Wednesday is Friday this week, so Jacobpedia will likely be quiet for the next few days.  If I run across anything particularly compelling, I might have a post up over the weekend, but the regular, erratic posting schedule will resume on Monday.  Until then, there’s plenty to read about below:

• The Street News Service has an exclusive interview with Bob Dylan about his Christmas album.  At one point, Dylan explains, “These songs are part of my life, just like folk songs.”  I have been surprised that some critics are so bewildered by Dylan’s choice to record a Christmas album.  Anyone who has paid attention over the past fifteen years or so already understood his motivation.  It’s good to hear it from the man himself.  And, once again, do yourself a favor and watch this video.
• Violence broke out in Madrid on the weekend Spanish fascists commemorate the death of Francisco Franco.  The article also reveals the Spanish government’s continued efforts to shape memory of the Spanish Civil War as it banned the annual vigil held at Franco’s grave on the anniversary of his death.
• Johnny Cash is the subject of a new graphic novel biography, Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness.
• John Jurgensen assesses Tom Petty’s place in the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll.  Despite all of his success, Petty has always seemed to be on the rung below legends like Dylan and Springsteen.  Jurgensen’s article explains why.
• The Edge of the American West offers an explanation for why James McPherson finally said something negative about a fellow historian in his review of John Keegan’s The American Civil War: A Military History.
• The new issue of The Believer includes forensic artist Barbara Anderson’s renderings of eight criminals from literature.  The Boston Globe posted images of Anderson’s drawings of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden.  For the rest, you’ll have to go to your favorite bookstore.
• In response to the nominees for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, Mark Athitakis presents his own awards for bad writing.
• And, who hasn’t wanted “Neil Young” to cover the theme song to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air?

Many many years ago, I discovered Might magazine.  It was a funny, silly magazine that spoofed everything (but had a serious backbone, too).  (You can order back issues here).  And so, I subscribed around issue 13.  When the magazine folded (with issue 16–and you can read a little bit about that in the intro to Shiny Adidas Track Suits) it somehow morphed into McSweeney’s, and much of the creative team behind Might went with them.

The early volumes (1-5 are reviewed in these pages, and the rest will come one of these days) are a more literary enterprise than Might was.  There’s still a lot of the same humor (and a lot of silliness), but there are also lengthy non-fiction pieces.  The big difference is that McSweeney’s was bound as a softcover book rather than as a magazine. And, I guess technically it is called Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern as opposed to Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Issue #6 came with a CD of music by They Might Be Giants.  And from then on it was anybody’s guess what the next issue would look like.  (This Wikipedia page provides a nice summary of all of the issues that have been published, including authors).

The latest issue (#33) is being printed as a newspaper (just to give an idea of the diversity of product here).

The books (for most of them are books, despite the above newspaper) come out occasionally.  I gather it was supposed to be a quarterly, but I don’t know that they’ve ever really kept a schedule. Many of the books are hardcover (beautifully bound).  Some have been paperbacks.  Occasionally they come in a fancy packaging (boxes, slipcases etc). You never know what you’re going to get, which is a lot of the fun.

Although you do know that you’re going to get quality short stories.  The list of fantastic (and well-known) authors grows and grows. (Just a few: Michael Chabon, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Roddy Doyle, A.M. Homes, and Joyce Carol Oates.)  And mixed in with them are less well known (ie. more indie) authors, as well as occasional unknowns.  And even if I don’t love every story, I know that they’ll all be worth a read.

McSweeney’s itself has grown from a publisher of this quarterly to include an empire that publishes books (their book of the month club is the way to go), an official periodical (The Believer), and a video magazine (Wholphin).

I am probably a little too steeped in McSweeney’s-world, but I’ve never been disappointed with a release of theirs (okay, that’s not true, they have published a few clunkers).  I’m always excited to get the box with the little chair as the return address.

And, of course, I began a Wikipedia page of all of the McSweeney’s Books. I’m delighted to see that folks have been adding to it!

Original mention in Periodicals Page:

McSweeney’s. Technically a periodical. A collection of short stories and things like it. I’m usually too overwhelmed by the time this comes in, and frankly, I am many many issues behind on reading this. However, I plowed through 21 and 22 recently, and just got 23. So, I’m looking forward to it and its brethren. I got turned onto McSweeney’s because I used to subscribe to MIGHT magazine (R.I.P) which was a hilarious magazine ala Spy (R.I.P). Might ran for a dozen or so issues and then strangely morphed into McSweeney’s. I think somehow my subscription ran over into McSweeney’s and the rest is 23 issues of fun!

Alright funny heading, but Ryan Gosling really is a great actor and now a great musician. I am sure the majority of you don’t remember YTV’s Breaker High anyway… So we all know that Disney own’s and runs almost the entire world, even Communist China has a Disney World… think it’s a coincidence… I think not. Also why do you think that Britney Spears is still in our lives almost every day even though she really does nothing of any importance anymore, or really ever did. It’s all part of their master plan… Ok I’m getting off topic here, we will cover Disney’s world domination another time. How did I get here again oh yeah Dead Man’s Bones and Ryan Gosling, well Ryan used to be a Mickey Mouse Club Member, for those of you that didn’t know. By the looks of the video I posted below (do yourself a favor and fast forward to 1:45 into the video) Ryan almost became part of one of Disney’s boy band/killer assassins groups, like fellow member JT. I think the only reason he was saved from this fate is because he’s Canadian, we are harder to brainwash. I’m sure it’s true, look it up, Google it, I’m too lazy. So luckily he escaped the grasps of Disney World because even though he did take part in such embarrassing projects as “Breaker High“, “Young Hercules“, and “The Mickey Mouse Club” he has taken a turn for the better and has taken part in such projects as “The Believer“, “Half Nelson“, and “Lars and the Real Girl” and now “Dead Man’s Bones“. The debut self titled album is the brain child of Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields and was released on  October 6, 2009, just in time for a couple pre-Halloween performances. Which is fitting considering the ghoulish feel to Dead Man’s Bones’ music. After listening to the album the first time I felt like Glen Danzig, Dracula, and The Big Bopper had a love child together. I’m not sure if that will make any sense to any of you but that’s what went through my head. Musically the album is very striped down with simplistic riffs and heavy drum beats on the tom tom drums, but has a much grander feeling to it with the help of a full choir. The music has an up beat feel to it much like that of music from a simpler time… the 50’s, but with a very dark overtone. I can not say how much this all appeals to the my personal music tastes. I really was not expecting to be blown away by Ryan Gosling’s first album, but I honestly was. The whole album is strong all the way through but the stand outs for me were ” Pa Pa Power”, “Dead Man’s Bones”, “Lose Your Soul”, “My Body is a Zombie for You”, and “In the Room Where You Sleep”, which is almost the entire album… you get the idea. I recently saw the band at Venue and was thoroughly impressed. The set design and costume design was very fitting with the music. The show stopper came in the form of one of the grade 11 student choir members. Jane Agyeman blew everyone away when performing her solo part in the cover of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”. The sell out crowd went nuts as it was one of those moments where you hear someone sing and it sends chills down your spine. I think even the band was taken aback. My only complaint of the whole night was that Ryan’s fame took away from the performance, as you had to listen to groupie girls that were not there for the music, talk about how hot Ryan was during the sets and then yell various intelligent things at him between songs such as “We love you Ryan” and “Take off your shirt”. I did not allow this to get to me though and enjoyed every minute of the show as Ryan and Zach and the choir of Carson Graham secondary all proved themselves to be great performers.  Please take the time to watch some of the videos below, you will not be disappointed.

