the almost right words

I’d like to put in a major plug here for Bloomsbury Academic’s 331/3, a book series with a brilliantly simple premise.  Get the best music writers on the planet to write single volumes dedicated to single albums.  Each book, there are currently 86 and counting, the most recent of which is Jonathan Lethem’s book on The Talking Head’s “Fear of Music,” explores (loosely) the inner workings of an album’s creation.  From what I have read and can tell, each book is unique and adopts a slightly different point of view on its subject matter.  For instance, Carl Wilson’s book about Celine Dion’s “Let’s Talk About Love” is much more a scholarly volume about the nature of “big” music and seeks to answer the question: why do so many people love or hate Celine Dion?  And might the haters (Wilson included) be wrong, or at least be missing something?  Dan Leroy’s book about the Beastie Boy’s “Paul’s Boutique” is more about the inner workings of the band and its contract disputes with Def Jam and the unique personal moment that led to the creation of the Beastie’s most unusual and sample heavy album.  John Niven’s book about The Band’s “Music From Big Pink” is not a scholarly volume at all, but instead a novella in which Niven writes the history of the album from the POV of a druggie who was friends with The Band and kicking around while they worked on “Big Pink.”

I’m not an authority on these books.  I’ve only read five of them, and while the overall consistent quality cannot here be attested to due to both the fluctuating approach and sheer volume of books produced, I’m still pretty comfortable praising the series as a whole and urging you to go out and get reading (Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion book is the best of them I’ve read).  We live in a world of niche markets and 331/3 is a great example of the benefits.  Plus they’re short and don’t overreach.  The few I’ve read I pounded through in a day or two and helped me to better understand and appreciate an album that I already loved or an album or artist I was curious about.

Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir Wild is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.  Engrossing.  Exciting.  Enriching.  Deeply emotional.  True in the best sense of the word.  There were passages in it of such honesty, of such naked emotional truth, that I shuddered as I read.  As such, I’ve been meaning to write a post to share with you just how excellent it is, how worthy of your valuable time.  But my good friend Alan Stewart Carl has just written a fantastic review of her book over at PANK, and he’s said it way better than I would have.  Enjoy.  And then get reading!

Sometimes in parenting, the line between fury and hilarity is paper thin.  You feel incredibly powerful emotions, emotions like rage and hate and amped-up types of frustration that make earlier, pre-parenting forms of frustration seem almost quaint by comparison.  And yet, these emotions, and the strong and often regrettable language that accompanies them that is directed at your misbehaving spawn, have dual lives, for they are also a kind of comedic performance you enact to be a good parent and to teach your kids life’s most hard earned and valuable lessons.  You become the emotion so they can learn.  Sometimes you literally want to wring their necks, and yet, you know that if you actually started to, wring their necks I mean, you might just bust out laughing because it’s so damn ridiculous how mad you’ve gotten over the fact that they won’t just eat their fucking dinner in the time frame that you’ve previously decided is the reasonable amount of time in which to consume a plate of food and now you’ve spent twenty minutes arguing about eleven peas and half a pork chop.  You also can’t help but face the fact that most of time you’re hating in them what you most hate in yourself (or other people hate in you) and there’s also a strange and sickening kind of karma at play that no one ever warned you about in the pre-parenting world, or could even have prepared you for if they had.

To wit.

The other night, Felix is in the bath and refuses to get out.  I’m standing in the bathroom doorway, lion towel in hand, spine aligned with doorjamb, palm against forehead.  It’s late.  I’m tired.  I want him out of the bath so as to be one step closer to the end of the day and my first beer and my book and my tv show or whatever the hell it is I’m needing.  He’s sassing me in the most passive way.  Kind of hearing me and then responding with gibberish and disappearing beneath the rim of the bathtub as if he didn’t hear me.  Lately Felix has been experimenting with two unfavorable traits: sullen faces and pointed fingers.  When confronted with a task he doesn’t want to do or a directive that’s not to his liking, he’ll play with these traits, setting my blood to boil as he crosses his arms aggressively and makes his angry face at me.  So I’m asking him to get out of the bath and he’s saying no in his own special way.  I’m getting kind of pissed, but trying to keep it together, urging him like I would my dog, “C’mon Felix.  Really buddy, it’s time to get out.  C’mon pal.  Felix.  Felix?”  My wife is sitting on the toilet seat, combing the hair of our younger son, who’s recently been removed from the bath and is already in his pajamas.  He’s also put up a fight, but luckily he can’t talk yet and isn’t that strong.  She’s watching me get pissed.  I’m in control though.  I am.  Until Felix barks “No!” and points his finger at me and then simmer becomes boil and I get really mad.  There’s just something about a pointed finger.

“You know?” I say, “I’ve had about enough of that tone from you.  You’ve been very curt with me and mommy lately and I don’t like it when you use that tone of voice.  And I don’t like it when you point your finger at me.  It’s rude and I want you to stop it!”

