... and stuff

"... and stuff" is Dead / Long Live "... and stuff"

2008-07-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

Follow me to Garrett's new blog.

Life Music

2008-04-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

This blog is not an autobiography. I keep my life out of these posts, even if my personality is always implicitly present.

But most of you know me. So what the hell. I'll tell you what's been going on lately.

I just moved into a new apartment. Across the street is the University of San Francisco soccer field. At night the field gets lit up like a stage for practices and games. The scoreboard blocks most of the ocean view. My girlfriend and I haven't unpacked all of our boxes yet, and we eat our meals on a small table covered with a curtain.

Details like this are important to me right now. My life has been shaken up, and the stuff of the world is vibrating. I wish I could convey how sublime this is, but I'm afraid of coming off like a stoner or a bad Romantic poet. But you know what I'm talking about. Think of the last time you moved to a new city, or your first night in a college dorm. Change makes everything vivid.

Especially music.

The summer before I went to college, I listened to the Wilco album Summerteeth almost every day in my Volkswagen Golf. Now whenever I hear "She's a Jar" or "How to Fight Loneliness," I think of downtown Santa Barbara, Spanish Colonial buildings, the courthouse where I interned, the 101.

A year ago, when I moved to San Francisco, I had LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum," "Someone Great," and "All My Friends" on iPod repeat. I made a special "On-the-Go" mix: Track 1 was "North American Scum," track 2 was "Someone Great," track 3 was "All My Friends." My memory associates those songs with the Market Street subway. Last January, when I ranked them in a three-way tie for song of the year, I knew I wasn't being rational.

At the moment I can't stop listening to In Ghost Colours by Cut Copy. When I try to listen to other stuff, I end up thinking, "I wish this was more like Cut Copy." Clearly, I shouldn't attempt a full review of In Ghost Colours right now. Impossible to be objective. So let's leave it at this: It's a feathery electropop record, part Daft Punk, part Off the Wall, part Cure. The choruses of "Lights & Music," "So Haunted," and "Far Away" make me want to dance like a Muppet.

Eventually my Cut Copy obsession will end. I'll get used to my new apartment, and the random details of my surroundings will become mundane again. But the way I see the soccer field, the partial ocean view, and the unpacked boxes right now will be preserved: faintly in memory, amateurishly in this post, vividly in music.

Instance of Beauty #3

2008-04-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

From Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov:

[Note: The narrator is speaking (in third person) about his spurned wife.]

He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rending dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into a strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness - and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection - but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.
[...]
At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Fyler collecting the documents left among the tea things.

Somewhere Between the Body and the Tip of the Long Tail

2008-04-08T12:06:00.000-07:00

The OaKs have been ignored. Amazon doesn't carry either of their fine LPs. Pitchfork hasn't mentioned them once; not even front man Ryan Costello's fire sale and humanitarian trip to Afghanistan moved the Fork to ring him up. The highest profile review of the OaKs's new album, Songs for Waiting, was run by the Atlanta branch of Creative Loafing.

So it goes. The OaKs aren't trying to resuscitate disco or interrogate the linkages between Afrobeat, dub, Tropicalia, and early rock 'n' roll (all while ripping off Panda Bear), so a nod from Pitchfork is out of the question. Same for radio play: Even the catchiest tracks on Songs for Waiting would sound awkward on a Clear Channel station. Too elliptical, too acoustic, too untrendy.

Also, reviewers keep missing that capital "K."

But the OaKs deserve your attention. Songs for Waiting is a distinctive, re-listenable album. A six-piece, the OaKs sound remarkably nimble; acoustic guitar, electronic textures, glockenspiel, all-over-the-place percussion, and boy-girl harmonies mesh crisply, never drowning out the songs. Weird time signatures abound. Verses and choruses are never played the same way twice. And while you won't find many sing-along hooks, certain riffs and one-off bass lines will burrow into your brain tissue. Exhibit A: "Masood." Just don't dance to it. You might pull something.

