GoHah

Friday, January 05, 2007

Music Review: Nellie McKay - Pretty Little Head

There's a lotta things that I'm proud of in this world
I got a pinch of Shirley Chisholm and a sprinkle of 'That Girl.'

Pretty Little Head

For sheer out-of-the gate gamut running, Get Away From Me, Nellie McKay’s dazzling and dizzying 2004 debut, displayed kaleidoscopic jazz-flavored pop smarts and well-wielded wit and wordplay embracing everything from cabaret, torch, biting hip-hop, and Doris Day-style dewy-eyed songcraft with a pinch of swing and a sprinkle of insincerity.

About all that didn’t get a try-out was yodeling, but McKay makes up for that oversight on her otherwise more uniform and long-delayed Pretty Little Head, which she ended up producing herself after a protracted dispute over direction and CD length led to Columbia letting her go. Releasing Pretty Little Head on her own Hungry Mouse label, a headstrong McKay showcases over two CDs 23 songs that, notwithstanding some diminishing returns, still put across an array of the expected eccentricities, self-effacing and acerbic quirks and vulnerabilities, and cause-related commentary.

But this time around, McKay, putting the first album’s precociousness behind her (when she was 19, or 21, depending on which conflicting facts you have at hand), has toned down the frenetic pace and constant pretty-little-head worry to an extent. Despite occasions in which someone is “coursing through my veins / Pulsing every pound / Panic on parade” (“I Am Nothing”), McKay realizes that she’s “supposed to have a laugh / And have a lot to say.” There's no cause for alarm, and after all, she sings languidly, “You’ve got a long and lazy river to your soul” (“Long and Lazy River”).

That may not be true for everyone, as the long and lazy river becomes at times a shallow tributary in which you’ll run aground. In the scathing “There You Are In Me,” McKay berates the “Selfish, stupid, so self-serious”:

The activist spirit within McKay escapes the trappings of sloganeering heavy-handedness, whether or not you agree with her stances, by being conveyed in oblique language and subtle gradations. Satiric jabs and gentle sarcasm marks the salute to gay marriage in “Cupcake,” while the acidic incisiveness in “The Big One” addresses commercialism and tenant’s rights with the help of some traces of hip-hop vocalizing.

In addition, the gorgeously rendered “Gladd” honors peace activist Gladd Patterson, but “Columbia Is Bleeding,” about allegations of animal cruelty at Columbia University, is more barbed, the most caustic song on Pretty. Allusions to those who “Generalize, proselytize, verbs were spillin’ out their sides,” and deadpanned pretexts that “They're just animals / Make good edibles,” put across the message with mordant humor that is as pointed and consequential.

Overall, however, Pretty Little Head, which gets assistance on a couple tracks from k.d lang and Cyndi Lauper, is not as consequential, consistent or as risk-taking as the brash and bolder Get Away From Me. There are some undernourished songs, lyrically and musically, and at the other extreme the voiceover excess on "Mama & Me" should've been excised.

McKay’s production on Pretty, though promising, doesn't always sit pretty and is a bit gawky at times, though she did have a hard act to follow: Geoff Emerick, who worked with the Beatles, produced and engineered Get Away, an album I can listen to straight through and still be bedazzled by - song after song.

That doesn‘t seem to be the case with the slightly disappointing Pretty Little Head, and I’m beginning to see Columbia’s point of view that it should’ve been more cohesively pared down to 16 songs on one CD.

Then again, let me give that yodeling song another listen…

Vinyl Tap: Best Reissues of 2006

Pick your format. Remastered, Enhanced, Extended, Limited, Legacy, Deluxe, Dual Disc, Box Set, Special, Live, Essential, Best of, Anthologies, Greatest Hits, Retrospectives.

There's even "Sordid Sentinels."

I hope they're Assorted and Sundry Sordid Sentinels - somehow that would seem to make my list of 2006's best-revisited recordings something complete, and alliterative, to boot. Whatever the case, and whether in compilation or repackaged compact disc-incarnation, squeezed of all traces of once-ubiquitous vinyl, this special year-end edition of Vinyl Tap has by necessity RPM'd for present purposes into The Polycarbonate Plastic Tap Top 10:

1. The Pretenders [Original Recording Remastered]

Yes, they‘re the great Pretenders. “I was feeling kind of ethereal ’cause I’m precious…” Chrissie Hynde may have tongue in cheek and in check, but you don’t know the half of it. She declares on this 1980 release that “I Love Pretending,” but there’s not a lot of reading between the lines needed on one of the most absorbing and vigorous debut albums from anyone at any time, lyrically and musically. From the pointed “anger and lust my senses running amok” to the poignancy of seeking forgiveness from a child who doesn’t understand as “You’ve turned your head / You’ve dropped my hand,” Hynde runs an emotional gamut on the self-titled album’s widely-varying touchstones.

2. Al Green - The Belle Album

When Elvis Costello was once asked if he had ever had a religious experience, he responded, "No, but I have heard Al Green." Whether Costello was referring to Green’s early R&B hits or his later gospel-oriented songs, or both, the transitional Belle from 1977 could be a contender for either view. Coming along at a time of Green’s personal problems and religious re-conversion, this 1977 album bridges the gap from the sinewy sublimity of the soulful Willie Mitchell-produced recordings to albums more in line with his emerging role as an ordained pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle. As it turned out, the tracks on Belle comprise the best of both musical worlds.

3. Matthew Sweet - Girlfriend [Original Recording Remastered][Special Edition]

Love lost and love lumbering and lurching toward new possibilities makes for a bittersweet emotion that finds musical expression in the inherent tensions of Sweet’s most fully-realized album, a crisp and commanding poptopian masterwork. Irresistible harmony-bedecked vocal melodiousness lands fab foursquare in a Big Star-light, star bright soundscape, set off against the assertive bite and crunch of the front-and-center guitars of Richard Lloyd and the late Robert Quine.

4. The Byrds - There Is A Season [Box Set]

So you want to be a rock 'n' roll star? “Then listen now to what I say / Just get an electric guitar / Then take some time and learn how to play…” They make it seem so easy. Chances are, however, you can’t do it half as well as one of the most preeminent American Bands, the Byrds, musically or harmonically, in whatever of their incarnations. This 99-song box set chronologically sequences the history of the Byrds from their folk-rock flights to their influential countrified landing, and whether you’re hearing an old favorite that really never grows old, or a new-spin of an outtake or oddity, a Byrds’ LP or CD never seems too out of season for another turn, turn, turn.

5. Lucinda Williams - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road [Original Recording Remastered]

As alternately sensuous and venomous as it is ever-vivid and evocative, the conscientious Williams’ remastered dual-disk deluxe edition of her masterfully crafted 1998 release, itself a laborious consequence of a revolving door series of producers, cities, and studios, almost seems like too much of a good thing, as if she’s out-perfected perfection - and in grand and glorious fashion.

6. Fats Waller - If You Got to Ask, You Ain't Got It! [Box Set] [Original Recording Remastered]

And if, after three discs and 66 songs of instrumental swing and striding and sly vocals, you still got to ask, you never will get it.

7. The dB's - Like This

The heart-surging “Love Is For Lovers” and the brooding “Lonely Is (As Lonely Does)” highlight a 1984 power-pop confection, Southern-style.

8. John Lee Hooker - Hooker [Box Set]

A comprehensive, career-spanning four-disc box set. For breadth and depth, things don’t get bluesier than this.

9. Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys - Legends Of Country Music [Box Set] [Original Recording Remastered]

With dance-floor style Western swing and its embrace of blues, jazz, country, and pop standards, this four-disc anthology shows why Wills distanced himself from the limitations of the “hillbilly” label.

10. Spoon - Telephono & Soft Effects [Enhanced]

Long lost Pixie-lated punk-pop from ‘96 and ‘97, jagged and jarring yet accessible and melodic.

Honorable Mentions:

Bangles - We Are The '80s

Beach Boys - Pet Sounds 40th Anniversary CD+DVD [ENHANCED] [LIMITED EDITION]

Captain Beefheart - Doc At The Radar Station [Original Recording Remastered]

The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me [Original Recording Remastered]

Los Lobos - Wolf Tracks: the Best of Los Lobos

Roy Orbison - The Essential Roy Orbison [Original Recording Remastered]

Pavement - Wowee Zowee: Sordid Sentinels Edition

The Replacements - Don't You Know Who I Think I Was?: The Best of the Replacements

Sebadoh III

T Bone Burnett - Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett

That's Entertainment [BOX SET] [SOUNDTRACK]

The Early Word: New Books for the Week of January 1, 2007

With most of the bookstore shelf-stuffing timed for the seasonal shopping crowd that has pretty much come and gone by now, January is usually slim pickin’s for new releases, the first week even more so. But for those bound and determined to exchange those bound, indeterminately-given gifts, there are a few notable titles available this week that may fit the bill, especially for fiction.

Fiction:

The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers by Lilian Jackson Braun

Cats may have nine lives, but you may be forgiven if you think they have more, and more whiskers still, as Braun’s 29th entry of her popular The Cat Who… mystery series chronicles a returning James Qwilleran and his novelistic felines, Koko and Yum Yum.

The Hunters: A Presidential Agent Novel by W.E.B Griffin

The Hunters marks the author’s third installment in his timely series. International intrigue abounds as U.N. oil-for-food bureaucrats and armed, black-clad "Ninjas" figure. So go figure.

The Sweet Potato Queens' First Big-Ass Novel: Stuff We Didn't Actually Do, But Could Have, and May Yet by Jill Conner Browne

Promises some big-ass chick-lit empowerment and ribaldry of the page-turner variety.

When Darkness Falls by James Grippando

A tense hostage crisis in Miami drives the action in Grippando's sixth thriller to feature criminal defense lawyer Jack Swyteck. This one centers on hostages, hush money, and the ever-present Miami vice.

Non-Fiction:

The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage by Laura Schlessinger

For those whose New Year's resolutions included subjecting yourself to browbeating sanctimony…

BOOK REVIEW: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra

“Do you like detective movies?” The main character in the audacious and sprawling Sacred Games asks another. “Only Hollywood movies. Our Indian ones are so badly made,” comes the answer. “But sometimes the Indian ones get things right also.”

That goes for novels as well. While there may be no hurrays for Bollywood forthcoming in Vikram Chandra’s newest work of masterfully crafted fiction, and though it may resemble, on the surface and in sense, an outsourced American-style police procedural, there is much more going on. The multi-layered strata of characters and details are only hinted at in the first drop-in-the-bucket chapters of this gritty and grounded epic, reminiscent of voluminous and character-rich nineteenth-century serial literature as much as modern day hardboiled crime capers.

Still, this tale of modern-day gumshoes and gurus is, in some regards, a departure for Chandra from the magical realism of his heralded 1995 debut, Red Earth and Pouring Rain. The A Thousand and One Nights-style storytelling -- 1997’s Love and Longing in Bombay collection of interconnected stories is framed by its own Scheherezade -- is pervaded with an impressionistic fusion of Indian myth, Hindu gods, fantasy and the workaday world. But Chandra has cast off any phantasmagoric flights of fancy in Sacred Games, retaining the nuanced intricacies, wide-ranging plotlines and high-definition characters in a cohesive and down-to-earth realization of Sacred Games’ kaleidoscopic and episodic style and structure.

In the book’s intertwining accounts of a seemingly jaded Sikh police inspector and a notorious Hindu gangster, it’s an all-encompassing realization, too, with ambiguities and events centering on a multitude of sins and incidents from cat-and-mouse games to a potentially catastrophic cloak-and-dagger gambit with no clean breaks or exit strategies. After all, as one Intelligence officer says on his deathbed, "The game lasts, the game is eternal, the game cannot be stopped, the game gives birth to itself."

The central game, the core storyline of Sacred Games, is set in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and unfolds with our introduction to detective Sartaj Singh, alternately cynical and romantic, past forty, divorced and world-weary. Moreover, because “Justice had sometimes to be manipulated into being properly blind,” he is resigned but still ambivalent to the system of institutionalized bribery and police brutality.

With such pragmatism -- or rationalization -- in tow, Sartaj gets an anonymous tip that leads to the hide-out of the notorious underworld gangster Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu Bhai who "dallied with bejeweled starlets, bankrolled politicians" and whose "daily skim from Bombay's various criminal dhandas was said to be greater than annual corporate incomes."

In a rather bizarre scene, Sartaj confronts Gaitonde as the mob boss sits inside an odd shell-like bunker, presumably impenetrable - that is until Sartaj, tired of chewing the philosophic fat and the back-and-forth taunting, calls for a huge bulldozer that doesn’t have a lot of problem gaining access. Gaitonde barely has time to commit suicide, after also killing a mysterious woman who was also, unknowingly to Sartaj, inside the bunker.

The mystery of the woman's identity has possible links to and sets in motion a long and at times meandering series of events with twists and turns that have their own twists and turns, and that ebb and flow along with disparate and sometimes relevant subplots. Meanwhile, Sartaj also juggles more mundane but personally profitable domestic disputes, blackmail, thievery, and other lesser crimes and misdemeanors.

But the actions of Gaitonde, detailed in interposed chapters, can’t remain too long on the back-burner - and the retelling of his power-grabbing ambitions and more benign and humanizing endeavors does more than fill in the narrative gaps. Gaitonde's rise within organized crime -- his arms dealing, infiltration of Bollywood and relationship with a movie star, his confrontations with his Muslim rival and associaton with a crafty guru bent on an apocalyptic calling -- all serve a larger purpose.

In addition to his bunker-mate’s feasible connection to “rabid extremists promising annihilation,” such undertakings also leave a trail that points to Gaitonde’s knowing, or unwitting, involvement with terrorist activity and big-scale bombing plans.

As Sartaj is pulled further into Indian Intelligence investigations of a portending disaster “that didn‘t announce itself and act in predictable ways,” so is the reader. Not only to the sequence of events and low-boil suspense -- Sacred Games is too expansive to be an all-nighter page-turning potboiler -- but also to the emotional and psychological toll taken on Sartaj as life, love, and career increasingly converge with a dead don’s plans that too slowly emerge at a rate outpaced by the race-against-time dread and apprehension.

“In this Gaitonde affair,” Chandra writes, “there would be no justice, no redemption. There was only a hope for some partial explanation of what had happened, and this creeping fear. Sartaj was afraid now, he truly was.”

And really, the attempts at solution and accounts of free-floating trepidation barely scratches the surface of a full-bodied and multifaceted story. With 900-pages (in need of some discerning editing), Sacred Games is a story with a lot of breathing room for the capaciousness of well-considered and deliberated delineations and subtleties, replete with uncertainty and doubt, happenstance and hope. Such breadth and depth allows Chandra to link the novel to a wide array of societal issues and philosophic observations, including the inextricable relationships to caste and religion, poverty, and the entrenched criminal element.