But even as I’m saying the words “It’s rude and I want you to stop it!” I’m also noticing my own totally heated and unreasonable tone, not to mention my own aggressively pointed finger and it’s at this point I realize that I’m basically looking in a horrible mirror.  I’m yelling at him to stop doing the exact thing I’m doing right that second and the whole thing is just so ridiculous that before I know it I’ve burst into fits of laughter and tears of hilariousness go cascading down my face.  I’m laughing so hard I can barely catch my breath and feel like I’ve just broken character because my cast mate was making funny faces at me.  Like I was just pretending to be mad, but really, I wasn’t.  I was really mad, but in a puff, all my rage went up in smoke.  It was one of those surreal moments.  Add it to the catalog.

There’s a great line in The Big Chill where the Glenn Close character is on the phone with her daughter and saying things like “I don’t care,” and “no, I didn’t say that, young lady,” and “well, when you’re a mommy, you can be mean” and things like that.  When the conversation’s over, she hangs up the phone, turns to her friend, played by Mary Kay Place, and says “sometimes I can’t believe the things I hear myself saying.”

I’m sure my parents played records by The Band when I was growing up.  They must have.  There was John Denver and America and Joni Mitchell and The Beatles and Neil Young and Elton John.  There was Cat Stevens and Roberta Flack and Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones.  I must have heard The Band too.    What’s funny is that even though The Band’s music harkens back to something deep within me, which is why I’m sure it was around in those days, I don’t have strong recollections of hearing their music until I was in my twenties.  A lot of other music I can firmly root, and concretely so, in my youth.  But not The Band.  High school was lost to rap and heavy metal and alternative and Dave Matthews.  College was dominated by jazz and Toad the Wet Sprocket.  In my twenties, my best friend and bandmate at the time, Nicholas, liked The Band and it was in his company that I first started really listening to The Band and when I first saw Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, which for many reasons has become a classic and is widely considered the greatest concert ever filmed.

The Last Waltz is a concert film masquerading as a love letter to The Band and to its intrepid chief songwriter and spokesperson (or so Scorsese would have us believe), the ruggedly handsome and windswept Robbie Robertson, with whom Scorsese was friends, but its most striking moments actually come not when Robertson is on camera but whenever drummer and singer Levon Helm is behind his drums singing timeless classics out of the side of his mouth like his very life depends on the next note, every glob of flying spit alive and bug like under the crew’s bright lights.  Helm died April 19th after a long battle with cancer at the age of 71.  Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson are the sole remaining members of the original line up.  So long, Old Friend.

When I first saw The Last Waltz, I had only a passing knowledge of who the guys in The Band were.  I’d go on to nurture a deep love of their music and learn all about them that I could, but at the time, I didn’t know much, other than that they sounded like they were from the American South circa Appomatox, but were actually (of all things) 4/5 Canadian and came up in the 1960′s and were, for a time, Dylan’s back up band, then known as The Hawks.  So I’d heard them a little bit, but with The Last Waltz, at last, I got to see them.  ”Don’t Do It” was actually the very last song played that Thanksgiving night in San Francisco in 1976, but it actually opens the film and I remember thinking, as I watched the music kick in and the camera swing over to Helm, He’s the fucking drummer?  Are you kidding me?  The Drummer!  Somehow this fact had eluded me.  There didn’t seem to be any possibility in my mind that that voice was coming from a guy who was also keeping time and ripping fills.  Up on Cripple Creek.  The Weight.  Ophelia.  Rag Mama Rag.  The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.  Get Up Jake.  All sung by a guy playing drums.

There’s a reason singing drummers are a rarity.  It’s hard enough to play drums when you don’t have to do anything else.  Trying to sing with feeling while playing  drums sounds to me like trying play drums while someone is throwing bottles at your head.  But even still, some end up doing it.  Don Henley and Phil Collins are probably the most famous examples, but for my money Levon was the best of them.  I don’t say the “best” because I want to make this into a contest. What I mean to do is just make a distinction of why I think he’s the best.

Here’s Don Henley singing lead and playing drums on “Hotel California.”

Now, here’s Phil Collins doing “In the Air Tonight.”  Skip to around 3:30 where he starts drumming.  It should be stated, though, that Phil Collins is actually a bad ass drummer most of the time and that this song doesn’t showcase his overall drum skills very well.  I’m trying to focus on singing while drumming, though.

Here’s Rare Earth with Pete Rivera on drums doing “I Just Want to Celebrate.” For me, Rivera’s a guy who actually gives Helm a run for his money.

