Okay, a litte. Whatever the reason, Borders is on its way out and that, frankly, makes me a little sad. I always try to hit the Seminary Coop or some of the few used shops left, but it looks like I’ll have to depend more on the internet than I’d like to for my books.

Gaga Bites on the Divine Ms. M.

2011-07-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

In response to Midler’s claim, Lady Gaga said that she has never stolen anything from another artist’s act, proof of which will be evident when her new single “Breeze Beneath My Flapping, Feathered Arms” drops in anticipation of her first feature film Sandy Places Near Water.

The Elasticity of Genius

2011-07-12T13:12:00.001-07:00

Today at the office I heard someone use the word genius to describe Cee Lo Green. For the record, I have no problem with Mr. Green, or Gnarls Barkley for that matter. But genius? C’mon.

I asked for specific reasons why Cee Lo can be called a genius. They were:

1. He is doing a retro thing no one else is doing (to which I replied: So he’s a genius for recycling?);

2. He is a great showman (to which I replied: So every good front-man in a musical act is a genius? Robert Plant, Perry Ferrell, Mick Jagger, Lady Gaga, Johnny Rotten? That’s a lot of geniuses);

3. He writes good music (okay, maybe this might qualify a person for some praise, but genius? Really? Next thing you know they’ll be calling Katy Perry a genius because she wrote a song that is, sadly, catchy).

To me a genius is someone who can do what no other person in their field, or, heck, no other person on earth, can do. A high IQ is not enough. One of my oldest friends has a high IQ and can’t get his shit together. I’d hardly call him a genius. No, genius is earned and Cee Lo has not earned that title.

I have a few heroes, musical and otherwise, I might call geniuses. And I suppose this is all relative and subjective, but I feel my evidence might trump the sorry three reasons listed above. My real beef is with the way people abuse words. Genius is meant to suggest a type of rare brilliance that the average person does not possess. Geniuses have minds from which we as a society benefit (or, in the case of evil geniuses, suffer) because their contributions literally change the world. It’s okay to call Cee Lo Green or Bob Dylan good songwriters or good performers or even talented. If they split the atom, then call them geniuses. In the meantime, lay off the stretching of this word. Words have meanings and abusing them robs them of their power. The more we misapply the term genius the more the actual geniuses will remain underappreciated.

Read Along With Me: The Twelve Chairs

2011-07-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

Once again, a book I am going to start reading is available online. Feel free to read along. For some quick context, go here, though the entry fails to detail exactly how important this book, and its sequel, was to Soviet life and how it continues to be the go-to book for generations of Russians. Mel Brooks even made a film version. Now that's cross-cultural!

Master & Margarita Website

2011-07-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

I just found this website all about The Master and Margarita. If you know me, you’ve probably heard me go on about this book before, how it is perhaps the finest novel I’ve ever read, certainly my favorite (though in a tie with three others), and how you should read it, blah blah blah. Well, not blah blah blah if you give a fig about good literature.

Anyway, the site is packed with lots of goodies, including this nugget of news that an American film version is in the works (though who knows if it’ll get off the ground). While the idea intrigues me, I have to admit to being torn. I know there are European films already in existence, but I’ve never felt compelled to see them. After all, one of my other “favorite books of all time” was famously made into a total disaster of a movie.

But back to the site.

What else will you find? A chapter by chapter guide, art work, essays, interpretations, and objections by the anti-Bulgakov philistines— I mean religious orthodox readers (who, apparently, lack proper analytical skills). Overall, it’s a pretty good site that has me thinking… maybe it’s time I reread this marvelous novel. After all, the third time I read it was when its genius really started to kick in for me. Fourth time’s a charm!

Directors Who Should Retire

2011-07-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

As far as I’m concerned, Kevin Smith retired form filmmaking a long time ago. The only post Chasing Amy film of his I’ve really liked is Jersey Girl. That’s right, Jersey Girl. It was a schmaltzy and featured a cute little girl charming her way (or trying to) into viewer’s hearts, but hey, it was better than Dogma, Zack & Miri Make a Porno, and whatever the fuck else he’s shit out lately (something with Bruce Willis, I think… looked like ass). So the recent news that he is (or is he?) retiring from filmmaking is really not too shocking. I never took him seriously as a filmmaker, but I doubt he did either. So why not retire? I applaud him going out with whatever dignity he has left.

That said, this list of other directors who ought to call it quits raises some interesting points. Really, Smith’s movies are innocent of not being too serious or demanding, thus the viewer knows what to expect: 90 minutes of dick jokes. Don’t complain about them if that isn’t your cup of tea. Now, going to see a Scorsese film these days is indeed a crap shoot, and so long as he is the Martin Scorsese some of us who remember what the man was capable of as far into his career as the 90s might hold some hope that he’ll return to form. We get our hearts broken a lot. Sniff.

My own list would include Quentin Tarantino. I’ve not liked anything since Pulp Fiction (which has aged badly) though Jackie Brown was pretty good, I think (forgettable movie that one). Kill Bill has its ups and downs. It might have been a good single feature but stretched over two separate releases it suffers from its excess and unforgivable anticlimax. On that note Inglourious Bastards sinks from its self-importance made all the worse by the scores of critics who decided to plop the thing up to higher than deserved ranks. Guys, the more you do that the more you make Mr. T. think he is doing important work. Stop.

Also on the list would be M. Night Shyamalan. He made Unbreakable, which I loved, and Signs, which I liked a lot, but otherwise… nothing. The rest is dross at best, often laughable, hardly scary or even interesting. He had something to do with Devil, a movie I quite enjoyed, so maybe he ought to stick to whatever role he had with that film (producer? story idea?) and let better filmmakers take the reins.

Clearly there are others, but I'm going to stop here as this list cvould go on indefinitely.

What I Drove Through Last Night

2011-07-01T10:57:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybpNvgjdx4k

“…there is no freedom but that we give ourselves.”

2011-07-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

An Open Letter to Mohamed Bouazizim the Tunisian who lit himself on fire and quite literary sparked a revolution that has engulfed much of North African and the Middle East. Words Without Borders is devoting the next two months to literature of the Arab Spring. Check it out.

Writer Beware!

2011-06-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

Interesting list/article on some of the writers who met their doom via the motorized vehicle. I like lists. Now, a list of literary suicides is sure to be longer.

The Blind Owl

2011-06-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

A book I just started reading is available for free here:

http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BlindOwl/blindowl.html

While I can’t speak to this particular translation (mine’s different) I can say that after only three pages I am entranced by this slim, bizarre book. From the intro to my version, and some of the notes on the angelfire site, it seems that the book has a controversial past. Apparently readers have killed themselves after finishing its short, anguishing pages. We’ll see if the same fate befalls me.

Stay tuned.

PS: For those looking to read it untranslated, go here.

Hitchens Takes Down Mamet

2011-06-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

Another for the love him or hate him group, Christopher Hitchens is, in my view, a more complicated figure than people think. I lifted an article from Conversational Reading, a fantastic blog, though its author was surprised that The Hitch cares about global warming. Why wouldn’t he? Yes, he’s turned to the right in recent years, but his opposition to radical Islam made him foolishly back the post 9/11 wars and say some utterly ridiculous things (notably, that we never really ended Desert Storm, thus the current war in Iraq is not pre-emptive). Nevertheless, Hitchens allowed himself to be (mildly) waterboarded and declared it torture, and he backed Obama against McCain, decried Sarah Palin, and eviscerated Anne Coulter, not the sort of stuff blindly obedient conservatives get up to.

That being said, Hitchens can venture into the land of the nutjob. His deep hatred for all things religious has informed his political position, which seems backwards to me. (Why would an anti-theist go the right?) To be sure, Hitch seems to be backing off the republican bit somewhat, though he’ll never admit it. His real love seems to be in disagreeing, and if he is a contrarian, well, he’s one of the funnier ones. To be sure, it is always fun to read Hitchens, even if he is talking utter crap. Here, while reviewing David Mamet’s new screed against liberals, Hitch is fantastic.

Gore Vidal Was Right

2011-06-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Love him or hate him, what Gore was saying then has pretty much become everyday thinking now.

It makes me wonder how future generations will look at our present debate over gay marriage. Actually, I don't wonder at all; I am quite sure they'll laugh at us.

Attack of the Lunch

2011-06-20T12:18:00.000-07:00

Though I usually avoid sharing these tales, as they make the author look a tad stupid, I am still so stunned by today’s misadventure that I felt like posting it for your, um, consumption. I say consumption as it involves lunch.

I bought a can of aloo peneer at Jewel. Aloo peneer, for those unaware, is a fantastic Indian dish consisting of peas and soft Indian cheese in a spicy tomato cream sauce. It’s fantastic. I have been waiting to eat it for days, excited out of proportion at the idea. It was the sole thing that made today, a Monday, worthwhile. It’s also gray, rainy, and humid today—not a good combination. I awoke to dark skies that made it difficult to get out of bed. Nothing seemed to be worth rising for, save for the thought of aloo paneer. You gotta find joy where you can.

I microwaved the grub for a minute and a half—just under standard time for soup—and carefully removed the bowl, peeled back the plastic wrap, and inspected my lunch. It was sizzling, steaming, obviously done. I took the wrap off completely. That’s when it happened. BOOM! A heat pocket under the sauce burst. Aloo paneer was everywhere. Thanks to quick reflexes I shielded my face with my hand, which got burned, but there was no way to protect my shirt, a nice blue Eddie Bauer number, one of my favorites. I ran the thing under water, used dish soap to spot treat it (a handy trick I picked up years ago), but the food covered too great an area. The shirt, it seemed, was ruined.

I did not have a back-up shirt (fans of Party Down! will get the reference). What to do… Well, first I ate the damn lunch. I suffered for it; I was going to eat it. And it was quite good, almost as good as what I get in my favorite Indian restaurant. Then I asked for a quick break to go to the dry cleaners. The trek was long, especially in the humidity, and I wore my undershirt and a black jacket. I looked ridiculous. The cleaner said the chances of saving the shirt were 50-50, so I went for it. Then I walked to Sears and bought a new shirt. It’s not the same, but close: blue, button up, fairly generic save for a Polo symbol on the breast pocket.

My thinking is that nothing worse can happen today, and if it does, well, so be it. After a near scalding and an embarrassing aftermath, I’m ready. Okay fate, you fucker, bring it on.

Another Reason Not to Get a Kindle

2011-06-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

I never had this problem with my paper books.

