28 December 2011

The Year in Books

The iphone ain’t been the life-changer others claimed it would be- I get a text every couple of weeks, make a few calls a month and occasionally check a score. One useful feature, though, is notekeeping. No more wads of soiled receipts with drunken scribble promising some new idea or album that I can't make out. Just poorly typed gibberish that hasn't gone through the wash. You can also keep track of what you’ve read, something I’ve never done and so here it is- a year in reading…

Tom McCarthy’s Remainder is one man’s obsessive attempt to recreate the conditions of his one perfect moment, a doomed and futile quest I learned from a professor in college when I was bemoaning the fading insights from a previous acid trip and he quipped, “The key to appreciating the hallucinatory experience is to recognize its ephemeral nature.” And he was right, for things don’t work out well for our narrator. I did a lot of rereading this year, and Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It was as rewarding a second time as it was the first. Sad to think this fictionalized account of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell’s tempestuous relationship (it’s his first novel for god’s sake- the nads on that young man) has not received more enduring acclaim, but hey, how do you market this shit?   If the prospect of tackling Wittgenstein directly is too intimidating, think of this as a 500-page sparknotes edition. David Foster Wallace’s suicide continues to haunt, and so continued contact with his work keeps the man alive, if only in synapses.  In McCain’s Promise, he tags along on the Arizona senator's 2000 campaign and delivers the requisite details, before McCain lost his rebel mojo and embraced the Republican establishment, even if both sides wince while hugging.

 David Lodge wrote a novel called Changing Places about two professors who exchange teaching posts, and in one famous scene, lit profs at a cocktail party admit to one classic they’ve never read. All is snickers and hoo haws until one schlump says Hamlet, and that’s all she wrote for his reputation.  I read Madame Bovary for the first time this year, so this mea culpa should keep me in Social Sciences for some years to come.  Took another stroll down p-rock memory lane with Eric Davidson’s We Never Learn, and all his prose histrionics aside, it’s a reminder that Crypt Records had one of the best winning percentages this side of Edwin Moses. Continuing the gaping hole in the canon thread, Lolita got checked off the list. Nabokov, in addition to sharing a name with a favorite Sharks goalie,  is a funny motherfucker, and his descriptive detail is vividly original. One can't help but feel a bit pervy, though, as he makes it impossible not to lust after the young thang, and there you are. Blasted through and thoroughly enjoyed a work on punctuation, Lynn Truss’s best-selling Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I always hit one major Faulkner, this time a second trip through The Sound and the Fury, and the Benji section did not make me want to hurl the thing across the room, the years between readings having filled in some of the blanks. Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers recounts how philosophers’ deaths match their philosophies, but fails to generate much amusement or enlightenment.

Reread David Shields’ Reality Hunger, his manifesto calling for the death of the novel’s relevance and championing a new kind of hybrid literature that looks beyond the realistic confines of 19th century novelistic traditions. He celebrates works like Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a failed biography about the author’s attempt to write a definite study on DH Lawrence. Reality Hunger is made up almost entirely of lifted passages that Shields comprised to illustrate how traditional notions of intellectual copyright should fall by the google highway as, like rappers and dj’s (love me- I play other people’s music), writers take what’s in the ether and rearrange it into something new. Maddening often, but also aggressively compelling, it’s a must read.

 Keith Richards’ Life was OK, but few details formed particularly strong neural circuits in the memory sections of my brain. I spent many hours curled up with good ole William Gass, whose love of language for its own sake is a refreshing rejoinder to the minimalists and those who insist on the carefully constructed plot. Gass is a literary critic who makes you want to read and write and eat and drink and fuck, and I would heartily recommend Tests of Time, Temple of Texts, and Finding a Form even if you loathe literary criticism and find all artistic theory pretentious crap that academics employ to justify their salaries.  Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists is a highly acclaimed modern novel that leaves me with the impression of having been mildly entertained and perhaps even amused. Beach or bar reading. The wonderful irony of David Shields’ memoir, The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead, written before Reality Hunger, is that it’s dreadful. He’s a far better arranger than he is a writer, as this may have been the worst book I read all year. Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer was not as good as Shields told me it would be, but it’s an interesting meditation on procrastination.