It’s also a true-to-life complexity reflecting, as Chandra declares in an interview, the author’s emphasis on “the grey areas between ‘good’ and ‘bad’” and his interest in “the incidentals, in the texture and mood that is revealed when somebody is narrating his or her own life as they see it. Often the lies they tell us are as revealing as the truths they are willing to reveal to you.”

In regards to characterization, Chandra also perceives the intriguing and often paradoxical Sartaj Singh, the detective who first made an appearance in one of Love and Longing’s stories, in such an extensively dimensional fashion, as a vehicle for further exploration and insight. “He’s cynical and reflective and yet hopeful,” the author says, “And a policeman is an interesting protagonist; he allows you to move across a culture sideways and vertically.”

Such novelistic latitude and attention to detail is not only employed to flesh out the warts-and-all characterization of Sartaj and the not-all-warts depiction of Gaitonde. While the conscientious care Chandra takes in Sacred Games may be business as usual in the aim to explicate the complexities of the main characters -- the poignancy of the once-dashing Sartaj’s regrets and sense of lost opportunities is effectively conveyed -- it is more unusual for that same craftsmanship to be applied to the many secondary characters. Going beyond any shorthand stereotyping or safe-target caricatures, Chandra presents, for example, an ultimately sympathetic portrayal of an affluent, pampered wife cheating on her husband. And the outward animosity displayed toward Sartaj by the son of his slain partner is unflinching, Sartaj's rumination unsparing.

Not that Chandra -- with the resonance and elegance and, at times, economy of his writing -- needs to belabor or expend too many words to put across the full vulnerability and humanity of his characters, and the challenges of the lives they lead. At one point, Sartaj thinks about “how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy it but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.”

Actions may speak louder from time to time, but Chandra’s words cut to the heart of many matters as they, too, “get things right.”

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Vinyl Tap: Mott The Hoople - Brain Capers

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #32:

Bowie!? We don’t need no stinkin’ Bowie!

It’s an affirmation of sorts that -- with such classics as Mott and The Hoople -- was certainly evident in the post-All The Young Dudes era of Mott the Hoople’s career after the invaluable David Bowie-orchestrated commercial resuscitation got them back on the radio and record store radar.

But in 1971, a year before Dudes, the group realized the zenith of their early period with the rough-edged and raucous Brain Capers. With no trace of sonic flat-lining anywhere amid the jolting spittle and spirit, the wailing snarl of Ian Hunter’s vocals contends with -- and tries not to get drowned out by -- the front-and-center instrumentation comprised in a big boost of energized Blonde on Blonde-style organ and Mick Ralphs’ propulsive and bristling guitar.

As the madcap chaos and ferociousness of the lead-off “Death May Be Your Santa Claus” promises, if not threatens, the resultant nothing-to-lose push-and-shove sounds like each Mott-top was “Really mad at this outrage” as they advance an unsettling and all-embracing outlook “From the good to the bad to the ugly change.” And it's not a question of if - but when: after all, “How long, how long ‘fore you realize that all’s strange?”

Not that life has to be without healing and solace, as Mott The Hoople takes a detour with seemingly surprising covers of Dion’s “Your Own Backyard” and the Youngbloods’ “Darkness, Darkness,” with the plea to “Fill the emptiness of right now.”

Which Hunter & Company themselves proceed to do -- and then some -- when they get especially back on track with a couple of Full Motty, and foreshadowing, tracks. The nine-minute keyboard-driven “The Journey” prefigures, structurally and thematically, such anthemic grand statements as “Ballad of Mott The Hoople (26th March 1972, Zürich),” and “Ships,” from Hunter’s stellar solo work from 1979, You're Never Alone With a Schizophrenic.

On a more celebratory note, the manic and swaggering “Sweet Angeline” recalls Mott’s “All The Way From Memphis” as much as it does Dylan. But lyrically, it's capable of belying such joyousness; when Hunter entreats, "Oh rescue me or bury me, for I care not what you do / There is just one thing that I want to say, am I really you?" - it evokes one of Hunter’s most poignant songs (also from Mott), the gorgeous and melancholic “I Wish I Was Your Mother.”

Much more ominously, the penultimate “The Moon Upstairs,” suggesting Chuck Berry as channeled by Deep Purple, relates some unhinged episodes of insanity when “I hated them and they hated me and I hated everything," so “they let my body go / But they locked away my brain”:

But let the two-minute toss-off that closes the album, “Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception,” be Brain Caper’s epitaph as it succinctly, if in slapdash fashion, sums up the preceding listening experience, whether expressly or in sense:

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Vinyl Tap: Paul and Linda McCartney - Ram

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #31:

The wondrous new Beatles-inspired and inspirited Love album, by virtue of George Martin’s production, escapes most charges of a "Hooked-on-the-Beatles-Classics" medley misstep (although I think “While My Orchestra Gently Weeps” would lend itself better to, oh say, a guitar!). The mash-ups and snippets intermingled with some of the Beatles best, both early and late era, for the most part work to great effect. I can see the resourcefully imaginative Martin relishing the idea of this project, perhaps having, in addition to the doubtless serendipitous impulses that cropped up, some of those resultant musical concurrences in mind for years.

Though the segue-heavy Love may conjure up for some Martin’s studio wizardry on Sgt. Pepper or the sweeping clearinghouse second side of Abbey Road, I can’t help but also make kaleidoscopic comparisons, though of a lesser sonic sheen, with Paul McCartney’s second solo album, Ram. The 1971 release is ear candy all the way, sometimes silly love songs for certain as McCartney enjoys the rewards of a happy family life on that Scottish sheep farm deep in the “Heart of the Country” (“Want a horse, I want a sheep / I wanna get me a good night's sleep” -- and with a bouncy confection like this, who would begrudge him that one-time contentment?).

But even though there are no profound lyrical statements being made on Ram, the sheer fun emanating from the grooves is infectious, whether it be found in the tuneful two-minute snippets (“Ram On,” “Dear Boy”) that wouldn’t have been out of place on the ramshackle first solo LP, or discovered amid the mini-suite pop gems such as the hit "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey.” The more full-bodied and produced rockers, furthermore -- such as “Smile Away” and “Monkberry Moon Delight” -- finds McCartney giving his myriad vocal intonations a helter-skelter work-out.

It is Ram’s exhilarating first and last songs -- “Too Many People” and “Back Seat of my Car” -- that bookend this classy and classic album and most imbue it with the many-moods and extra textures that pre-figure the accessible experimentalism of Love. “People” alternates a punchy pop-rock attack, guitar’s a-blazing, with a wistfully eerie rumination as the lyrics parallel the musical dynamics with a thematic shift from modern-day exasperation to one of romanticism and resignation:

The “She‘s Leaving Home"-style morality tale of “Back Seat” skimps on lyrical substance, but more than makes up for that lack with a more wide-ranging musical adventurousness that wraps up its moments of poignancy in a build-up of orchestral grandeur. Still, it doesn’t lapse into the sappy excess that McCartney fell into down the road with such songs as “My Love” - just as Ram overall retains the kind of singular vision and Beatles-esque inventiveness that later abates from time to time when McCartney tries on some ill-fitting trends such as disco and takes a departure or two in reggae and synth-heavy new wave.

McCartney’s trademark and seemingly effortless pop-rock majesty, as exhibited in abundance on Ram, is his saving grace, however - even in the nooks and crannies of his songs’ hooks and canny resonance and warmth. Show me someone who decries, say, “Silly Love Songs,” and I’ll show you someone who most likely turns up the volume full blast when the song comes on the radio - if only to hear that amazing and melodic bass line.

And "what's wrong with that, I'd like to know?" Smile away, indeed.

The Early Word: New Art and Photography Books (in Song)

Got to hurry on back to my hotel room,
Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece.
She promised that she'd be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.

My writing about some of the more notable and quirky art and photography books out there this holiday season will never be misconstrued as a masterpiece, but Bob Dylan’s music-meld of art and commerce wherein he’s “Sailin' 'round the world in a dirty gondola / Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!” got me to thinking of appropriate songs for some of the books I stumbled upon. Well, that, and plus the fact that I had the headphones on and a whole lot of CDs and LPs within inspiration’s reach.

Monkey Portraits by Jill Greenberg, Paul Weitz

Feeling a bit anthropomorphic lately? You would’ve thought Chuck Berry said it all:

Blond haired, good lookin' - tryin' to get me hooked.
Want me to marry - settle down - get a home - write a book!
Too much monkey business. Too much monkey business.
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in!

But with 76 emotion-ranging photos, Jill Greenberg displays some surprising images of monkeys and apes, many of whom have appeared on film or in television shows. Maybe she found them more disciplined than the Hollywood celebrities she used to photograph for major publications.

My Secret: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren

As the Beatles once implored:

Listen,
Do you want to know a secret?
Do you promise not to tell, whoa oh, oh.

Closer,
Let me whisper in your ear…

Or just mail them to Warren for this follow-up to the bestseller, PostSecret, his 2005 exercise in community art in which strangers mailed him anonymous postcards with their innermost secrets. This time around Warren has personally selected never-before-seen anonymous postcards created by teens and college students from across America with such hilarious and off-the-wall messages as:

"My friends think I was homeschooled. I spent high school in juvi."
"I am avoiding you because you are socially below me."
"I know the truth to the lie my parents tell... "

A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 by Annie Leibovitz

The Kinks once sang:

People take pictures of the Summer,
Just in case someone thought they had missed it,
Just to proved that it really existed.
People take pictures of each other,
And the moment to last them for ever,
Of the time when they mattered to someone

Many photographers have taken pictures of the celebrities and scenes documented by Leibowitz in her career with Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. With shots of such famed figures as Johnny Cash, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Keith Richards, Michael Jordan, Joan Didion, R2-D2, Patti Smith, Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, William Burroughs, and George W. Bush; and scenes from the siege of Sarajevo in the early '90s, and distinctive landscapes and ad campaigns -- many collected in this volume -- Leibowitz brings her own style to “the moment to last… forever.”

The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

Ray Davies also sang as an “Art Lover”:

Pretty little legs, I want to draw them,
Like a Degas ballerina.
Pure white skin, like porcelain,
She’s a work of art and I should know
I’m an art lover.

Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Sisley, Morisot, and Cassatt. Private Lives constitutes a rich illustration of these revolutionary artists known for their atmospheric landscapes and candid depictions of everyday life - paintings as much valued now as they were disdained then. For a full portrait, Roe provides more biographical breadth and depth than you get in most art books.

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis

Sure he’s “Mysterious and spooky, all together ooky” - he was, after all, fascinated by "the aberrations of life." But is he “Neat. Sweet. Petite?” Find out as we “ get a witch's shawl on / A broomstick you can crawl on" to pay a call on the darkly-humored New Yorker cartoonist in this scintillating biography which includes previously unpublished artwork, photographs, and personal drawings.

Shelter Dogs by Traer Scott

Tom Waits sings of their canine cousins:

Inside a broken clock
Splashing the wine
With all the Rain Dogs
Taxi, we'd rather walk.
Huddle a doorway with the Rain Dogs
For I am a Rain Dog, too.

In photographer Traer Scott’s empathic and poignant portraits of fifty beautiful shelter dogs -- some of whom eventually found good homes, others not so lucky -- Scott raises awareness of animal rescue causes, and especially the need for more adoptive homes for abandoned dogs.

Other intriguing finds:

Postcards from Mars: The First Photographer on the Red Planet by Jim Bell

The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker

Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 by Roz Chast

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain De Botton

An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories by Ivan Brunetti (Editor)

Life: The Platinum Anniversary Collection: 70 Years of Extraordinary Photography

Presidential Doodles: Two Centuries of Scribbles, Scratches, Squiggles & Scrawls from the Oval Office by Cabinet Magazine, David Greenberg

Ocean by Robert Dinwiddie, Louise Thomas, Fabien Cousteau (Foreword)

Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills by David Milch

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford

Robert Polidori: After the Flood by Robert Polidori, Jeff L. Rosenheim (Introduction)

Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson, Daniel Weinberg

Shoes: A History From Sandals to Sneakers by Giorgio Riello (Editor), Peter McNeil (Editor)

Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft by Simon Houpt, Julian Radcliffe (Foreword)

Born to Run: The Unseen Photos by Bruce Springsteen, Daniel Wolff (Introduction), Eric Meola (Photographer)

The Radio City Rockettes: A Dance Through Time by James Porto

The Anime Encyclopedia, Revised & Expanded Edition: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917 by Jonathan Clements, Helen McCarthy

Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album by Matthew Robertson

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts) by Kirk Varnedoe, Earl A. Powell III (Foreword), Adam Gopnik (Preface)

BOOK REVIEW: With Amusement For All - A History Of Popular Culture Since 1830 by LeRoy Ashby

It’s Dumbo, on the home front, and to the rescue…

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and Germany’s declaration of war a few days later may have understandably knocked the endearing elephant star, Walt Disney’s newest cartoon creation, off the front cover of Time magazine, but that wouldn’t last long. As detailed in the voluminous critical compendium of all things Pop Cultural, With Amusement for All: A History Of American Culture Since 1830, Americans, as focused as they were on the unfolding events of World War II, ultimately didn’t make a insurmountable distinction between entertainment and reality.

And neither did Time, who sensed a collective clamoring not for all-out escapism as much as for enlistment of all forces in times of trouble. And so the weekly featured in their December 29 issue a well-received article on the enormous-eared cartoon character, gauging the underdog-turned-hero star of Dumbo -- in an aptly recognizable and paralleled plight against injustice and attack -- as “the most appealing new character of this year of war.” Indeed, “Among all the grim and forbidding images of A.D. 1941,” Time speculated, “Dumbo’s “guileless, homeless face is the face of the true man of good will.”

As author LeRoy Ashby notes in this pertinent chapter on “Building a Wartime Consensus in the 1940s and 1950s,” the entertainment industry bolstered throughout World War II and into the Cold War a “victory mystique” that provided temporary respite in a bleak world, and “profoundly influenced Americans’ perceptions of themselves and their country.”

In this regard, it is much too simplistic to assert the purely diversionary aspect of popular culture, and Ashby doesn’t acquiesce to the easy temptation to provide a mere trivial pursuit and or produce a piling-on of hit-and-run factoids as he chronicles -- with analysis that couches his topics in incisive sociological and historical terms -- the advancement of such fixations and affairs as radio, comic books, movies, music, and sports.

You’ll find elsewhere in this engrossing and ambitious 600-plus page book (with copious notes and bibliography), the oft-mentioned fact that movie-going during the Great Depression increased - period, end of story. But it wasn’t so much that poor folk found a fantasyland refuge in watching carefree cosmopolitan dandies like Fred Astaire trip the light luxurious in top hat ‘n’ tails, or in a Busby Berkeley extravaganza-for-the-sake-of extravagance -- though there is that escapist aspect. Ashby digs deeper in mining other explantions - the economic factors at play, say, that led to real life gangsterism and crime movies which “tapped into a growing vein of public anger and disillusionment.” Or the moral climate among the public and producers that led to sensationalism in the “sin-ema,“ before the censorship clamp-down constituted in the Production Code and the Hays office.