With Age Comes Who Cares

2011-06-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

As I am now 40 (more on that later) I find it easier to laugh at much of the world whereas I, as a younger, angrier man, would have screamed. Looking back at the year 1994, as The Reader did this week, I am reminded of how much I disliked Bill Wyman, their former music critic, and how much I loved Steve Albini, who I still think has made a significant contribution to music though he is indeed an asshole. Here’s a great letter war that makes me laugh like hell now, though at the time it seemed like pretty serious business. And time has definitely made some things clear: Albini was mostly right. Urge Overkill? Who cared then and who cares now? Liz Phair has always sucked in my opinion. Overrated at first and now not able to produce anything even the critics can forgive. She’s well beyond her greatest hits days. And Smashing Pumpkins—Gish aside—never made a record to get too excited about. This was evident right around the time Corrigan penned what remains one of the ten worst lyrics in rock history: “Despite all my rage I’m still just a rat in a cage.” Deep, Billy. Deep.

So enjoy and laugh and remember when any of this mattered (if you are my age).

Fuck Bob Dylan

2011-06-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan turned 70 this year and my first thought was: good—he’ll keel over any day now. Then I realized that would be the worst thing that could happen, as surely I’d be forced to suffer tributes, wall-to-wall TV footage, ubiquitous re-releases and rarities, and every Starbucks within 100 miles (which is approximate 70) playing his music from open to close.

I’ve never understood the cult of Bob Dylan. Okay, he has a handful of good songs, but he’s not a poet. Sorry, folks—he’s not. Joyce Mansour, Ernesto Cardenal, Ciaran Carson, C. K. Williams, Byron, Anna Akhmatova, and Farugh Farrokhzad are poets. He’s a songwriter. If he ever wins the Nobel Prize for literature, which his worshipers claim may happen, I’ll know that the Swedes have also sipped the Kool-Aid.

This morning I was strolling through the pedway on the way to work, sleepy from the train ride and a bit grumpy, when “Like a Rolling Stone” butted into my head via the crappy speakers outside Au Bon Pain. I tried to describe Dylan’s voice to my wife and the best I could up with was: he sounds like a gopher dying inside a whale’s asshole. I was proud of that one.

Okay, Tom Waits, Kevin Sharp, and Eye are three of my favorite vocalists; clearly I do not always listen to singers with perfect voices. But Bobbie Zimmerman’s voice just bugs me. And his harmonica playing is brutal. And his songs are often more frustrating than brilliant. “Ballad of a Thin Man” for example, is a song I always liked, but the last verse is so awful it ruins the whole thing. But nobody wants to say that as Bob is beyond reproach in our post-baby boom world that seems to follow piped pipers of his sort. I think it has to do with his carefully constructed enigmatic persona. Yeah, he’s a rebel and his harmonica has been described a big middle finger (though I’m not sure to whom), but I’ve suffered through Don’t Look Back and I have to say that his antics in that film are very annoying, occasionally callow, and often self-important. He was buying his bullshit early on and the world followed suit. He’s managed to pad that out to a very long career. Well, good for him, and, to paraphrase Robinson Jeffers (another actual poet), I’m happy to let the duped stay duped.

Jesus, I just had to get this off my chest. Thanks for listening. I feel better now.

Bolaño Mania

2011-06-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, I can’t read this in its entirety, but the long and the short is that Bolaño is getting a street named after him in Spain. Some see this as flogging the dead, but I’m amused.

Anyway, Between Parentheses, the newest translated book of Bolaño’s is out. I picked up my copy, and though I am currently wading through Orhan Pamuk and speed reading some texts I’ll have to teach this summer, I’m looking forward to this book as it is the first collection of Bolaño’s nonfiction to be published in English in one volume. I skimmed some already and it looks to be great—certainly better than the last few releases (short story collections that I’m ambivalent about).

2011-06-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Jack

Choicers? Dear Lord...

2011-05-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

For those who think homosexuality is a choice, read the last part of this week’s Savage Love.

Big Books

2011-05-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

If you have the time (joke), read this essay from The Millions (great site) about the so-called Stockholm syndrome of reading fat books. I'm not sure I agree with all of this, but there are some points that I do back. Mainly: life’s too short to waste time reading a book you are not enjoying (enjoyment being difficult to define; one can enjoy a challenging book as much as an empty-headed TV show or tweeting with their "friends"). Sure, school will often force you to read those big, intimidating classics and your friends and the New York Times may try to convince you that Jonathan Franzen is too important to ignore, but aside from those moments you ought to read because you enjoy the process. There are books we feel compelled to read out of duty or curiosity, but I don’t think it a bad thing to abandon a book if one is not truly invested. In short (joke again): books require effort—not a bad thing—but, to use this author’s example, they ought to reward more than they punish. Otherwise I worry that slogging through a big book just to be able to say you did as much is bullshit posturing. Why put yourself through that for some pretentious bragging rights?

That being said, I have not finished The Man Without Qualities or In Search of Lost Time, though I very much liked what I read of both. I have given up on Ulysses three times now. Last Bloomsday, I vowed to read a chapter a month until it was finished, and made it further than ever (but still chucked it). Joyce and I will never be buddies, it seems. Oh well—I’ll content myself with Faulkner.

But that’s just it—there are plenty of “important” writers and books to be discovered, some long, some short. It's about finding the ones that truly matter to you. Content matters more than length to me, and while I admit to feeling thrilled that I made it through 2666 (which is a great book) in no time at all, I will also say that Distant Star is a better book in many ways. And yeah, Moby-Dick is great and all, but Bartleby is equally as important to me. And Thomas Bernhard may be the greatest 20th century European writer, and he, as this article states, never wrote a long book.

Look, challenge yourself. It’s good for you. Do your mental gymnastics and put those big books before you. Give ‘em a try, but love the process and don’t stick with them for the sake of saying, “I read Pynchon” when Pynchon is—sorry folks—a bore.

Out.

Take 2

2011-05-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

The sleeper wakes...

How I Plan to Spend the Summer

2011-05-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

Reading with a sleeping dog.

People

2011-05-13T13:28:00.000-07:00

Why can't they shut the fuck up?

Adonis Review

2011-05-10T10:48:00.000-07:00

Check out my review of Adonis's selected poems, which I offered to review in a vainglorious moment that I soon came to regret.

There was nothing I could say about Adonis or his poetry, or so I thought while reading the book. Well, I sallied forth and did my best, and while I do not hate this review, the process made me reconsider the art of reviewing art. I make no claim to be an expert or a skilled critic. I just like what I like and want to share that with everyone. Well, I think I did that and now I will shrink to my corner and read in silence.

“Naturally, I blamed the world for that”

2011-05-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

I’m not a fan of Franzen. I couldn’t read The Corrections and I heard him on NPR reading a bit from Freedom and wanted to strangle him through the airwaves. So I was somewhat annoyed to read this, though there may be a point in there somewhere. But blaming the world for your poor book sales is wrong. Blame yourself. Oh, and then you write a hit book and suddenly there are readers out there! Wow.

Oh, this was actually found through a great Conversational Reading post where the conversation is, of course, ongoing. Check it out.

Some Sung Heroes: Trey Spruance

2011-05-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

This one’s been a long time coming. Hell, look back through the posts and you’ll see lots of mention of Trey Spruance and the Secret Chiefs 3. My love for Trey and that band knows no bounds. I’ll say this now and ready myself for attack (though it’ll never come, partially as I don’t think anyone cares): Trey Spruance is the example of a complete musician, one of the few working today who can boast versatility, vision, and execution all on a level above the rest of the foaming herd.

Take a second and consider what it means to be a musician. Okay, you may say it’s the ability to play an instrument. Sure, but I can half-ass my way through some Led Zeppelin songs on the six string, but I am not a musician—not by a long stretch. Was Sid Vicious a musician? Are Tibetan chanters musicians? Were the first cavemen to beat two rocks together rhythmically musicians? Yes to all of these but there’s more to being a complete musician than playing an instrument with a modicum of skill. Composition is equally important, as is arrangement, and, most overlooked, production (and Spruance is one of the most overlooked producers working today). On every one of these levels, Spruance shines. His playing is fantastic (proven by all three Mr. Bungle records alone). More interesting is his statement that he has lost interest in the guitar. To Spruance it is another tool of execution, not the fetishistic instrument elevated to supreme status by classic rockers and aging metal heads. Equally as comfortable on the keys, the trumpet, and any number of “exotic” stringed instruments, Spruance’s vision would be sadly limited were he to solely fixate on the guitar. He is a multi-instrumentalist and, as such, sees a spectrum where others see static.

So yeah, the guy can play, but so what? Yngwie Malmsteen could play like a motherfucker but he couldn’t write a song to save his life. Spruance’s compositions exceed most others’ expectations of what it means to make music. Sure, Mr. Bungle was silly at times, and though they matured over the course of three records, there was always room for their favorite themes, mostly suicide and twisted sex. The personalities of the band contributed to (and competed with) the mix, and as such Patton’s vocal stylings and Dunn’s technical expressions mixed and, sometimes, butted heads with Spruance’s aesthetic. This made for some goddamn great music! Still, the band was a band in the true sense, meaning it was a collective. Without full contribution from the core, and flawless playing from the whole, the band would not be. And yeah, that happened, sadly after only three fucking records. As pissed as I was that my heroes were splitting up, it freed up time for the Secret Chiefs 3, Spruance’s baby. This is the band that, for my money, should take over the world.

Okay, the first thing people notice is the Middle Eastern vibe. That and the surf influence. So the usual description of the increasingly difficult to describe music is “Like Morricone meets Dick Dale in an Indian hookah house!” or some such bullshit. Okay, I get it. We only know how to digest by comparison, but still, if only we could lay off the X meets Y shit for a bit and really dig into what the dude is up to up in those California mountains where he has retreated from the “scene” to focus on making some meticulously crafted music, maybe we might get somewhere far away from Katy Perry and closer to something beautiful. Or maybe let’s just chart the progression of the band from a Bungle side project to their first release full of slapped together improv and otherwise scattershot recordings, to the second CD where the vision became clear, to the third, Book M, where the whole thing really started to ferment, to the soundtrack for an imaginary horror film, to Book of Horizons, the mammoth undertaking that introduced to the world the truth, that this was not a band but seven bands working under the banner “Secret Chiefs 3,” each reflecting a particular mode of Spruance’s muse. On that record one will find more than sitars and reimaginings of Italian movie soundtracks; they will find blistering death metal, quiet, pensive laments, and yes, a surf song rearranged to a massive degree. Oh wait, here I go trying to put the music into words when the music will do. Just check this out.

Okay, so much more I could say, but maybe you ought to look for yourself.

Today's Funny

2011-04-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

Just in time for the wedding. OMG! Did you see the dress?!

Get Serious

2011-04-28T16:14:00.001-07:00

A killer essay onthe whole Professor X thing. My favorite part looks like this:

"People who are not serious, on the other hand, buy houses they can’t afford and run up credit card debt. They let the oil industry write the deep-sea drilling regulations that led to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t insist that their government inspect their commercial airplanes, their levees, their bridges or their food. They rail against taxes and then devote more than half of every tax dollar to military spending. They argue that universal health care and strict environmental laws are evil government intrusions, and that “creationism” should be taught alongside evolution in public schools. They regard Sarah Palin and Donald Trump as valid presidential contenders. All this because the basement of the ivory tower is teeming with illiterates? Well, yes. A society unwilling to demand excellence of its students is unlikely to demand – or get – competence from its government."