It’s a dark, gloomy day.  The kind where having all the lights on in the apartment is doing nothing to brighten the room.  I’m working from home, but the gloom is weighing on me and focus is proving a challenge (hence the creation of a new blog.)

Oscar is pacing, hitting everything with his giant plastic cone along the way.  He got fixed not too long ago and had a reaction to the dissolvable stitches and thusly doomed to the lampshade-like appendage for another 10 days while his junk heals more appropriately. (Hugh has been showing a rate of empathy far surpassing my own, understandably.)

Grizzly Bear is keeping me company, though not doing much to lighten the mood.  It might be time to bust out some cheerier musical guns to lift the day’s tone.  I went on a bit of a musical bender on Sunday and practically doubled my iPod’s content…surely there’s a pop-ish tune or two to break the funk somewhere on the list.

Life has been hectic and full of happy times of late.  I’m thinking of my overzealous vodka tasting at Rasputin last week.  Who knew premium vodkas, pickles and rye bread could bring such joy?  Joy until my early morning wake-up (read: hangover) the next day.  And then of course I embraced my inner 13 yr old girl by catching a “New Moon” matinee with my very indulgent (perhaps overly so that he allowed such a thing) man.  Robert Pattinson is just too delicious to resist, I don’t care how old you are.

I salvaged some dignity as a grown women and an appreciator of fine films by catching “An Education” on Friday.  Nick Hornby, I love you.  Side note: Did you know that Dave Eggers’ wife is one of the co-founders of “The Believer”?  Amazing.  And lovely that these beautiful genius people find one another.  We also went to a warm and wonderful birthday party on Saturday full of just the most interesting people.  So great because I was so socially burnt out by Saturday that dragging my ass out the door was a feat in and of itself.  It was a tasty potluck with an eclectic, beautiful spread and we enjoyed and satiated ourselves fully.

And here we are, a new work week begun, a puppy still in a cone and a blog introduced for all to read of my various whims and rambles.

Go Go

Greil Marcus, in his Real Life Top Ten feature for October’s issue of The Believer, quotes Charles Taylor (I’m assuming it’s this Charles Taylor and not this one or this one) who writes about seeing Sonic Youth for this first time. Taylor writes about a show in NYC, but he may as well be writing about my experience seeing Sonic Youth at the Fox Theater in Oakland. The only difference is that Taylor is middle aged. Otherwise, I think this review is pitch-perfect and encompasses exactly the same feelings of respect, awe, and excitement I felt at the show.

How do you explain the difference between volume that is pulverizing and volume that is liberating? At one point during the first encore, Kim Gordon, who was wearing a silver sheath dress, was doing her go-go-dancer moves and looked as if she was actually surfing the waves of sound. Visually and in attitude, she’s the steady center of that band. At times, she and Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo and Mark Ibold would form a loose circle, facing each other, and they had the deadly precision of a group of hired killers in a Leaone Western. And the music seemed to me perfectly pitched between songs and guitar freak-outs, the latter of which never – never – lost discipline or structure. Maybe only Neil Young has that sense of physical expansiveness at his most slashing.

Part of what moves me, and this may sound trivial, was that for the first time in memory I was at a show watching people older than myself, and people not playing at anything, not posing, but doing what they love without feeling they have to resort to rock-star cliches of bad behavior to do it. Did you see Gordon in Last Days? I hated that movie. I thought it treated Cobain the way generations of college girls have treated Sylvia Plath (though there it fits): as the fetish object at the center of a death trip. When Gordon walks in, she shows the entire movie for the lie it is. Here’s someone who is as rock and roll as rock and roll can be, and she’s not self-destructive or frantic or foolish.

For something a little more light-hearted:

“Making a Beatles record…requires more than the presence of individual Beatles voices; it requires the potential for at least three-part harmony; it requires Paul’s bass and piano style; it requires George’s lead-guitar style, it requires unusual guitar harmony between George, John and Paul and the peculiar drumming style of Ringo; it requires John tempered by Paul, and Paul darkened by John; all of them spiritualized by George; all of them lightened up by Ringo; all of the excited by Paul; all of them made wary by John.”  Michael Boyce, letter to the editor.  The Believer Magazine, October 09.

But not too light-hearted.  Here we have a new (new?  new to me) method to study music.  In any case, it is well written and beyond my abilities to either confirm or deny.

Hey Cancer

How’s “the darkness

Fine

Not as dark as you make it sound

Black beans and codfish

Shapeshifter rsvp’d.

Self-Zine?

Got fired Friday, can’t make it

Dog wearing lipstick?

Dunno,  she’s in heat, maybe spayed,  upset

really?

aye

listen

Fear-monger

canceled too. it’s just gonna be me you and self-zine

shapeshifter

And li’l caesar

The pizza guy

used to work for Men’s Wearhouse.

Hey whoww ofenn does your zine come out?

—Every other fortnight

does it pay

No but the internet makes the printing free, minus electricity and rent

***

paper mewl is here

PAPER MEWL: I’m so fed up with the ass in this city

TEAM: where’s your girlfriend?

PAPER MEWL: Out with her friend gary

TEAM: you didn’t invite her?

PM: She doesn’t need to come to everything, i don’t think her and gary are anything more than friends

TEAM: Whe—

PM: To a reggae/dub/skiffle/punk/lord show. at the Beenurry

T: In Troeptown?

PM: Near there. Clobo Village.

T: That’s a gay neighborhood

PM: …so?

T: Nothing, i’m just bean helpful with regard to you know travel… guide

PM: So are we gonna DO THESE DRUGS, OR WHAT?

T: cool your jets, hang on, here [hands drugs]

PM: I wanna do drugs carefully, not just in a big blast

T: Well, that’s your call not mine, be as careful as 7ou want

PM: I can’t be careful unless you are too. your sloppiness infects  MY UNIVERSE

t: look we’ve been friends for almost twenty years, you know how careful iamb, which is not that careful, but you know my style, my styles not changing, i’m learned but i’m not a PEDANT, so take the drugs and be the peace or go eat a pizza be well but let’s not talk about it

PM: I’m the Prime Mule. Announcement time.

TEAM: Our favorite game

pM: I’m the prime Mewler. Minister Muenster. Papa Gyyno ["Geeno"].

TEAM: Cannibullingus! Classic. “Framingham Farms”

PM: Sodabeer Sobadeer! HarmHock Tavern! I’m lickin the back of a pretty heart

TEAM: Lick that back of pretty hearts.  great stuff.