Read far less biography for some reason, but Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist provided all the information a mildly curious reader of some of Beckett’s plays and novels could want. I’ve had a poster of the great man in my classroom for many years, and something about the severity of that face and haircut makes the man unknowable.  Cronin fills in the details and delivers the influences, and even if so much of the man’s work remains ambiguous and difficult to penetrate, at least it’s less fog and mystery between every unspoken line. Having trouble refusing that third helping of lasagna or saying no to that eighth draught of Drake's Denogginizer? Try Daniel Akst’s We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess, in which our hero offers the following thesis- we have limited self-control reserves that are depleted each hour by the onslaught  of choices at our dispersal in a high-tech, 24/7 world, and we need to make pre-commitments (i.e., don’t buy a kegerator, alchie) to reduce our daily scream of temptation. Dan Ariely is all about behavioral economics in Predictably Irrational, another tome in the growing literature attacking the classical model of the rational consumer, and he has plenty of research studies and market examples (he’s much like Malcolm Gladwell in tone and style) to illustrate our follies when it comes to choosing wisely. Barbara Ehrenreich got cancer and loathed those who insisted she bear it with a smile and a positive attitude, so she wrote an entire book called Bright-Sided scalding the notion that optimism improves our lives. Timothy Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves has been getting a lot of recent love  due to nods from Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman, for his exploration of the power of the unconscious mind on how we think and behave. Given the mysteries of why I want or do or think anything, I’ll concur. After reading Michael Spector’s Denialism, I’m supposed to believe that my vitamin supplements are no substitute for eating fruits and vegetables and that is simply one truth I must deny. His attack on Jenny McCarthy’s ranting that innoculations cause autism is savage and, from all I’ve read, right on.

Andrew Baggerly’s Band of Misfits was a disappointing summary of the Giants’ World Series season that offers little that’s new if you were paying attention. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice offers that too much choice is bad for us and he’s got the studies to back it up. Damn, that’s enough pop psychology, so how about Nick Hornby’s new novel, Juliet, Naked? I humbly believe that each of Hornby’s books has gotten worse, but this breaks that trend. I rarely cringed, and there is plenty to recognize in these middle-aged strugglers about love and loss and regret. Back to the couch with Robert Burton’s On Being Certain,  which posits that the feeling of certainty is an emotional state that tricks us into believing we are right when often we are not. James McManus’s tale of entering the World Series of Poker and finishing in the top ten made poker seem thrilling, but he’s less successful guiding us through his own experiences at the Mayo Clinic in Physical. This is another in a long line of non-fiction works that should have remained magazine pieces. Patty Smith won the National Book Award. I repeat- Patty Smith won the National Book Award. Her Just Kids is the story of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe when they were young upstarts in the NY arts scene. It is overly romanticized and deeply sentimental and while some of the poetic prose shines, not all of it does, and I’m baffled by the nearly universal praise this book has received. A far weightier and less dreamy-eyed account of the artist at work is Sarah Bakewell’s (love that name) How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and one could do far worse than to use this book’s wisdom as a secular bible. Not quite matching Bakewell’s recipe for a life well-lived is Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, in which he uses the life and key ideas of a number of noted philosophers to teach simple truths about the art of living well.

Reread Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, and while it wasn’t as hilarious a second time, I would highly recommend the man for anyone who likes his comedy black. Peter Carey is an extraordinary novelist, and his newest, a retelling of Tocqueville’s journey to America and the making of that most quoted of all texts, is called Parrot and Olivier in America, and it will do nothing to harm his reputation. Mary Roach’s Bonk gets downright filthy as she investigates what science has to say about sex. This woman is a national gem- arguably the funniest writer out there. I kept putting off David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King because who wants to read an unfinished novel when you have no idea what he would have wanted and how much of it is actually finished and what would have been cut and, well, the questions- they do go on. But just to spend more time with the man’s prose, his humor and his humanity. And there are moving and hilarious and heartbreaking sections, but they don’t add up to a novel, which is fine. Read it without looking for coherence and you can find enough to make the muddling worth the time.

