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Pandora's Boxed Set

A friend sent me this link to www.pandora.com which creates a stream of music based on a song or artist you specify. Unlike, say, amazon which simply refers you to more music by the same artist or predictably similar artists, pandora can surprise, because it breaks the music down into elements.  So far, I've created "Life During Wartime" radio, "The In Crowd" radio (Ramsey Lewis edition), "Look Through Any Window" radio, and "Staring at the Sun" Radio.

I will joust with Joyce tomorrow. And thanks much for the birthday greetings.

Today's My Birthday So No Post

In Which I Invoke The Phrase “Tradition And The Individual Talent” In A Way Which Would Really Bum Out T.S. Eliot: NOTES ON THE DANDY WARHOLS AND THE GREENHORNES

A thought that itself isn’t original: No artist who’s any good is wholly original. One writes fiction or makes music because you love what you’ve already heard or read and you want to create something like that. Of course, you also suspect that what you have to say has never quite been said  but that impulse has gotten plenty of play in our culture (ever hear of an “other-esteem” program?)

When I listen to the GreenHornes or the Dandy Warhols, I can hear them listening to music. On the GreenHornes garage rock, I can hear the Kinks listening to Sonny Boy Williamson or Van Morrison listening to whoever was on his turntable when he recorded Gloria.  And the result is satisfying, like finding a 1966 album that was somehow overlooked.  (And , which, frankly is tighter than most albums of the time.)  The Dandy Warhols sound does the same thing for 1968, especially on thirteen tales from urban bohemia.    

WRITING THE MIDWEST or FEAR OF FLYOVER, CONCLUDED

The trick to writing about the Midwest appears to be to have zero idea that you’re doing so. Christine Schutt doesn’t mention a single place name and nails the details of the actual and emotional weather. Calvin Trillin has lived for decades in Greenwich Village and yet he embodies Midwestern virtues more thoroughly than any living writer. And then there’s David Foster Wallace.    

Although he grew up in Illinois, he set Infinite Jest in a speculative post-millennial New England; the few stories in Hideous Men that I read before abandoning the book seemed located in the character’s fevered heads. But his September 11 essay in Consider The Lobster is filled with generous observed detail. Because he didn't own a TV at the time, he spent the day with ladies from his church in Bloomington, Illinois:

“Mrs. T has coffee on, but another sign of crisis is that if you want some you have to go get it yourself–it usually just sort of appears.”   

The problem may be that I’ve never thought of myself as a Midwesterner. When I was a kid, we used to visit our relatives in Illinois. I liked our cousins, but I hated those dismal prairie skies. I couldn’t wait to leave the Midwest and return to Minnesota.

The "e" didn't load: On adding Flickr

I just added a Flickr "Zeitgeist" thingee (see lower left). If you're looking at this site via a slower connection, does this create any problems? 

Male, Pale, and At Least Ten Years Out Of Date: MY Musical Tastes Revealed

The AV Club asked some musicians to play their ipods on shuffle, list the first songs that played, and react to them.

The songs: 

Ziggy Stardust     David Bowie     1972
Complicated     Rolling Stones    1967
Don’t Go     Matthew Sweet    1991
Lipstick Vogue    Elvis Costello 1986
Frank Sinatra    Cake    1996

I don't need to comment on the music; it has already commented on me. But the little digital thug waited  until later to play Speeka,  Joy Division, the Sundays, Evan Dando, and Sam and Dave. And, damn, the Loving Spoonful.   

Please feel free to leave your list as a comment or email it to me using the email function in the upper right.   

WRITING THE MIDWEST or FEAR OF FLYOVER

I would usually rather repeatedly staple my hand to my desk than think about “writing the Midwest.” Militant above-averageness, leisure-suit accents, big empty skies, and airless generalizations. Oh, boy.  But, with no stapler at hand, I had no choice.

I’ve enjoyed both A Prairie Home Companion and Fargo. But do they have to take up so damn much cultural space?  Has any other region been so relentlessly defined by its own self-parodies? Did anyone else notice, as they were leaving the theater after Fargo, that people in Minnesota affected “Fargo” accents–which suggests that the movie wasn’t quite accurate. (But there was also the guy E overheard on the North Shore who said, “Yeah, I guess we do talk like that.” Awesome.)

Here's what I'll pass off as an insight: Once you say, I’m writing about the midwest you’re screwed. It’s no accident that it was Saint Paulite F. Scott Fitzgerald who cautioned that if you start with an individual, you get a type. But that if you start with a  type, you get nothing.   

To be continued

Calvinism: Thoughts On Feeding A Yen

You can only read Ulysses for so long, especially since what Judge Woolsey refers to as its “satellite” books (the annotations) intensify the book’s  Ground Hog’s Day-like claustrophobia.  I’ve now read four versions of the action of the first chapter. 

Calvin Trillin is the anti-Joyce. More so than any other writer I admire, my relationship with Trillin is a kind of easy but rewarding, one-way, virtual friendship. His prose seems to me to embody the best of what it means to come from the midwest. (Raised in Kansas City, he wrote for the New Yorker for decades.) His values are decency, humor, level-headedness, unpretentiousness, love for family and friends, and an unassuming clarity that can ripen into incisiveness. His only flaw is also Midwestern: he doesn’t always know when a joke is no longer funny.

And, in his writing about food, he adds the additional qualities of enthusiasm and a sense that–as a jacket blurb points out–food “connects us to those we care about the most deeply.” 

How much of a fan am I?  The frontis material for his latest collection of food writing, Feeding A Yen, lists twenty-one of his books. I’ve read nineteen of them, including the so-called Tummy Trilogy, the three food books.  Feeding A Yen makes the trilogy a quartet. I’ve read the first two essays–about his quest for his daughter’s favorite childhood bagel, about his passion for pimientos de padron, a Galacian specialty pepper not available outside of Spain. Unlike Trillin, I have to be careful around food; I can fall into a compulsiveness that deadens enjoyment. But this taste–pun intended–made me realize how important food is to our lives here, in this neighborhood: how when we first moved here, we celebrated with udon noodles at TanPopo and how we regretted its loss to Lowertown; how I will walk Al past Moscow on the Hill and tell him of the wonders inside (“they make their beef stroganoff with filet mignon; they’re our kinda guys, Al); how a Paisano’s tuscan white sauce pizza and greek salad or Thai Delight's red curry can brighten a friday night or how Nina’s rosemary egg salad sandwich can elevate a Tuesday lunch. I’ve started making a point of picking up the Italian Beef from the local gyros place because it’s tasty but also because of the memories it invokes and because the owner is a good guy whose kid is sick.  Thus, the link/post below.   

Out Post

Link: Cool on the Hill: Carnivore on the hill.

Must Sea

Link: Samantha Hunt : : The Seas . Maud Newton (see link at left) mentioned this site, which suggests what a web site for a book might be. Note the author photograph.