PM: There are some drugs left. …. May I?

tTEAM: you’re still my guests—be our guest. my guessts is as good as ours

PM: Pull yourself together——the last thing I meantioned about “careful”

TEAM GOGOLBERRYS: Careful did as carefully was— you know that expression

PM: That’s not the expression—————it’s “a careful home gets bigger as my gorgeous daughters get older”—-pita read sadder for older

PM: Listen listen your zine is good but you need to delete more of it

TM: You mean “edit”?

PM: Nah, edit or delete,? Same thing. just pick huge arbitrary/celebrity swaths that aren’t singing and click #delete

TM: What do you mean “Sign” i mean “sing

PM: Same root as “swing”. swing flue. sign flu. the nonjazzy parts.

TM: Punk-jazz?

PM: Jazz isn’t the same as it was in the 1970s: be troppa deuce and so on. swinging jazz has to come from a lamer emotion in today’s age  to really get the big dicks swinging. punk rock is fine-ground avenue.  is working construction—

TM:  I need to work construction to make parts sing?

PM: Deleting unsinging parts is more important but doing big jobs in construction is fine.

I started out as Party Mule, but went backwards in time with the aid of drugs and now have a confusing relationship with  Trawldad, with Party Mule, with Picaba and D. the Skiier and the wreast of my Team; Team was the other guy. Multiple dudes with a single voice that choruses  sweetly & softly ( then, horny, gets meaner with more “skronk”——[jazz term]). After a meal the quietest parts go deaf and drown in the gay roar of a metabolism overwhelmed by an excess (or, contra-pace Gander, a “sudden access”) of satiety. All that remains is the basic four-four  pattern native to pop: “It’s A Gas,” “Onlycake Fountain,” e.g.

Math-rock, “Intelligent Dance Music,” Polynesian polyrhythms—all of them sad, wishful thinkings of a freeboned drug-depression found in culture. A cake is a metaphor you can eat; a shower’s only as hot as its horniest teardropped teabag; pastiche is not flavor; and so on.

RAE ARMANTROUT, TROY JOLLIMORE, & JOSHUA CLOVER perform language TONIGHT at the LATIN-AMERICAN CLUB of San Francisco, 3286 22nd St, 8:30 p.m. Arrive early, call venue for parking. More information is available here.

After releasing an album geared towards the club and dance scene with 2008’s Universal Mind Control, Common is promising a return to his raw hip hop roots on his upcoming album, The Believer.

For this album, Common plans to work with his longtime collaborators, No I.D., Twilite Tone, and his boss, Kanye West. Common is excited to be working with the producers who helped him with his early releases and to be working with Kanye once again.

Initially, this album was supposed to be released last year, but it was pushed back in favor of his dance-themed Universal Mind Control. Now, with the dance out of his system, Common is back and ready to dominate rap. His upcoming album will return to the themes that made him popular.

Common has been working on this album since early October 2009 and the album will be released sometime early in 2010.

*Photographs: Would you like to view some images of sausages that look like watermelons? I knew you would. [eatmedaily]

*Interviews: Vulture interviews John Mayer, who is a dick. Unfortunately, he is a very good dick. An amusing, though existentially disturbing conversation. “I’m going to forcefully sodomize your editor.”

*Essentials: Rap Exegesis offers an annotated version of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy.” Highly recommended.

*Television: Basket of Kisses offers crackpot theories of the popular television program. Oh, and/or The Atlantic regarding the same show. I have talked at the day job on a few occasions about the core concept behind the “mega-movie,” though without using that term. It seems like a good term. [lindsayismtumblr]

*Music: Is the Rezon really a new musical instrument, or is it just a ruse to expose my inattentive reading habits? [coudal]

*Media: McSweeney’s is putting out a newspaper, The San Francisco Panorama. Interestingly enough, The Believer was begging for money just to keep the doors open not too many months ago. They must have received it.

*Writing: Here’s a short story from @samhey, who is a subtly excellent twitterer.

*Words: I recommend that you read this glossary of literary terms. Don’t ask, read. I just learned about ubi sunt.

*Projects: I am currently entertaining the notion of doing a Kickstarter project that would fund another bombing of the moon. I think it would take maybe a billion dollars in pledges. Also, we would allow high bidders to write their names on the bomb.

*Today’s links: F

Here’s a nice snippet from the Believer/Varda interview, in which she gives voice, I think, to the irritation some of you feel in the company of your Michael Moores and your Morgan Spurlocks. The resistance, perhaps, being a reaction to an artist who ventures out of his depth? Into contrivance? Into shtick?

BLVR: You used to make fictional films. Why don’t you make fictions anymore?

AV: I’m not sure I’m in the mood for that. I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me. I had a very good time when I did The Gleaners—even though the people are poor, and I was suffering to see the conditions, and plus they are not such lovely hearts. They are tough to each other, they beat each other, they are rude and they are violent and they drink. They’re not sweethearts, you know, but some were so interesting.

With The Gleaners, the problem was bigger than me. I wanted to catch the problem of consumption, waste, poor people eating what we throw away, which is a big subject. But I didn’t want to become a sociologue, an ethnographe, a serious thinker. I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious subject. It made me feel very good that I could investigate a certain way of doing documentaries in which I’m present—I’m myself—knowing I’m doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I’m what I’m not.

The interview in full is right here.

common talks working with kanye, no i.d., and twilite tone producing the believer, along with motivation for making the album. color me ridiculously, ridiculously excited.

- panda

i love this woman. i knew nothing about her until my dearest film-hound-of-a-friend dragged me to see “beaches of agnes” this summer. but what a gem of a human, what a mind, and what a sweet and sophisticated riot… at 80!

Damian Ortega, Cosmic Thing, 2002 

• READ NOW: Agnès Varda interviewed in the brand new issue of The Believer.
• Richard Lacayo on The Art of the Steal, a new documentary about the legendary Barnes collection. All four related blog posts are located here. [Looking Around]
• Videos of Jim Jarmusch during a post-screening Q&A at the All Tommorows Parties festival a few weeks ago. [The Current]
• Up in the hat, blotto, sloppo: the many literary pedigrees for words and phrases for “drunk” at Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy Blog.
• Podcast, schmodcast: interview with David Thomson at The Film Talk.
• Robert Farmer remembers the Left Banke filmmakers (Marker, Resnais, and Varda) at the redesigned Senses of Cinema.
• Monty Python is forty years old [New York Times]
• Legendary radio DJ Mr. Magic passed away [SOTC]
• Massive Rilke piece on eve of newly translated work [Times UK Literary Supplement]

…That’s gonna be a blockbuster of an album.  Click the pic for the full story.  XXL reporting.

click to "enlarge"

LI’L TIFFANY: Thirty dollars? Fuck that.