Similarly and more recently, in the chapter “Popular Culture and 1960s Ferment,” Ashby’s systematic exploration of the Beatles’ overwhelming popularity goes beyond the standard right-time right-place reasoning which posits that, in coming along in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination and national mourning, the group struck a much-needed chord. True, the author agrees, “Timing was important in the Beatles’ explosive impact in the United States,” but in addition to the bracing music and refreshing personalities that complemented such welcome optimism and energy, the fab foursome's emergence also coincided, we are reminded, with the post-war baby boomers coming of age in the mid- ’60s.

Moreover, Beatles manager Brian Epstein was certainly instrumental, carefully orchestrating the Beatles arrival in America with various promotional pushes that had gotten “the American media to turn the Beatles’ U.S. arrival into a major event.” Great first impression, and the rest is history - and not just pop cultural, considering the Beatles as an ongoing galvanizing catalyst for many social, political and artistic changes.

But these seemingly disparate forces are inextricably linked. As Ashy contends, pop culture cannot be considered strictly and discretely in isolation from these other considerations. The celebrity of the Beatles, for example, may have started out with a considerably commercial side to it, but that is what, in part, defines pop culture. “What separates it,” Ashby notes, “from noncommercial neighborhood and family games, for instance, is that its creators and/or disseminators seek to profit from it; they are in the business of merchandising entertainment.”

This has been the case in the United States at least since the mid-19th century when the 1830s saw the burgeoning of blackface minstrel acts and the rise of P.T. Barnum’s circus. But popular culture has been and continues to be malleable and resilient as such impulses as new technologies, economic and political conditions, changing values and demographics alters the business and its products.

This impetus transforms the enterprise in unpredictable ways, too, as popular culture both reflects and shapes the larger
society, as Ashy points out:

It can refract as well as mirror, breaking the larger society into a wide range of images and meanings. It can follow well-worn paths and set new directions. American entertainment has never comprised a neatly homogenized set of diversions. Instead, it is full of contradictions and speaks in many voices, some louder and more influential than others. Its messages can be liberating and confining, reassuring and unsettling.

For a good taste of this complex subject’s multifarious nature and potentially visceral impact, you need go no further than the pop culture fever dream that is With Amusement’s index, consisting of 35 pages of wide-ranging subjects from Hank Aaron to Adolph Zukor. It's all here -- sports, movies, music, television, comics, pulp fiction -- and everything in between, subjectively favorable or not.

Ashby, with With Amusement For All, has written an invaluable interpretive history and comprehensive reference tool, good for methodical types to immerse themselves in page by page, cover to cover - or for the more restless to flip through or plunge in purposefully or randomly. Either way, you’re going to get an education and some history, and a lot of opinion and perspective.

Liner Notables #9: Dave Alvin - West of the West

Not an old album this time. I dragged myself kicking and screaming into the CD age for a spell to share some new-fangled liner notes from a favorite recent release. Liner Notable #9:

“While California doesn’t quite have the deep indigenous folk music traditions of Mississippi, Texas, or Georgia, it does boast a rich history of jazz, blues, R&B, country, surf, and early rock and roll. California has also produced more than its share of damned good songwriters.”

Paying tribute and playing interpretive craftsman to the hilt, California native Dave Alvin’s West of the West is a beautifully realized collection of songs -- with liner notes more than up to a systematic task -- from California-born or raised artists who’ve "at least had their first kiss or broken heart here.” But Alvin brings an American roots element to many of the songs, not only bringing in an amalgam of that “rich history,” but altering some songs beyond recognition; I didn’t quite recognize Jackson Browne’s “Redneck Friend” until about halfway through the bluesy revision.

Which kind of tells you that this year's West of the West, with its infusion of blues, folk, R&B and country, is not your quintessential coastal car-cruise music, SoCal style. No, this has more of an inland intrigue, perfect musical accompaniment for driving through the Central Valley or along the Eastern Sierras to Bishop and beyond. Yes, Brian Wilson’s “Surfer Girl” is represented here -- in an exquisite gospel-tinged cover -- but so are songs by John Stewart (San Diego), Tom Waits (Pomona), Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and Louis Perez (Los Angeles), and the Bay Area’s Robert Hunter and John Fogerty, among others not so expressly linked to an overarching fun-in-the-sun Golden State sensation. And how about Bakersfield's Merle Haggard and under-the-radar Fresno folkie Jim Ringer? Reason enough to pop in West in the CD player as you're driving through the farm communities and oil towns of Highway 99.

With such an array of talent and artistry, Alvin admits to an initial difficulty in “Considering who to choose for the CD, from the famous and obscure deserving songwriters.” As a prime example of modern-day liner note writing, wherein the artist -- not the promo copywriter -- is free to introduce and expand upon how they decided what they decided, West's commentary alludes to Alvin's painstaking and fascinating methodology to such free-rein musical madness, while at the same time touching upon his vast knowledge of musical Californiana and arcana.

The choice of "California Bloodlines," the first song on West, was no-brainer, though: "One afternoon in 1969, my mother and I were eating lunch at the kitchen table and watching a local L.A. daytime talk show on our black and white TV,” Alvin begins. “The host introduced a young singer/songwriter named John Stewart…” Alvin, in his "infinite 13-year old wisdom," fakes indifference to the Monkees' Stewart-penned “Daydream Believer,” but he really takes notice in a couple other songs:

But then he did 'July, you're a Woman' and he sang the line, 'I have not been known as the Saint of San Joaquin.' My mother smiled and said, 'He's singing about where I'm from, the San Joaquin Valley. Then I paid closer attention. The TV host asked Stewart questions about songwriting, his time in The Kingston Trio and about growing up in California. I don't remember his answers but when he sang 'California Bloodlines' at the end of the show, I do remember my mother telling me, 'That's what you have, just like him, you've got California bloodlines.' Maybe that was when the idea for this CD first entered my mind."

Most of the other selections were filtered from a lifetime of diverse musical saturation and the encyclopedic knowledge garnered throughout his career with the roots and rockabilly-centered Blasters, a brief stint with punk upstarts X and Alvin's solo work. Indeed, the writers he’d been drawn to have “helped me define myself as a songwriter and as a Californian. I first heard their songs on jukeboxes and Top 40 AM Radio when I was a kid and on folk and underground radio as a teenager while others I heard sung live in smoky bars as an adult.”

The net result for the recording of West is compilation of songs by writers "shaped by California’s mix of cultures, beliefs, and attitudes, as well as by the oaks and redwoods, the cities and farmlands, the highways and barrooms, the ocean, mountains and deserts and the eternal hopes and disappointments of growing up in a mythical promised land.”

But it doesn’t stop there. One of the benefits of modern-day liner notes is that, in an effort to fully communicate from the heart as well as with cold hard facts, they so often come in the form of personal ruminations from the artist. Alvin writes with passion and inspiration about the road taken to get him to the recording of West of the West, but he also acknowledges the evolved and ever-developing nature of society and, by extension, music.

“The landscape,” Alvin notes, “that shaped these songwriters have vanished or changed drastically.” But whatever the outcome in forms or genres, he is optimistic about the range of possibilities that stem from such variegated potential:

Right now, whether on a guitar or with a computer, on a cattle ranch near Alturus or in a garage in Orange County, in a shack in the Mendocino woods or a one room Hollywood apartment, or sitting somewhere at a kitchen table, somebody is writing the next generation of songs with California bloodlines.And so that "California heartbeat in my soul" John Steward wrote about keeps beating on...

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

The Early Word: New Non-Fiction Books (an O.J.-Free Zone)

How many shopping days 'til Christmas? Don't know. You do the math. All I'm here for is to feature, in this installment of The Early Word, some non-fiction titles for your perusal and amusement.

BIOGRAPHY

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler. Gabler takes full advantage as the first writer to have gained access to Disney’s archives to write with great biographical breadth and depth. From Disney’s bleak upbringing to the development of a rich imagination that led to unimaginable success in film, television, theme parks, music, book publishing, and merchandising, this richly detailed 880-page tome has it all. Including some of the names originally considered for the dwarfs in Snow White: Deafy, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Burpy, Gabby, Puffy, Stuffy, Nifty, Tubby, Biggo Ego, Flabby, Jaunty, Baldy, Lazy, Dizzy, Cranky, and Chesty.

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. Forget Disney. Do I even have to tell you how richly detailed this book is?

Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir by Robert Hughes, esteemed art critic, biographer, historian, polemicist, television commentator, and now memoirist.

Mandela: The Authorized Portrait. A sumptuously illustrated and comprehensive tribute to the South African statesman’s life and work.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir by Bill Bryson. A memoir and follow-up to the humorist’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung. Soldier, and especially in this comprehensive look, much more.

HISTORY

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. The subtitle clues you in, but even knowing that this book is The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, doesn’t do it justice. The author of Everything You Know Is Wrong has provided not only a compelling step-by-step historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in 19th-century London, he traces the pathways to solutions that revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, and science. Ultimately, the work of foresighted health pioneers who mapped out the disease's spread resulted in efficient public waste disposal systems, and disease control measures that saved millions worldwide.

Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson and Daniel Weinberg. Praised as the definitive illustrated history of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, this unique work contains over 300 documents, portraits, memorabilia and arcana.

The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism by Paul Kengor. Here’s the rest of him. Especially in the 40th President’s role as a Cold War victor.

Dangerous Nation by Robert Kagan. Far from any notion of the United States as an historically isolationist power, the Washington Post columnist and bestselling author (Of Paradise and Power) argues that a policy of aggressive expansion was always the aim and has been inextricably linked with liberal democracy.

OTHER NON-FICTION TITLES

On Truth by Harry G. Frankfurt. In an extended essay, the author of On Bullshit offers a sequel. "A society,” Frankfurt says, “that is recklessly and persistently remiss in [supporting and encouraging truth] is bound to decline." No bullshit.

Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives by John Edwards. Apparently the former senator had some time on his hands, so he compiled this coffee-table book about home and its comforts. Hey, ex-Prez Jimmy Carter knows something about building homes! But, for what it's worth, he decided instead to put in his two cents with Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.

Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen. Apparently there’s hope for the planet, according to this feel-good resource. But don’t wait until the last minute of Christmas Eve - there’s lots of assembly required, and probably some missing parts.

Next up in The Early Word - New Books of Note: Gift Books, perhaps. Haven't thought that far ahead.

Vinyl Tap: Sam Phillips - The Indescribable Wow; Cruel Inventions; Martinis and Bikinis

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #30:

No, not the Sun Records one. But the Sam Phillips we’re talking about is outwardly sunny on her 1988 record, The Indescribable Wow. This unabashed pop masterwork, Phillips’ first secular release after a time as a Christian rock artist under the name Leslie Phillips, does indeed wow 'em musically with ‘60s girl-group and folk-rock appeal merged with ear-candy melodies and harmonies.

Lyrically, incisively-expressed poignancy and self-doubt, usually centering on love gone wrong or relationships gone on too long, emerges amid the smart popcraft. “When faith went blind she found the truth/but lost her nerve,” Phillips declares in “She Can’t Tell Time.” And whatever abstract philosophic corner she paints herself into, Phillips walks on eggshells with more delicate fragility each time she makes her way back to a human touch, to that irrational pull to the “The Flame” with which she bobs -- “Why do I dance so close to you?” -- and weaves: “When fires rise the shadows fall/Over the edges where we crawl…”
Indeed, Phillips doesn’t merely want to fall in love with the idea of love, or just "be in love with love" (“I Don’t Want to Fall In Love”), but she does realize the real thing is a shaky proposition, and if attained, prone to a delusion or two poking through the threadbare grandeur.

In marked and darker contrast, Cruel Inventions' striking but often disturbing imagery comprises no proportionate twenty-foot-tall answers. Though also, like Wow, produced by Phillips' husband T-Bone Burnett (and aided here and there by such luminaries as Elvis Costello and Van Dyke Parks), this 1991 release not only offers less salvation and solace throughout its sonic gravitas, instrumental sparseness, and Phillips’ de-Laupered lower and sultry vocal register, it kicks up the vulnerability and trepidation a few notches, sweeping up some psychological and societal ills along with the interpersonal ones.
Even the moody infectiousness that wouldn’t be out of place on Wow bites back. The hooky-as-hell title song talks of dying dreams and bleak prospects in “a world of elevators with music like magazines" where the beat generation all departed on the morning train and "left me at the station/Breathing dust from hopeless rain." In the hypnotic and otherwise lovely “Standing Still,” the dance floor becomes a place for “thinking I‘m standing still” and where “I want them to think I’m dead.” And the humor and wordplay in “Now I Can’t Find The Door” -- recalling a Chrissie Hynde-like bittersweet where's-my-sandy-beach timbre -- becomes free-floating apprehension with the recollection that “Love is what I leave for.”
These are not the same tuneful Phillips ditties you hear now and then as incidental music throughout The Gilmore Girls. Furthermore, the cryptically elliptic noir of “black Niagara of control spilling down to culture mock” extends throughout Inventions even to some shadowy high-contrast cinematic sleeve photos (Phillips’ Garbo-mannered femme-fatalistic looks even landed her a Die Hard role).

Inventions' thematic irrationality, imbalance, emotional paralysis, and cosmic discombobulating in “tripping over gravity” abound in a hopeless state: the sweetness and light of the title song is belied by the exercise in futility that we can “Un-invent the wheel of endless greed.” Moreover, in the propulsive “Raised on Promises,” there’s little refuge to be had in retreats “to the furnace for shade to the dust for a drink / Logic’s mad and shame doesn’t care what you think… It’s only a phantom that you fathom.”
In the gorgeously eerie “Private Storm,” the mercurial artist warns that whatever plot of land you stake out is little more than shifting sand and dirt, sure to disturb whatever metaphoric mental breadcrumbs are painstakingly left behind:

A reassuring new dawn and an anticipatory glimmer does emerge, however, in the last lines of Inventions' last song, “Where the Colors Don’t Go,” in which Phillips ultimately discloses “I want your eyes to color my world/And see your endless longing.” Buoyed by Van Dyke Parks' orchestral arrangement, the forthright punch-up and fade-out suggests “Penny Lane” and foreshadows the Beatle-sonic nip-and-tuck of Phillips’ next album, Martinis and Bikinis.
A splendid time seems to be guaranteed for all: “Come and join the dream that never ends,“ the 1994 album cordially invites; “God will grant us all our wishes/Martinis and Bikinis for our friends.” On top of the Fab Four flourishes, the shaken-up and stirring Martinis also comes with a distinctive dose of solo Lennon thrown in for good measures, some song structure, intonation, and upfront blisters-on-me-fingers guitar. And though it doesn’t come to a full boil, a simmering, seething primal-reverb cover of “Gimme Some Truth” is as effectively pointed as the original.

