Reviews, mine.

Hey kids. In case you're interested, here's two book review pieces I've done recently, along with a review/meditation on some newly released Hank Williams stuff. Enjoy.

Omega: The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
Hank Williams

Debut of the new gig!

So it seems I am now the monthly country music columnist for PopMatters.com. Which I'm pretty excited about. I even did a little dance.

You can check out the first column here. Naturally I've decided to launch my journalistic career by misquoting Toby Keith. I'm pretty sure that's how HL Mencken got started.

In other news, I am about to dive face first into the second and hopefully final set of page proofs for the book. Do not envy me my headache. Small type's a bastard.

Oh yeah, and I'm back from Berlin. It was neat. I ate a blood sausage.

And so but.

So this is what brings me out of blog semi-retirement. Not the bike accident that tore up my face and left me with a shattered sense of what I looked like for weeks, so much so that when I look in the mirror, my eyes still go immediately to the new scars on my forehead, upper lip and chin, all of them faded now from their angry red to an apologetic pink. Not the cancer diagnosis that even now, as it enters its last week of real medical importance with the last of the offending tissue coming out of my neck in a chunk this Thursday, haunts my brain in a big black robe, checking its watch impatiently, or the accompanying paranoia regarding the upcoming surgery and its (statistically unlikely) threat to my facial-motor skills. Not any of the awfulness and growing despair surrounding the current election. No, not those. It's DFW.

One opens oneself up to derision (or at least would've last week) by claiming to be a David Foster Wallace fan. He was, after all, one of the smartest of the smart kids, and while he may have lacked some of the smarminess of Dave Eggers, his style had a type of intellectual intensity that reminded one, first and foremost, of the kid in the front row of the class, practically jumping up and down to get the teacher's attention, to answer yet another question posed to the entire class or worse, volunteer a bit of extra information on the subject at hand.

Extra information is certainly one of the first things that stood out in DFW's work, and as a style it's one I openly cribbed when working on my Flying Burrito Brothers book. Sure, it indicates certain...mental health issues when a writer cannot physically bear the thought of a stray related fact left on the cutting room floor. But it also indicates a deep investment in things, things in the William Carlos Williams sense: objects seething with meanings. In short (although nothing about DFW was ever in short), a sort of feeling that this fact might save your life. And if not that one, maybe this one. At the very least, maybe it'll be something you can turn over in your head for a little bit, while your laundry dries or in the seconds/minutes/hours before falling off to sleep.

This speaks, I think, to two things about DFW. The first is the difference between his mode of intellect (and expression of said intellect) and that of many of his contemporaneous young turks. When I finally got around to attempting "A Heartbreaking Stagger of Et Cetera", I was immediately (as in "before the first page"), I was immediately thrown out of the text by the feeling I was about to start a long conversation with someone who wanted me to know exactly how smart he was. The feeling was cold, condescending and alienating. DFW's work, no less showy and fact-packed (moreso on both counts) gives the opposite feeling. DFW was excited to tell us all the things he knew not so he could look at us smugly afterward, but because he knew we were smart. And he knew he was smart. And he wanted us to remember how fun that could be, how knowledge, even little trivial bits of it can light up the quotidian with the soothing warmth that a string of Christmas lights can give a kitchen, a sweet and needed opposite to the glaring overhead fluorescent of everything about the world that constantly threatens to overwhelm us with the almost blinding unknowledge of ideas ungrounded in things, of ideology uber alles. Or, in the case of many of DFW's characters (and possibly the author himself), the deafening roar of the solipsistic self. One of DFW's most resonant sentences (up there for me with Pynchon's devastating one-two, "They were in love. Fuck the war.") is Hal Incandenza's desperate lament at the beginning/end of Infinite Jest, when, unable to communicate from inside this all-encompassing sense of isolating self (whether because of a mystery drug as the novel suggests or because he's trapped in a pervasively ironic discourse where nothing can be said and meant, as the novel insists), he pleads to the "I am in here." As if the reader, speaker and author all need convincing.