PROVOST GARY: Li’l Tiffany, you spend that much on Vitamin Water and Zen Party Mix every week. And it’s a fundraiser for the Believer magazine, which you’re always reading at Patronio’s house. But you never buy it! And you love Nick Hornby’s “sensibility.” And look at this effing still from the film, it’s awesome:

LI’L TIFFANY: That does look funny. That looks like a photograph of your birthday party.

PROVOST GARY: Oh, Tiffany!!!

LI’L TIFFANY: OK, I’ll take 12 tickets, please.

PROVOST GARY: Oh, Tiffany!! I’m not selling the tickets! You’ll have to buy them from Brown Paper Tickets Dot Com!

LI’L TIFFANY: Sure thing, Provost Gary!!!!

[They both perish from Melancholia]

[Later that day, LI'L TIFFANY's brother, JARED, is washing the dishes—one of his regular chores. He takes a sponge, wets it, and reaches for a plastic bottle of what he assumes is diswashing soap. He pours it all over the sponge, squeezing it, re-wetting it, etc. His mother, BETHANY, enters.]

BETHANY: Jared what the holy frock are you doing???

JARED: Whaddaya mean, mah? I’m doin’ my chores!

BETHANY: But Jared, you’ve coated your sponge——with honey!!!

[JARED regards his sponge with new interest. It is shining and sticky with Grade-A California Honey, a  plastic bottle of which stands near the sink. He smiles and shakes his head with amazement.]

JARED: Geez, that’s amazin. Mah, didya know——I’m flying on three tabs of acid right now?!??

BETHANY: Jaaaa-redd!!!

[They perish from dehydration]

SOUNDTRACK: TOPLESS WOMEN TALK ABOUT THEIR LIVES soundtrack (2006).

I learned about this soundtrack from a very cool article in The Believer (the beginning of which is online here).  In the piece, the author claims to have never seen the film (he was given the soundtrack by a friend) and he doesn’t want  to change his associations with the music by watching the film.  And now, I too can say I have never seen the film, and likely never will.  And I really enjoy the soundtrack too.

The soundtrack is sort of an excuse to showcase a bunch of bands from New Zealand’s Flying Nun record label.  Featured artists are The 3DS, The Bats, The Clean, Superette, Snapper, The Chills, Straightjacket Fits, and Chris Knox.

It’s nigh impossible to give an overarching style to these songs.  Even when the bands have multiple songs on the soundtrack, they are not repetitive at all.  Even trying to represent a genre would be difficult.  The opener “Hey Suess” is almost a surf-punk song, while Chris Knox’s gorgeous “Not Given Lightly” is a stunning ballad.  There’s a cool shoe-gazer song “Saskatchewan,” and some great simple indie rock (a bunch of other tracks).

The only thing these bands have in common is that they’re all from New Zealand.  And as with any large body of land, no two bands are going to sound alike.  Nevertheless, all of the bands fall under the indie rock umbrella.  It’s a great collection of songs that many people probably haven’t heard.  It’s worth tracking down for the great collection of tunes and, if all you know about New Zealand is The Flight of the Conchords.

[READ: September 24, 2009] Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

After finishing Infinite Jest I wasn’t sure just how much more DFW I would want to read right away (of course, seeing as how I have now read almost all of his uncollected work, that is a rather moot point).  But when I saw that John Krasinski (of TV’s The Office) was making a film of this book, I had to jump in and read it again.

Obviously, there are many questions to be asked about this film ().  Is it going to be based on all the stories in the book?  (Surely not, some are completely unrelated).  Is it going to be just the interviews? (Probably, and yet there’s no overall narrative structure there).  And, having seen the trailer, I know structure is present.  I’m quite interested in the film.  In part because I didn’t LOVE the stories.  Well, that’s not quite right.  I enjoyed them very much, but since they weren’t stories per se, just dialogue, I’m not afraid of the stories getting turned into something else.  The text isn’t sacred to me, which may indeed make for the perfect set-up for a film.

Anyhow, onto the stories.

The obvious joke is that the author of Infinite Jest has created a book with “Brief” in the title!  But indeed, many of these stories are quite brief.  Some are only a couple of paragraphs (which true, from DFW that could still be ten pages).  But, indeed, most of the interviews in the book are brief too (except the final one in the book, which is nearly 30 pages).  

There are a couple of very long pieces, most of which follow DFW’s now-signature roundabout style.  But it’s these new short pieces that are quite a change of pace.  And I have to say I’m mixed on them.  Most of them feel like sketches: a scene or two but little more.  And while plot is not essential to every story, it often feels like these are experiments in writing shorter pieces.

The title stories (the Brief Interviews) (some of which appeared in Harper’s and one of these Harper’s stories (the first one (#16)) does not appear in the book) are indeed brief interviews.  They are scattered throughout the book in seemingly random order.  But I’ll look at them in numerical order.

The basic conceit here is that each hideous man is being interviewed by an unamed interlocutor whose questions remain unseen.  Most of the questions regard sexuality or women (although some deviate).  And the men have different perspectives on situations (some of them offensive, but most of them offer an insight that is almost shocking in its frankness).  Nealy all of the men are “educated” which means they get to use interesting terms, either literary or psychological.  And one or two have even studied feminism, it would seem.

I’m not going to review each B.I. because that would be silly.  The stories don’t really “do” anything beyond giving a picture of a man.  There’s not necessarily a plot (although some do have a plot) and there’s no real resolution to most of them.  And yet I found them all quite engaging (some more than others, obviously).

But so here is a one-line summary of the context of each B.I.   There is no indication that the gaps in numbers mean there were other interviews.

B.I. #2:  “Honest” explanation of how he can never fall in love with you.
B.I. #3: A dialogue about a man “assisting” a woman at the airport whose fiancee was not on the flight.
B.I. #11: Man is leaving the questioner (this seems to break the mold of the B.I. set-up, as the questioner does not appear to be the same one and I wonder how the film will address it).
B.I. #14: Man screams inappropriate things upon orgasm (very funny).
B.I. #15: Bondage with relation to parent issues.
B.I. #16: (Harper’s only) Dad laughs when son is too impetuous (quite funny and worth clicking on the link for).
B.I. #19: I like you cuz yer smart.
B.I. #20: Not brief at all.  This is the tour de force interview about a man who falls for a woman only when she relates the story of her abduction.
B.I. #28: Intellectualized dialogue between two men about how difficult it is to be a woman (no specific interlocutor here).
B.I. #30: He marries her because she has a good body.  Anything wrong with that?
B.I. #31: The selfishness of the Great Lover vs the honesty of the selfish lover.
B.I. #36: Self-help is good.
B.I. #40: Man with deformed arm.
B.I. #42: Man whose father worked as a bathroom attendant.
B.I. #46: Rape could be a meaningful experience, like the Holocaust (features my favorite New Jersey-ism “Alls I’m sayin’”).
B.I. #48: Third date=asks to tie her up=sexing a chicken (innuendo laden & hilarious).
B.I. #51: Fear of “what if I can’t?”
B.I. #59: Masturbation fantasies ruined by physics (very funny!).
B.I. #72: Weird twist ending (to the whole series?).