T-Bone Burnett again produces, as Van Dyke Parks gets a little more work here with aural auras of George Martin’s knob-twirling wizardry groove-by-groove with chunky-style White Album wallops. Though this is truly an overarching Phillips effort, especially in lyrical content and melodic surety, the musical nuances and intimations may evoke what a true songwriting collaboration might have sounded like from Lennon, McCartney and Harrison together. Or give you ideas of what, say, “She’s A Woman” might have sounded like if written for Revolver.
“I got myself so tightly wound I couldn’t breathe/I could feel the fire burning underneath,” Phillips avers in “Signposts,” and you might think she is referring to a little too much self-absorption in The Indescribable Wow and the edgy restlessness in Cruel Inventions. Inspired by the realization that “I need love, not some sentimental prison/I need God, not the political church” (the lilting Harrison-tinged “I Need Love”), and by such ruminations as “The Same Rain” falling on “the holy man…the liar’s hand…and me,” Phillips comprises Martinis as indeed a logical extension of wanting and needing to give in to that rudderless wanderlust, that inclination to get outside yourself and explore other psychological and philosophic worlds, other societal and environmental perspectives. As she says in "Signposts," "I wanted to get lost and love the questions there/Beauty and the truth I could breathe like air/Then I finally found the signposts in a strange land.”
From the signposts for personal accusations -- “You try to tell the world how it should spin/But you live in terror with the hollow men” (“Baby I Can’t Please You”) -- to the portentous “Black Sky’s” indictment of “diggers, drillers, and sellers” stealing away the future, Martinis' all-embracing concerns may not constitute all the right approaches, but it does mark a self-assurance and confidence in Phillips that was lacking one or two albums previous. Consider the assertions made in the exquisite McCartney-esque “Strawberry Road”:

The singer who was once too busy trying to hold on to the earth and who stated “Love is what I leave for” is starting down that road “Where our hearts break into love.” Now that's an indescribable wow. Martinis and Bikinis all around!

Saturday, November 25, 2006

The Early Word: Calendars - Far Side is Back! Stitch 'n' Bitch, Retro Lemony, Ying-Yang, Miro Miro, Bice Bice Bo Bice, Speed! Lust! Madness! Hey Lady!

This installment of The Early Bird - New Books of Notes becomes New Calendars of Consideration as we catch up with the 2007 items that will let you know when you've been where you've been and will need to be. But be advised: the most popular of these sell out before Christmas. You can be sure that the revived-for-now Far Side calendar will be sold out long before then. And if you hurry, you still may be able to get, in a most, most unfortunate event, a two-year-old Lemony Snicket calendar.

In any case, here's some wall calendars, page-a-day desk calendars, engagement books, and diaries that caught my eye:

Art and Photography

Salvador Dali Engagement Calendar. Because you can’t always rely on the persistence of your memory.

Edward Hopper Diary. Dear Diary: Gosh, forget that darned old malt shop - I met the most interesting people down at the diner tonight!!

Retro Modern Wall Calendar. Ah, Ye Olde Retro Calendar is not just horse and buggy thinking anymore. Oh, wait - it’s the 1960s we’re talking about, not the 1860s…

Monet Wall Calendar. Monet. It’s what you want.

French Impressionism Wall Calendar. I know this one French impressionist who does an impeccable Jerry Lewis.

Miro Wall Calendar. Miro, Miro on the wall, who's surrealist one of all?

Metropolitan Opera Wall Calendar. Kill the wabbit! And no, it does not contain a centerfold of the Fat Lady.

Celebrities and Icons

Beatles Wall Calendar. That should be ‘nuff said.

But I know, I know - this is yet another Beatles calendar. And I realize this is totally subjective, but nobody needs yet another calendar of Elvis Presley or Madonna (one of whom died on my birthday, the other sharing my birthday -- I’ll leave you to sort out who is who). Speaking of repeats: I don’t Love Lucy, and even more so, Coldplay leaves me cold, but you should know there are still tried-and-true calendars out there, and upstarts untried and trying to be true.

I will, however, broach the subject of American Idol contestant and now calendar boy Bo Bice only because I can’t think of him without thinking of the old Shirley Ellis hit, "The Name Game": "Bice, Bice, Bo Bice / Banana fanna fo fice / Me my mo mice / Bo Bice…" (Forgive me if this is a well-worn gag - I never really watch AI beyond the early stages of the tuneless clueless.)

Children

Yin Yang Cat 2007 Wall Calendar. With Japanese-inspired art and hints of Manga and Anime, this calendar promises to pass along such qualities as love, appreciation, patience, determination, and faith.

Which you may need if you attempt to purchase, for the less discriminating child, say, Lemony Snicket's 2005 -- yes, 2005 -- Calendar of Unfortunate Events: Thirteen Alarming Months! (A Series of Unfortunate Events) currently being featured by Amazon.

I don't really know what's going on here, but I thought the idea of offering a two-year outdated calendar pertaining to Unfortunate Events was an apropos joke -- a very funny one to my barely grown-up mind -- but come on Amazon! Our children are the future (so I've heard again and again and again), and even hinting of putting them two years behind themselves, so to speak, seems most alarming and unfortunate, indeed. And they probably haven't learned what caveat emptor means, yet.

Dogs (As a member of the He-Man Cat-Haters Club, I won’t be featuring anything but Canine Calendars.)

Bad Dog Wall Calendar. If they’ve been really bad, this is also great for rolling up and chasing.

For the Love of Golden Retrievers Deluxe Wall Calendar. I’m not sure what makes it so “Deluxe” -- maybe because it started in April 2006, much longer than most 15- or 16-month Calendars. You might want to ask your Golden Retriever -- they’re pretty smart about these things, or you could at least send him or her out to retrieve the information.

William Wegman Puppies Wall Calendar. "Mom, this calendar followed me home - can I keep it?" Okay, lame joke. But are you going to tell me you can resist this calendar? These are puppies, puppies! What kind of monster are you?

Humor

The Far Side Gallery 2007 Off The Wall Page-a-Day Calendar. Our long national nightmare is over. The Far Side Calendar, after a five-year absence, is back. Sort of. An "encore edition" of Gary Larson’s best seller has been released, featuring the same cartoons as The Far Side Gallery 2001 Off-The-Wall Calendar, which collected the most popular comic panels in the strips memorable run. Still, whether new to you or familiar, this is hands-down the only humor calendar you will need for 2007 -- no Far Side wannabe calendar or comic strip has even come close since Larson retired over a decade ago.

Furthermore -- and in keeping with Larson’s wildlife concerns -- all of his royalties from the sale of this 2007 calendar will go directly to fund Conservation International (CI), a nonprofit organization that works to protect critical habitats worldwide.

Which reminds me, just to digress a bit, I’ll never forget the time I went to see an exhibit of Larson’s cartoon art at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum in the late ‘80s (Far Side has always been popular with natural scientists). As the many patrons of the comic strip arts snaked through from framed enlargements to framed enlargements, I of course had never heard such hearty laugh-out-loud responses from museum-goers. Not a shhh! or stuffy moment to be had.

Sports

NASCAR Facts - Box Calendar. Speed! Lust! Madness! A Hot Lap in your lap! Or better yet, on your desk.

And for the golfer, Lost Balls Wall Calendar: Great Holes, Tough Shots, and Bad Lies.
No Speed! No Lust! No Madness!

Other mentionables

Monster Movies Wall Calendar. It’s Alive! With lively posters of everything from Dracula to Dr. Jekyll, King Kong to Mothra to Village of the Damned.

Lonely Planet Diary/Day Planner. Lonely, eh? Well, at least you're still a planet. Do you want to end up like Pluto? There's no calendar for Pluto!

Dogs Playing Poker Wall Calendar. Alas, not in velvet. But consider the Psychedelic Posters Wall Calendar. You’ll not only convince yourself it's velvet, if you stare at it long enough you'll see dogs playing poker, too.

Antique Maps Diary. For your antique husband who refuses to ask for directions. Glove compartment-sized to go with the maps he can’t make sense of though he pretends he does.

Stitch 'N Bitch Page-A-Day Calendar: The Knitter's Calendar. Includes a “yarn of the week” and “knit wit” that’ll keep you in stitches. And for the tragically industrious, patterns and new techniques.

Speaking of industriousness, the next Early Word will be out next week. What it will cover, I don't yet know. I said I was industrious, not organized.

Vinyl Tap: The Dukes Of Stratosphere - 25 O'Clock

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #29:

Tune in, turn on, drop dead; the road to hippie hell is paved with good vibrations. Brown acid and brain damage combine with blissed-out bacchanalian love-ins and cosmic consciousness teeters into full-totter bad karma and choking-on-your-own-vomit bummerdom. Before you know whether it's tomorrow or just the end of time, the Woodstock nation's freak flag is at half-mast and you've helter-skeltered into your own private LSD-is-groovy-kill-the-pigs Altamont.

But with the EP 25 O’Clock -- somewhat anachronistically and curiously released April 1, 1985 -- the sonic ecstasy of the Dukes of Stratosphere ensure that freak-out pop and flower power never flounders. These trippy avatars of the hip ‘n’ happening ever-high did more than mine pure nuggets of British psychedelia -- they mixed in delectable pop reverb and resonance for an aural amalgam evoking everything from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, Barretted and Barrett-less.

The title song even stoops for a salute of psych-out sorts by merging into its Floydian soundscape an American "artyfact" invocation from the Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” setting the latter’s lament that “Comes the dawn / Then you were gone…” against the Dukes' temporally anticipatory hope that “The ticking seconds hear them call / My spell of hours will make you fall.”

While the lyrical and musical shapes of happenings in “My Love Explodes” conjures up the over-under Yardbirds in a sideways-down Antonioni movie, “What In The World” is even more waywardly adventurous. For a for full-on mid-sixties sensibility, the Dukes here add an unmistakable Ray Davies-tinged vocal inflection while also recalling Revolver-era Beatles -- think the “Tomorrow Never Knows” shriek-fest loopiness backwardly and barely masking a melodiously propulsive McCartney-style bass pattern in your ears and, it seems, in your eyes.

"Cannabis in tea / What in the world, acid is free,” indeed.

Speaking of the Kinks, “Your Gold Dress” is really “something else” in going back and forth between its influences instead of fusing them for a seemingly effortless blend. Just when you think you’re in for fuzz-toned eastern mysticism-enwrapped days of future droned, promising “a thousand melting Dali guitars… dripping slowly down,” up pops a poppy harpsichord-backed Kinks-size assurance in a pocket-symphonic surety of “Vibrations coming my way / When you’re floating on by.”

The Lennon-esque last song, “The Mole From The Ministry,” is the total trip in your mind and back in time, Sgt. Pepper- and Magical Mystery-style. This becomes clearer as things get fuzzier with the double-meaning wordplay, the Strawberry Fields-insinuations and druggy references to day-in-the-life “Holes appearing on the lawn,” and Lucy-in-the-allusions of walking flowers and a garden that “starts to rearrange / From perfect lawn to mountain range.”

Beyond the lyrical bent, the “Mole’s” overall musical and sonically psychedelic cast is enhanced by the ending, replete with "Walrus"-ian incantation -- a smokes-pot smokes-pot certainty set in a hear-the-colors see-the-sounds psychical framework.

Otherwise, in this song and a few others, there’s a more modern power-pop quality that creeps in from time to time that I can’t quite pin down except to say I sometimes hear and see the colors and sounds of something else, someone else...

Friday, November 24, 2006

Liner Notables #8: The Rutles

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...

The Clash once sang “Phony Rutle-mania has bitten the dust!” Or something to that effect.

Not so. The only band that doesn't matter may have started out wanting to hold our hands (“yeah yeah!”) and declaring themselves more omniscient and omnipresent than God (thereby giving themselves the power to hold each and every hand in the world at the same time).

But in short order the Prefab Four wrote really important stuff while on acid that no one understood -- unless you played it backwards or happened to be Bob Dylan -- things such as “Bible-Punching heavyweight / Evangelistic boxing Kangaroo / Orang u tang and anaconda / Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse / Even Pluto, too (yeah yeah!).”

And it seems like only yesterday we plopped down in front of the TV for the Ed Sullivan Show to watch that creepy mouse puppet and that plate-spinner guy. Oh yeah... and to see the Rutles perform and get acquainted with them early on in their career. We got to know the cute one, the quiet one, the funny one, and the “sorry girls - he’s homosexual” one.

As the The Rutles' liner notes and interviews look into the glass onion, the commentary in this, um, anthology from 1978 brings back that magic, starting with the group's beginnings at 43 Egg Lane, Liverpool, where Ron Nasty and Dirk McQuickly first bumped into each other: “Ron invited Dirk to help him stand up. Dirk, merely an amateur drinker, agreed and on that spot a legend was created - a legend that will last a lunchtime.” Soon enough they found Stig O’ Hara, “a guitarist of no fixed hairstyle,” but it took a while to discover drummer Barry Wom hiding in their van.

The Silver Rutles, as they were called at the time, learned more musical ropes in Germany, “far from home, and far from talented.” It was also here that they picked up a fifth member, Leppo ("Sorry girls, he's dead"). As the chronicle notes: “For five hungry working class lads there are worse places than prison, and the Rat Keller in Hamburg is one.” But it was here where Dirk, Nasty, Stig, and Barry sharpened up their act and got some silly haircuts that got them booted out of the Reeperbahn and sent back to England.

An interview with Mick Jagger serves to pick up the story from there as the Rolling Stones’ front man notes the first-meeting anxieties:

Mick:

Question:

Mick:

Of course, the Rutles eventually made their way to the United States after finally getting good directions out of Greenland. An interview with Paul Simon gives an American perspective, including his impression of the watershed Sgt. Rutter album:

Paul:

Sgt. Rutter

Question:

Paul:

Later in the interview, Simon, asserting that “it’s probably easier to place them sociologically as a phenomenon than to judge them at this point musically as to where they’ll stand," expands on the overall historical significance of the Rutles:

Paul:

Question:

Paul:

As an added extra, The Rutles LP comes with a booklet of further commentary and photos. And who knows? Maybe that superfluous glut of minutiae will get its own Liner Notables feature.

Then again, might be more trouble than it’s worth. Oh hey, look - lunchtime's over.

Book Review: Golem Song by Marc Estrin

“…One Saturday night, when he was a differently-abled teenager, Oedipus and his buddies were tooling around in the limo, and they decided to take in an oracle. So up to Delphi and guess what?”

You can most assuredly guess that you will never hear a more hilarious account of Oedipus Rex than you will encounter in Marc Estrin’s trenchantly voltaic third novel, Golem Song. But it may also be the most disconcerting, too, as the main character — with unthinking Freudian relish in the embellishment — tells the story to his mother. On Mother’s Day. With a Snoopy card.