Mary Roach again, a good laugh required after the posthumous Wallace, and Stiff makes dead bodies a barrel of plastered monkeys. Really. When you start reading metacriticism, you have to wonder if the journey into your own ass has landed you in the maze of the large intestine from which  you cannot extract yourself. Or something, but I’m sitting on the couch again and enjoying Craig Seligman’s dissection of Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag, Sontag and Kael, and digging out my collection of Kael’s essays and wishing I had time to go a movie. Instead it’s to England for Martin Amis’ new one, The Pregnant Widow, which is about a twentysomething’s pursuit of pussy, mostly the prized gash of a teutonic blonde he spends most of the novel plotting to enter. I actually preferred the jumps forward in time to see how the characters deal with middle age and how these desperate early searches for transcendence through mad Italian sex might affect them later. I’ve always enjoyed reading Christopher Hitchens, even as his arrogant public persona threatened to blind folks to the quality of his prose and the breadth of his erudition, and his recent death hit the solar plexus as few obits do. His memoir, Hitch-22, is a fascinating ride through the second half of the 20th century, and even as he’s name-dropping and placing himself at the fulcrum points of modern history, it’s hard not to be carried along by the sheer force of his storytelling and the savagery of his wit. He will be missed. Completing the troika of aging British monsters of lit is Ian McEwan and his Enduring Love, a creepy bit of psychological obsession that has our narrator stalked by a religious freak who feels divinely bonded by their experience in a balloon accident. Strangely suspenseful.

William Gay has studied long and hard at the Cormac McCarthy College of southern biblical grandiloquent prose, and his The Long Home is shockingly riveting, given how easy it is to fail out of that university. William Deresiewicz has become one of my favorite literary critics, and his recent takedown of the vaunted James Wood was a vicious thing of beauty Sadly, his A Jane Austen Education, in which he tries to show how reading JA taught him to be a better man is rather trite in spots and unbelievable in others. It’s also not very funny and not nearly as smart as he usually is. I can only guess he was going for those Jane Austen bucks that seem to roll in when you put her highness in the title and promise slippery bits of wisdom. Or maybe I’m still an emotional adolescent incapable of recognizing the quiet truths revealed. Don’t answer that.

I received Ammon Shea’s Reading the OED from a student, and like most gifts that happen to be books, I dreaded opening it.  It is, however,  a very funny account of one man’s year reading the OED. This is a trend in publishing- have some dude do something most polite suburban types would consider outrageous- read the whole bible, or the encyclopedia, or Remembrance of Things Past- and then recount the experience with witty asides and much self-laceration. What kind of dweeb does x or y or z. Why, this one!  I liked this version, though, because it is filled with words I’m glad exist, like natiform (buttock-shaped) or insordescent (growing in filthiness) or goat-drunk (made lascivious by alcohol). In Lowboy, John Wray puts a 16-year old paranoid schizophrenic off his meds on a train and has him pursued by a monkish cop and the lad’s crazy mother. That sounds like a premise from hell, but this is one of the most satisfying modern novels I’ve read in a long time. Wray delivers on that premise by making the young man’s perception of the world alternately hilarious and horrific, but always believable.  It’s also a page-turning thriller, and that combo ain’t no easy trick. Can’t believe anybody made it this far, but with four days left in the year and just 100 pages into Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, it looks like John Jeremiah Sullivan’s The Blood Horses will be the finish line.  This is mostly a portrait of the author's recently deceased father, who,  when asked by his son the greatest thing he had covered as a sportswriter, replied, “Secretariat,”  which sends the young man off to research the history of horse racing. I much preferred the family stuff to the old-time equine tales, because in the end this is about a son mourning his father. Stories don’t get much older than that.

23 December 2011

This happiest time of the year


Thank God for children. Without them, this time of year would just bum me out. Another year has passed and, wow, I still feel like a lifelong underachiever. But I can spend the next few days numbing acute feelings
of self-loathing and self-pity with little kids' laughter (and a healthy amount of booze). And rock 'n roll. Lord Christ, I love the rock 'n roll.

The Eddy Current Suppression Ring - So Many Things. What we have here is a collection of singles and B- sides that are, as usual, great. I wouldn't expect anything else from the godfathers of the New Aussie scene. The consistency of songwriting, sound and groove thing from this band is unparalleled. Nuff said. Even my Coldplay-loving wife loves these guys!