The second, corollary to a love of knowledge because it's fun to be smart, is DFW's deep compassion. I can't find the quote now but I think it was Turgenev who suggested all art should prepare us for compassion. This sentiment might have seemed a little too moralistic for a lot of contemporary writers (and any statement that begins "the purpose of art is..." pretty much begs for a fight), but DFW seems to hold it close to his heart throughout his work. DFW was adept at drawing compassion out of a reader (often along with its ugly stepsisters, pity and revulsion) through his gift at a sort of narrative brutality, most notably in the threateningly honest "hitting bottom" narratives of "Infinite Jest"'s addicts, which serve not to advance the story but to offer an almost violent counterpoint to the ironic discourse employed by other characters in the novel (a discourse which, as previously mention, is one centrally concerned with non-meaning, anti-compassion and the protection of the solipsistic self and leads to one of the novel's central frustrations/thrills: a series of unsolvable ambiguities, sets of signs that mean neither one thing nor the other) and in the throat-grabbing two page piece, "Incarnations of Burned Children". But more often, DFW offered a training course in compassion through his intellectual investment in things. If he could teach readers to apply his sort of sprawling deconstructive techniques (not to be confused with Deconstructive techniques. Lower case, it means something like taking a watch apart to see how it works, learn how to put it together and possibly build a better watch. Upper case, it means something like taking a cat apart to see what a cat looks like when it's been taken apart) to objects around them, to invest those objects with attention and caring, DFW seemed to believe transference of those skills to the people around them would necessarily follow. This is of course not always the case: there are plenty of people who have a rabid curiosity for objects and no interest in other people. But in DFW's work, the two seem intrinsically linked. His obsessive inclusion is born of a sense of caring or attempting to care fiercely about the world outside of himself.

I first read "Infinite Jest" during my second summer in Boston. I could tell you I was living with a prostitute, dating a nineteen year old albino, drinking heavily and teaching sixty hours a week, but those are just a scattering of facts I've told so many times they have the snark of irony about them, for me at least. I could also tell you I'd just been kicked out of graduate school, which amounted, at the time, to the total destruction of every life-plan I'd had, and left me with the feeling of being completely adrift in myself, unconnected with the world ("life-plans" being, after all, just maps for how we want our selves to interact with/fit into the world). I could also tell you, in the spirit of inclusion, that when I went to Brookline Booksellers to buy "Infinite Jest" I nearly knocked over a small Asian woman who turned out to be Amy Tan. For those weeks of reading, mostly on the medievally slow B train of Boston's Green Line, the moments I passed locations mentioned in the book seemed like the first connection I'd had to the outside world, the fact of Mike's Liquor's, the actuality of the Cambridge subway station. Slowly, my feet extended out of myself and touched the ground again, legs shaky as a frequent subway rider's can become. In the months that followed, I returned to DFW's description of depression like a promise that mine would eventually retreat, that my depression and I were not identical (a difficult conclusion to reach from the inside of such a condition).

Of course, like Salinger, I could never read DFW if I had any plans to do writing of my own: the precision of his sentences, so different from Salinger's (closer, I've always thought, to a sort of hipster Henry James) but just as pristine, ringing, gorgeous, would invade and overtake my own cadence til I was thinking in DFWspeak. I would often point to one of the exchanges between Hal and his older brother in "Infinite Jest" as exemplifying all the modes of conversation Ford Maddox Ford and Joseph Conrad outlined and have recommended to numerous professor-friends the use of one or the other of his essays in their classes (I know I've focused largely on his fiction here, but the rest of the journalistic world is giving ample attention to his non-fiction). And I borrowed/stole his footnoting riff for my own nefarious uses. But his way of thinking, of taking things apart, putting them back together and taking them apart again, his ability not to distract the reader with facts but to ground and center the reader with them, to draw the reader out (rather than draw things out of the reader) into a space where they were vulnerable to ideas, to feelings, to other things became locked in my mind as a kind of underlying architecture, a palimpsest that changed the shape of everything written over it. I never scoured publishing schedules for news of DFW's next work or trawled through magazines hoping he'd contributed. New work would show up like the occasional and unexpected letter from an old friend, and like the best of old friends, the conversation would seem to pick up in the middle of a frantic sentence, bursting with a pent up enthusiasm that broke through every dull thing around it.