But Alan Krieger is not your standard-issue 35-year old emergency-room nurse with a brilliant, non-stop mind and mighty mouth. For one thing, he still lives with oedipal ma in a sixth-floor New York apartment that, “floor-to-ceilinged” with scholarly tomes, ominously reminds him — and us — of the Texas Book Depository. Often endearing but just as often infuriating, tossing off bonmots and potshots cavalierly quickly, Alan is more than one of those people you either love or hate effortlessly and uncritically. Once more, with intensity: You love to hate him or hate to love him; friends and family seem to enjoy pursuing that extra effort it takes to submit to the voodoo-that-you-do, or to push in more pins.

But with Estrin’s character-driven comic touch, you will come for the foibles but stay for the foils in this 1999-set novel. Alan’s self-sabotaging and manic antics may undermine him but it is the hell of other people — adherents and adversaries alike — that helps define him, especially and increasingly in the degree with which they accede to his strong stance on Jewish theology and its legacy.

“I’m sick to death of Jewish patheticness,” he rails. “Exemplary victims, weak, passive, cowardly, timid and downtrodden, limp Jewish rags soaked in repulsive silent suffering…” It’s a mindset Alan uses in his lifelong standoff with his pacifist brother over the issue of Israel, and an outlook that buttresses his stance against converts to Judaism he encounters, including a black acquaintance: “What, you haven’t suffered enough?”

Despite Alan’s neurotic edges and perceived extremism, though, he's affable with his ER co-workers of the rank and file stripe, and patient to a point with the patients. He fancies he has the pick of two girlfriends, one an out-of-his-league psychiatrist and the other of the levelheaded soulmate variety, understanding and comforting. Though she may have her limits, too.

Further complications testing Alan's people-person skills crop up during a night when a senseless city-wide gang war turns the ER into a “stitch-em-up factory,” and a garrulous Farrakhan-inflamed Anti-Semite GOMER (“Get Out of My Emergency Room” regular) pokes and prods Alan to the point where contention is construed as racism - but only on Alan's part. Ultimately and however arguably justified, Alan’s better judgments and attempts at poetic but un-PC justice — the denigration of affirmative action in confrontaion with his African-American supervisor doesn‘t help — leads to the loss of his job.

A latent fanaticism fanned also signals the advent of a new and unstable phase, tinged with tension and dark humor, that comes as Alan deludes himself into believing he’s been “chosen” to deliver America from Anti-Semitism. Indeed, as one character says, he’s become enslaved “to your own rhetoric, to the flight of your ideas.”

If Alan has become a Frankenstein of sorts, it’s all the more a Faustian connection rooted in the folktale of the Golem, the animated being of clay that defended the Jews in 16th Century Prague. It’s a theme that pops-up repeatedly in Estrin’s ever-arresting novel; Alan remembers reading as a child about this “cross between the Jolly Green Giant and the Pillsbury Doughboy.” His mother used to call him a golem, too (perhaps just a twisted term of oedipal endearment, though).

But now, as Alan prepares for a retaliatory plan of cultural attack, it is more befitting to remember that in Hebrew, the word golem equates to “shapeless matter.” “Something,” Alan is told, “that has potential but is not yet formed, not yet there.”

Nothing ratchets up the riveting anticipation and the anything-can-happen possibilities more than putting them under the command — or utter lack of control — of a man who is himself still an unfinished works-in-progress.

Liner Notables #7: Chuck Berry - The Great Twenty-Eight

Why, it seems like only yesterday [cue harp and wavy, out-of-focus visuals] when you could pore over an album's liner notes and not have to squint to garner an embarrassment of riches and a treasure trove of tidbits...

“Dance! says Chuck Berry, reel and rock, around and around! ‘Move on up and try for further.’ This rock ‘n’ roll that’s blowing fuses around the world would set Beethoven spinning in his grave and ‘deliver us from the days of old.’”

The duck walk may not be quite as smooth these days, but having just celebrated his 80th birthday, Chuck Berry is still a smooth “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.”

Chess Record’s The Great Twenty-Eight double-album from 1982 is not only a fantastic best-of collection in quantity and quality of tracks, it also matches that excellence in its liner notes. Straightforwardly no-nonsense yet poetically celebratory -- reflecting Berry's songs' musical accessibility in rhythm and rhyme-scheme -- the insightful commentary fulfills the commemorative need for a matter-of-fact overview combined with an expressive tribute befitting rock ‘n’ roll royalty.

The all-embracing yet cohesive notes by Michael Lydon start out simply enough: “Charles Edward Anderson Berry grew up a bright kid in black St. Louis, Missouri.” Lydon then briefly sketches out Berry’s influences in Louis Jordan and Nat “King” Cole, and his introduction by an impressed Muddy Waters to Leonard Chess. Hearing a dub of “Maybellene,” Chess signs up Berry for his label and guides him to the themes of “the big beat, cars, and young love.”

Lydon, as much as anyone can convey a sonic sensation, deftly encapsulates the appeal and the immediacy of a Chuck Berry song:

Ah, the triumph of Chuck’s Ford catching Maybellene at the top of the hill! The poor coup de ville left behind like a ton of lead! The fast lane tempo, the clanging chorded guitar with its howling break, the wild piano, slamming drums and bass -- ‘the highway sound’ -- urged on the listener a mood flamboyantly dramatic, rebellious, and free.
Onstage, Berry was a bit rebellious and free himself, as Lydon describes this charismatic marvel - good looks, duck walk and all. And though Berry "had no kick against modern jazz," he quickly proved to be a prolific songwriter and record maker of catchy and clever rock 'n' roll gems, able to capture the “teen feel” again and again in such smashes as “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Carol,” “Memphis,” “Back in the USA”…

Putting Berry in historical perspective, up there with Elvis Presley and above Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, Lydon concisely explains what Berry did with the subject matter -- youthful turbulence and yearning -- shared with these other artists:

No wonder he went on to influence the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, the Who, the Kinks, T. Rex and “every group of kids who’ve gotten together in somebody’s basement to bang out rock ‘n’ roll.” After all, Lydon continues, Berry’s “been the outside voice that’s awakened the inner voice of all these hopeful young artists and given them that indispensable ‘you can do it’ shove.”

In addition, there’s a timelessness to that sense of awakening and discovery as Lydon stirringly affirms, “These are twenty-eight great records, as crisp and tangy as the day Chuck laid them down.

"It still amazes me how good they make me feel… Rock on, Chuck Berry!”

And Hail! Hail! Happy Birthday!

The Early Word: New And Upcoming Children's Books, Plus One $150 Doorstop

In last week's Early Word I squeezed in a mention of the just-released finale from Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events - Book 13: The End, noting that the publisher would like us to know, and I quote, ahem: “The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope.”

In that spirit, and because this is the start of a selected compilation of Children’s Books being released for this holiday season, we will begin the beginning Children’s Christmas selections with the titles that have already been released so that we may end THAT END and start anew.

Quickly, though -- we have a long ways to go before we come to the beginning, so let’s catch-up with some titles already on the bookstore shelves: Artemis Fowl, teenage criminal mastermind, figures, it figures, in The Lost Colony (Artemis Fowl, Book 5) by Eoin Colfer. Mommy? is by Maurice Sendak - shouldn’t that be enough? Peter Pan In Scarlet, by Geraldine McCaughrean is the first-ever authorized sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan -- shouldn’t that be more than enough?

Is There Really a Human Race? asks Jamie Lee Curtis. I guess all those years in Hollywood can keep you a little too much out of touch. Gloria Estefan gets into the act -- the magic act -- with Noelle's Treasure Tale: A New Magically Mysterious Adventure. And to the manners born is Whoopi Goldberg with Whoopi's Big Book of Manners, while Joy Behar has a different view of things in Sheetzucacapoopoo: My Kind of Dog.

Did you somehow miss International Talk Like A Pirate Day a few weeks ago? Then Pat Croce’s Pirate Soul: A Swashbuckling Voyage Through the Golden Age of Pirates! might just be up your gangplank; brush up on your buccaneer skills with one of the world's foremost pirate-artifact collectors and authorities - Arrrrhh! In more otherworldly escapist fare, Jack and Annie are off on another Merlin Mission in Mary Pope Osborne's Blizzard of the Blue Moon (A Stepping Stone Book).

The following title alone should be enough to grab ya, but if not, I'll need to tell you that Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich by Adam Rex, contains illustrated poems describing the lives of well-known monsters, including -- one hopes -- hair care secrets from the Bride of Frankenstein.

YA YA YA! For the Young Adult crowd, Wintersmith is the bewitching third entry in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld story. More bothersome is the "Gossip Girl" world portrayed in Would I Lie to You? by Cecily von Ziegesar, while there’s no escaping the bewildering social whirl of college in Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires, Book I (The Morganville Vampires) by Rachel Caine.

That was then and this is now: We're caught up with what's in the stores, and can take up where we left off with upcoming up ‘n’ comers for up-and-coming Young Adults. And what better way to start than with Terrier, the first installment in the Tortall trilogy, the latest Tamora Pierce nether worldly series -- it has that new carcass smell! -- introducing law-enforcer Beka Cooper, whose knack for communicating with the dead tips her off to the vast underworld conspiracy. But this time it’s personal! (due Oct. 24.)

Come to think of it, the following mystery wrapped in an enigmatic appellation o’ verbosity looks like just the job for Tamora... No, it’s not the matter-of-factually sassy Reckless (The It Girl, No. 3) by Cecily von Ziegesar (Nov. 1). I’m talking about The Mislaid Magician Or Ten Years After: Being the Private Correspondence Between Two Prominent Families Regarding A Scandal Touching The Highest Levels Of Government And The Security Of The Realm. It’s by Patricia C. Wrede. ‘Nuff said? 'Nuff intended (Nov. 1).

Of course, any hero or heroine is going to need a dependable reference for those dastardly situations with which a villain or two may ensnare, those dastards! DK Publishing’s The Marvel Encyclopedia, containing more than a thousand of Marvel Comic’s characters and their superhero characteristics, is a marvel of a resource tool (Oct 16).

Or, if geography gets ya not knowing if your coming or going, get your bearings with Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America by Lynne Cheney. Maybe she'll pinpoint some of our nation’s great undisclosed locations (Oct. 24). Or, at the very least it will help one little girl find her way in Eloise in Hollywood, by Kay Thompson, Hilary Knight, J. David Stem, and David N. Weiss. Which two of those authors do you suppose refused to ask for directions to Tinseltown in the writing of this book? (Oct. 24.)

Kid-tested, mother-approved: Fans of Jan Karon’s bestselling Mitford Years series might find their pre-schoolers delighted with Violet Comes To Stay. In this tale inspired by Karon’s character Cynthia Coppersmith, Father Tim’s wife, writer Cynthia Cecka fashions a story about a wayward white kitten who finds hospitality and comfort in a bookstore. Well, who doesn't? (Oct. 19).

Everybody talks about the Weather Fairies, but no one does anything about them! Here’s your chance to pick up an ideal stocking-stuffer with Evie The Mist Fairy (Weather Fairies), by Daisy Meadows (Nov. 1). At the other end of the size spectrum is a fascinating book about a fascinating subject -- neither of which can be considered ideal stocking-stuffers -- Elephant by Steve Bloom. A title simply put, but after 12 years in the making, this is a book with a tightly-packed trunk full of details about our pachydermic pals, in words and often surprising photographs (Dec.1).

Compared to such ginormous jumbos, you'd think the care and feeding of your sprites would come a little easier, especially after reading, um, Care and Feeding of Sprites (Spiderwick Chronicles) by Holly Black (Nov. 1). Perhaps you can placate them with Mouse Cookies & More: A Treasury, by Laura Numeroff (Oct. 24.) A Box Full of Lilly by 2005 Caldecott Medal Kevin Henkes might also make a nice gift, of the inedible kind, that is (Oct. 17).

So would Madonna’s The English Roses, Too Good To Be True. Or should you spring for that $150 Collector’s Edition Box Set of Madonna’s The English Roses/The English Roses: Too Good to Be True? (November-ish.) Talk amongst yourselves while I list some of the more notable and strictly Christmassy Christmas books:

Bah! Humbug? by Lorna Balian (Oct. 28)
Christmas Pop-up by Robert Clarke Sabuda (now available)
Christmas Toy Factory by Geronimo Stilton (now available)
Mary Engelbreit's A Merry Little Christmas: Celebrate from A to Z by Mary Engelbreit (now available)
Miracle on 49th Street by Mike Lupica (Oct. 24)
Pablo's Christmas by Hugo C. Martin (Oct 28)
Snowmen Pop-Up Book by Caralyn Buehner (Oct. 19)
This Is The Stable by Cynthia Cotten (Oct. 31)

This is the end, of both the end and beginning. For now.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Book Review: The Black Dahlia Files - The Mob, The Mogul, And The Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles by Donald H. Wolfe

Amazingly enough, The Black Dahlia Files’ subtitle -- The Mob, the Mogul, And The Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles -- doesn’t quite say it all. The alliteration and the intimation are there, but the breadth and depth of the book's implications are barely alluded to in an unsolved 60-year old case that took in many elements and considered varied personalities from Bugsy to Bumstead -- Mob boss Bugsy Siegel to the Blondie movies’ Dagwood, Arthur Lake, that is.

In retracing that transfixing story behind the murder of the would-be starlet Elizabeth Short -- the subject of a recent Brian De Palma screen treatment of a James Ellroy novel -- Donald H. Wolfe delved into recently unearthed case files that had been buried in the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office since the black-haired beauty's bisected body was found January 15, 1947 in a vacant lot. Or, to be more precise, found in a symbolically ritualistic manner in what may have been more than just a randomly selected dumping ground.

This is just one of a multitude of findings, one layer of an intricately interlocking set of circumstances discovered as the investigative Wolfe draws on personal knowledge and delves into those “catacombs of money, power, and influence.” The outcome constitutes an ultimately convincing and level-headed account, and casts a substantial net, from the coast to coast travels of "The Black Dahlia" and, within Southern California, her wanderings from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

What helps make Wolfe escape conspiratorial crackpot charges, and what makes Files so credibly convincing, is that he uses some of Southern California’s usual suspects in mid-20th century sleaze and open secrets -- the corrupt police department on the take, organized crime, movie industry sordidness, and a sensationalistic press that will look the other way when it serves them to -- as springboards for substantiations of collusion and cover-up.

If you didn’t before know the extent of the inextricable and historic links between crooked L.A. cops at all levels and the Syndicate, and how the newspapers and film studios fit into this deceitful web, Wolfe presents a seamless case. Moreover, the author shows how all these forces kicked into cooperative overdrive when Short, her Tinseltown dreams turned into a nightmarish call-girl existence, finds herself pregnant by the most powerful man in the city, the Los Angeles Times’ publisher Norman Chandler.