Black Lips- Arabia Mountain. A band that has absolutely dominated the scene for years with their encyclopedic knowledge of garage rock and insane work ethic. I wouldn't say all the songs on their latest will stick in your head, but pretty damn close. Still the best in the land?

Bass Drum of Death-There are some who will accuse these 2 of being young Nirvana wannabes. And I'll grant you at times they sound a bit like 'em. But I think BDOD are more in the J Reatard vein, which is great stuff in my book. Plus they're from Mississippi. So they've got that going from them.

Jack Oblivian- Check that. Jack Oblivian is the best in the land. See Sonny's review. Nothing to add other than this was in heavy rotation on the family turntable.

OBNs III- The One and Only. The greatest dirty p-rock record since the dearly remembered Problematics. Music for drinking with your friends and trying to act like you're 18 again. Glorious. Every year there should be a couple of rippers like this record. It makes you feel young and hungry.

       

22 December 2011

Comfort Food for Late-Night Boozehounds- The Top 11

And here we are again, reflecting on the lost opportunities, stupid comments and increasing jowliness of another year.  Yea, but there's always reasonably good health, mister, so take a sip of gratitude, find the good in the taken-for-granted, and let's wallow for a moment in the righteous sounds of 2011. Sadly, neither John Prine or Harry Nilsson made a new record this year, so this list will have to do.

11. Dexter Romweber Duo- Is that You in the Blue?- that Dex is still kicking is cause for rejoicing, and even if this record can't be counted among his best, it's a comfort to know he's still out there, ready to transport the weary with one more aching ballad.

10. Missing Monuments- Painted White- King Louie is another nearly sunken American treasure, and if he wants to dive for pop gems, I'm listening.

9. GG King- Esoteric Lore- just enough weirdness here to help it transcend the genre tag, that being SoCal skate punk of the 80s, a sound that hasn't aged all that well but that conjures enough memories to bleed a little nostalgia into the listen.

8. Case Studies- The World is Just a Shape to Fill the Night- I don't know what happened to The Duchess and the Duke, but this gentleman keeps the folk flag flying with more yearning weepers sure to help the lonely keep the rope at bay.

7. Psandwich- Northren Psych- it's Ron House, for crying out loud, and he's rocking and screaming that he's stoned to death. So maybe it doesn't quite reach TJSA heights, but that voice plus guitars = a rasberry to the little things getting ya down.

6. Jack Oblivian- Rat City-  this man just keeps delivering- a model of consistency as he drives through the vast array of styles he owns. "Girl on the Beach" should have been the summer hit that brought rock back to the radio.

5. OBN IIIs- The One and Only- 100% p-rock stomper with enough variety to keep things interesting but not so much that your feet stop moving.

4. Royal Headache- S/T- Aggressively hooky Oz pop that just keeps getting better as the melodies lodge indelibly in that place where emotional memory fires up the dopamine and pleasure ain't just a dive bar outside Vegas.

3. Total Control- Henge Beat- sometimes stylistic diversity means lack of vision, and sometimes you get the feeling the band is determined to do justice to its full range of influences. These guys might have made a love letter to Wire, Gary Numan and Joy Division, but they've woven their heroes' ideas into a thing entirely their own.

2. Crooked Fingers- Breaks in the Armor- this guy delivers more emotional weight in his voice than a middle-aged burnout can sometimes bear.  More scaled back than recent albums, but all he needs are those melodies and that voice, and you've got yourself weepy gold.

1. Apache Dropout- S/T- what an original and entertaining record this is- wacky and hallucinatory and anthemic and you can call it a bonafide aural miracle. Folks will be digging this for years to come.

14 December 2011

El Camino



In the post-9/11 era, the mainstream has steadily shed rock 'n roll's influence. The Hives, White Stripes, and  Strokes 2000 garage rock era is now about 10 years dead, an eon in popular culture. To aspire to be a hip hop mogul, dance floor diva or earnest sock-headed indie type is where it's at. Jay Z Inc, Katy Perry or Bon Iver.  Some collaborative effort among the three would be the defining soundtrack of our age. Indeed, rock 'n roll is primarily relegated for Super Bowl half-time shows and guest judges on American Idol. Even video game publisher Activision has stopped making Guitar Hero because no one cares about that old man's music.