Check their MySpace. Leave a comment. Tell them to back away from that ledge. Pitchfork will call someday.

Friday Top Five: R.E.M. Songs

2008-04-04T15:35:00.000-07:00

In honor of R.E.M.'s supposed "return to form," here are five truly in-form songs from the band's first fifteen years:

5 "Texarkana" (from Out of Time, 1991)

Mike Mills, bassist and harmonizer, takes the lead vocal on this one. He also wrote the melody and the indecipherable lyrics. It's always fun to hear Mills out front; for me, he's the key member of R.E.M.: Without his lissom bass lines and his contrapuntal back-up vocals, Stipe, Buck, and Berry would be a conventional-sounding Byrds tribute band.

4 "Electrolite" (from New Adventures in Hi-Fi, 1996)

Click the link, dig the video. Spike Jonze directed it! Spike Jonze!

3 "Talk About the Passion" (from Murmur, 1983)

This would make the cut on the strength of its opening riff alone. Eat your hearts out, Lennon and McCartney.

2 "Fall on Me" (from Life's Rich Pageant, 1986)

Stipe puts on a verse-bridge-chorus clinic.

1 "Nightswimming" and "Find the River" (from Automatic for the People, 1992)

Yes, it's cheating to have two #1's, but these two tracks - the closing pair on Automatic - belong together. "Find the River" fills out the instrumentation, mirrors the chord changes, permutates the melody, rounds out the emotional arc of "Nightswimming." Separately, they're elegant, moving songs. Together, they are the best back-to-backers in rock history.

Discuss.

Yes, This Band Actually Calls Itself Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin

2008-04-03T22:44:00.000-07:00

Ah, silly band names. "Hey, let's go see the Someone Still Loves You, Boris Yeltsin" - pause, recuperative breath - "show."

Yeltsin - let's just call 'em that - plays crisp, shape-shifting pop. Think of a math rock band doing a Hanson tribute. Indie-lite, for sure, but songs like "Glue Girls" tear-ass around like vintage New Pornographers, doing as many melodies-per-minute as the most ADD tracks on Mass Romantic. Repeated listens are inevitable.

Yeltsin's new record, Pershing, which apparently won't include the snappy B-side "Half-Awake (Deb)," drops on April 8. In the meantime, try some hors d'oeuvres.

Instance of Beauty #2

2008-04-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

From "The Initiation" by James Tate:

The long wake continues,
quiet and moronic expressions.
The jowl of the dead
is agape with infinite abandon
as if he were about to sing:
if we concentrate
he may remember the words.

Kind of Raw

2008-04-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

Stream the new R.E.M. album, Accelerate, for free .

This record comes billed as a return to form - that is, a return to concision, volume, chiming, and skittering polyrhythms. Which is fine and all. Stipe, Mills, and Buck play this type of stuff better than anyone. But it's never a good sign when a band talks about wanting to "simplify everything" or record "something that felt kind of raw." U2, for instance, has "returned to that classic U2 sound" on, like, fifty different records, but has never come within bombing distance of War or The Joshua Tree.

Not coincidentally, R.E.M.'s new producer, Jacknife Lee, worked with U2 on 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

Artistic aesthetic, as Ernest Hemingway's late-career catastrophucks prove, must emerge naturally, maybe even subconsciously. Once an artist becomes over-aware of that special something he does - in literature we call it "voice;" in music, "sound" - his efforts begin to feel like just that: efforts.

Surprisingly, Accelerate sounds fairly unforced - a result, perhaps, of its nine-week-long genesis. The songs are serviceable, but not memorable; the performances are enthusiastic, but not distinctive; the ragers are propulsive, but not explosive; the few ballads are pretty-not-sappy, but not celestial.

Accelerate is a professional album by one of the most professional bands in the biz. I'll listen to it a few more times.