As a man who can control the editorial and news slant of his leading newspaper, who influences which shady politician is elected mayor or which minion police commissioner, and who determines the course of contending mob wars and violence, Chandler wields overwhelming command over the fate of the city - a domination that can’t be jeopardized by a scandal that could trigger outcry from competing newspapers and opposition from an unaware public.

In providing explanations of why LAPD officials were actually railroading innocent “suspects” and how the newspapers purposely published misleading stories, Wolfe names names -- including that of the murderer -- and details the particulars of the murder itself. Taking his incisive analysis beyond the speculative realm, the author uses and cites a barrage of documented proof -- and many of these archival photographs, investigative reports and news clippings make it into the body of the book or are included in the abundant appendixes.

While the demoralizing "fact that the Black Dahlia case had been handled by the enforcers of the city’s vice-ridden underworld was a confidential manner hidden from the public for more than fifty years,” it is nonetheless a relief that there were a few heroes and principled institutions. Wolfe makes sure these honest detectives, journalists and newspapers are duly acknowledged, even if they faced demotion or retaliation at the time.

In addition to Wolfe’s expressive page-turner style that successfully conveys Short's ever-edgy sense of terror and desperation, this kind of attention to detail is another indication of Wolfe’s comprehensiveness and conscientiousness as a writer, marking a cohesive and riveting read and assuring The Black Dahlia Files its likely status as the most definitive book on the subject to date.

Vinyl Tap: Vanilla Fudge

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #28:

The few seconds of technical gibberish at the start of Vanilla Fudge ends with a promise: “Ultra-Sonic Operating Level - Set Pleasance Control.”

In “All You Need Is Pretension” ‘67 that could mean just about anything. With Vanilla Fudge it mostly meant slowed-down psychedelic-sludge cover songs sustained at times beyond endurance and identification. The group first got notice and radio airplay with their 7:20 minute version of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hanging On,” and with their self-titled debut album they also take a similar diversionary tack with the Beatles, Curtis Mayfield, Sonny and Cher, and the Zombies.

Sandwiched in between tracks of ham-fisted and heavy-icious style -- if not necessarily substance -- are Fudge’s original cacophonic-calliope of confections, “Illusions Of My Childhood,” that total slightly over a dispensable minute of out-dated freak-out filler.

The Beatles songs that open and close Vanilla Fudge, “Ticket To Ride” and “Eleanor Rigby” respectively, comprise a different and contrasting kind of filler that won‘t make you forget the Carpenters or Ray Charles - let alone the fab four themselves. Except for the brown-acidic and bloodcurdling flying-monkey screams at the end, "Ticket" sounds not unlike the Rascals on lithium (or as you might imagine that would sound). This relatively straightforward approach is refreshingly put to better blue-eyed soulful use on the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” and the Jackie Ross/Evie Sand hit “Take Me For A Little While.”

The stoned-out eight-minute “Eleanor Rigby,” on the other hand, is too fragmented and disjointed to be effective, especially when it verges in earnest on William “Golden Throats” Shatner-style histrionics and melodrama, such as in the highly-wrought and sibilantly whispered aside, “No… one… wasss… savedddd…”

Maybe it is “nothing to get hung about” -- as Fudge sneak in a little “Strawberry Fields” snippet -- but the same kind of fussy elaboration mars Sonny Bono’s “Bang Bang” just as the In-A-Gadda-Da-Hammond-heavy noodling of “She’s Not There” takes all the fun out of a great pop tune.

Even so, “You Keep Me Hanging On” still sounds pretty tantalizing all these years later - but in a little-goes-a-long-way manner. Though the group began to merge some original material into their hit-and-miss work, there seemed little need to belabor the long-drawn-out covers-conceit over the course of a few more albums.

Vanilla Fudge can, however, be cited as a precursor to heavy metal and they went on to other career highlights, including touring with Jimi Hendrix and also headlining with an early-on Led Zeppelin as their opening act. A couple members also formed a short-lived power trio with Jeff Beck -- Beck, Bogert, and Appice -- in the early '70s.

But Vanilla Fudge's time-lag miasma of sonic molasses just keeps me hanging on and on a little too much.

The Early Word: King, Koontz, Connelly, Harris, Hiaasen, Hillerman, Steel, Sparks... Snicket!

It’s always nice to bump into promising books, but the bruises you may incur as you literally collide into the high stacks of the following new and upcoming blockbuster titles in the bookstore may not be what you had in mind. Also included here are a few potential or semi-blockbusters that’ll be in shorter stacks -- just the inconspicuously right height for tripping over and landing flat on you’re face. Let's be careful out there this holiday season!

And be careful to not stay up too late at night with the chill-inducing masters of horror. Then again, in Dean Koontz’s latest you’ll always have Odd Thomas to keep you company, except Koontz’s much-loved character in Brother Odd has holed up in monastery in California’s High Sierra with a killer running loose (due Nov. 28). More in the much-reviled category is the title character in Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising. This is essentially “Hannibal: The Early Years,” wherein we see him become the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France -- and see him evolve with the help of a little extra-curricular education of a more invidious and insidious sort (Dec. 5).

You never know in which literary direction the prolific and versatile Michael Crichton will go. With Next, he merges foreboding fact with frightful fiction as he extends to plausible possibilities the truth and consequences of our genetic world (Nov. 28). To allay any fears Crichton may cause, of course, we can always count on a soothingly escapist love story from Stephen King. Um, well... there is toned-down terror and a tender and transcendent side to Lisey’s Story of a coping widow. But do expect the expected supernatural element as Lisey feels strangely drawn to pursue otherworldly -- and healing -- clues to her husband’s disturbing past (Oct. 24).

For love and romance of the more traditional variety, Daniel Steel rolls out the red carpet for H.R.H., and considers: How ya gonna keep her royal highness down in the imperial palace after she’s seen Berkeley? A restless Princess Christianna, despite her father’s stern wishes, takes her American education and awakened social consciousness to the far ends of a suffering world, determined to make a difference. And in the process, of course and incidentally, find true love (Oct. 31).

But with a title like Dear John, you might expect the road to ultimate ardor to be a little rocky in Nicholas Sparks' new novel. And, with a storyline about the mutual attraction between an opposites-attracted couple, you’d be right (Oct. 30).

In the suspense realm, the requisite heroes are far-flung where roads are always rough-going. In David Baldacci ’s The Collectors, the four-man conspiracy-centric Camel Club battles a threat to national security (Oct. 17). Irreverent detective John Corey, in Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire, has bigger fission to fry in dealing with a scheme to set off nuclear bombs in two American cities, with the aim to trigger a world war of unthinkable proportions (Nov. 6).

And in slightly smaller, but still somehow unthinkable scale, the pages within the audacious Treasure of Khan by Clive Cussler brings us Dirk Pitt battling a threat to the global oil market posed by a Mongolian mogul out to reinstate the grandeur of the dreaded Genghis Khan himself (Nov. 28).

If you love mystery and police procedurals, there’s a good assortment of whodunits and why-fors for your wish-list. A first-rate candidate for the top of anyone's list would be anything by the consistently dependable Michael Connelly, but Echo Park looks especially compelling. Harry Bosch is back with the LAPD as a member of the Open-Unsolved Unit, providing him with the opportunity to tackle the one that got away - an old case that’s been haunting him for years, and one that brings him face-to-face with a psychotic killer (Oct. 9).

In a much lighter vein -- let’s face it -- in another sure-to-be hilarious laugh-out-loud mystery, Carl Hiaasen’s Nature Girl has, as usual, colorful characters-on-parade and twists and turns that have twists and turns. Just to clue you in a bit, I can tell you, however, that it involves half-Seminole failed alligator wrestler Sammy Tigertail and members of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God waiting for the Messiah to make landfall. Jocularity, jocularity! (Nov. 14.)

A time zone or two away from Florida’s swamplands lies the Navajo reservation in Arizona and New Mexico - the familiar Tony Hillerman terrain of The Shape Shifter; this particular caper updates the life of Lt. Joe Leaphorn as he takes on an old case he thought he had solved, and confronts a murderer he thought had died. In Boston, between the covers of Hundred Dollar Baby, Robert B. Parker's dogged detective Spenser also confronts the past when an old character, former teenage-runaway April Kyle -- now a madam protecting her call-girl operation -- seeks his help again (Oct 24).

With the gumshoe gambit at play in Born In Death, by J. D. Robb (Nora Roberts), PI Eve Dallas, in solving a gruesome double homicide, reveals the sordid secrets of some of the city's richest and most secretive citizens (Nov. 7). If you like adventure with a little analysis, psychologist Alex Cross, in James Patterson’s Cross, helps track a serial rapist in Georgetown, discovering in the process a link to the murder of his wife years ago (Nov. 13).

For something different from John Grisham, his first non-fiction work, The Innocent Man, tells of a trial built on junk science and jailhouse snitches that put a possibly innocent man on death row, while raising questions about the issue of capital punishment and the criminal justice system (Oct. 10).

And for the kids, this Christmas brings us, alas, a Lemony Snicket finale, A Series of Unfortunate Events - Book 13: The End. As the conclusion to the series, the publisher would like us to know that “The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end of the end of your rope.”

Which brings me to end of mine, in an unfortunate turn of events, for now. Next up in The Early Word: More Children’s Books!

Liner Notables #6: The Jam - Dig The New Breed

“ELECTRICALLY RECORDED LIVE - play it on all phonographs” reads the cover of Dig The New Breed, a lovely parting gift from the Jam in the form of a career-spanning live LP of more substance than Style Council.

The instructional tip of sorts comprises a ton of tongue-in-cheek sanctioned sass sustaining the kind of flippancy found in a couple earlier ad campaigns for other artists. “The ’80s - We’re For It!” proclaims Devo without equivocation of their dawn-of-a-new-decade release, Freedom Of Choice. “20 New Songs - All Different!!!” touts Columbia Records for Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!!!” Furthermore, the logical extension of such impertinence saw titular tomfoolery in a Sugar album Bob Mould called File Under: Easy Listening.

Whatever the trend, by the time the Jam came along there was also a tacit, if not tranquil understanding that, in addition to the pan-phonographibility of an LP, one should play one's album loud. But could record commentary be read out loud? It would almost seem to be demanded with Dig The New Breed as main Jam man Paul Weller, in a three-part harmony of shared liner-notational endeavor by the trio, tries to set the tone with a spirited and fast-forwarded flashback and incantation:

A brief six years! Sweaty frantic Red Cow residency, 1st week 50 people, 2nd week 100, by the 4th week a queue around the block! SWITCH the Marquee with Shane, Claudio and Adrian dancing on stage to the confusion of the usual Marquee hippies! SWITCH the first tour, traveling in this red Cortina for hours and having to learn to walk again when you got out! SWITCH Dunstable and that hotel?! SWITCH QUICKLY! Making the first LP in 5 days or something, vocal tracks done in a lift! SWITCH Actually being on Top of the Pops!! SWITCH…

Now, that’s entertainment! Not so much, though, when it comes to the appreciative but prosaic stiff-upper-lip offerings from the other two members of the pioneering British -- and so very, very British -- punk band.

Bassist Bruce Foxton alludes to, in a generalized manner, memories and emotions running high, then goes on to virtually demand that the Jam be treated with RESPECT. Uppercase, almost Aretha-style R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Then, before offering his indebtedness and thanks to the trio’s long-time backers, Foxton declares that “Loyalty from the fans has always surprised and amazed me. Traveling around the world to give us the support we badly needed in places such as the States.”

Drummer Rick Buckler proves to be even more a master of fractured and fragmented sentence structure. In arguing that Dig gives more than “‘just an account of songs played live,’” or is a “‘Greatest Hits’ type album,” he discloses that “I have never been a great fan of live albums that try to emulate a studio recording with a cast of thousands, but instead a more basic and honest account.”

Um, let’s make the…

“…SWITCH the Sound Effects tour. SWITCH ‘81 was a ‘orrible year for songs! SWITCH cracking up over the GIFT LP, I wanted it perfect, but settled for good, oh well! SWITCH the noise those Japanese kids make, fantastic! SWITCH Chicago gig, brilliant! SWITCH What have I learnt? BELIEF IS ALL!”Thanks Paul, though we believed all along, it's good to hear commitment so vigorously and distinctively expressed, and see doubt and apprehension succumb to the "beat surrender" with such steadiness. After all, "as it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end."

Vinyl Tap: Sparks - Kimono My House

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #27:

It was pure pop, but it just wasn't for now people, as Nick Lowe would phrase it. Sparks, as oddly anachronistic as main songwriter and keyboardist Ron Mael’s catatonic Charlie Chaplin facade, came along much too late for the Gilbert and Sullivan-style comic operas their work suggests, and a few years too early for the first ripples of skinny-tie new wave, which might have fully embraced the Los Angeles-based band.

So leaving behind the vicissitudes of the fickle glam fandom in America to logically take their infectious and witty Brit-beat confections to the land of the 19th-century British music hall, Ron and, incongruously, his seemingly standard-issue golden-god vocalist brother Russell, found a home and waiting arms in London. It wasn’t long before they formed a new band and success came along with their 1974 recording of the quirky Kinks-some Kimono My House, sparked with a potent, if unlikely, combination of wily wordplay and big dumb fun.

The lead-off cut, a big hit in Britain, fulfills that complexity -- but with an American twist. While retaining an operatic kill-the-wabbit Euro-aura that showcases Russell’s acquirable-taste of a soaring falsetto, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us” nonetheless lyrically presents a western horse-opera chorus replete with rifle blasts to complement the gunslinger bravado. In addition, a Walter Mitty-esque fantasy element plays throughout, further cementing -- even in the most mundane of circumstances -- a sense of rugged and individualistic American heroics:

“It’s a lot like playing the violin / You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin,” sums up an ode to adolescent lust, the whimsical and wistful “Amateur Hour.” The song summons up the Kinks, not only in the invocation of “Waterloo Sunset”-style background harmonies, but lyrically as well. Then again, as “Amateur Hour goes on and on / When you turn pro you know she'll let you know,” consider it The Village Green Preservation Society gone relatively wild:

In another, the appropriately histrionic and hilariously over-the-top “Here In Heaven,” a Romeo ponders plans gone awry, lamenting his fate and the consequences of “Second thoughts, for eternity, for eternity, for eternity...”:

These three samples of the cornucopia of melodious smarty-pants pop smarts that comprises Kimono My House are just on the first side. Other songs include one about a narcissist “falling in love with myself again,” a boy genius “scribbling things, genius things,” and a complaints department sales clerk threatening to “dive off the mezzanine if one more points at crooked seams.”

Travelers take center stage in the doom-bluesy “Equator,” wherein the narrator, seemingly ditched by his love interest, still harbors hope, though “All of the gifts are now melted or dead.” And in "Hasta Manana Monsieur" a naïve traveler is in over his head as he contends with an unexpected foreign affair: “You mentioned Kant and I was shocked... so shocked / You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues.”