Another “series” in this book is “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders.”  This book collects numbers VI, XI and XXIV.

VIII appeared in McSweeney’s #1 (in 1998) and again in Oblivion as “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”.
VI appeared in McSweeney’s #3.
I have no idea if others were written or were published.

These are all very short pieces (about 2 pages) and they work more as sketches than actual stories.  They don’t even work as flash fiction.  After the length and detail of Infinite Jest and even many of the pieces in this collection, it’s hard to know what DFW was doing with these short pseudo-stories.  I enjoyed VI and XXIV but not so much XI.  VIII, which appeared in Oblivion but not here was very long and convoluted and quite enjoyable, very different in almost every way from the ones here.

As for the rest of the book, there are several very short pieces here (and one seems to have once had the “Yet Another…” title but has been changed for the collection.  These short pieces include:

“A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”
Two paragraphs about the effects of introducing people.

“Death is Not the End”
A Poet Laureate sits poolside, ruminating.

“The Devil is a Busy Man” (there are actually two stories with this title)
The first one (“Plus when he got…”) was originally called “Yet Another Instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders (XII)” and reveals how you can’t give things away for free…you’ve got to charge something even if it’s worth nothing.

“The Devil is a Busy Man”
The second one (“Three weeks ago…”) examines how revealing the secret of a good deed can actually make the deed evil.

“Think”
A story of infidelity which changes dramatically, unexpectedly.  Despite its unspecific information, it’s still a powerful story.

“Signifying Nothing,”
Here is a weird one for you.  That’s how the story opens and that is what it is.  In it, a man recounts a time when his father wagged his dick in front of him.  The incident is never mentioned again. The story ends with a strange family reunion in which the incident is, indeed, not mentioned.

“Datum Centurio“
A lengthy definition of the word “date.”  It is written as a very expansive definition, and the definitions do get funnier as they go along, although really this is sort of a lexicographer’s joke.

“Suicide as a Sort of Present.”
This story is the most complete story of these little vignettes, depressing at is may be.  It is also rather unsettling.

In general, I’m not that big a fan of these shorter pieces.  There’s nothing wrong with them per se, they just don’t do a lot for me.

That leaves these longer pieces:

“Forever Overhead”
This is a pretty great piece about a boy climbing to the top of the tall diving board at the community pool.  It is one of Wallace’s great, detail-obsessed pieces.  You can feel yourself on the ladder with the young boy.

“The Depressed Person”
Another of Wallace’s tour de force pieces. This story is quite long for what all happens in piece.  However, its recursive nature and its attention to details perfectly encapsulates the mindset of a depressed person, trying desperately to reach out to friends that she has reached out to far too often already.  A very moving piece.  (It was published (I think a little differently) in Harper’s and is available here).

“Octet”
This piece is weird for many reasons.  It is a footnote-fueled set of ostensibly eight pieces.  However, the footnotes explain why there are not actually 8 pieces and why the whole piece has failed in its original intent.    The pieces are designed as sort of pop quizzes, and yet as the footnotes explain, some of the original questions were just bad.  And one question was reworked but the original version had to stay in for the rework to make sense.  It’s a very meta- piece of fiction and is fairly fascinating.  Although, what its point is is anyone’s guess.  And, one gets the feeling that the footnotes are all true, and yet there is no way to know if this whole exercise is as DFW intended or was just a fun experiment.

“Adult World (I & II)”
This two-part story concerns the same characters.  In the first part, we meet the young wife, a few years after she got married.  She comes to the realization that her husband’s sexual proclivities have nothing to do with her.  And that for the first few years of their marriage, she was foolish to be so self-deprecating. As is DFW’s way, the story wends it way around several different focal events but eventually curlicues around itself to get to the heart of the matter which is fully revealed in Part II.

Part II of the story (although actually Part 4) is designed in an entirely different format.  It continues the story from where it left off, but it seems as if it is a rough draft for a skit or play.  Strangely, this style increases the dramatic aspect of the story and makes it climax a lot faster.

It’s certainly a weirdly designed piece, and yet as experimental fiction it works quite well.

“Church Not Made with Hands”
This is one of my least favorite DFW pieces.  I simply could not connect to anything that was going on.  It is set up in several different “chapter” segments, but the surrealness of the story combined with the peculiar storyline never meshed for me.

“Tri-Stan:  Sold Sissee nar to Ecko”
But this piece is probably my least favorite DFW piece of everything I’ve read by him.  The conceit revolves around mythical characters trying to create shows for TV.  I got a lot of the jokes and references in the story (Sissee Nar, etc).  Even the title, Tristan & Isolde, I see a lot of what’s going on.  And yet the whole conceit seemed simultaneously painfully obvious but also far too obscure.  So I don’t know if I’m missing something crucial or if the conceit is just not well founded. I still haven’t figure out who Agon M. Nar is supposed to be (as it doesn’t conform to the Narcissus inversion style or even the Herm ‘Aprho’ Dite jokey style).  Anyhow, this piece degenerates into a protracted (dream sequence?) attempt to sell a story about Narcissus’ beauty.  This is also one of the few cases where I feel that DFW’s circuitous style fails him.  The “metaphor” (or whatever it is) is working too hard to compete with the detail obsessed style, meaning you’re too busy thinking of two different aspects of the story to allow it to do what I think it wants to do.  It’s also well known that DFW had a love/hate relationship with TV, and it seems like he is just taking potshots at TV as well.

“On His Deathbed Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon”
This is another very lengthy piece that doesn’t really go anywhere.  And because of its very subject, I at first found it hard to bear.  Basically the story is of a father on his deathbed relating how much he has always detested his son.  Because yes, as a father there are things that your kids do that drive you crazy, but to hear someone this hateful and spiteful  made me very uncomfortable.  However, at about the midway point, the story really comes to life building to a fascinating twist at the end.  I think you could lop off the first ten or so pages and make this an even more successful story.  This is one of those rare cases where the repetitions and circles were just too circuitous.  Not to say that that opening information wasn’t important.  I just feel it was too much.

So, overall, I found this collection to be somewhat mixed.  The strong stories were really great.  The Brief Interviews were fun and interesting as character studies.  And some of the short pieces were enjoyable as sketches.  And yet, I can’t help but think that the short story is really not DFW’s strongest suit.

Charles Foster Kane proves money and good intentions do not a hero make.

There’s nothing I love more than a really sneaky, unpredictable, hateful and delightfully ee-viyill* villain. Unless we’re talking about antiheroes. And if we are, well, that’s a horse — or should I say jackass? — of an entirely different color.

Few things are more intriguing than characters who do that wavering, drunken dance on the line between good and bad and seem to stumble onto both sides equally at random. Those are the people, the warts-and-all sorts, we root for because they are human in their imperfections. They are us, and us real-life dwellers can’t seem to resist seeing a bit of ourselves magnified and flung up on the silver screen.