As goodbyes go, this one is overly long and rambles into places it need not. But I imagine DFW would have wanted it that way, and I'm a little less for knowing his next missive will never be delivered.

Rediscovered: The Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine"

Six hours into what looks like it's going to be a fifteen hour work day and coming off listening to three straight hours of Yo La Tengo, I'm watching the rain roll in and out and enjoying the jesus reference out of the Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine". Like a punky John Darnielle grappling with issues of Christianity. Darn fine stuff.

Sorry, needed to put something new up here and not feeling entirely lucid. Deep coats of work glaze as a long week concludes. Put together a new muxtape though, as if that's some sort of achievement. Enjoy.

http://noradio.muxtape.com

To Boldly Go Where No One Should Have Gone to Begin With...

I would have taken pictures, but there was really no point. Some time I’ll take you all to the Saturday Super Flea back home, you can imagine everyone there is wearing crimson with little triangular buttons and you’ll get the idea.

So as I’m writing this, I’m DJing the closing dance for the regional Starfleet Conference. Which is apparently like a Star Trek convention only not as freewheelin’. I think if we had done show of hands, at least sixty percent of these folks would either be card-carrying NRA members or at least highly sympathetic. Median age: 43 (to be fair, Helen throws off the curve a bit, this statistical outlier is certainly joining us from not just before the United Federation of Planets but a good decade before the United Nations). Median weight: deuce and a quarter and I’m being generous. Median facial hair: goatee. Lots of them and a fair count of mustaches.

When I arrived at the Ramada (seriously , how the fuck do I allow myself to be talked into these things?), I was greeted by the fairly ancient manager, who kindly waited til I had loaded in everything but a handful of XLR cables before asking if he could lend a hand. I snuck my gear in during the dinner, noting to my utter horror the lack of beer bottles and wine glasses on the dinner tables. A couple folks were sipping some sort of blue concoction, but for the most part this looked like a dry event. A dry dance party. I swear, I am never going to try DJing in Salt Lake City. You need social lubricant, people! Especially if you’re as socially…creaky as some of these ladies and gents.

Once I was set up, I snuck over to the McDonalds for dinner, where the young man at the counter sans front teeth reminded me that no matter how this week ended, I should count it in the plus column since I’m still wearing my whole face despite last Friday’s accident. A moment of relative peace before heading back. You know the view from up by the mall is actually…nonexistent.

Back to the Ramada, I excused myself to get passed a young lady managing to block the doorway all on her own. This is actually my first glimpse of the blue beverages, which I think Esteban jokingly mentioned to me as “synthahol” earlier in the afternoon. I think he was joking. The first emcee—

Time out. Two things have just happened. First, I noticed that everyone in the room was at the opposite end of the banquet hall, staring at me like the Blues Brothers in the country bar scene. Secondly, the very nice older dude with the hell of white mustache came over and requested some slow songs. His reasoning:

“A lot of us guys during this conference, we’ve got our ladies with us and we don’t get to spend much time with them. So this is our chance to make it up to them. So if we don’t have a couple slow dances, we’re screwed. Actually, we’re not getting screwed, which is the problem.”

Anyway, I put on “You Were Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson followed by “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers. And you know what? “Unchained Melody” kind of choked me up. No joke. I mean, that’s a whole lot of fucking song.