Now, here’s Levon Helm singing lead and playing drums on “Up on Cripple Creek”

Again, I’m not trying to malign these other musicians because they’re all great, just to draw some attention to Levon, who I think is a cut above other singing drummers.  It’s mostly a distinction made by two things: his intensely emotional singing and his jazzy right hand.  Helm plays the ride cymbal like a jazz player, using it to syncopate both what he’s doing with his snare hand and what he’s singing.  There’s a liquid connectedness in his overall performance that’s simply unteachable and the product of the panoply of influences that informed Helm’s style.

I’ve spent some time thinking about what made Helm so special and I haven’t come up with much that you haven’t come up with.  It was alchemy more than anything.  The sweet combination of passion and natural ability.  The comfort with so many different kinds of music.  Shit, on The Last Waltz alone the guy plays drums for Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Dr. John, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, and more.  And that was during one concert.  There’s a lot of intangibles that make Helm special, too.  He looked the part, for one.  The guy just looked right singing that music.  Tell me I’m wrong.  Pete Rivera…eh…not so much.  Helm was damn handsome as well, and seemed to be pretty well in touch with that fact.  Watch how he mugs just a bit for Scorsese’s cameras, an extra sly smile or two, a little more mustard behind each fill.  He also had an uncanny ability to play off his bandmates, something you don’t see much of from Henley or Collins who seem pretty much lost in themselves and keeping time.  In this, Helm sets himself apart, becomes a drummer’s drummer.

There’s many a writer and music fan missing Helm these past few days, missing his windswept dirty hair, his hunched posture behind the kit, his awkward interview smile, his (mostly) humble ways, his bravery as he battled the cancer that would strip his voice down to a fierce whisper, the incredible Americana of his life’s story.

There’s a lot to miss.

Today, in continued honor of National Poetry Month, I share with you Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”  It’s long been a favorite of mine.  Enjoy.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,

and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Admittedly, you probably need to have seen (at least some) of The Wire to make it through all 36 minutes of Erlend Lavik’s video essay on the “visual style” of the show, but it’s a fascinating and comprehensive look at an aspect of David Simon’s great television masterpiece that you may have overlooked, or undervalued.

But, let’s say you’ve never seen The Wire?  I don’t see that as a problem.  After all, what better way to prime the pump and get you to start watching than with 36 minutes of stills and artful commentary steeping you in The Wire’s visual subtleties and camera work?

I’ve spent a little bit of time watching television shows.  In fact, I’d say that my screen time has shifted from movies to television shows by at least a 2:1 margin in the past five years.  Oddly, most of the television I end up watching is not “on” television but later on DVD, but that’s a story for another essay.  This is because we happen to be living through what many have rightfully called a high point, or a new high, for television as a medium.  The Wire is just one of many landmark shows to be produced in the last ten years that have changed the landscape of not only television shows themselves but in how we see and how we “view” television, the latter having more to do with our expectations for how good a TV show can be.  For my money, The Wire is one of the five best shows ever produced, in the company of other masterpieces like Six Feet Under, The West Wing, Seinfeld, and Mad Men, the shows that would round out my dessert island quintet were I pressed to choose.

Like most viewers, I watch The Wire for its incredible story telling; its unflinchingly realistic portrayal of city life in Baltimore, Maryland in all its many incarnations, especially those that deal with crime, poverty, drugs, and corruption in all forms, from city hall to the street corner.  It’s no accident that The Wire has been called Dickensian.  It’s novelistic scope of characterization and its viewer (reader) centered approach to allowing these characters to come to life over time feels, well, like reading a book.  Find me a show that has ever better managed so many characters yet has not any one clear hero at its center (Jimmy McNulty being the closest, but even McNulty flits in and out of the show and we often go several episodes at at time without a McNulty centered plot, especially in Season 4).  But I’ve spent less time thinking about the visual context of The Wire, the means by which is tells the story, which is a significant part of what makes it IT.  According to the respected Norwegian academic Lavik, I’ve been missing a lot.

Watch this when you’ve got a little time.  Or do what I did and watch it in four minute chunks over many days when you don’t quite have the time.  Either way, this guy sounds pretty smart to me and even though he has kind of a dull voice and doesn’t emote all that well, it will likely either get you to watch or begin re-watching The Wire, which can only make your life better.

One of the great things about teaching classic works of literature is that you’re arming students with a cultural bookmark that they carry with them for life.  Who hasn’t been somewhere where people started talking about Of Mice and Men or Romeo and Juliet or The Catcher in the Rye and been silently thanking their lucky stars (or maybe, just maybe, damning their high school English teacher all over again) that they read that book and can comment on Lennie’s diction or Romeo’s cock driven idiocy or Holden’s acerbity?

By the way, I’m willing to concede that you’ve never had that experience and that I’m just making myself feel better.

Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea has always been one of my favorite novels.  It grows in richness with each sweet return and it’s one of the books of which I never seem to tire.  I just stumbled upon this amazing interpretation of the novel done through drawing and sped-up photography.  I think they missed the mark with their music choice, but this video is pretty much the poster child for everything that’s great about the Internet.