Here’s a list of 10 antiheroes who’ve made me laugh, cry and feel guilty about liking them (just a tiny bit):

1. Charles Foster Kane, “Citizen Kane” — There are many who would argue that Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) is most certainly a champion of the common man. Look again. Whatever good Kane achieves, there’s always an ulterior motive lurking in the corner: greed, the desire for control, arrogance. His ability to wrap these flaws in the cloak of good intentions makes him the quintessential, iconic antihero.

2. Alex, “A Clockwork Orange” — C.F. Kane may be an antihero for the ages, but Alex (Malcolm McDowell), the focus of Stanley Kubrick’s highly disturbing “A Clockwork Orange,” is nipping right at his heels. Or pointing a gun to the back of his head, more like. A rakehell who swigs drugged milk and patrols the streets of futuristic Britain raping women and revelling in mayhem — what’s to like about a guy like this? Alex has a few redeeming qualities that nudge him away from “villain,” but not so many that they make him good. He’s an antihero for the annals.

There are nicer people than Dee Dee -- we call them "losers."

3. Dee Dee Truitt, “The Opposite of Sex” — When a narrator describes her mother as “a loser bitch” and seduces her gay brother’s boy toy, you know you’re not in for a heart-warming tale. Savage wit, anything-but-good intentions and snarky condescension are all we get from the unflappable Dee Dee Truitt (Christina Ricci), one of the pluckiest, snidest and most irresistible characters ever created.

4. Rob Gordon, “High Fidelity” — What can you say about a bitter, broke leading man (John Cusack) so self-absorbed he’d rather stew about failed relationships than pay attention to the woman who loves him? It wouldn’t be incorrect to use words like “conceited jerk” or even “rampaging jackass” to describe Rob, a record store owner who elevates wallowing in self pity into an art. He’s not a nice guy, or even a halfway decent one, but that’s exactly why he’s such a compelling character.

5. Lester Burnham, “American Beauty” — Kevin Spacey has made a great and acclaimed career out of playing himself playing people who, uh, seem a whole lot like Kevin Spacey. Lester Burnham, a lumpish, discontent and disengaged spectator in his own life, is no exception, but he is one of the sharpest characters Spacey’s put his sarcastic stamp on. When Lester finally jolts out of his coma, we’re cheering his efforts to embrace life. Or least buy a dime bag.

5. Danny Balint, “The Believer” — “Conflicted” hardly begins to describe Danny (Ryan Gosling, fearless in his quest to take difficult parts), a violent young man who turns on his Jewish upbringing to become a fiercely antisemitic KKK member. And herein lies the contradiction: Brutish as he is, Danny’s also an educated man capable of kindness and intelligent, rational thought. It’s hard to like a character like this, but it’s equally as hard not to find him truly fascinating. 

Good and bad do battle in Gerd Wiesler.

6. Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, “The Lives of Others” – Nations that call themselves “Democratic Republics” tend to be anything but, so it seems that a man (Ulrich Mühe) who rises through the ranks of the Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret police, would qualify as a villain. But the rigid, grim Gerd Wiesler finds humanity in the couple he’s ordered to survail, and soon his own humanity emerges.

7. Ray Elwood, “Buffalo Soldiers” – It’s no secret I’m mad for Joaquin Phoenix in most anything, but resistance is futile when he plays men like the manipulative, shrewd and morally flexible Ray Elwood, who tolerates other people only as long as he can use them for something. He’s a real cad, to be sure, though there are moments where flashes of real feeling peek through, and those keep us coming back for more.

8. Sherry, “SherryBaby” — As a rule Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn’t sign on for parts that have less than 37 layers of complexity, but she outdoes herself here as Sherry, a fresh-out-of-prison ex-heroin addict working to get custody of the daughter she hasn’t seen in years. She’s rude, immature, brash, selfish and confrontational, and her love for her daughter is tainted by a sense of entitlement — Sherry’s hardly her child’s beacon of hope. Yet we cannot write her off because she sees herself clearly and tries, in her small way, to change. That’s my kind of woman: a real one.

The only thing Bernie's good at? Losing. Hard.

9. Bernie Lootz, “The Cooler” – Look up synonyms for “pathetic” in Merriam-Webster and you’ll likely find photos of Bernie Lootz (William H. Macy) beside every single word. He’s unlucky to a fault, and what’s worse is that his bad luck is contagious — so much so that casino bosses use him to “cool off” gamblers on a hot streak. Yikes. There are many moments where you wonder what there is to like about this wimpy, hapless sadsack, but it all boils down to Macy, who plays Bernie as a man who accepts his faults and means well. Sometimes, that’s enough. 

*Hedley Lamar-approved pronunciation

Moby Dick, or my “summer book” of ‘09 was closed this evening, and I’m gonna miss it.  I might suffer a bit of separation anxiety like I did when I finished up 2666 some months ago, because in it’s own brilliant way, Melville’s classic is a glorious mindfuck of a novel.  One that which I am almost tempted to tackle (in small doses) again.

In the meantime, the white whale, has been popping up as of recently in a few places.

1)”What makes Melville Melville is digression, texture, and weirdness” -Damion Searls piece in this months issue of The Believer: “Carving The Whale“.

2) Searls again, in discussion over at The Quarterly Conversation.

3)  San Francisco band, Or, The Whale putting out a pretty alright slab of tunes on their self-titled album.  Can’t deny that I hear a nice cross between The Byrds and Pentangle in these eleven songs off the bands second offering.

By Jason Diamond

Reunions are sometimes inevitable, as is the talk of why the band reuniting decided to get back together after how ever many years.  As the fans of these artists, we can only really hope it’s for all the right reasons, and the bundle of money we will pop out to see said reunions will be worth it.

We have 60’s obscure folk singers come back to more attention than they ever had back in their heyday, 70’s punk bands still spouting off the same rebellious lyrics to a crowd of teenagers who might not even be able to fathom exactly what “Alternative Ulster” even means, and we have 80’s bands touring the “oldies” circuit, sometimes playing their one-hit-wonders twice in a set.  As of recently, we have seen groups from the 90’s indie underground pop back up to acclaim in  a blog-fueled world that they may not have had fifteen years ago.  My Bloody Valentine had the hype, but would they have played top of the bill at Coachella in 1991?  Did people really care about Polvo as much as they do now?  Jesus Lizard, okay, well, they have always had their core of people who want to see David Yow do things that would turn Iggy Pop white (myself included), but Pavement reuniting is an entirely different bag than all of them.  The equal level of fanaticism and disdain this band has gained is almost second to none of their contemporaries, and whether they are reuniting to pay off home loans or because they genuinely feel like they have unfinished buisness is something we may never know.  But who really cares anyway?  In 2010 when the band take the stage in Central Park, as long as they play all our favorite songs, those of us who love the band will be able to sing, and in many cases of Malkmusian crooning, stretch the cryptic lyrics into the summer night, and I think we will be pretty satisfied – even if the band go out the back stage door with bags of money, looking like indie rock Monopoly men.