—the first emcee was giving out awards for Best Officer, Best Enlisted Man—

Time out again. Three Icelandic brothers, statistical outliers far to the left on the weight chart. All sporting hammer pendants. Hammer of Thor, they inform me. You’re thor? I’m tho thor I can’t thtand it. They don’t like me. No one here likes me.

—and so on. Did I mention that the Starfleet is divided into ships? Yep, it’s divided into ships. They’ve all got the name of their ship on their lanyards, along with their ranks, like, “Lt. Ed of the USS Syracuse. Why is it the Star Trek ships are all designated USS? Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of United Federation of Planets or is this just reinforcing US cultural/military hegemony? Hey, you know the Beatles version of “Twist and Shout” actually rocks pretty hard. And this whole endeavor is making me dumber by the minute. Also, not to be racist, but these people seem to only like music by white people. Stevie Wonder=death. Oh, and they all love KISS. And schmaltz! Any song I thought was far too sappy to be played went over like…I don’t know, what goes over well? Is that woman wearing fringed chaps?

Following the awards (which begin the trend of injokes I don’t at all grasp) is the auction of goods that would be passed over at your average flea market. Star Trek trading cards. Action figures on which the number imprinted on the foot must be checked before bidding can begin. Next time I go back to Buffalo, I’m totally digging out my old Star Wars toys and checking the tiny numbers on their feet. A picture of Patrick Stewart playing Captain Picard dressed as some kind of private eye, signed by Patrick Stewart. A set of commemorative coins that go for (no joke) a thousand dollars. More jokes I don’t get that slay the crowd.

And now it’s my big moment. I lead off with Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom”. Which I thought, you know, science fiction related. Involves counting. German. Can’t lose! The main organizer (decked out in what tuxedos will look like in the future) digs it, but he’s pretty much alone on that. At about this point, the first request for Faith Hill comes in and I started scanning the table around me for sharp objects. Requests that followed included: “Can you play some eighties?” during “In a Big Country”. House music. At least three separate requests for “Time Warp”. At least two separate requests for Journey. And I fucking hate Journey! Everyone knows that. I took out that ad in the Ithaca Times. At one point this eight year old kid starts requesting album tracks by Depeche Mode, waving away “Just Can’t Get Enough” in favor of “real Depeche Mode”. He’s thrilled I’ve got “Black Celebration” and for a moment I think there’s hope. Then his dad dragged him upstairs to their room and I’m left with the rest of them.

So the rest of them got me thinking a bit, as I warded off requests for really just the worst songs you can imagine. Now I am very much a geek in any number of ways. I can bend your ear on comic books, Star Wars, X-Files, you name it. I've never gone in for Dr. Who, but I own all of The Prisoner. But the Star Trek stuff has always left me pretty cold. I always thought it was because you had to keep track of a lot of stuff and I like my sci-fi pretty simple ("There's this Force. It has a Dark Side and...well, a side that isn't so dark.") But now I’m realizing the actual reason. Take Star Wars, for just a minute: a plucky band of rebels plots to destroy the oppressive empire. X-Files: a plucky pair of FBI agents attempts to decrypt a vast conspiracy by a shadowy and oppressive government. Star Trek: everyone dresses the same, has a military rank and everything’s pretty okay. It’s the ultimate dream of a police state, free will subjugated to a vaguely defined “common good”. The state is no longer the enemy: the state is ubiquitous. No wonder its fans seem to be, for the most part, conservative and fairly passive. They're supposed to be geeks, but geekism, I always thought, involves a basically inquisitive and acquisitional nature. There's nothing to acquire/inquire about the world of Star Trek that I can discern. Everything is in it's right place, Roddenberry's in his heaven and all is right with the world. All watched over by military-industrial complexes of loving grace.

And I realized I actually wished these people harm. I wanted bad things to happen to them. I wanted them to be eaten by Klingons or anally raped by Romulans or something unpleasant and thematically appropriate. But I couldn’t help trying to please them, struggling to make them like me, please for the love of god LIKE ME!