Poetry Month: Wisława Szymborska

2011-04-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Today’s poem comes from the great Wisława Szymborska. Her poems have always struck me as deceptively clear and direct, and accessible without being banal.

Anti-Royal Watcher

2011-04-27T13:21:00.001-07:00

Peep this.

I personally could not care less about William and Kate and have to wonder why anyone outside of the inbred-- sorry, royal family gives a goddamn.

Poetry Month: Donald Justice

2011-04-27T05:30:00.001-07:00

Not a perfect sonnet but I love it.

Poetry Month: Aharon Shabtai

2011-04-22T14:46:00.000-07:00

An interesting poem from a provocateur.

Poetry Month: Kevin Stein

2011-04-22T08:52:00.000-07:00

Today’s feature is from Illinois Poet Laureate, Kevin Stein. I read him after meeting him, the circumstances of that meeting many of you know (something about winning 1st place in some contest). I only read him because a friend practically insisted, but after I finished his book American Ghost Roses I completely understood why Blago appointed him. Stein’s the man. Read this and see for yourself.

Poetry Month: Three from the Harlem Renaissance

2011-04-21T08:18:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty famous one by Langston Hughes, but it gets better each time I read it. Still, his peer, Countee Cullen, ought to get some attention as well, not to mention Jean Toomer.

Poetry Month: Anna Akhmatova

2011-04-20T09:35:00.000-07:00

An all time favorite.

Revisiting Risky Business

2011-04-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

When I first saw Risky Business I was too young to catch all the jokes or understand all the events. It was on cable and I was sneaking bits of it while the grownups were distracted, though I doubt they would have cared. A few years and several hormones later, I watched it in full and followed the story with great, um, interest. It was exciting. A nice kid from the Chicago suburbs sleeps with a beautiful hooker, throws a wild party, and has the time of his life. That was all I needed in a movie.

I am tempted to attribute college to the opening of a more crucial eye, but who am I kidding? I’m no smarter than I was at fifteen, in some regards, and even when it comes to movies I’m a hell of a lot more forgiving than the average grad school asshole. I love horror films, no matter how stupid. I’m always ready to drive down nostalgia lane in the form of Weird Science, Back to School, Trading Places, Caddyshack, or most other goofy ‘80s movies. So when I saw Risky Business on cable this weekend, I, along with the lovely Cassandra, decided to give it a go.

What I was expecting was the same wild ride through the north shore and the city that I enjoyed as a kid. And yes, some of that was there, but behind the whole “what the fuck” philosophy resided bigger questions of Reagan era greed and avarice that I found compelling.

When one thinks of the quintessential 1980s send up of rampant capitalism they might name check Wall Street. Sure, Michael Douglas’s “greed is good” speech works, but the film—like all by Oliver Stone—handles the subject matter the way a sixth grader would. The bad guys are clearly bad, thus deserving of what they get, and the good guys are pure and noble who may succumb briefly to temptation but always find their moral center and do the right thing. In Wall Street, Michael Douglas is unquestionably bad—charismatic but clearly evil—and Charlie Sheen is the moral center. (Talk about irony!)

No, Wall Street is not the great cinematic indictment of the decadent 1980s; that would be Risky Business. Consider the story: Joel, played by Tom Cruise in the only film I have ever liked him in, is a typical north shore kid. He has well to do parents with boring, well to do tastes. His father sets the equalizer on his stereo to boring perfection to properly enjoy his classical music. Joel’s first act of rebellion when his parents leave is to fuck with the settings and blast “Old Time Rock and Roll.” So the characters are set: stuffy adults and their rebellious kids who feel a million miles away from them even in the same house. His father’s meticulous nature is symbolized by the stereo, but his mom is all about the goddamn egg—that obvious symbol of innocence and shelter that, of course, is risked, stolen, bartered over, and, eventually, cracked by the film’s conclusion. Joel’s adventures cause a crack in the egg and usher in the end of his naïve, sheltered life. Yay for metaphors!

Back to the story. Joel, like most teens, is horny as fuck and clueless on how to change all of that. His folks are gone, so his seemingly worldly pal calls a hooker. The hooker, a tranny, hips him to the sort of hooker he might actually want to fuck, which he does. Naïve and stupid, Joel has not the cash to pay her in the morning. So what can we pull from this? That a north shore spoiled son of well to do parents is that stupid? Has he been so insulated in his life that he failed to understand that this hooker might require money for her services? That Porsche in the garage didn’t come free either, Joel. Shit costs money, but to a privileged son of well to do parents, the idea often seems foreign. They just expect things.

That the hooker might rip him off while he goes to the bank to cash in a bond is also a thought absent from Joel’s head. His naiveté is hilarious. These ridiculous plot machinations seem implausible, but I want to suggest that the makers of this film were using them to raise larger social-political questions about class. Lana, the hooker, asks Joel not to judge her while he sits on his father’s $40,000 car (is that what a Porsche cost in 1984?). Though she aspires to wealth, her story is rooted in a starker reality. She’s probably not a hooker because she likes the life. There’s big differences between the two primary characters and while these disparities are hardly new or even all that interesting, they are used to further skewer a society where the biggest aspiration is to make money and the mere suggestion—half hearted though it may be—of helping people results in laughter and condemnation. This is the Reagan era.

Lana is honest. She is in it for the cash and she’ll screw anyone to get it—literally and figuratively. Joel is blind. He is easily seduced into the life of easy money, power, sex, and drugs because this is the life he was making for himself all along. He and his friends are budding capitalists, future CEOs eager to get rich regardless of the cost to others. They care nothing for the world at large. And why should they? They can’t see it from the position of their north shore homes. They’ll never see it from the corner offices either.

Joel’s adventure seems funny enough, and no one really gets hurt, right? Sure. He has one more night with Lana at the end, and while it’s all a little ambiguous this is hardly the guy-gets-girl, ride off into the sunset kind of ending. There’s a bit more going on. Joel loses all the money but he gets into Princeton. It is not his grades and achievements that get him in the Ivy League, but the fact that he got the admissions officer laid. Clearly his efforts at school were a means to an end, as seen in his aggressive behavior toward the school nurse (“I’ve busted my butt in this shithole!”). Also evident in this scene is his sense of entitlement. Of course he ought to get a break, even though he missed class and broke the rules. You see, it was not his fault. A hooker accidently knocked the gear of his father’s Porsche, which sent it into Lake Michigan, so he had to get it to fixed and miss class, so, you see, it’s not his fault. Not taking responsibility for his actions (his father told him not to touch the car, he called the hooker, he got high with her), Joel expects special treatment. Why? Because he is the son of well to do parents living in the north shore and he will, of course, go on to be rich and powerful himself. Why? Well, because it is predetermined. Why shouldn’t he get a break?

It is this entitlement that Joel and his pals feel. It will stay with them as they go to Ivy League schools and climb corporate ladders. It will inform their actions. It will justify their lies, adulteries, and petty grievances against a world that should know better than to fuck with them. These are the cogs in the great wheel of laissez-faire capitalism.

Forgive me for seeming didactic or for overanalyzing a somewhat forgotten film, but I had to get all that off my chest. Stay tuned for more poetry and less pseudo intellectualism.

Poetry Month: Forough Farrokhzad

2011-04-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

Rather than link to a single poem today, I give you this link to a page dedicated to the great Forough Farrokhzad, with a generous selection of her poems and other material. I came across her work a while back when looking through the City Lights catalog. Apparently they were putting together a sizable collection of her work that has since been cancelled. I wonder if the selected poems that came out around the same time killed it, but that would be a shame. While Sin is a great collection, wonderfully translated by Sholeh Wolpe, another book in English, complete with letters and an array of writings, would be nice. Oh well…

P.S.: Well what do you know? I quick Amazon search revealed this forthcoming book.

Chile to Exhume Allende

2011-04-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

Unreal.

Poetry Month: C.K. Williams and Ciaran Carson

2011-04-15T07:51:00.001-07:00

Three poems from the great C. K. Williams whose long lines inspired my favorite living poet, Ciaran Carson.

Poetry Month: Breton & Desnos

2011-04-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

Today’s batch comes from the French. Yeah, the French. The Black Widow Press has done a lot of work retranslating and reprinting French poets, some of which are pretty remarkable. Some slip too quickly into the pitfalls of surrealism to be as engaging as I’d like, but I admire the ambition. Here’s a poem by Andre Breton that greatly impacted me when I stumbled across it a few years back. And here’s one by Robert Desnos that pretty much kills.

Poetry Month: Amichai and Darwish

2011-04-11T09:02:00.000-07:00

Since I missed yesterday, not to mention the first few days of April, today's post contains a chunk of poems by two of my favorites, Yehuda Amichai and Mahmoud Darwish.

Amichai hailed from Israel and Darwish from Palestine. In the interest of not choosing sides in that famous schism, I present poets from both lands. I will say that Amichai's "A Man in His Life" was one of the serious contenders for my Pinsky favorite poem choice, though I really prefer "A Dog After Love," "A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention," and "A Precise Woman." Darwish is simply Darwish-- always engaging, often astonishing.

Poetry Month: Joyce Mansour

2011-04-09T09:04:00.000-07:00

Today’s poem is from the great Joyce Mansour. She wrote in French, though hailed from Egypt, and was one of the few women (that I know of) representing surrealism. I have a love/hate relationship with surrealism, especially when it comes to poetry. A lot of it leaves me cold or irks me, but I love Mansour. This poem is one of the more popular things she wrote, probably due to the subject matter, and I include it as an intro to her work for the uninitiated. Still not convinced? Well, peep this video and see how that grabs you.

Poetry Month: Nazim Hikmet

2011-04-08T09:30:00.000-07:00

Today’s poem comes from the great Turkish poet, Nazim Hikmet. Cassandra has told me that he resembles my grandfather. I never noticed, but yeah, he does a little.

I’ve decided to read this poem as part of Robert Pinsky’s favorite poem project. It's damn good, maybe not my favorite, but who can pick a single favorite poem? (Okay, my father can. This one.)

Poetry Month: Nick Laird

2011-04-07T08:02:00.000-07:00

Two poems today by Nick Laird, one of my favorite of the younger Northern Irish crowd. Actually, he’s a favorite in any crowd. I aspire to be Nick Laird. He writes novels and poems, both very well. It is a rare thing for a writer to bounce back and forth between the two disciplines and do admirable jobs with both. His first book, To a Fault, is a fine collection of poetry, too fine for a first book (bastard); his second novel, Glover’s Mistake, was one of the finest books about bad friendships I’ve read. The hero (?) is a real bastard. I loved it. Real frienemy stuff, to emply that goofy term.