I’ve always had a theory about Pavement fans, and that is unlike almost any other band I can think of, each individual fan has not just a specific song they relate to, but one of cryptic plays on words that Stephen Malkmus did better than anybody since Mark E. Smith* of The Fall.

With that in mind, I decided it was an appropriate time to test my theory about Pavement lyrics, and after asking a dozen or so people I like and whose opinions I respect, it shocked me a bit that with the exception of two folks picking the same song, nobody picked the same set of lyrics.  Below are a few.

“did you see the drummer’s hair!” From the song “Cut Your Hair” picked by Vincent Cacchione from the band Soft Black

“And the check when it arrived, we went dutch dutch dutch!” From the song “Shady Lane”, picked by Jesse Sposato of Sadie Magazine

“pick out some Brazilian nuts for your engagement” From the song “We Dance” picked by Brad Haggert of Crystal Stilts

“I don’t need your summary acts / To get into the narrative age”
[which I always thought said: “I don’t need your summer reacts
to get into the narrative aim…” from “Old to Begin”, picked by Ari Messer, contributing editor at The Rumpus

“Someone took…in these pants” from “Shoot the Singer”, picked by Jens Carstensen of The Giraffes

“You’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.” From the song “Shady Lane”, Sarah Pollock from 826NYC

George Chen of Zum picked some in-between live song banter that Malkmus was/is famous for:

“This one is from the Fab Four from Liverpool – Echo and the Bunnymen.”

James Yeh of Gigantic Magazine displayed the kind of fandom of somebody that takes the music of Pavement quite seriously:

re: favorite pavement lyric: Hmm, that’s a good question! Well the one that’s at the front of my “hopefully one day will be published novel-in-stories thing” is from “Spit on a Stranger”:

“Honey I’m a prize
And you’re a kitchen
We make a perfect match”

This is what I misheard for years. As you may already know, the actual lyrics are:

“Honey I’m a prize
And you’re a catch
And we make a perfect match”

Which obviously I don’t like nearly as much. If we’re talking about something I like, as was originally intended, I guess it would be from “Gold Soundz”:

“So drunk
In the August sun
And you’re the kind of girl I like
Cause you’re empty
And I’m empty
And you can never quarantine the past”

And finally, from a guy who wrote what could be (in my mind) considered one of the finest pieces on Malkmus buddy/cohort/sometimes bandmate, David Berman (July/August ‘09 issue of The Believer), chimed in. Justin Taylor beaking it down via e-mail:

1) from Gold Soundz- “So drunk in the August sun, and you’re the kind of girl I like, because you’re empty, and I’m empty” This doesn’t need explaining, right? Some of the other ones do.

(2) “Box Elder”- pretty much the whole song is amazing, because the lyrics are so plainspoken and raw (which is relatively rare for Malkmus) and articulated in that clear, rising voice: sonorous as a lullabye over the strummed fuzz. But I’d like to pinpoint two parts of the song that seem like the linchpins of its success. The first is “Wasn’t the question you asked me / It wasn’t the answer I gave / that made me feel like I was on a train.” It’s just genius, the idea that “I am on a train” could be a *feeling* in the context of a relationship-conversation, and of course the notion is couched in the double-dismissal that neither question nor its answer (neither of which the listener is privvy to) are what triggers the feeling. Then there’s the song’s refrain, which is a very hard thing said plainly and with full confidence, something we’ve all wanted to say at one time or another, but probably only ever choked out of our mouths when it wasn’t true- “I’ve got a lot of good things coming my way, And I’m afraid to say that youre not one of them.”

(3) “Summer Babe”- “I saw your girlfriend and she was eating her fingers like they’re just another meal.” Yeah, we all saw that girl, Steve. And we wondered why the fuck she wasn’t OUR girlfriend…but then we realized that we actually kind of were glad she wasn’t.

(4) “Blue Hawaiian”- the whole first verse:

“A welcome to my friends:
This house is a home and a homes where I belong
Where the feelings are warm and the foundations are strong
If my soul has a shape, well, then it is an ellipse
And this slap is a gift
cause your cheeks have lost their lustre”

Holy shit! It’s Malkmus-as-Bitch-Goddess. It’s like a glimpse into the alternate universe where he’s a tart-tongued drag queen doing piano burlesque at Marie’s Crisis in the West Village. Except, you know–literary, kind of, still.

(5) “Starlings of the Slipstream”- The whole song is a great example of his *other* compositional method, where instead of nasty emotional jabs and one-liners, he allows the sounds of words to generate the ideas and images and lines. In verse one there are the “starlings in the slipstream,” which I can only assume he made up because he liked how it sounded (or saw some news article about birds riding air currents? who knows?) but then he thinks outloud that “the language of influence is cluttered with hard c’s” which leads him to the “spycam” he claims to have put in a sorority, which leads him to the priceless second refrain: “Darlings on the split screen.” It’s a totally beautiful sentence, but also utterly bizarre, and almost totally meaningless outside of the immediate context of the song (is he thinking of the original Revenge of the Nerds here? Or is he actually just riffing on the sounds of refrain #1?). Anyway, the thought of all the naked girls on camera (this is still a pre-internet world Malk is writing in) reminds him of the myth that “there’s no women in Alaska,” which in turn suggests something even more intellectually dubious- “There’s no creoles in Vermont,” which somehow brings him around to the first unequivocally True thing he’s said since the song started: “There’s no coast of Nebraska.” This is the heart of Pavement right here, isn’t it? Brilliant nonsense smartly declaimed–and American through and through.

See?  People take this shit seriously.

Like Taylor, I’ve got my moment with “Summer Babe” and “Box Elder”, except when I hear: “Every time I turn around I find I’m shot” in S.B,  I feel like that could be my own motto for any uncomfortable moment (there are many of these).  When Stephen M. waxes about how he had to “get the fuck out of this town” in “Box Elder”, that quixotic desire to leave the hustle and bustle out of New York takes over.  Not sure if I ever will, but if a song could empower me to do it, that is the one.  In “Silent Kit” he asks us not to “listen to the grandmother’s advice about us”, and it makes me think of a cryptic take on one of the greatest rock n’ roll love songs ever: Big Star’s “Thirteen”. Alex Chilton sings: “won’t you tell your dad, get off my back”, from the perspective of a teenager who just wants his music, and his love, to be understood.  If you take the time and place of the Malkmus lyric (1994), when the band had established themselves as a weird underground phenomenon — who people either loved or hated — it sounds like Pavement saying this is the band we are, this is what we do, and we don’t care what the older punks think, or if the indie snobs call us sell-outs.

But, if I had to pick a single lyric that meant the most to me, it’s from one of the bands biggest hits, “Range Life”:

“I want a range life, if I could settle down, then I would settle down.”

Malkmus,  now in  his forties, living in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two kids may have settled down, and is leading the ideal life.  A solo album (with a pretty solid backing band) every year, a tour here and there, and now, for whatever reason, he got the old band back together.  To me, that song, and those specific words above, are an anthem to go beyond the facade of whatever scene or sound you think you need to fit into, because at the end of the day, you probably just want to retire, and take it easy.  In the case of Pavement, they did just that, but figured one last time to let us all get our kicks couldn’t hurt anybody.