The Dunk of Death

2008-03-31T16:53:00.000-07:00

French newspapers called it "the dunk of death." In the YouTube video the play happens in about four seconds. At the beginning of a fast break, a long-haired white guy with a knee brace tries an around-the-back pass. A navy blue USA uniform steals the ball, dribbles twice, jumps - and this is where things turn bizarre. Between the American player and the basket is a very tall defender. The American is headed straight for the defender's chest, but he keeps rising, rising, rising. The defender flinches; the American glides over him. In mid-air the American spreads his legs, leans forward, extends his arm, and hammers the ball through the basket.

The defender doesn't seem to understand what has happened. Straightening up, he looks at the shaking backboard, the bouncing ball, and he walks to the baseline. The American flexes and screams at the ceiling. He throws a vicious fist-pump, which nearly knocks out a teammate who has come over to congratulate him. And by "congratulate" I mean "push him in the chest and yell something like, 'Fuck yeah mothafucka!'"

(This form of celebration, native to football and basketball, mystifies me. I long to see more athletes jump around and giggle, like Reggie Miller did after he sank that buzzer-beater against Jordan's Bulls.)

The American in the YouTube clip is Vince Carter. The poor dude he jumps over? Frederic Weiss, a 7'2" - 7'2"! - center for the French national team. And the congratulator is Kevin Garnett, who, despite his questionable celebratory habits, is one of the most likable players in the NBA. Garnett plays as hard on defense as Allen Iverson does on offense (read: he plays hard), sacrifices his point and rebound totals for the good of his team, takes and creates high-percentage shots, comes off as genuine and passionate in interviews, and appears to enjoy playing basketball. Vince Carter, not so much. On all counts.

I'm starting to see "the dunk of death" as a microcosm of Carter's career. He's the greatest dunker in NBA history: more powerful than Jordan, more graceful than Dominque, a better leaper than Dr. J. That much is clear in the first four seconds of the YouTube clip. Then he Tarzan-yells and flexes his pecs and curls his upper lip - and sure enough, whenever he plays, he seems to be acting. Then he almost clobbers Kevin Garnett - and sure enough, he has never been much of a teammate.

Meanwhile, the rest of Team USA is getting back on defense.

Instance of Beauty #1

2008-03-26T17:01:00.000-07:00

From I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal:

... I went on singing as if through the singing - not through the song, because all I could produce now were squawks - I was emptying out of myself drawers and boxes full of old bills and useless letters and postcards, as if fragments of tattered posters were blowing out of my mouth, posters pasted one on top of the other, so that when you rip them away you create nonsense signs, where soccer matches blend into concerts or where art exhibits get mixed up with brass-band tattoos - everything that had accumulated inside me, like tar and nicotine in a smoker's lungs. And so I sang, and I felt as if I was hacking up and spitting out phlegm from clogged lungs, and I felt like the beer pipes the innkeeper cleans with a strong jet of water, like a room with all the wallpaper torn off, several layers of it, a room where a family had lived for generations. (221-2)

Hey, These Guys Sound Like...

2008-03-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

It's a reflex: Play Fleet Foxes, critics shout, "My Morning Jacket!"

I suppose the comparison is legitimate. The lead singers sound almost exactly alike, and both bands clearly think the 1970s are underrated. The songs on Fleet Foxes's Sun Giant EP could have been bucolic come-downs on My Morning Jacket's At Dawn or It Still Moves.

The difference? Whereas My Morning Jacket builds intensity through jamming, a tendency that grates after a few spins, Fleet Foxes lovingly develop their songs, adding new movements, melodies, textures.

Until their self-titled debut comes out on June 3, gorge yourself on the generous selection of Foxes tunes here. "Drops in the River" and "Sun It Rises" kill it dead. So does "Mykonos."

"Well-Crafted Sci-Fi:" Not an Oxymoron

2008-03-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

It was as if I were in a movie, some grade-B flick that, with its exotic backdrop of the veldt and the alchemy of its stars, transcended the need to aspire to "A" status and would live in the hearts of its viewers.