The second poem in this link is one of my favorites from his last collection. I love the idea of a stressed couple, pre-wedding, contemplating running off and eloping. He makes it sound so private, beautiful, perfect, but the last line, “We could” pretty much suggests that they won’t.

Poetry Month Kick Off: Kenneth Koch

2011-04-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

It’s national poetry month, in case you were not aware. To celebrate, I have been emailing some of my students a few poems every other day. My goal in life is to convince people that poetry can be fun. Shakespeare and Chaucer, god love them, don’t always appeal to non-English majors, thus the rest of the bunch tend to run away from poetry. Their loss, one might say, but not me. I’m on a mission.

Anyway, I’m posting this link, as it leads to a long, funny poem by Kenneth Koch, one of the New York School poets. There are a few good moments of advice here. Three lines in particular helped me through a minor crisis.

More to come.

13 Complaints Against Humanity, the Individuals and the Collective

2011-03-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

1. Lack of humor
2. Inability to understand their own ironies
3. Reluctance to embrace their contradictions
4. Ongoing need to believe in mythology
5. Disinclination toward true self-examination
6. Love of the new before its full exploration is conducted
7. Selectively upholds tradition
8. Quick to discard its relics and history
9. Revisionism
10. Quick to accept easy answers
11. Hypocrisy
12. Revels in slovenly behavior
13. Thinks it’s so goddamn special

Some Sung Heroes: Cliff Burton

2011-03-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

The last time I posted one of these it was to prop up a bass player from a great ‘80s rock band. And now it’s time to prop up another bass player from an ‘80s metal band—perhaps THE ‘80s metal band: Metallica. Now I know that James, Lars, and Kirk have pretty much rubbed their asses all over the name Metallica in almost every record since the Black Album, and though I don’t give a fig about the Black Album, and never, ever want to hear “Enter Sandman” again, I will admit that it was maybe the last time Metallica made anything worthwhile. I’m not a huge …And Justice for All fan either, though there are some quality moments on the otherwise bloated double record. Really, the only material with Newstead on it that I endorse is the killer Garage Days Re-Revisited ep, which still ranks as my favorite Metallica record. And none of it is original material!

So this last week I have been playing Master of Puppets repeatedly. Why? It was the soundtrack to much of my high school years and the opening acoustic strumming of “Battery” was how I began many a day at St. Lawrence (someone in the cafeteria or in the parking lot was always playing it on their shitty boom box). Listening to it 20 plus years after it was made, the thing still sounds pretty fresh and a whole lot better than the pro-tools, Bob Rock produced crap the band shat out in the '90s. The songs are better, the playing is faster, tighter, and the whole thing just sounds awesome. I credit a lot of this to the man on the 4-string: Cliff Burton.

In the unintentionally hilarious documentary, Some Kind of Monster, the fragments of Metallica audition their latest bass player, Rob Trujillo, and, of course, comparisons to Burton arise. I dare say it was inevitable. Burton was a unique player. He never used a pick, loved the wah-wah pedal, and played chromatic leads that threatened to shove the actual lead guitarist aside. And he was tall, long-haired, dirty looking, fond of denim jackets, had a Misfits tattoo, and, well, looked like a dirt-head. That is how I like my Metallica: looking like a bunch of dirt-heads. Not in suits, not drinking martinis, not shelling out absurd amounts of money to goofy therapists in ugly sweaters, not suing Napster. Oh they grew up, I know, and that’s fine by me, but I tuned out by the time they dubbed thee unforgiven. It just wasn’t the same anymore. Or maybe I grew up? No, that’s can’t be, because I still think “Leper Messiah” is the shit and get all excited when singing along to “stinking drunk with power!”

I once said, very unfeelingly, that the three members of Metallica who survived the bus accident actually conspired to murder Cliff Burton. Burton knew they would stop making interesting, fast, crazed metal and go on to make mainstream shitty imitations, netting them cash and losing them cred. So they pushed him out the window, as he was the one holding them back while, ironically, aiding in their best material. Obviously this is nonsense, but it seems a bit coincidental that the band’s output began drifting toward suckville after Burton’s early demise. I can’t help but wonder what Burton would be up to now. Would he too be clean and sober? Would he have cut his long hair and stuck with the band even as they made, ugh, “Unforgiven Too”? Maybe it’s best he went out when he did.

Well, there’s so much I could say about his playing, but I’ll let that speak for itself. Dust off Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets, or better yet, peep this video and watch Burton shred on that bass. Case closed.

Fear and Loathing Turns 40

2011-03-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

A damn fine piece on the classic Hunter Thompson book that has inspired a million acid trips, imitations, a movie, and far less of the conversation I think the good Dr. was trying to elicit in his stoned, quasi-revolutionary readers. I have never quite known how I feel about the book. Part of my thinks it’s an important book; part of me thinks it's self-indulgent tripe. Well, mostly I love it, but I dislike the book’s fans a bit. Kinda like how I admit that the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty is a good record, but I fucking hate Deadheads. Anyway, one commenter in this post makes the argument that the better read, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, is always eclipsed by Thompson’s search for the American dream, whatever that is. I’d agree. Still, like it or not, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is now 40, and, I suspect (though I won’t reread it) not much better for it.

Patton Oswalt Gets Hit With Bad Questions

2011-03-16T13:43:00.000-07:00

Read this horrible interview.

Patton Oswalt having a bad time being interviewed. Even when he is not being funny I laugh.

Some Sung Heroes: Michael Anthony

2011-03-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

Putting aside, for just a second, the oft debated Van Halen question, Roth or Hager (ROTH!), and ignoring, for two seconds, the recent activity of this shambles of a band, let’s look at the structure of this rock behemoth from the late ‘70s and ‘80s and see how the beast was built. An outrageous front man who performed in, as Eddie called it, the “clowny, classy” roles. Check. A killer guitarist who reinvented the way the instrument was played. Check. A competent, occasionally fantastic drummer who could keep time and land a few awesome fills. Check. A solid, underrated bass player and background vocalist who got the least amount of attention but was an irreplaceable component of the sound. Checkmate.

I get it. Eddie Van Halen is a loving father, and, as such, he can’t see that his son, Wolfgang, is no replacement for Michael Anthony, the pint sized, whiskey sippin’ bass player from Chi who went to Cali and landed a slot as the backbone of one of the best rock acts of all time. Van Halen was the shit. Their run from the debut to 1984 is a thing of rare beauty that can’t be tarnished, not even by their post Roth years. Yeah, I saw them with Sammy twice if no other reason than to see Eddie play solo for 10 of the greatest minutes of my young life, but even as I apologized for 5150 and was genuinely happier with OU812 (probably the best Hager record, though it still pales in comparison to anything from the Roth era), I was one of the many who felt that the band died when Roth left (was kicked out?). Still, I apologized for their shitty records. The guys were maturing. This was good, right? You can’t sing songs about whiskey and partying forever can you? No, you can’t, but does that mean we have to suffer through “Dreams”? Or, ugh, “Why Can’t This Be Love?” a song that broke my heart. (I remember the first time I heard it. I was on the bus coming home from St. Lawrence and one of my friends had his radio tuned to the Loop. They were the first to play the song, one we were all awaiting anxiously. We knew Hager was in, Roth was out. We were worried, we were excited, and then, three minutes later, we were depressed. It was undeniable: the new Halen sucked. But we kept quiet, forming a wordless pact to defend the song and the new incarnation of our favorite band. Still, we all knew deep down that the band was over.)

While the years have not been kind to Van Halen, Van Halen, specifically Eddie, has not been kind to his former bandmates. Yeah, he buried the hatchet with Roth long enough to cash in on a reunion, and he’ll probably reunite with Hager one of these days, but to snub Michael Anthony is unforgiveable. Even if Hager’s lyrics were more obnoxious, trite, and forgettable than Roth’s (which is saying A LOT), and his vocals were, um, reaching for heights (yeah, let’s stick with that), at least the elements of the music were kinda the same. Alex on drums, Eddie (occasionally) shredding on guitar and (often) wussing it up on the keyboard, and Anthony as anchor. But without Mike the band is definitely not the band anymore.

What makes a bass player so special? I hear that question often and I usually want to launch into a tirade in response. Perhaps it is because I played the bass or perhaps it is because I identify with the underdog, but damnit I tire of that question. Still, it needs a response. In regard to Van Halen, I’ll simply direct the listener to their best record, Fair Warning, and ask them to pay special attention to harmonics on “Dirty Movies,” the groves on “Push Comes to Shove,” and the absolute rock steady perfection of “So This is Love” all courtesy of Anthony. This is the record that was at once the peak of their career, the lowest seller, and the beginning of the end. Eddie was ready to quit. He was tired of the party songs and wanted to stretch as an artist. Roth was battling him to keep the band fun and stupid. The tug of war resulted in their most interesting record that still had some wild-n-crazy moments (“Sinners Swing!”) but focused on a considerably darker vibe (“Mean Streets” and the Goblins sounding “Sunday Afternoon in the Park”—one of my favorites). But, as Eddie struggled with the desire to write less dispensable material, Anthony had an open door to shine as the bass player he is. Legend has it that Alex and Eddie hired him after one audition, as he was the only bass player who could keep up with their odd time changes. His presence is barely felt (save for the vocals) on the first record, and the bass opening of “Running with the Devil” is kind of hilariously simple, but fuck all that. Anthony, like many gifted players, knows when to fly and when to walk. He knows well enough to leave the flashy solos to Eddie, but he’s not opposed to laying down a tight bass line where he can. There’s ample evidence that the guy is a workhorse of a player overshadowed by one of the hardest rock musicians in the world to overshadow. Still, to ignore the guy, to kick him out of the band and replace him with a kid, well, that’s just rude. Eddie will always be remembered as a stunning guitarist (rightfully so). Roth will always be remembered as a showman. Let’s hope there’s a little space in the books for Mike as well.

New QC

2011-03-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

The newest, latest Quarterly Conversation is up with some great essays and reviews. Among the highlights, a discussion of Bernhard— one writer I feel everyone ought to read— a review of a fascinating looking book on Latin American dictators, and reviews of The Ecco Anthology I assisted with, which, as the author notes, is far from perfect (way too many poems by Milosz) but, nevertheless, is a killer book (by the way, WWB has a new anthology out of Middle Eastern lit that is next on my list, thank you Cassandra), and this review of Zukofsky that cements my decision to never read his sprawling opus.

C’mon get happy!

2011-03-07T08:04:00.000-08:00

Her birthday was over the weekend, and I tend not blog during weekend hours, so belated shout out to the one and only Cassandra, mi amor, mi niña, mi vida, mi todo, mi esposa. Besos para ti.