It didn’t work. They paid me, but they didn’t like me. And I’m out hopefully in time to see some of the Hubcap show. Those guys like me.

Mind-Blown on a Saturday Afternoon

Okay, if you haven't gone and downloaded the new Girl Talk album, "Feed the Animals", you really need to. I mean, you know this guy's shtick by now and this one doesn't really do anything fundamentally different from "Night Ripper", although it seems to me it's a little less heavy-handed with its hiphop samples. That is, Gregg Gillis isn't so much laying his frantic collage of pop hooks behind extended hiphop samples; he's integrating them more fully into the songs. It still has the breathless name-that-tune vibe of his earlier efforts, but it seems a little less ADD. When, for instance, Deee-Lite and Nirvana are seamlessly blended together, you get the feeling that both samples have been digested by the DJ, not just thrown together haphazardly. And yes, there's some Metallica in there and, well, I don't want to spoil any of it. I'm not sure it'll bear repeated listening: the primary joy of Girl Talk is just that: primary. It's the act of discovery, of puzzling out. What's left once the mystery's solved remains to be seen, but for now, this is speeding up a day that'd otherwise be creeping by.

Of course, maybe I'm just happy because there's a lot more classic rock on here. A lot.

Get it here.

The Pretty Things That Summer Brings

During my daily staring at my face too long in the mirror just now, I had cause to wonder if my nose has been knocked off center by my recent encounter on the Commons. The light makes it tough to tell.

Enough about my face, let’s talk about me. I’m finding myself in the last summer of my twenties, which it turns out is a little scary. Oddly, while most summers my mind turns to one thing (kidding, actually. I meant what you probably thought I meant), this summer I’m just feeling sort of quiet, cheerful in a general sense I think is not blindly optimistic but informed by an idea that even with my finances in a state of shambles and the most meaningful relationship in my life existing between me and my cat, things are better than they have been.

Luckily for me, this summer has led off with a couple albums that perfectly suit this mood. Vetiver’s Things of the Past, Bonnie Prince Billy’s Lie Down in the Light and even the Silver Jew’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are pleasant, hopeful little albums. They’re more about affection than love, more about the dawn and the hours after than the night, although it’s clear all three have arrived at the dawn by waiting up.

A new Will Oldham, although not all that rare an occurrence, is always a welcome one. On one hand, Will gives me the creeps. Not just because a lot of his stuff is creepy, but a lot of his material in Palace goes to dark places that I find consistently thrilling and unsettling at once. He’s creepy because he manages to emote with an almost autistic blankness that allows the emotions to be drawn small and explode off the album. As he claims on Lie Down in the Light’s “For Every Field, There’s a Mole”, Oldham is the king of infinite space, but often it’s the infinite space between moments, or eyelashes. The massiveness of the very small, the infinitesimal of the gigantic. And, wait, is that an oboe?

In a recent interview, David Berman, who is another animal entirely, claimed that he could never collaborate with Oldham because Will collaborates with everybody. Berman deftly carried this analogy over to state that “collaborating with Will would be like collaborating with everyone Will’s ever collaborated with.” Which would mean collaborating with this guy:



But seriously folks. In the past few years, Oldham has moved past the stark roots of Palace to collaborate with the heavy guitars of Matt Sweeney on the amazing Superwolf album, then switched over to the guitarless kids in Tortoise for the fantastically weird but aptly titled covers album, The Brave and the Bold. Last year’s The Letting Go was a perfect distillation of what Oldham does with, an exquisite piece on mourning and loss with hints of what sustains us through the roughs. With Lie Down in the Light, the roughs are behind him and the listener is left with what remains: close friends and lovers, current and past. Lie Down in the Light is a collection of objects held so close to the heart they permanently retain their heat and an invitation to hold those objects in your hands, to take a little warmth from them to wash off the last lingering chills of the night before.