~ Jeffrey Ford, "Exo-Skeleton Town"

I wish I could stand mainstream science fiction. I wish Robert (Strangers in a Strange Land) Heinlein's characters weren't 60s cliches. I wish the recently deceased Arthur C. (2001: A Space Odyssey) Clarke had ditched all that po-faced faux-grandeur. I wish Frank (Dune) Herbert's dialogue didn't make me want to die.

Because, you know, I like aliens. Aliens are cool. So are dystopias. And I can't figure out why there's so much bad prose in the dystopian universe. Were Fitzgerald's collected works destroyed in the apocalypse?

Turns out, some sci-fi writers might know their Gatsby.

Not sure why it took me till last year to read a Phillip K. Dick novel, but I'm glad I picked up The Man from the High Castle. Of course, Dick's no Alice Munro: His characters tend to travel along predictable, one-emotion-at-a-time arcs. But his overall vision - setting, concept, ballsiness - is impressive.

Jonathan Lethem's early short stories (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye) and novels (Gun, with Occasional Music) stage a big-love marriage between Phillip K. Dick's vision, Ross MacDonald's cynicism, and Raymond Carver's efficiency. But now that Lethem is on a realist tip and being mummified with literary garlands for his efforts, he may never give us another futuristic detective.

But there is hope, and his name is Jeffrey Ford. He writes sci-fi like a man who knows how stupid sci-fi is. If you have a few - or, say, twenty-five - minutes, check out this story.

Distant future. Bug planet. Main character wearing Joseph Cotten body-suit. Evil bug named Stootladdle.

Please, please read it.

Album Review: Distortion by the Magnetic Fields

2008-02-13T12:26:00.000-08:00

Most reviews of the Magnetic Fields's new album, Distortion, mention Stephen Merritt's penchant for gimmick records - or what in the 70s might have been called "concept albums." First there was 69 Love Songs, a masterpiece. Then came i, in which all the song titles began with - you guessed it - the letter "I."

With Distortion, Merritt tries his hand at aesthetic gimmickry: Inspired by the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, he soaks the entire album in feedback. The drums are from the Steven Drozd School of Bombast. The songs sit atop distorted guitar drones like vegetables on a bed of overcooked rice. Even the piano parts are distorted.

The tragedy? These are great songs, every one. The melodies feel vintage and novel at the same time, the dejecto lyrics clash beautifully with the major chords. This is the kind of magic Merritt worked on 69 Love Songs, and I really wish I could hear it better.

My theory, which is based on nothing but intuition, is that Merritt writes perfect pop songs in his sleep. He was born with that talent and now he's bored with it. In order to achieve greatness, he thinks, he must Experiment; he must set himself a Task and Conquer It.

On 69 Love Songs, this creative anxiety served him well. The whole-lotta-love-songs gimmick wasn't overly restrictive; he could produce the tracks however he wanted, or however the songs themselves demanded; and after all, he writes almost exclusively (out-of) love torchers anyway. He just needed to record 69 of them, which he did with frightening ease.

Nine years later, Merritt is writing the same kinds of songs, and they simply don't belong under feedback. They were tied down there, and now they're squirming and crying to get out. Just listen to "I'll Dream Alone" on the Fields's MySpace. A lovely little number, which would have gone perfectly with plain ol' piano-and-horns. "Get this distortion offa me!" it screams.

So here's a concept for you, Stephen Merritt: Distortion, Un-Distorted. That's right. Record the exact same album, minus the pretentious "high concept" production. No one's ever done that before! Or have they?

Whatever. Just don't screw it up this time, Merritt.

Where Have All the Speeches Gone?