Happy Birthday, Dad

2011-02-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

My father’s birthday is today, so, in his honor, I am going to defend the Rolling Stones, his favorite rock band, and go against my instincts in the whole Beatles v. Stones debate. For the record, I prefer a few Beatles songs to most of the Stones’ catalog, but my mood is shifting. “Cry Baby Cry” and “Taxman” are great enough to make me a Bealtes guy, but really the Kinks and the Who are better than pretty much all else from the era. But I digress…

10 reasons why the Stones are better than the Beatles:

1. The Stones didn’t write “Oh Blah-Dee, Oh Blah-Dah”

2. While the Beatles merely made an off joke about being bigger than Jesus, the Stones hinted at real Satanism. That’s hardcore!

3. John and Paul might have smoked some grass and dropped acid but neither of them knew the fury of heroin. Keith, love him or hate him, is a rock star who’s danced with the skag.

4. Two words: GIMMIE SHELTER!

5. The Beatles sang “all you need is love”; the Stones sang “I’m a flea bit peanut monkey, all my friends are junkies!” Who would you rather party with?

6. The Stones never let their drummer sing.

7. The Beatles had many phases, mostly cute and relatively harmless. The Stones made a record called Sticky Fingers with a pair of pants and a working zipper on the cover. For all intents and purposes, the Beatles were pretty sexless and sex is an essential component of rock and roll.

8. The Beatles stopped touring. The Stones never will. Okay, these last few decades have been a joke as far as that’s concerned, but a real rock band plays live. They sweat it out on stage. They live a chuck of their lives on the road. They miss birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries to play gigs. The Stones might charge absurd fees for their shows, and they may be long past relevant, but they know that rock and roll lives in a concert venue.

9. The Stones managed to make disco palatable.

10. One of the Stone’s tamer songs, “Under My Thumb” was the soundtrack to a murder at Altamont. Even the slower material is pretty dangerous.

"She's Always Been So Hard to Figure Out"

2011-02-18T08:02:00.001-08:00

I am not a Tom Petty fan. That being said, I don’t dislike his music, but there’s just not much to write home (or blog) about. A few songs are pretty good (“American Girl”) and a few, well, not so much (“Into the Great Wide Open” which contains a line he lifted from Paul Westerberg, which can be assumed since the Replacements opened for Petty shortly before he shat out that terrible song). Anyway, this is the one song that pretty much justifies Petty’s continued, otherwise baffling existence. Thanks to the internet, I don't have to buy the CD to enjoy this lost gem.

Just thought I’d share.

Fish’s Sentence

2011-02-16T14:09:00.000-08:00

Funny, grating, spot-on review. Stanley Fish is an interesting figure, and I admit an interest in some of his essays and even this book, though the thought of it also makes me want to run far away.

Dibs!

2011-02-09T13:56:00.000-08:00

In all the years I have lived in Chicago, with and without a car, I have never condoned the practice of calling dibs after digging out a parking spot. Yesterday, I did it. I caved. I had spent, collectively, about four hours tending a spot right in front of my apartment, digging the snow, piling it on the grass, salting the area around the tires, cleaning off the car itself, scooping up the snow from the car and depositing it away from the road so it would not impede anyone else on the block. I did not drive for days as a result of this effort. The question of whether or not it is ethical, justified, and, damn it, just plain right to call dibs on a piece of city property weighed heavily upon weary head. In the end, I decided that if everyone else on my street was doing it, so would I.

My logic centered on the idea of martial law, or some version of it. Basically it goes like this: in a state of emergency, and a blizzard counts, minus proper authority, a separate entity shall rule. In this case the people of Chicago are the de facto leaders of parking regulations.

This is, of course, bullshit. No one can call dibs on a spot with a lawn chair. Not legally. I did hear a story (from a “friend-of-a-friend” source) about a woman who called the police when someone took her reserved spot and the cop sided with her over the usurper. That story was the last bit I needed to tip my scales on the side of dibs.

Remember the Seinfeld joke about kid law? He had this whole bit about “callin’ it” and how, once a child does this, the other kids know that the called object is solely the property of that child. It was air tight, unquestionable, just. Perhaps this is the sort of experience that is too early and too often imbued within us, leading to unrealistic expectations and bastardly senses of entitlement. We’ve entered adulthood; time to leave the kid rules in the schoolyard.

Nevertheless, I was pissed when I got home last night and saw that my markers—a bucket, box, and broom—were removed and someone had jacked my spot. I contemplated recourse. Should I, like the woman in the dubious story, call the cops and complain? Key the car? Piss on the locks? Break a window?

In the end, I found another spot (a frigid block away) and left a note under the wiper. I penned the first draft of this note, an angry screed employing four letter words and righteous indignation, in my car. This I revised after calming a bit—I thought it better to express my displeasure without great insult. I settled on “jerk” over “motherfucker.”

If there is a universal force that watches over us, perhaps I had offended it with my arrogance. Only a few hours earlier I had discussed this very subject with both my classes. The aim of this discussion was to spot both sides of an argument. I asked if it was fair to claim a parking spot. Almost all of my students said it was. I asked if it was right to assume that no one else should take it. They all seemed to agree with one young man who said it was dead wrong and that he would bust the window of a car if he found it in his space. Was there no argument against calling dibs? “I dug it out, so, um, it’s mine!” That summed it all up. One earns the right to claim the spot after spending all that time and energy. Or so we all agreed. A fine thing, a classroom—we solve so many of the world’s problems. Sadly, the real world does not recognize our authority.

So I’m done calling dibs. The one argument that I cannot beat is the one my brother once voiced: you live in the city, you take all that comes with living in the city, including high sales tax, “vintage” apartments, crime, the fallible CTA, bad winters, and, yes, parking difficulties. If you want a secure parking spot, then move to the suburbs. Suck it up. You choose to live here. You can’t call dibs on Lake Michigan and expect people not to go swimming.

Goddamn, Nick. I hate to admit it, but that argument is tough to beat.

Proof That I am Now a Dog Person

2011-02-09T12:55:00.000-08:00

Some of us opted to skip the Super Bowl in favor of this.

PS: you’d be a dog person too if this is what waited for you every night.

Stairway to Theft?

2011-02-04T10:31:00.000-08:00

The greatest (most overplayed) rock song ever… was it stolen? Decide for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czfI66yQUkk

PS: Thanks, Carla.

Dalkey's Blunder

2011-02-03T14:39:00.000-08:00

A great not-so-little post at Three Percent from an author who had her story changed by the hands of an editor at the otherwise fantastic Dalkey Archive. Dalkey and Open Letter represent two of the better lit in translation sources, though there's a bit of bad blood under the bridge.

If you ask me, aside from New Directions, Dalkey is tops. They publish lost treasures and exciting new voices, champion the avant-garde, and insist that every book they publish stay in print forever. Their press boasts G. Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, Flann O'Brien, Carlos Fuentes, Dubravka Ugresic (though she's moved over to Open Letter), and a host of other notables. I am always excited to see new additions to their press and have a tall stack of their titles waiting to be read. (Retirement can't come quick enough.)

That being said (writ), this blunder looks bad. If this is Dalkey's regular practice and not a egregious error on the part of some editor (and Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian-American writer one would think sympathetic to such concerns, supposedly edits the annual collection of Best European Fiction), this does call into question the ethics of Dalkey. I understand they are small, busy, probably under-funded, but still, it's not too much trouble to send copy to the writer before printing, right? Let's just move on and assume this was a one time slip and that John O'Brien (who did once write a rather obnoxious essay about literature in translation) and Co. are better than this.

Some Sung Heroes: Dale Crover

2011-01-23T09:52:00.000-08:00

Dear lord, there is no end of love for John Bonham, and unless your name was Keith Moon, there’s no reason to look elsewhere, right? The man defined rock drumming for generations. Aside from that legend, names like Steward Copeland get mentioned, rightfully so. Neil Peart is also thrown into the discussion, and yeah, the guy is fantastic, but his own arrogant refrain of “I’m not a drummer; I’m a percussionist!” has pretty much made me want to write him off for good. In short: fuck you, Neil. Talk to me when you your band makes a good record again. It’s been a decade or two.

Rock drummers are living in these tall shadows, and, to date, few rise above them. Some think Dave Grohl the only candidate for contemporary master of the skins. Bullshit, says I.
It was with great annoyance that I endured the following conversation with a coworker:

Him: Hey, do know what the best live rock album is?

Me: Live at Leeds.

Him: Yeah, that’s good, but it’s definitely Nirvana’s From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkay.

Me: No, it’s Live at Leeds.

Him: You should check this out. Dave Grohl is the best drummer since Bohnam.

Me: No, that’d be Dale Crover.

And that’s the problem: Grohl is famous, mostly for his post-Nirvana hijinks (fuck the Foo Fighters) and Crover is a cult hero to legions of Melvins fans that are certain they’ll never hear better drumming than on the first half of “Skin Horse” or the what-the-fuck opening drum parts of “Boris” (the heaviest song ever recorded?). But aside from being the guy who pounds hardest on the drums, Crover is versatile and adds a distinctive sound to the kit. Few drummers manage to add personality to their beats and fills, but I can always tell that it's Crover when I hear a Melvilns record. Anyone might have filled in on Nevermind and done an equally adequate job. Anyway, Cobain famously gave Grohl so much shit for not being Dale Crover, who helped shape the sound of Bleach by lending his talents to that record. It’s no secret that Cobain modeled his band after the Melvins. He worshipped them and even tried to join once, long before he was the Kurt Cobain. Subsequently, whoever was filling in as Nirvana’s drummer had an impossible task presented to them, as no one could be Crover but Crover.

This is not to say that the Melvins are a better band than Nirvana (though they are) or that Crover deserves Grohl’s recognition (he does) but simply to point the unaware away from Dave “I’m a rockstar!” Grohl and his mediocrity and show them the way a real individual approaches the kit. Aside from Dave Lombardo, the before mentioned Stewart Copeland, and yeah sure, I’ll thrown Peart a bone, no other rock drummer has created such a unique presence that elevates their playing to more than keeping time. Keith Moon will always be a better drummer to me than John Bohnam simply because he tore down the expectations of what it meant to be a drummer and made the job his own. Crover has done the same, more than anyone else I can think of outside the world of jazz.

Unreal

2011-01-21T08:28:00.000-08:00

Read all about a night. last week, in Tunis.

Thinking of Tunisia

2011-01-17T06:54:00.000-08:00

A lot has been going on in Tunis this last week, and my thoughts have been with the friends I made out there, the people who showed me and mine the highest level of hospitality I have ever known. I sincerely hope that when the smoke of this week’s chaos clears a more equitable and compassionate government is installed and that the history of so many countries does not repeat itself in Tunisia.

In thinking about this whole damn thing, I remembered this poem, which I do not pretend to fully grasp, yet this line “I still don't know what the wind will bring” seemed pretty apt. Poetry solves little, but here I go referring back to anyway.