Foul tongues, sharp tongues, silver tongues -- a variety of situations and circumstances from the everyday to the exotic take shape and are expressed in the gamut-running words and music of the Mael brothers. Sparks would eventually move back to America and continue on in different incarnations with varying degrees of success, but one of the heights so far in their career lies in their invitation to Kimono My House.

The Early Word: Lehane, Francis, Le Carre, McCarthy, Frazier

It’s beginning to look a lot like crowed aisles in the bookstores this holiday season. With an unusually sizeable number of big-name books in the publishing pipeline potentially drawing in ever-more book buyers, it's almost a matter of a good thing gone awry.

According to Michael Cader, founder of Publishers Lunch, a book industry website, “There’s a legitimate question whether this is too much at once, whether the market can handle it. There are just so many of them.”

That’s where I come in. Over the course of the foreseeable future of ever-dwindling shopping days ‘til Christmas, I’ll be offering -- weekly if not more frequently -- a selective assortment of suggestions in fiction and non, from scratch ‘n’ sniff children’s books to “Outhouses of the World" coffee table tomes, to scratch 'n' sniff “Outhouses of the World” publications too, perhaps.

In any case, we have some catching up to do. Before we get to Grisham and Pynchon; Atwood and Allende; Crichton, King and Koontz; we should take note of some titles that have hit the bookstore shelves in the past few weeks.

In a change of pace for the always gripping Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), Coronado offers five stories and the titular centerpiece, a two-act play based on Lehane’s short story "Until Gwen." Take a hustler father, a son just out of prison, mix in an uneasy reunion and some missing loot and you have the makings of some volatile intensity. Indeed, as the lead-off story would have it, "a small town is a hard place to keep a secret."

After an absence of six years, Dick Francis, in Under Orders, is not only back with another racetrack caper, he’s bringing back popular series character Sid Halley, once a champion jockey, and now a gumshoe out to solve the murder of jockey - in a case that gets a little too up close and personal.

John Le Carre keeps going strong, too, bringing a lighter, comic touch in The Mission Song, a story of an idealistic and earnest British interpreter, Bruno "Salvo" Salvador, whose expertise brings him steady work that soon enough spirals into covert government assignments and no lack of hot water and trouble.

The Road is a departure for Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses), but is nonetheless a masterwork of a vividly harrowing post-apocalyptic epic, rendered in multi-layered and majestically evocative prose. A father and son, survivors of an end-times holocaust, plod on aimlessly through the ashen wasteland, beset by the elements, marauders and “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

If that isn’t dark enough for you, you might relish the fantastical escapism courtesy of the short story collection, Strange Candy by Laurell K. Hamilton, author of the black-humored Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter novels. Something similarly wicked this way comes with the territory surrounding the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, where Christine Feehan’s Dark Celebration: A Carpathian Reunion takes place. The 17th in Feehan's Dark series (and the first in hardcover) features the blood-drinking and shape-shifting Carpathian clan as they gather for what many may not consider the most traditional of Christmas celebrations.

Also in stores: from the author of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, comes Mitch Albom’s eagerly-awaited For One More Day. That particular hoped-for day in the novel is one of solace and peace for an anguished son distraught by and guilt-ridden over the death of his mother.

And finally, in a brief early word about an even more highly anticipated work (available Oct. 3) Charles Frazier brings us, a decade after the award-winning Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons. Epic in scale, the novel starts before the Civil War this time, following the life of the narrator from the time he is sent to run a trading post in the wilderness of Indian territory.

Next up in The Early Word: the stacked-up blockbusters you’ll be tripping over in the bookstores.

After that: select titles on the shelves behind the stacks of blockbusters you’ll tripping over in the bookstores.

Vinyl Tap: Graham Parker And The Rumour - Squeezing Out Sparks

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #26:

“No one's going to illuminate you / All the odds are stacked against you."
---"Nobody Hurts You," Graham Parker

Anger is an energy, and anger can be power, as Public Image and the Clash would have it, but Johnny Lydon and the late Joe Strummer have nothing on Graham Parker when it comes to bristling with bile and bite -- and discharging devastating energy and pessimistic power in precise and snarling articulation deep into every album groove.

Graham Parker was not just Squeezing Out Sparks in this 1979 masterwork. He’s seething with spittle and spite that variously belittles the world and betrays his own weaknesses -- though it’s often hard to detect vulnerability when such barbed lyrics are embedded in such searing and stinging vocals. It's an on-edge singing prowess ably matched by other former pub-rock Brits, like Parker, who make up the Rumour - whose propulsive sonic assertion features the scorching guitar work of Brinsley Schwarz.

The thematic ambivalence is part and parcel of a complex and all-too-human ambiguity, an emotion-driven and at times numbingly treacherous terrain Parker unflinchingly faces. “I try to straighten out but I'm too wrapped up to see / I don't know how it's supposed to be,” he sings in the mental anguish of “Love Gets You Twisted.” But overweening bravado, false or not, is countervailed in the misanthropic belittlement of small-minded provincialism in the almost perversely infectious “Local Girls,” in which a strutting Parker announces, “Yes I'm aware of exactly what I'm doing / Making everything a mystery / Don't bother with it, it don't bother me…”

In between such extremes of confession and bluster lie a myriad of seemingly insurmountable and psychological defensive barriers to be hurdled, obstructions tossed up on both sides of any relationship. “You try to reach a vital part of me, my interest level's dropping rapidly / It's all excuses baby, all a stall, we just don't get excited,” Parker sings in the frenetic “Don’t Get Excited.” And moving from the state of apathy to one of deadened desires, Parker admits in the heartrending "Passion Is No Ordinary Word": "'Cause this is nothing else if not unreal / When I pretend to touch you, you pretend to feel."

In the same song Parker cavalierly contends “The world is easy when you're just playing around with it” -- a stark contrast to what life becomes when tough decisions are to be made and cold reality confronted. The rationalizations and regrets of abortion are explored with brutal candor in the acoustically spare “You Can’t Be Too Strong”:

"Can't Be Too Strong" may be the most blatantly honest and straightforward deviation from Parker's tendency to "wear a blank expression to conceal my real impression," as the reggae-fied “Protection“ puts it. But it joins the other tracks from Squeezing Out Sparks whereby, ultimately and always -- in the words of "Discovering Japan” -- “some kind of truth emerges" from its rich stratum of vigor and vitriol - whether in the between-the-lines insinuation and scorn, or by the by note-perfect denotation, bitten off and chewed. And sometimes spat back out.

Liner Notables #4: The Zombies - Odessey And Oracle

There’s no all-out fury in some of the minor-key moodiness of the Zombies, perhaps, but the sound of organ-laced hyperventilating intensity emanating from the lower-profile British Invaders in their swan song psychedelic-tinged Odessey And Oracle from 1969 at least signifies something Bardic: “Sound, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not./ Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/ Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices.”

Due attribution and acknowledgment is extended in the mixed-use liner notes to an accommodating and blurb-worthy “Will" Shakespeare -- the “not flatmate of [bass player] Chris [White] -- for his contribution to the sleeve note.” One Terry Quirk, it may as well be noted -- who actually is the flat mate of Chris and not, say, of the long-dead playwright -- created the paisley-esque flashback happening of an album cover for the fondly remembered hit-makers of “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No" - and, after a lull in the Billboard action (despite never-wavering productivity), one other unexpected big-time late-breaker single that was definitely not too little, though certainly too late.

But who had time for Top 10 trivialities, rife with lowest common proclivities? This was the time of Rock Music As Art, and Beatles songs displayed, according to one Deadly Profound New York Times critic, such Mahler-ian features as "major tonic sevenths and ninths built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches, so natural in the Aeolian cadence.”

Who knew? The Zombies acknowledge with chagrin such high seriousness to an extent, then sexy-sadie it out the studio door. Some A&R guy stuck a pen and paper under head Zombie Rod Argent’s nose and he came up with this Mission Statement of sorts:

Really music is a very personal thing; it’s the product of a person’s experiences. Since no two people have been exactly alike, each writer has something unique to say. That makes anything which is not just a copy of something else worth listening to.

But then, going for broke as the Zombies go for a baroque-pop masterwork, he makes such high-falutin’ pronouncements palatable with a bit of drollery in briefly recounting how the group, “laden with gifts of fruits and nuts from the Orient,” confronted the CBS suits and “with smarm and charm extracted, astonished, the finance necessary to, compose, arrange, perform, produce and cover an LP ourselves, with no outside help or interference.”

Well, except for a little unlikely boost from our next liner-note luminary, the Renaissance rock musician and producer Al Kooper. At this time the renowned keyboardist for Bob Dylan and the leader of such groups as the Blues Project was a CBS producer himself, and even though he was deeply-steeped in blues and R&B, Kooper took a musical and promotional interest in the Zombies, who with their nuanced pop sensibility, were a decided exception to the R&B-based school of British Invasion bands.

“While in London recently,” Kooper adds to the liner note hodge-podge, “I acquired forty British LPs. Upon listening to them, the tuneful and trippy Odessey “stuck out like a rose in a garden of weeds.” Moreover, in giving a brief rundown of some of the wide-ranging cuts' subject matters -- from the girlfriend coming home from prison to a World War I battlefield story -- he finds the Mellotron-infused music “so original in thought” with “melodies incorporating well-timed diminished chords leaping through warm melodic tapestries.”

“With this album, the Zombies establish themselves alongside the royalty of rock,” Kooper sums up. Indeed, they are “very much alive.”

That might’ve been a little wishful thinking on Kooper’s part. The of-late hit-less but always prolific Zombies, contracted with CBS only for this one final release before disbanding, went their separate ways. Rod Argent took his distinctive, jazz-flavored keyboard skills to his new group Argent, and vocalist Colin Blunstone continued a solo career with some success in Britain.

Not even the surprise monster hit from Odessey and Oracle, the classic oldies staple "Time Of The Season" could get them to get back together.

"The Isle is full of noises," Shakespeare two-cents it. Yes, but with a little less in the way of sound and sweet airs that give delight.

Book Review: An Alchemy Of Mind - The Marvel And Mystery Of The Brain by Diane Ackerman

---Bob Dylan, "Desolation Row"

When Albert Einstein died in 1955 of a ruptured aneurysm of the abdominal aorta, his brain was secreted away by Princeton pathologist Thomas Harvey, who cut it into 240 blocks for study. Nothing in the noggin’ immediately jumped out and sang “I am genius, hear me roar” and so Einstein’s brain -- after being plunked into two mason jars of formaldehyde -- was placed in a Costa Cider cardboard box collecting cobwebs and virtually forgotten about as it sat under a beer cooler in Harvey's office. (The adage about preferring a bottle in front of me over a frontal lobotomy seems somehow apropos here, but I don’t know how.)

[ADBLOCKHERE]Eventually, renewed interest among various scientists and neurologists meant Einstein’s gray matter mattered once more and so Harvey took it out of mothballs and passed it around rather casually at times to in-the-know know-it-alls all over. At one point it was tossed into the trunk of a Buick Skylark for a cross-country road trip - which might make for a good buddy movie ("Dude, Where's My Cortex?").

In fits and starts of theory and inquiry, notes Diane Ackerman in the scintillating and enticingly all-embracing An Alchemy Of Mind, the 240 poked-and-prodded blocks went on to endure some flawed studies and unexpected conclusions. Public interest was stirred for a while, notes Ackerman, "with many of us picturing his glia as a sort of golden mucilage, the pith of brilliance.”

But the path to Einstein's brilliance, it was ultimately determined, may have stemmed from a missing Sylvian fissure, a fold running through the parietal lobes. Without that division, the consequent ease of connection and communication between neurons corresponded to Einstein’s contention that his mental functions didn’t involve words; he thought in images and took a mathematical approach to problem-solving. With such a unique brain formation, Ackerman suggests, no wonder Einstein “symbolizes genius” -- though his affability gives it "a farouche human face surrounded by electric hair.”

From such a summing-up most stopping points are made. But Ackerman not only goes the extra meditative mile to concisely yet incisively ponder such potential imponderables as the consequences of anatomical mistakes, evolutionary flukes and even “the zeitgeist of the era” - she gives free rein to her non-academic imagination.

She muses about the incidentals that usually fall through the scholarly cracks. Between beers, for example, did the self-styled keeper and curator of the great scientist’s brain “sometimes peer into the jars and turn them gently like snow globes, talk to the brain, commune with it?” Did Harvey “entertain dreams of glory, of solving its mysteries?”

As may be indicated here, Ackerman has the gift of stylistic gab and poetic resonance with which to better precision-toss the substance of her insights. With such a word-perfect emphasis and almost playful sense of language, it is no wonder that Alchemy’s epigraph consists of an e.e. cummings poem that evokes the book's mingling of cold hard fact with the gradation and shade of allusion-rich expression.

Alchemy's seven sections hit such topics as the evolution of the brain, its physical structure, memory, the self, emotions, language, and consciousness. Meanwhile, some of the more intriguing discussions in the book's 34 chapters chip away at absentmindedness and multitasking, Alzheimer’s and the aging brain, the role of dreams in memory, artistic and mathematical minds, the spiritual brain, animal minds, and “How Shakespeare’s mind was different.”

So, like slings and arrows or, to quote cummings again, “sharp fatal tools” and “sensual chisels,” Ackerman -- in the same way others use charts and graphs and tables -- benefits from the gentle nudging of determined and determining words to unravel the marvel and mystery of the brain.

Vinyl Tap: The Beach Boys Today!

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #25:

With summer now turning into fall, it’s never a smooth seas-to-leaves transition here in Southern California. I yearn, perhaps too perversely much, for the autumnal melancholy - when I can brood with abandon. Something’s gotta wipe this summertime smile off my face.

I must, however, wait out the fits-and-starts of my meteorological mindset. Today, a few days after 100 to-the-nth degree conditions, it’s refreshingly overcast and cool - and 20 degrees cooler. But it’ll get hot again, and cool then, and hot yet more as the thermometer’s wigged-out mercury gets all mercurial and all but bursts from its seemingly ceaseless careening.

Come to think of it, though, in a fitting reconciliation of record-breaking temps to successful record-making attempts, I have a one-album-fits-all-temperaments LP that should do the one-stop mood-shopping trick and get me through the five-day forecast flip-outs. At the start of this season, I aptly and gladly Vinyl-Tapped for another moment in the sun, Endless Summer, the quintessential compilation soundtrack for warm-clime lollygagging.

Now, as I "feel-flow" into fall-time free-fall, the perfect accompaniment, I'm thinking, is the Janus-faced Beach Boys Today! Side A is tethered to the trademark and traditionally infecto-pop Beach Boys thrills, but it's a whole new story on the innovative other side, which spotlights Brian Wilson’s largely unexpected foreshadowing of Pet Sounds-style sonic sublimity. Though perhaps much to the consternation of a perennially perplexed Mike Love, Today covers all facets.

