Link: TYPO 7: JAN SJ�LAND. Wonderful contemporary Swedish poetry, translated by Kristina Sigler. For the contents of the whole issue: www.typomag.com.
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Link: TYPO 7: JAN SJ�LAND. Wonderful contemporary Swedish poetry, translated by Kristina Sigler. For the contents of the whole issue: www.typomag.com.
Link: Whats New. Our friends at Aurinka Glass are exhibiting their work. The link provides details.
I had lunch today–at the Barbary Fig, thanks for asking–with a couple of MFA friends. The purpose was to discuss my memoir. But even before lunch I looked at my manuscript and saw something I didn't like: a kind of too modulated, too precious, too high-on-the-fumes-of-its-own sensitivity quality. It's a memoir of boyhood that lacks the yelp of boyhood.
I wasn't a particularly bookish or sensitive (unless fear counts) kid. As late as junior high, my boy scout buddies and I played a game called Eat The Dirt, which involved actually eating soil, and I didn't think this was anything other than an optimal use of my time.
A quick look at Wilfrid Sheed's My Life As A Fan, a memoir about his love of baseball, provided the sample I needed to read:
The fields we played on had no fences and the ball could roll forever as some poor wretch panted over field and farm with the shouts of the baserunners growing fainter in his ears. As he reaches down, cursing baseball with every wheezing breath in his body, the ball skips out of his hand. And then again, as the last run scores and the crowd gives a final burp of joy. He is too furious to pick up anything by now, even if it had glue on it. Finally he calms down enough to get a handle and heaves the ball into the woods. Or tries to. But we might as well leave him at this point. He will never be a baseball fan.
The key is the slightly feral diction: "wretch," "panted," "wheezing," "burp," "heaves." Even if the word's not a verb, it's a verb.
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The Spring Issue of Rain Taxi includes reviews by MFA ’05 buddies Amy Shearn and Matt Duffus. Amy writes about Noria Jablonski’s first story collection Human Oddities and Matt considers Australian writer Tim Winton’s collection of linked stories, The Turning. Rain Taxi reviews books that often won’t be reviewed elsewhere, so it’s a great place to refresh your reading list.
The excellent David Denby wrote in the New Yorker of Walk the Line: “Though it’s not bad—in fact, it’s rather sweet—it’s too simple a portrait of a very complicated and calculating entertainer.”
A question, part rhetorical, part not: Has any biography of any artist ever satisfactorily captured the complexities of its subject? I opened a New Republic that was sitting on the top of the entryway table and read “Yet the obvious connections between [Kafka’s] life and work have not explained much about the work.” And if no one's ever done something, is that a meaningful standard?
And the bio pic is a doubly reductive: first the biography reduces the life to a book, then the film reduces the book to a movie.
Especially when it comes to artists, doesn’t the biographer always show up late for the epiphany?
Isn’t whatever happens between synapse and spirit and world ultimately unfilmable? Bob Dylan tried to capture the artistic process in Chronicles I and wound up sounding a little crazy.
Yes, maybe Walk The Line somewhat glibly made the love story the life story. But the movie showed that the uncool country singer my dad loved was also the protopunk my friends worshiped in the nineties and put some songs in my head for a couple of days. (Thanks to Mo for reminding me of this effect.) And some of the mildness and tentativeness of Walk the Line serves to debunk the Mount Rushmore quality of Johnny Cash’s image. I’m not sure it could do much better than that.
For a wonderful poem by Karen Rigby, and rich design by Laurie Phillips, click.
One theme emerged toward the end of last week: there was plenty going on in the late 50s and early 60s. (I uploaded the whole of Miles Davis's Kind of Blue to itunes.)
Then on Friday we rented Walk the Line. I’ve always admired Johnny Cash without ever bridging the gap between admiration and enjoyment. When I was very young, he was my father’s music, a bad-ass version of Tennessee Ernie Ford. I remember novelty hits like “A Boy Named Sue” and novelty non-hits like “The One in The Middle”about a musical group . . .
. . . long on musical ability
Folks thought they would go far
But political incompatibility led to their downfall
Well, the one on the right was on the left
And the one in the middle was on the right
And the one on the left was in the middle
And the guy in the rear was a . . . Methodist
I (retrospectively) cringed at the cheesy way he held out before saying "Methodist," to ensure the laugh. The cover of that album featured an illustration by Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis. I secretly thought Cash's music was catchy but I didn’t want to catch it. I had my image to think about. I was eight.
I didn’t think much about him for a couple of decades when some of the designers I worked with enthused about him. By that time, he seemed too cool–less a performer than an archetype or, more cynically, a brand.
Ever since I admitted that I loved Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Linemen,” I’ve been getting ready to actually hear Johnny Cash. And Walk the Line did the trick for me. It did it by employing all sorts of film-making and acting subtleties that i can't identify now and it did it by showing that the country crowd pleaser and the man who escaped to prisons were the same guy.
My fantasy baseball draft is Saturday at 2:30 and preparing for it is humbling. Partly, because I don't follow baseball closely enough to select with confidence, but more so because herding careers into my cheat sheets, I see the prospects who didn't perform to expectations, role players defined by their flaws, the hopes punctured by injuries, the entropic stars. And I think: man, what if there were a fantasy draft in my business? Last year my team "Thirty Pounds Down" didn't do very well.
I never quite got into the lounge music revival, because it could only celebrate the late 50s/early 60s by condescending to them. The nostalgia always tasted of contempt. But a part of The Nightfly's sophistication is Fagan's recognition of the sophistication of its subject.
When Fagan sings, of Dave Brubeck, "he's an artist, a pioneer, there's got to be some music on the New Frontier," he knows that a certain percentage of 1961 America would get the joke. (The joke being that Brubeck was a gifted popularizer–we have two of his albums–not a pioneer.)
In the late 50s/early 60s, Miles Davis was making Kind of Blue and John Coltrane was making a A Love Supreme, John Updike was writing the subtly experimental stories that became Pigeon Feathers, James Baldwin was writing a memoir that was also a major meditation on race (The Fire Next Time), the political philosopher Hannah Arndt was reporting for the New Yorker (Eichmann in Jerusalem), Godard was filming Breathless, Pauline Kael was writing her early movie reviews, Bob Newhart and Lenny Bruce were doing standup, and the Ford Thunderbird and the Eames chair were rolling off assembly lines.
I don't believe in romanticizing the past. But are we sure we want to condescend to these people?
What might get lost in the ipod shuffle is the concept album.
But have their been any at all in the past ten years? Have there been any great ones since Donald Fagan’s The Nightfly, his 1982 effort which perfectly evokes the lush minimalism of the era? And which evokes irony with love and love with irony? And which, along with Herb Alpert’s Theme From Casino Royale and the Beastie Boys’ cover of Benny and the Jets, is one of the few pieces of music that can predictably make me smile?
And, I say in an awkward transition, are we also losing transitions? The remarkable thing about the Dandy Warhol’s 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia is how the songs, especially the first handful, flow together. (Ditto for the first side of Steely Dan’s Aja.)
I think of Fagan because my friend Neal saw him Sunday night at the State and reported that the concert was great. I gotta keep up on this stuff.
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