Some Sung Heroes: Bob Stinson

2011-01-14T13:50:00.000-08:00

Page, Hendrix, Clapton, Beck… the greatest guitarists in rock history, right? Um, yeah, I guess, but who gives a fuck? Stones or Beatles? What does it matter? Enough has been said, written, and endured in the name of these classic rockers. Why spend more energy discussing them? Okay, they made some great music (some greater than others), but I propose a series of informal, half-assed (what else would you expect?) posts on some lesser discussed figures, though, what with the internet making all cult art no longer quiet works of out-of-proportion worship, there’s clearly more than enough on these guys as well. Still, I’m throwing some more space their way. Why not?

Why? I’ll tell you why.

I asked for Hootenanny by the Replacements for Xmas this year. I got it. Rhino has reissued all the records by the legendary group—every 80s/90s alternative rock fan’s favorite. I was a mad nut for the Replacements myself, discovering them late in their career and not long before their demise, though the real Replacements, as some would argue, died when they kicked out Bob Stinson. We’re coming up on the 16th anniversary of his death, which makes him my candidate for the first of Hungry Inferno’s Some Sung Heroes.

Stinson represents the first half of the Replacements’ career: drunk, sloppy, and brilliant simultaneously. Some have said that anything could have happened at a Replacements concert, but really only one of two things were possible: you’d see a brilliant rock show or a total disaster. Both, allegedly, were great fun. They were notorious substance abusers who would play shows consisting of almost only cover songs that they barely knew how to play. As a sloppy guitar player who faked his way through shitty covers that were all winged, off key messes, the Replacements represented something wonderful: the possibility that anyone could make rock and roll magic, no matter how wasted. But there was far more to the band than drunken louts butchering Muddy Waters. Paul Westerberg was (is) a fantastic writer of enduring songs that have earned him his well-deserved reputation. But it was Bob Stinson, his foil, who added to these gems the out-of-control element essential to the ‘Mats’ sound.

Stinson’s dislike of the new direction (less shambolic, more melodic) and intense drinking and drugging got him kicked out of the band, an act that always seemed cold to the fans, but we didn’t have to live with him. All accounts are that this was next to impossible, and the worst place for a manic depressive addict to be is in a rock band. His half-brother was still a member, to the bitter end. That had to make for some awkward Thanksgivings. From all the reports, and there are many if you look, Stinson’s last days were as a couch surfer popping up often in many bands centered in his native Minneapolis where all too many people were willing to buy him a drink and feed him dope. (Echoes of Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, other great drunks killed, some day, by their fans.) Few in the world of big rock noticed when he died, but Spin and Rolling Stone gave the guy his due, sort of. One of them said something like, “No one could fuck up a guitar solo like Bob Stinson.” True, true, but the recklessness that did him in helped make an otherwise fine band a little riskier and a lot more interesting. I’m one of the annoying fucks who think the Replacements were never the same post-Bob. (This is not to say I only like the rocking ‘Mats—oh no. “Swinging Party” and “Androgynous” are two of my favorites.) The band seemed always on the brink of implosion and Stinson’s departure, while making room for a few so-so, considerably calmer records, can be read as the first step down, but that seems neither here nor there. The band “matured” some but listening back to their final performance at the Taste of Chicago, only somewhat. Really, no one, including the members of the band, expected them to last forever.

Westerberg is always going to be remembered as the heart-on-his-sleeve, unsatisfied rocker with a gift for penning inspired, enduring songs. Tommy Stinson has a good gig going in G&R, though many Replacements fans are overlooking that (or not holding it against him—we all gotta eat). Chris Mars apparently paints and has retired from music. The ‘Mats have grow up and moved on. Bob Stinson has moved on for good, but here’s hoping the recent reissues resurrect his name.

Bolaño Non-Fiction

2011-01-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

One of the defining qualities of Bolaño’s work, the one that maybe interests me most, is the digression. His books are full of them, and while they often lead back to the supposed topic, they usually go in more interesting places. I’ve tried to work digressions into things before, to terrible effect, and so I admire essays like this, from the forthcoming non-fiction collection, very much. This coming book is one I am eagerly anticipating. It’s been a while (relatively speaking) since I’ve been anxious for a book to be translated (not since 2666, really) and while I love the Bolaño short story collections that New Directions has put out, I find them to be a mixed bag. The novels are where it’s at, and it looks like the best of Bolaño’s fictions has now been published in English. I must then turn my attention to the essays (out this year!).

State of the Mind

2011-01-13T08:44:00.001-08:00

As Cassandra pointed elsewhere in cyberland, I have been struck with an unfortunate problem since attending a dinner party last weekend: the song “Bitches Ain’t Shit” by Dr. Dre won’t leave my head. No amount of alternative songs, catchy as they are, will scrub this tune from the gray matter.

Art That Changed My Life: Brazzaville

2011-01-12T11:54:00.000-08:00

Ah, Brazzaville. I have been listening to little else these last few months. Each record reveals something new and exciting to these here ears, though I suspect I am merely going through a period where RAWK! and/or roll is doing less and less for me. Maybe not. I still love the rock, the hip-hip, punk, jazz, and all the things Brazzaville is not (not quite) but it’s nice to mix it up from time to time even if that means slowing down and taking it easy for a fucking change. So to those less initiated but perhaps interested, here’s my loose review of the first four records (I’ve yet to pick up the last 2 released or David Brown’s solo effort). Also, here’s a link to the band’s website where you can read all about the band, their manifesto, the progress they are making to secure a massive floating studio space/artist’s retreat, and all else relevant: http://www.brazzaville-band.com/

Brazzaville (aka: 2002)

Debuts are tough. One assumes that an artist would pack it full of all they got and make the best impression possible, right? Damn straight. Zappa did it. Zeppelin did it. Ween did it. Brazzaville did it. The start to Brown’s career was as a saxophonist for Beck and the influence is noticeable here. While I don’t listen to much Beck, I can discern how he had a direct impact on Brazzaville, but I don’t give a monkey’s whatever. This is a goddamn great record, start to finish packed with gems and not a moment of filler. It’s lush, baby, lush and only occasionally delves into the “Rock” label that my desktop media player applied. Aside from some screaming guitar parts on “Sewers of Bangkok” there are more horns and keys and faux-tropical elements and so forth to be found (and enjoyed). Lazy keyboards and infectious melodies galore, the gem of the record is “Voce” with its chorus in Portuguese and air of ultra hip, laidback cool. Another bonus, Joe Frank, one of my ten favorite Americans, contributes a monologue to the song “Oceans,” which fits in with Brazzaville’s aesthetic perfectly.

One of the most striking things here is how different this is compared to the records that followed. Oh, the essential qualities are in order and would be recycled to great effect on subsequent releases, but this record is a kitchen sink and all production where every instrument seems to be in competition with the others for attention, whereas later albums feature steady melodies accented by the occasional trombone or electric piano solo. The effect is somewhat chaotic for a Brazzaville record, though that is like saying that the 5th Symphony is chaotic for Beethoven. This is a busy record, very busy, but not overwhelming. Still, listen to this record back to back with, say, Hastings Street and it feels pretty damn intricate. I suspect Brown has mellowed a bit and realized that one does not need to put all their tricks into the mix, so to speak, to make a great record. Evidence of this is found on the follow up…

Somnabulista

On the website, Brown states that he felt at one point that every moment of this record was worthless, which is probably what most artists feel about a lot of their work. When I read that I laughed, as, to me, this is a near perfect record that is definitely the best one to hear first. Aside from containing some great songs, it runs the gamut of what the band is capable of. “Air Mail” is an impossibly cool and catchy song about a hobo who just threw it all away (and doesn’t everyone get tempted to do that?); “Foreign Disaster Days” feels simple and direct but I get tripped up on lines like “Memories of her face drag me down like heroin” and “There’s nothing like a car bomb. Window shopping at 3:00.” Shortly after this run through the fake reggae and tropicali sound comes “Boeing” a straight up rocker with a fantastic chorus: “Boeing, carry me away. Help me press erase on all of my stupid mistakes.” Again, who can’t relate?

All of these tunes seem pretty flawlessly composed and produced, save for “Casa Batllo” which I often skip. Not a bad song, it’s just the only one that feels a touch forced. Buy hey, this is still a great record that never fails to take me to a wonderful place. I feel oddly uplifted when I hear this, as opposed to…

Rouge on Pockmarked Cheeks

The first time I heard this CD I was disappointed. I was hoping for another Somnabulista. It is not. It’s far gloomier, mellower, stranger. It is now my favorite of all the Brazzaville records. This is largely due to me listening to it while driving in the rain, at night, stuck in traffic and trying to figure out a better route from the north of Chicago to Cicero. In such a frustrating situation I normally go mad, scream, want to hit things, but Brazzaville soothed me.

Apparently, Brown was not in a good place when he made this one—depressed, he sings of loneliness, dissatisfaction, failure, drugs, many of the usual Brazzaville themes, but here put to full effect. Whereas songs like “Air Mail” and “Shams” celebrate vagabond life (to an extent), or at least deal somewhat with the negative aspects of such a life, the tracks here do not shy away or romanticize the downtrodden existence. “Motel Room” sounds like just that: a dirty, sad, motel room where one can mediate on the angst and defeat of weary travel; “1980” delivers this feeling via some haunting arrangement and instrumentation. “High Life”—I song I used to hate—is a direct confrontation of, well, the high life. “N. Koreatown” is an ode to Brown’s youth when he lived homeless in that area of L.A. doing drugs and panhandling, like one of the many annoying homeless white kids that populate big cities. It seems Brown would have fit in well on Hasting Street, which is probably why he wrote a song about that junkie laden area of Vancouver (more on that in a bit).

The real highlights of this record: “Samurai” which is six minutes of slow working darkness adorned with muted horns and a ceaseless nylon string guitar working under gorgeous vocals (Brown’s not nearly as much as his female co-singer); “Rainy Night”—maybe my favorite Brazzaville song—is the only real up tempo number here, though even this one is fairly restrained; “Genoa” is a steady, slow, haunting number with out of control electric piano working out over a repetitive beat and single note guitar picking. The lyrics of the song conjure up riots and destruction (“Anarchists tearing up the beltway. Molotovs as if they knew the right way”) incongruent with the quiet, controlled music. Gotta love that! And then we have what is maybe my least favorite song on the record musically and favorite lyrically: “Xanax and Three Hours of TV” a “post 9/11 song” that focuses on the ennui of our American lives where there is no E. E. Cummings, Mark Twain, or Martin Luther King to be found, only pointless distraction, self-medicating, “online porn and SUVs.”