2008-02-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

The scenario: Fabrizio, the child-like hero of Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, has been imprisoned in a tower. From his window he can see into the aviary of the warden's house, a room frequented by the warden's daughter, a Juliet to Fabrizio's Romeo. Complications arise when the jailers put an immovable wooden blind on our hero's window. "I might cut out a square of the oak board that will form the shutter," Fabrizio soliloquizes. "I could remove and replace this piece depending on the circumstances."

As he prattles on, he busts out with this Shakespeare-worthy epigram:

"If I can just manage to see her, I'm a happy man... No," he said to himself, "she must also see that I see her."

Says it all, doesn't it?

The comparison with Shakespeare is not spurious. Stendhal uses a distinctly Bardian method - the extended speech, sometimes monologue, sometimes soliloquy - to mine the interiors of his characters. Even when they're alone, Fabrizio and Clelia Conti and the Duchess Sanservina express themselves in full, powerful sentences, and like Richard III or Macbeth, they take detours, zigzag emotionally, contradict themselves, correct themselves. Clearly, they haven't thought before speaking; they are speaking in order to think. So even though they're acting unnaturally - verbalizing when they should be brooding - they seem thoroughly human because, like all of us, they are inventing themselves as they go along.

Thus: "If I can just manage to see her, I'm a happy man... No, she must also see that I see her." First the soaring declaration; then the ellipsis, during which we can imagine Fabrizio smiling, envisioning his beloved, then frowning because something's missing; and finally the self-correction, the admission that his love is not entirely selfless.

This is what Shakespeare basically invented: mind-swirls rendered in speech. And since his plays were, and continue to be, read as proto-novels, many novelists from the 18th and early 19th centuries aped the Bard's window-on-the-soul techniques. I'm not sure if Stendhal read Shakespeare, but given Charterhouse's flood of speeches and tendency to equate "Italian" with "passionate," it would be hard to believe he didn't.

Eventually, of course, the novel weaned itself off Shakespeare. Let's face it: Nothing like "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" has ever happened in real life. Shakespeare wrote soliloquys out of necessity; his medium limited him to speech, movement, and scenery; but novelists like Flaubert and Henry James discovered they could bypass all the yapping and plunge straight into their characters' minds. Goodbye soliloquy, hello free indirect speech.

But as much as this was a necessary development, a key moment in the history of the novel, I wish someone would bring back literary speechifying. Even playwrights these days tend to chain their characters to terse, realistic conversation. The art of writing extended speeches - a subtle, specific art that requires a sense for the texture of speech, the second-to-second sway of emotion, the interior made exterior - is dying out.

Except in politics.

Which terrifies me.

?!

2008-02-04T13:52:00.000-08:00

Of all the nifty orthographic factoids I picked up in Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, this is my favorite: That annoying, valley-girl-ish symbol - "?!" - is called an "interrobang."

An interrobang!

Truss says the word "has overtones of a police interview terminating in an explosion."

Me, I've probably watched more porn than finicky ol' Lynne, so "interrobang" reminds me of an entirely different type of scene, also taking place inside an NYPD Blue-like interrogation room.

Interrobang. I see a website, a classy one. And perhaps a direct-to-video series.

Friday Top Five: Take-Away Shows

2008-02-01T15:54:00.000-08:00

Find some sound equipment that works outside. Use leftover money to buy digital camera. Hire out shaggy-haired indie band for an afternoon. Film band strolling down Parisian sidewalk playing, singing, bumping into pedestrians, attracting stares. Make sure sound guy catches heel-clicks on cobblestone.

Such is the basic idea of Les Concerts a Emporter, or Take-Away Shows, one of the most entertaining sites on the web. Here are my five favorites:

5 "Wet and Rusting," Menomena
Not a polished performance - this must be a devilishly hard song to play live - but watch what happens at the end.

4 "Spare-Ohs," Andrew Bird

Bird's got chops. Violin, guitar, vocals, and of course whistling. Whistling like you haven't heard since The Andy Griffith Show.

3 "Shifts," Grizzly Bear

Never seen a band look this miserable. Rarely heard one harmonize this beautifully. (Click on the top vid.)