And maybe making some money while doing it isn’t so bad either…

*possibly someone who has more disdain for the reunited band, Mark E. Smith once said “It’s just like music when you reckon it up. It’s like listening to Pavement: it’s just The Fall in 1985, isn’t it? They haven’t got an original idea in their heads.”

From about 8:30 to 9:30 in the morning and about 10:30-12:00 at night weekdays and from early afternoon to early evening on Sundays, I read exclusively print material. I’m trying to hit a goal of about 150-200 pages a day on days I don’t write.

I’m not really reading anything particularly heavy. No Hegel or Hofstader. Yet. Just trying to get to a state where I read quickly but reflectively from a wide variety of materials.

I just finished the last couple volumes of Gardner Dozois “Year’s Best Science Fiction” anthologies. In general, I enjoy the majority of what he selects, as his tastes walk the fine line between hard and soft without going too much either way. I own about half the anthologies and have read back to the original 1984 one. It’s rather interesting as more and more it seems we are living in the future, narratives of the future are less in demand (outside crappy Hollywood blockbusters).

Right now I’ve been plowing through piles of magazines Asimov’s, 2600, The Believer, Pipes and Tobaccos. There would be more if I had more money, but I’m starting to feel that I need to focus on books more. Still, DIY and SEED would make good additions to the list.

Right now, I’d like to focus on one of them. The Believer.

I’ve got something of a love-hate relationship with the magazine (as opposed to the all-hate relation I have with n+1, it’s ‘rival’ of sorts). I love its inquiries into the incredible minutia of culture. Just the recent issue with its article on the long forgotten musical notation for all sounds made by William Gardiner and it’s inquiry into the otherworldly aesthetics of the Lawrence Welk Show is worth the price alone.

Then there’s the fairly interesting articles on how writing about music is like dancing about architecture complete with various literary examples.

Then there’s the shit that makes me want to throw the damn thing against the wall. A godawful paean to the lyrics of some Indie rock sensitive artist that reads like a Pitchfork review sans the snark and with triple the unearned importance. The almost painful centerpiece article about Beth Ditto, who apparently is a stereotype of all the annoying aspects of the painfully cool, from the “famous for being famous” done hipster style, to the definition of “punk” which includes acting like an ADHD child while amongst the general public, mouthing the political and sexual platitudes that is Puritanism wearing Burroughs’ dirty raincoat as a disguise, to just general pointless self-indulgence and excess that doesn’t even try to be tasteful, witty, or even self-aware.

If a hot chick with barely any musical talent strips down during a show and acts like a vapid fashion show hopping party girl offstage, she’s a trashy Pussycat Doll. If a fat dyke does the same damn thing, she’s the darling of the hipster media.

Often even with the good articles, like last year’s inquiry into Bill Fox has that certain myth-building, “my-aren’t-we-profound” sorta feel to it that grates. It’s no wonder, Bill Fox reputedly said he’d like to punch the writer in the face.

Add to that the PC lip-service that ruins perfectly good articles like the Karl May one, which while factually fascinating, did the great disservice of thematically linking the depictions of the Wild West written for Germans that were actually pretty progressive for its times (with old Shatterfist helping bring the Indians into Christianity and restoring peace on the frontier) to the genocidal visions of May’s most infamous fanboy, a certain Adolf Hitler.

Frankly I’m torn. Where else can I get articles about the obscurities, the artists and writers that fall through the cracks of history, the odd takes on pop cultural things without the whole social and political subtext I find obnoxious?

And no, it’s not the leftward slant of it either. I find traditionalist monologues that refuse to accept anything culturally or aesthetically avant-garde pretty grating as well. It’s the whole interpreting art through a lens of social peer group enforced norms rather than on its own  merits.

SOUNDTRACK: GREAT NORTHERN-Trading Twilight for Daylight (2007).

A patron donated this disc to our library.  I had never heard of Great Northern, but I gave it a listen, in part because I hoped that the band name came from Twin Peaks (no idea if it does). And wow, I was blown away by this disc.

This is like the great unheralded indie rocker band (although having looked them up apparently the are quite heralded).  Their songs sound like an inviting combination of The Anniversary (the GN song “The Middle” always puts me in mind of The Anniversary’s “The Siren Sings”), Veruca Salt, Nada Surf and any number of supremely catchy bands.  The vocals are split between a make and female voice which makes the diversity even more appealing.

There’s not a bad song on the disc, and I find myself playing it quite often. The music is first rate, with great textural setups and drop offs, and the choruses, oh the choruses.  It’s hard to even pick a favorite song.

I’m somewhat surprised I’d never heard of this band before (they have a new album out this year that I haven’t heard), but then they are on a label I’ve never heard of either (Eenie Meenie).  I will totally get their new disc, as well as their Sleepy Eepie EP.  I’m really that impressed.

[READ: January 2007] Sacco & Vanzetti Must Die

I read this book over two years ago (I’m cleaning up the final books that I haven’t posted about), and I’m afraid I’m a little shaky on the details.  But I just remembered that I read about it in The Believer.

The premise of the book is that Sacco & Vanzetti are actually a comedy team, not anarchists.  Well, they are anarchic, but in the realm of comedy, not bombs.  They are a sort of Laurel & Hardy with Sacco as the fat troublemaker (and yes the name fits) and Vanzetti as the straight man, the ideologue.  As they progress from slapstick routines to film, their comedy gets more specific, and their schtick concerns “knife grinders/throwers.”  The knife angle is explained as a family trademark or maybe it’s a stolen gimmick.

Inevitably, their careers begin to wain, and their lives take a turn for the worst.  And when things get bad, they get really bad, leading them to trial, with possible execution.

There are a lot of undercurrents about the role of immigrants, specifically Italian immigrants, in America (and the scapegoating that was often done to them).  For example, one of their films is called A Couple of Wops in a Jam. Other Italian stereotypes are also employed in the book, all of which lends to criticism of the way the real Sacco & Vanzetti were treated in their trial(s).  For an overview of the real case, including the suspected Italian prejudices, see here.

The main conceit of the book, however, is that Sacco & Vanzetti are inevitably doomed.  It is their nature to be found guilty, whether as comedians or as anarchists.  And so the book plays out as something of an alternate history of the 20th century, yet with a similar outcome.

If memory serves, the end of the book gets a little confusing.

Well, I just flipped through the copy and I’d forgotten that there are “supplemental materials” and “historical interludes” and as the book nears the end, the confluence of art and history gets very tricky.  It turns out to be a rather intellectual exercise (which is not surprising coming from Dalkey Press).  It deals with grand themes, but also revels in pie fights.

I remember there being a lot of scenes that I enjoyed (especially the film excerpts).  And of course, I love surreal/metafictional concepts.  As I said, I think it got a little tricky at times, but overall it was a really good read.  In fact, writing all this makes me want to read it again.