Suspecting that Brown might have ridden this train all the way to crazytown, I was somewhat anxious to hear the follow up, which, based on the direction Brown went here, not to mention the title and cover photo of the next record, promised to be bleak. What a surprise…

Hastings Street

The cover art depicts what I assume is a typical junkie from the Eastside Downtown area of Vancouver (represent!). And yeah, there are moments that feel dire and sad, but overall the mood of this record is pretty upbeat. Mostly there are love songs to be found on this one, some good (“Old Folks”) some not so much (“Dark Eyes”) but fear not: “Hastings Street” is indeed a downer. Ditto “Single Apartment.” Other tunes are still a mystery (I admit I’ve only had this record a short time and am still warming up to it). “Love is the Answer” seems like a love long but the lyrics betray a deeper sense of desperation. Really, the crux of the record is “Night Train to Moscow” which is kind of a sad number that probably seems that way to me because of that goddamn accordion. When I hear the chorus I get all sad and shit, but I think that has a lot to do with my listening to the song right before dropping off my dog for a week with his babysitter before jetting off to Vancouver and feeling like I was abandoning the little pooch. Yeah, I’m a big sap for the little dog, but the song stayed in my head as I walked him that night and I was oddly very fucking blue.

Anyway, aside from making me blubber in such a manner, Hastings Streets contains the tune “Asteroid Field” which may be the most beautiful song Brown will ever write. It pretty much carries side two and leaves the listener in a good place near the exit. Really, this is kind of a mixed bag of good, okay, and occasionally great moments, more than a lot of artists can boast. And, like I said, I am still digesting the record so who knows—it may turn out to be my favorite someday.

So that’s it, my quick review and half-assed attempt at describing the work of David Brown, man behind the band Brazzaville. Back to reality now.

The Worst From the Worst

2010-12-23T07:20:00.000-08:00

A hilarious list, even if I don’t agree with all of it. But I will say this: as little as I have read of Franzen, I really just don’t give a fuck about his work. He sets his sights on being the next Faulkner but I just can’t get past his persona, which I fully admit is media created and cobbled from out of context sound bites largely pulled from the Oprah debacle. Still, I just can’t get it within myself to read more than a page of his so-called great American novels. I very well might be missing some brilliant fiction, but when I heard him on NPR reading from his latest, almost universally praised novel, I was annoyed, bored, and depressed. Is this what we want: big toothless examinations of the American upper-middle class? I suppose their stories are as significant as anyone’s, but I don’t give a damn at the moment. When Franzen dies, maybe I’ll care, as is the case with his buddy, David Foster Wallace, who annoyed the shit out of me right up until the moment he killed himself. Oddly, I am only now getting interested, but maybe that says more about me.

Anyway, I did recently purchase Adam Levin’s The Instructions, which is big, literally and figuratively. It is rare that I buy a book from the McSweeney’s press, but I am partial to this tome as it was written by an instructor at Roosevelt, is a first novel by a Chicagoan, and is ambitious as fuck. I applaud ambition, even if it falls flat. So I was not on board with David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at the time of its publication, but maybe I can get in on the ground floor of another Illinois writer of big, meandering, PoMo fiction. And if it sucks, well I can use the 1,000 pager as a weapon. I can find Mr. Levin in the halls of RU and bludgeon him (metaphorically). Either way, I thought I’d take a chance on the thing, even if it popped up on this worst of 2010 list. More on that someday.

Lastly, let me say that "worst of" lists are annoying as shit and evidence of an asshole author, as in the case of the worst American writers list from Anis Shivani that caused a bunch of discussion, debate, and fist shaking. These lists are great fun but should be regarded as more junk food than criticism. I love a slice of pizza too, but bran is better for me. Oh well, it’s the holidays; enjoy some intellectual eggnog.

North American Cities

2010-12-07T08:03:00.000-08:00

In an interview, the great G. Cabrera Infante was asked about his exile from Cuba, to which he replied (paraphrase) that he was not exiled from Cuba, but from Havana. I have long made this distinction in regard to my status as a Chicagoan who happens to live also in the United States of America. I’ve never been what you might call a patriot (patriotism kind of annoys me), but I understand a bit of the loving something because it is so familiar thing when it comes to cities. That being said, I have been trying to travel as much as possible in my late 30s so that I might explore the world, obviously, but also as a means of weighing the whole Chicago vs. Everywhere Else mentality that I, for some dumb reason, evince whenever someone talks shit about my kinda town.

Example: I went to London a few years back, and (as reported in a long ago post) found myself defending my city to an expat from North Carolina. I was annoyed not so much because the guy was measuring London vs. Chicago (why bother?) but because of the automatic assumption that London, or anywhere else, was somehow better. Had he evidence, even anecdotal in nature, or had he any real experience to back up his boasts, then maybe I’d let it go, but to my knowledge he had none. Mostly I was annoyed at myself for stepping up and defending my town. It all seems rather foolish, and I admit to being the worst proponent of us-against-them, but it’s difficult to avoid. I can be as critical of Chicago as the next guy, but when confronted by those who want to talk some shit about the great stacker of wheat, I will throw down.

In the interest of being slightly less provincial, though somewhat domestic, let me talk a bit about the great cities of North America that rival my beloved Chicago. I am omitting the bits about other parts of the world as I have probably written on them already and with a lot of fanfare, a whole bunch of sound and fury signifying sweet fuck all. For the record: Lisbon was magic, Paris is beautiful, Taipei was surreal, Tunis incredible, and I am anxious to see Spain, Italy, Russia, Ireland, Japan, Chile, Argentina, Cuba (please, Mr. President, lift the embargo), and a bit more of Africa. But let’s stick with this continent for the length of this post.

Cities to Rival Chicago:

Vancouver

A special place in my heart, primarily because the great Carla lives there, but also because it was when I was there last (the first time—though a second trip looms) that I discovered how a city can be both urban and yet retain much of nature in its construction. Parts of town contain the asphalt, glass, and steel that comprises my view of a proper city, yet getting to trees, water, and mountains is a snap. It is a clean city that would appear to be in perfect balance were it not also for the east side of downtown and the street called Hastings. Of course, a city without a slum is pretty hard to come by, and Vancouver is no exception. Hastings Street remains a skid row that I had only imagined possible before seeing it with my own eyes. Junkies stagger like zombies and shout their odd exclamations—it’s very exciting! We went through it in the rain, which seemed the best way to see the sights. It was bizarre and, oddly, sort of beautiful.

Speaking of slums, let’s talk about the D.F.:

Mexico City

Is there a more baffling city? Those who think New York is difficult to navigate (it isn’t), or that Chicago’s diagonal streets are confusing, should try to make sense of the immense, complex, and expansive spectacle of Mexico City. The city has it all: grit, grime, slums, tall buildings, gorgeous neighborhoods, fine dining, public art, history, grandeur, a huge population, and the most frightening highways on the continent. There may be speed limits, but I didn’t notice them. Certainly no driver obeyed them if they do exist. Getting around town may be easy for locals, or even seasoned visitors, but I admit to being confused when I, a mere passenger, was trying to map the streets and find my way through the labyrinthine city. A fond, excruciating memory: trying to find the Mercado Insurgentes, which the lovely Cassandra had visited years prior, and which our driver was sure didn’t exist. Finding it was like looking for the lost city of gold (in this case: diamonds, silver, and knock-off crafts), but it was worth the effort not only to finally get to the fabled market but also for the experience of seeing so much of the sprawling city, even if by wayward vehicle. We essentially settled on El Zócalo as a drop off/meeting place. It’s hard not to find your way to the large plaza and from its nucleus spring many streets, all of them filled with shops, cafés, and all those urban elements that seduce me. The slum we saw (not far from El Zócalo, closer to Garibaldi and the famed street mariachis) was best seen at night, as the night provided cover. Rolling through that part of town in the day might have resulted in trouble; it’s easier to be spotted as a tourist in the light.

San Cristobel

As wonderfully complex and urban as Mexico City is, San Cristobel is infinitely more laid back, though still very urban, at least in its core. Shops, street vendors, and churches (sadly infested with American hippies) adorn the landscape, and it is easy to feel centered but even easier to get lost. The proximity of mountains and predominance of Mayan culture color the town well, offering the humble Yankee a bit of escape. I loved the town when I was there—I loved walking at night through the plaza and the streets, hitting shops, getting food, taking it easy, and, unfortunately, getting sick. But as ill as I was, I still felt happy to be in that magic city.

New York

Okay, I’ll admit it: I liked New York a whole lot when I finally got there (almost a year ago). I had so many planned trips, all of them failed, and it started to seem as though I would never see the so-called big apple. It also seemed that it might be for the best. How else but disappointed could anyone feel after years of preparation? I mythologized the city far too much (as have many far too often) to not be let down. But, saints be praised, the fucking town was pretty grand. Brooklyn charmed and Manhattan delighted. Aside from a few touristy snafus (Times Square—to be seen once in your life—was as close to hell as I’d like to get; The Strand was a disappointment), the city appealed in all the ways I thought it would. Obviously there are the requisite skyscrapers. There is also nature, though mostly in the rather imposing famed Central Park, and pizza on every corner (some better than others, none of it as good as Chicago’s finest deep dish) (sorry, I had to resort to some Chi v NYC shit for a moment). I even found a great bookstore, which, though I am sure there are plenty others in and about the town, seem to be a dying entity these digital days. Harlem was a highlight, as I am rather fond of and intrigued by the Harlem Renaissance (I, as you may know or suspect, tend to contextualize cities and counties by their literary history), and walking down from uptown to midtown before seeing Fela! on Broadway was the topper of the trip. My favorite part of the island might be the East Village with its gritty appeal and hip vibe. Also it’s where Bongwater, The Lounge Lizards, and all those cool 80s-90s cats hung their hats. Oh yes, I’d give New York another dance, though I can't really see myself living there. Those born and bred are not so bad, but there may be no more annoying creature than the person who moves to NYC and immediately decides that all else is empty prairie. It’s like when I quit smoking—my biggest fear was that I’d become an aggravating non-smoker. (For the record, I am a reformed smoker.) I can’t imagine going east and suddenly boring my friend from Chicago with tales of the city, how much better everything is over there, how it is the “greatest city in the world,” a self-proclamation New Yorkers like to boast, proving beyond a doubt how deluded they are.

Moving on… let’s talk about the big easy:

New Orleans

A recent trip to this town, my first visit, though I hope to go back often, made me think that life outside Chicago was possible. Oh yes, I know—there is life all over the world, probably all over the universe, but I have long said (worried?) that I might not be able to exist outside of Chicago. I go to these places with an eye on moving. Could I thrive and survive in San Francisco, Seattle, Albuquerque, Portland, Kansas City, Asheville, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, or any of the other places I’ve seen? Sure, I could, but I don’t seem willing. No, Chi has claws and those claws dig deep. Nevertheless, it was while walking through the French Quarter, newly married and all aglow, having visited Faulkner’s house turned a bookstore, a café au lait sitting well in my stomach, that I thought a life in that town would be fine and sweet. Well, then I realized that the hurricanes might prove a challenge, not to mention the sweltering summers, and a local (originally from the north) informed me that while life was slower in the big easy, there were downsides. If he needed an electrician, say, it might be a while. People took a relaxed attitude to work, not a bad thing per se, but it sometimes bites one in the ass. When you need a job done quickly, you might not get so lucky. Accustomed as I am to quick turn-around, this might prove grating. No, I think regular trips to New Orleans sound good, with the base of operations elsewhere. Still, I will always hold the town dear, as it is where I made my legal union with my beloved.