Which is to say, you take your guitar players and real drummers where you can find them. Enter the Black Keys. Guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Jay Carney came on the scene as Junior Kimbrough disciples recording their home made hits in some flyover basement about a million miles from New York or Hollywood. They even recorded an lp of Junior covers called Chulahoma, named after his hometown. Moreover, The Big Come Up, Rubber Factory and Freak Thickness referenced not only delta blues but Sonics-style garage rock.   Slowly the Black Keys' reputation grew among the few who still cared about this kind of music.

El Camino is the follow-up to the duo's massive crossover success Brothers. It continues the break from earlier blues-y traditionalist records. In fact, El Camino raises the bar by offering more hits, hooks and melodies than Brothers. It should appeal even more to an audience not inclined to rock. The sound is much fuller with a whole band, multi-track vocals with soaring harmonies and dance-y beats. The Black Keys are a long way from that flyover basement, as hip hop producer "Dangermouse" makes another appearance.

No band can stay static lest they turn into the Ramones, so I understand why they have moved on. And this music sounds good to me in parts.  I suppose I'm just that crabby old man who can't help but feel it was better back in the day. And who knows? Maybe the pendulum will swing back rock 'n roll's way.

08 December 2011

Royal Headache

The Oz-invasion continues with more shocking quality but with straight angles this time- fast-strummin pop music from the ironically named Royal Headache, about the least migraine-inducin' sounds from down there since the Hoodoo Gurus' "I Want You Back."  I'm guessing Paul Weller is sitting uncomfortably somewhere, knowing this sound exists and that he failed to produce it when he dumped The Jam for the Style Council, that wimpy white man's attempt at a soul revue.  Most of the R&B in this pup comes through the vocals, as the dude ain't afraid to sustain a note and emote.  Mostly you get frantic down-strummin underneath those silky vocals, and as an old English teacher, I'm impressed how they cut fat from each tune.  Economical, these boys, but with one exception. If you're going to produce a symmetrical pop album with six 2-minute songs on each side, an instrumental added to each just means a touch of bloat you worked so hard to cut from each song. I don't know if they decided 23 minutes would not make a proper album or somebody has an instro fetish, but unless you've got Rick Wakeman on keys, stick some vocals in and don't allow for bathroom breaks in the middle of your record. That is a quibble, however, for what is essentially an entirely loveable album.  It's hard to imagine anyone but nitpicking naysayers not enjoying this thing. So sorry Paul Weller- I'm going to play it again and haunt your oxycontin dreams.

01 December 2011

Deaf Wish- S/T

I am a domestic dad with little bastards running through my house (six, as of one hour ago) at high speed ignoring my every command, smearing shit on the couch, torturing the dog and throwing things at my head. "I didn't mean it," is the mantra, and I wonder at the glories of the 1930s father, certain of his position, Scotch in hand, belt in the other, ruling his castle with the confidence of a man who knows his kingdom.  I know the  part of the sunken couch that I slink to when the wave passes and the video games go back on and the walls stop shaking and my bugged out eyes seek solace in a long draft beer and some Gene Clark.

So let's just say noise rock don't fit the current aesthetic, or paradigm, or pick your noun with the general meaning of model and give me a fucking break- I still own that Scratch Acid record, pull out the Laughing Hyenas late night, and find Pissed Jeans one of the three best bands of the last five years. Just don't ask me to pull out Wolf Eyes when you arrive at midnight on your bi-annual trip down wild hair lane- chances are, I'm passed out on the couch with Gram Parsons on repeat. But shiver me frayed nerve timbers, this Deaf Wish record, another Aussie missile in that island continent/nation's insidious attempt to rule our humble shores, is one effective drone.  I do believe I like every song on it, and it ain't exactly Singles Going Steady.  Screeching and pleading and fuzzing and, well, it's very noisy but you can sing along. Sort of. This shit just screams 1988-1992, if that means anything to anyone.  You could almost call it Texas acid-damaged emo if you had no shame, which I don't, so there you go.  The songs work, OK? Aristotelian catharsis is at hand. Just be glad you're not him, if you know what I mean. Now somebody tell me where I can find their other records so I can ignore the little bastards' next wave of madness.