I, on the other hand, am going to be more selective here. For the sake of this review I'm dispensing with the first side’s consistent string of familiar hook-filled songs to focus on the more anticipatory autumnal second side, mostly comprised as it is of a seamless sequence of warm, relaxed-fit but still anxiety-ridden ballads complexly arranged with orchestra-bolstered production.

So, like Brian dove into the experimental deep end at first opportunity, I’m going to jump right into the five-song untried-but-true tunes Brian felt compelled to, and given liberty to, write and produce after having quit the concert tour circuit to concentrate on studio work.

The first song on this particular first shot of production freedom pays off bigtime. It may be a little jarring to flip the platter from the joyous frug-worthy excitations of “Dance, Dance, Dance,” which closes side one, to the affecting, heart-on-sleeves “Please Let Me Wonder.” But the soothing melody of “Please” will capture and enrapture you right away, as lyrics implore (though not seeking answer quite yet!), “Please let me wonder / If I'm who you're dreaming of.” Palpitations and trembles and walking on air is enough for now. Please let me continue to be smitten…

In the musical makeover “I’m So Young,” a gorgeously rearranged and intricately harmonious cover of a ‘50s doo-wop song -- graced with Brian's transcendent falsetto -- finds a love-struck couple ready to take the next problematically marital step. But the honeymoon may be over for the quarrelsome twosome in the piercing “Kiss Me Baby,” as -- in bewitchingly harmomic splendor -- the songs builds in its exuisite reminiscence of the thematic teenage apprehension at the core of “Don’t Worry Baby":

Elsewhere, other mixed-up match-ups, instead of having “thought it out,” fight it out instead. “I treat her so mean I don't deserve what I have,” bewails a clearly bothered Brian in “She Knows Me Too Well,” a standout and poignant track lyrically suggestive of Pet Sounds in its emphasis on a troubled relationship - this one burdened with immaturity. Though “she can tell... I really love her," nonetheless “When I look at other girls it must kill her inside / But it'd be another story if she looked at the guys / 'Cause she knows me so well…”

Furthermore, the sophisticated instrumentation, soaring vocals and all-embracing harmonies pack a punch in their own visceral way that is on par with anything from the hits-on-parade of Side A, such as “Good To My Baby” or “When I Grow Up To Be A Man.”

Moving on, the soul-shattering "In The Back Of My Mind,” is unique in featuring Dennis Wilson's soulful solo on a heartrending vocal, expressively conveying some of Brian’s most personal and ultimately self-doubting lyrics:

This idiosyncratically haunting song also features some orchestral and percussive instrumentation that will find echo not only in Pet Sounds, but in Brian’s “pocket symphony,” “Good Vibrations.” But for Today‘s “Back Of My Mind,“ the coda features an abrupt and discordant crescendo suggesting a “to be continued” open-ended promise of better things to come.

Though not necessarily real soon, that is, except for Today's clashing and disposable comic-relief ending cut. “Bull Session With The ‘Big Daddy,’” is of mildly-amusing interest upon first listen, but otherwise it mars the spirit and creativity at work in The Beach Boys Today!

At this point, the group, if not re-trenching in response to Capitol Record's assembly-line pressure, at least went into an enjoyable-enough holding pattern with the next two albums, Summer Days (And Summer Nights), and Beach Boys Party.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a masterpiece was being created by a mastermind. And no, it wasn't Mike Love.

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Like “genius” or “hero,” the word “reinvention,” lately waylaid by artistic lightweights, has been devalued and is increasingly a cliché in literature, arts and entertainment. Whether it’s a has-been actor turned reality show never-was, or a vapid va-voom starlet famous for being infamous who yearns to write an “as told to” tell-all, everyone -- though keeping one foot in the door -- wants an out. The rest, seeking a different stint in the same trade, will be all those washed-up actors who really want to direct.

But sometimes it's not the klieg-light acclaim, but the off-stage immaterial accrual that somehow constitutes a tenuous tie to perceived artistic growth. Madonna affects a British accent and myopically chases Kabala-rooted spirituality like a trend-on-a-stick, and - at the drop of a new CD or another concert curtain - proclaims herself transformed, like a virgin no more. Again.

If, to ratchet up the gravitas considerably, any novelist deserves a Reinvention Booksigning Tour of his or her own, it would have to be Cormac McCarthy, who could most certainly reinvent reinvention once again if he had to, restoring back to its former glory the golden substance beneath the stylistic glitter.

With the beginning of his writing career as a Rhode Island transplant to rural Tennessee in 1965, McCarthy distinguished himself as a Southern novelist with a mean Faulknerian streak. But after having moved to El Paso a decade later, McCarthy invented himself anew as a Western writer, marked by touches of Melville and Conrad. With the publication, in 1985, of his dark masterwork Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West -- a violently Peckinpah-esque retelling of the Davy Crockett legend -- McCarthy decidedly descended into an American-ingrained exploration of thematic and visceral force.

The inconsistent but often striking '90s-spanning Border Trilogy that brought to McCarthy both book awards and mass appeal -- All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities Of The Plain -- toned down the cinematic brutality by affording, in these affecting coming-of-age stories, more of a John Ford flavor. And last year’s modern-day No Country For Old Men trades in a little literary cache and rich characterization for a more accessible and entertaining capper to his Western phase - at least for now.

With The Road, McCarthy makes a full-tilt departure with a bleakly picaresque post-apocalyptic epic. Though presumably America, the unnamed land of deprivation and “cold autistic dark” here is not only not a country for old men in the Western or even Yeatsian sense, it is, in effect, a no-man’s land unfit for anyone and anything.

But some, bloodied and often bowed, have chosen to subside, if not thrive, in the ill-boding badlands that stretch on seemingly ceaselessly. With his keenly-focused study of resolve in the face of such desolation, McCarthy follows the travels and travails of a father and young son, "each the other's world entire." The pair -- determined to survive after the suicide of the family's wife and mother -- slowly plod on, scavenging with cart in tow and revolver in hand, heading south to the sea to escape in aimless flight the increasingly cold climes and bleak setting of an ashen-skied wasteland.

Destroyed cities and burned-out countryside are devoid of all wildlife and virtually uninhabited, and many of the befallen few who’ve lived to tell a harrowing tale become, if not “creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a fever land,” then too-willingly amenable to a cannibalistic desperado existence as Mad-Max-style marauders and looters.

Beyond the comforting charade that the pessimism-driven but perceptive and understanding father displays for his son -- that they are the "good guys" who “carry the fire" as they run from menacing raiders -- there are, even within the truly horrifying events witnessed and among the wretched souls, madmen and prophets they cross paths with, no specific villains to name. And little of value to point to amid many shades of gray merging with the dust and smoke.

And besides an allusion to a corollary devastation constituted in a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions," the exact cause of the end-times holocaust is never explained. Then again, no too-little-to-late consideration of fire or ice, bang or whimper really needs to be reflected upon when confronted with the ineffability of "the frailty of everything revealed at last,“ and “old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.“

But The Road is not a book you will be plucking from the SciFi/Fantasy shelves in your bookstore. There are no plot-driven devices at play here, and though it is not the chronicle’s destination that matters - neither is it the journey, perilous as it is, fraught with injury and illness, and rarely, relatively, rewarding.

Furthermore, the overriding genre-busting literary recompense of The Road is also not just comprised in the stylistic matter of McCarthy’s multi-layered, commanding and majestically-evoking poetics, broken here and there with spare, circular and at times droll Samuel Beckett-like dialogue. Neither is this the case of McCarthy merely building upon and extending -- though there is that facet -- the edge-of-the-frontier themes undertaken in his previous Western or Southern works.

In concerns more geared toward present-day political and military issues, whatever allusions to specific global-power saber-rattling and its potential consequences may be read into the novel -- and perhaps justified to an extent -- there is indeed a limit to such forced speculation. McCarthy’s at-times cryptically under-wraps economy in word and meaning belies any clear-cut conjecture here, though it may be presumed that he is addressing such topics obliquely, with universality and timelessness in mind.

That's not the case when it comes to characterizations, especially when each emanation of analysis, appreciation and gut-instinct authority lies in conveyances directly derived from the actions and reactions of the father and son, whose personalities are indelibly marked by contrasting natures.

The father’s emptiness and ever-guarded suspicions extend even to his dreams, whether unsettling or comforting - because “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.” The child, probably no more than ten years old, is too ready to trust and empathize with others in such times, in such “Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

Both fundamentally fragile and vulnerable in such dire circumstances, they may be able to survive, “Slumping along, Filthy, ragged hopeless,” but only one will endure the “sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.” That such a grim and undaunted a rumination on ruination and depravity may possibly allow a glimmer of redeeming affirmation and love speaks to McCarthy’s masterful command and precision in this profoundly moving story.

And that someone, anyone, in such formidable conditions could “raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle,” speaks volumes about McCarthy's capacity for humanity, heart, and ultimate hope.

Liner Notables #3: The Velvet Underground And Nico

“You’ve never really known life until you’ve fucked death in the gallbladder.” It isn’t immediately apparent how this warm and fuzzy homily from the crap-and-camp film Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein is related to such music in which the figure of one song, as Lou Reed would have it, "started dancin' to that fine fine music / You know her life was saved by rock 'n' roll."

But if anyone can put a death-mask on celebratory vigor it would be the avant guardian who splattered a soupçon of soup-can consumer culture on canvas and called it art. Indeed, as Andy Warhol produced them on their 1967 self-titled debut, the Velvet Underground and Nico -- way before death metal and goth -- stuck out from the Summer of Love like a Winter of Discontent.

With songs such as "The Black Angel's Death Song" and lyrics that deal matter-of-factly with the slipstreaming surrender to "nullify my life" while "closing in on death" ("Heroin"), the dark realism of a group who brought their tried-and-true brand of experience and experimentalism to this innovative album extends to the liner notes as well.

Those observations came in the form of newpaper excerpts from chomping-at-the-bit arts and music reviewers bending over backwards and soundboards to wallow in Warhol's mixed-media/performance art ensemble, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable -- a psych-out extravaganza designed to introduce VU to a potentially waiting world. As it turns out, the all-boffo commentary prominently featured in The Velvet Underground and Nico overstates a wide variety of preening pretentiouness as creative juices overflow.

Some writers stick to the expected hyperbole for the times, and concern themselves with the show-bizzy rock particulars. "At the Plastic Inevitable it is all Here and Now and the Future." One, more taciturn, takes his turn with "Three-ring psychosis"; perhaps "like Berlin in the decadent '30s" fits the bill; or "fused together into one magnificent moment of hysteria."

Meanwhile, the music of the Velvet Underground is described by one twisted wordsmith as a combination of "Sado-Masochistic frenzy with free-association imagery... the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade." Another frets that, by comparison with the "far out" headliners, the "great, groovy group which opened the show sounds passe."

But, getting back to the Frankensteinian philosophy of life and internal organs, other liner note contributors display an intimate fascination with dying and danger. You would not have thought death had undone so many...

"Not since the Titanic ran into that iceberg has there been such a collision as when Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable burst upon the audiences at the Trip Tuesday." Embellishing this notion of watery graves, another reviewer opts for "these flowers of evil... in full bloom". To experience this menacing assemblage "is to be brutalized, helpless -- you're in any kind of horror you want to imagine, from police state to mad house."

Is the late Nico, the Velvet Underground's resident Teutonic "Chanteuse" (as she is billed), a "beautiful, flaxen-haired girl," as one writer puts it -- or, as another attests, "another cooler Dietrich for another cooler generation"? A little less sweetness and light comes when a somewhat obsessed Dante wannabe plunges head-first into the inferno: "Nico, astonishing -- the macabre face -- so beautifully resembles a memento mori, the marvelous deathlike voice coming from the lovely blond head."

He might be a little head-over-heels for a Necro-Nico persona, but at least he's not gaga over gallbladders.

Vinyl Tap: Aztec Camera

I get a new turntable and dust off some old records. Vinyl Tap #24:

Elvis Costello knows a thing or two about deserving left-of-the-dial artists and promising up-and-comers, from Robert Wyatt to early-day John Hiatt, who was introduced onstage once as “America’s best-kept secret.” So when Costello lavished praise upon Roddy Frame, the Scottish leader and sole mainstay of Aztec Camera, for being one of the best songwriters he had ever heard -- this after only the 1982 debut album, the superb High Land, Hard Rain -- you had to take more than a little note of this acoustically-driven and folkish pop-rock outfit, and of the finely-tuned craftsmanship of Frame's biting and biding romanticism.

By the time of the third release, the self-titled EP Aztec Camera (1985), the wunderkind Frame was also an accomplished live performer, as this five-song release attests. This collection of bipolar love songs for the bloodied but unbowed were -- except for one "mad impetuous fool"-type departure -- recorded in concert at the Dominion Theatre in London on October 16, 1984.

"The Bugle Sounds Again" may comprise the lone sliver from the debut LP, but it remains one of Frame's most richly melodic songs, couched in whisper-to-a-scream dynamics complementing the thematic restlessness and cold-feets-don't fail-me-now equivocation. The Romeo inclined toward the "nighthawk call" to "meeting after midnight like we do," is the same rambler whose fleeting notions of settling down is torn ablunder by the nagging call to "Grab that Gretsch before the truth hits town."

But then, "How come when I'm gone I get the blues?" In "Backwards and Forwards" from the too-polished Mark Knopfler-produced Knife (1984) - the rougher-edged and stronger-voiced live EP showcases Knifes' songcraft much more affectingly - the narrator seems to be swaying back again, bent to "the essence of my peers / Handshakes, hellos and golden years."

Is this the beginning -- as Aztec's second slice of Knife would put it -- of "The Birth Of The True"? As one line of this jaunty tune would aver to be ever thus: "I'd sack the world and make a second start," but moreover, in the realm of a more interpersonal affirmation: "Don't wipe your eyes over lies / Just let them shine their blue / On every whisper that welcomes the inconceivable / And the birth of the true."

In other words, "you've got to roll with the punches / to get to what's real." Which makes the inclusion here of a cheeky studio cover of Van Halen's precious-moments ultra-romantic song of endless love, "Jump," some kind of sense. In any case, it's a bit of deadpan fun to have Frame laconically invite us all to -- decidedly lower case and strictly optional, mind you -- "jump... you might as well..." (checks his watch) "jump..." The only thing really declarative and imperative is Frame's feedback-drenced but anti-Eddie guitar solo.

Nevertheless, as Frame sings in the EP's wistful original "Mattress Of Wire," "when you speak, I still hear the fire." That could apply to scorched-earth instrumental breaks, but it most certainly has implications for listeners of Aztec Camera. When Roddy Frame speaks - when he sings his own indelible and incandescent words and music - we always hear the fire.

GoHah

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