So that’s it, for now. I have yet to see Boston and much of New England. I want to visit the southwest a little more and maybe some more of that California I’ve heard so much about. But these are my favorite North American cities in no real order. I’m off to Vancouver at the end of the month to do some recon, enjoy the snow, and see if junkies freeze in winter. More on that when I return.

Ecco Anthology Review

2010-11-18T07:33:00.000-08:00

Read here Three Percent’s review of the Ecco anthology that I had a small hand in bringing to light (small, but the process felt enormous). While it is not a perfect anthology (a few too many poems by the already widely read Milosz, not as many lesser known poets, lots of Europeans, not so many Africans or Asians, the terrible exclusion of Joyce Mansour, Roque Dalton, and Ernesto Cardenal), it is really a fantastic book with a wider breadth than you’ll find in most other poetry anthologies. If nothing more, it is a good introduction to international poetry for some and a nice collection of some favorites, and a few new surprises, for the more seasoned lit in translation reader.

Things I Dig These Days

2010-11-09T12:50:00.000-08:00

For no other reason than I can, here’s a list of shit I’m digging:

Brazzaville

Not the city, the band. And what a band. Comprised of a man, a mission, and some fantastic musicians, Brazzaville makes uniquely laid back, compelling, easily digested sounds with difficult to digest content. Check this line out: “It’s our weakness that makes us beautiful to God, That’s what she said. If your life’s too safe you might as well be dead.” With lyrics like that (not to mention: “She smiled a lot for a girl who was raped”) one could say I am predisposed to liking this band, though the music (usually mellow, occasionally rocking, effortlessly cool) has hooks enough to keep me on the proverbial line. I mean, what more do you need to know about a song called "Lazy, Flawed & Hopeless"? Mostly it’s the feel of the band, if that makes sense, that makes me want to buy the entire catalog and spend weeks inside their moody little world. There’s something philosophically interesting about Brazzaville, something more indie than indie rock and more genuinely artistic than affected, although Mr. Brown (the man behind the music) is at times given to that “up all night doing coke and drinking, smoking endless cigarettes, drowning in ennui, sleeping with damaged people” kind of hipness that can rub any number of wrong ways. But I like it this time, I really do. The closest I can equate this “feel” to is “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. There’s joy in the failure and a mixed bag of uncertainty in the desultory behavior.

The Double Macchiato

It took going to New Orleans to rediscover this gem of a drink. Back in my coffee abuse days, I opted for the macchiato on the daily, baby, but Starbucks fucked this drink in the ass. I could only find it at Seattle’s Best, though only at a few locations where the baristas had done time in smaller, better venues. They knew what was what. Starbucks decided to reinvent the macchiato as a large drink with lots of caramel and milk, which is like remaking The Seventh Seal as romantic comedy. Subsequently, I was unable to find a good macchiato, as Starbucks tends to set the trends for all other cafes.

The drink’s appeal is its brevity: two shots of espresso (or one, if you prefer), topped with foam from steamed milk and, if you dare, a touch of powdered cocoa. I prefer the shots with just the dab of foam, literally marking the espresso as the Italian name suggests, and that’s all she fucking wrote. Okay, a little sugar if the mood strikes, but the great thing here is how simple, short, and direct the drink is. It’s more than espresso, but far less than a latte. I don’t like giant coffee drinks these days, and a little bit can go a long way. PJ’s, a fantastic chain in the Big Easy, served a fine macchiato, the best I’ve had in ages, and I have spent the past few days looking for a suitable Chicago substitute. I think I’ve found two wonderful surrogates, one at LaVazza (two locates near work!) and another at my favorite Loop café, a place too special to my heart to name here for fear that people will find this little secret out and flood the already pressed space.

Bad Marriage Literature

I’ve been reading the worst books about marriage lately, including Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband and Farwell to the Sea by Reinaldo Arenas. Both paint pretty grim pictures of the married life, though there’s certainly no shortage of that in art (Revolutionary Road and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? come to mind). The next big read might be Rhode Island Notebook by Gabriel Gudding, which chronicles one man’s back-and-forth trips from Illinois to Rhode Island to see his wife, though I hear the whole thing goes awry. The destruction of passion is nothing new in the arts, but finding these interesting twists is what makes the theme an appealing rediscovery. For example, Carson uses Keats’s famous line that “beauty is truth” to reflect on her cheating spouse; Arenas writes of a married couple in communist Cuba, the husband being a closest homosexual who entered the union as a means of avoiding jail; Gudding seems to have constructed his poetry on the fragile, oddly philosophic state that overtakes us while on the road. Good twists on the old story certainly help. If you must, call these cautionary tales.

Fall

I love this time of year, but usually by November the weather is too cold for these bones. But lord oh lord the last few days have been glorious. I have been, of course, too goddamn busy to truly enjoy the weather, but the few moments when I can steal a walk with Cassandra and the dog, all of us dressed in our fall finery—I must say I look best in a comfortable coat though not as good as the dog—well it has been a pleasant relief from the normally frigid temperatures. I’m treating this like the rare thing it is and savoring it before the whole world (i.e., Chicago) turns to cold.

Lousy Actors, Good Directors

2010-10-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of The Onion’s obsessive lists, I thought I’d make one of my own right quick. So I bring you, a list of actors who make better directors.

1. Woody Allen.

No one is as goofy as Allen in his early films, as smug as Allen in his middle period, and as dated as Allen in his recent acting roles, which makes me happy that he seems to be farming out the leading man gigs to the likes of Larry David and other aging New Yorkers who can grouse and say very Woody Allen-like things but, you know, without bringing to the role all the Allen baggage. Thus, it is somewhat less creepy to see Larry David’s romance with a young girl then it would be if the very geriatric Allen were still forcing all his starlets to French him. That being said, I do like a lot of Allen’s movies, but it occurred to me when I found myself enjoying Vicky Cristina Barcelona that the reason I liked it so much, whereas so many of the post Mia Farrow films bug me, might very well be connected to Allen not being in the movie. My favorite Woody Allen movies are probably Radio Days (no appearance of Allen, just voice over) and Another Woman (no Woody anywhere but behind the camera). See a correlation?

2. Clint Eastwood

Clint has decided: Fuck it— I’ll make a movie every year. This decision has brought us Grand Torino and Changeling and a slew of movies since that I have not seen, most of them with Matt Damon. Who can keep up? Anyway, old-man Clint made the odd appearance, all appearances being odder than the last, though he manages to remind us that he once was a bankable leading man who never cried on film and always kicked wholesale ass. So when he made The Bridges of Madison County, many turned away. When he riffed on the cowboy theme of Unforgiven, many cheered and just as many scratched their heads. Clint was, in a sense, starting to boggle the action movie goer’s mind. Then there was his portrait of Burgess Meredith in Million Dollar Baby, a movie more divisive than proposed tax cuts. In an effort to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct his tough guy image, he gave the world what many thought was his swan song: Grand Torino. While it was fun to see Clint play an asshole with a heart, racist though it may be, it was a far worse movie than its compelling cousin, Changeling. The differences in the two are many, but it seems to me that Clint behind the camera is a formula that works better. Or would it matter? I supposed an aging Charles Bronson could have pulled off the role of a widowed vet with a shotgun just as well. That being the case, Clint, in a career where you have stayed the course and then broken it, you have proven yourself to us. Here's hoping you keep that grizzled ass off screen.

3. Ben Affleck

I have not seen the sophomore film from Mr. Affleck, but Gone Baby Gone was so rock solid that I’m on board and excited to see if Big Ben can redeem himself in the world of cinema as an ace director. I’ve always favored team Matt Damon in the inevitable debate over which of the Boston buds was worth a damn, and, let’s face it, there’s really no coming back from Gigli. Affleck is wise enough to know that if he has a comeback in him, it is as a filmmaker, not the big lug who ruins movies by opening his mouth. Even if we are forced to suffer his acting in his own films, at least we might hope that what he brings to the party as a director surpasses his own limited range as a thespian. That and we hope that he is not given to directing romantic comedies with insufferably cute retarded people or little girls. At least we can be sure that J. Lo will be nowhere in sight.

4. Spike Lee

A tough one to justify, as Spike has far too checked a career to even rank him anywhere as a director. The term “director” implies that one has direction, or, better yet, vision. Spike suffers from a lack of direction, too much vision, and a dislike of silence. I might have loved Summer of Sam or Clockers or Jungle Fever if they would slow down, relax, stop with the wall-to-wall soundtrack and just breathe a little. Alas, his films are largely crowded with too many ideas, some of which work, many of which go nowhere or, worse, to ridiculous places. Nevertheless, he can pull off a good movie when he’s really focused (Do the Right Thing is a goddamn classic), though even his best work suffers from excess. Nonetheless, one thing on which all film critics can agree: Spike can’t act. At best, his roles tend to be caricatures and his presence in front of the camera feels so self-conscious that he sinks his own ship. The viewer suddenly thinks, “Hey, that’s Spike Lee, the director… in his own movie!” and subsequently remembers that, yes, they are watching a Spike Lee film, a tenuous effort at best, and thus they also remember that there are better films out there and better directors and damn, why did I waste 9 bucks on this? Speaking of overrated directors who can't act for shit…

5. Quentin Tarantino

We tolerated him in Reservoir Dogs, as we didn’t know him then and his role was minor, but in Pulp Fiction his shitty acting stuck out like a sore thumb. Easily the weakest part in a movie that has not aged well, the whole Bonnie situation segment, well, kind of sucks. Why? Is it the absurdity of gangsters in suburbia? Is it the bizarre hit-n-run performance of Harvey Keitel? No, it’s Q.T. sucking the believability out of the movie just at the point where the viewer is asked to stretch it pretty thin. His lousy acting fucks the movie in the ass right then and there, luckily at the 11th hour when most of the audience has already bought into the mixed bag of goods. Tarantino, perpetual 9th grader that he was, obnoxioused his way out of the limelight with a string of idiotic interviews and knock-offs that somehow bore his name (True Romance, Natural Born Killers, and the goofy hotel movie that really, really sucked) but not his direction, proving also that he is a lousy writer. By the time he came back with Kill Bill—a movie I have some problems with but still kind of enjoy—it seemed he got wise and stepped out of the frame, but no, there he was again in the half-assed Death Proof, trying to act cool and instead acting the fool. Ugh. What a waste. Still, the guy obviously knows how to handle a camera, and he might even crap out a good movie again someday (fuck Inglourious Bastards—that shit is terrible), but here’s hoping I never see his ugly mug on screen again.

Okay, that's it for now.