2 "Neon Bible & Wake Up," Arcade Fire

They play a song in an elevator. Then they play another in the middle of a fan-mob. Arcade Fire always goes overboard.

1 "Start a War" and "Ada," The National

I spent about five minutes trying to choose one, but you should really watch both.

I Have Liked, Like, and Will Continue to Like Vampire Weekend

2008-01-31T23:03:00.000-08:00

This Culture Vulture article, which mock-reports the fall of Vampire Weekend in "late 2008," is hilarious, but gets one thing wrong: There has already been a Vampire Weekend backlash. There's even been a backlash against the backlash.

And the poor kids just released their self-titled debut two days ago. Officially released, that is.

Me, I've been listening to Vampire demos since last spring. I liked the songs when I first heard them, and I like them now, in their not-so-different album incarnations. The perky "A-Punk" made my year-end song list, but I also dig "Oxford Comma," "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," "Bryn," and "Walcott." Catchy little ditties, all of them.

But wow. People really despise this band.

Hate was inevitable, I guess, given the Vampires' Ivy League pedigrees, Afropop affectations, and predilection for cardigans. They even describe their music as "Upper West Side Soweto," which kinda makes me laugh. It's like they're saying, "C'mon, Gawker! What you got?"

Vampire Weekend has been compared - unfavorably, of course - to Orange Juice, Talking Heads, and various Afropoppers, but as Pitchfork's smartly above-the-hype review points out, the band's true predecessors are the Strokes. Remember those guys? Released a likable pop album, Is This It? Conquered the British press. Lots of Fork-love. Accused of aping the Velvet Underground and Television and the Buzzcocks. Outed as (gasp!) polite, well-educated, well-healed youngsters - who just happened to have messy hair and perfect rock star names.

Like the Strokes, the Vampire boys play nimble, uncluttered pop. Like the Strokes, they probably have hard drives full of hipness. Like the Strokes, they sound like dorm buddies jamming on stolen licks.

Like the Strokes, they attract an amazing amount of vitriol, a mixture of jealousy (too young, too charming, too charmed) and disappointment (hyped like the Beatles, sound like the Monkees). Even a respectable critic like Hugo Lindgren can't contain his rage: "If they’d shown up at CBGB circa 1978, these outré Ivy League preppies probably would’ve been beaten with bicycle chains." Okay, first rhetorical question: So what? Second rhetorical question: Is David Byrne, king of CBGB in the late 70s, less likely to get beat up than... anyone?

Like the Strokes, Vampire Weekend gets flak for a prepster image and supposed derivativeness. But no one says the songs aren't fun.

And like the Strokes, these Vampire guys don't have the emotional urgency of a great band, but they make sunny, addictive music, and twenty years from now, when the fog clears over San Francisco and I want a happy fix, I'll scroll down to the V's on my iPod.

On Reading in Translation

2008-01-29T15:16:00.000-08:00

English is my only language. Hablo un poquito espanol, pero no puedo leer, por ejemplo, Borges en la lengua original. No je parle le... I don't speak French.

I'm a true upper-middle class American: I have a $150,000 education, a degree in literature, and one-and-a-quarter languages.

This means I've read a lot of translated literature. I got to know Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol through the (blessedly clear) lens of Pevear and Volokhonsky; I loved Gregory Rabassa's take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's twisting, energetic sentences; and I thought Margaret Mauldon did an elegant Madame Bovary, but since she hasn't gotten around to Three Tales, I had to settle for Roger Whitehouse's workmanlike rendition.

I've grown so accustomed to reading literature in translation that I no longer think, "Am I really getting the full experience? Or even half?" Much of what I love about, say, Grace Paley is untranslatable: the slang, the precise rendering of speech, the simple swing of the sentences. But when I read an Murakami story or an Endo novel, I focus on what's there, not what might have been lost on the trip over the Pacific. So the main favor I ask of a translation is this: Stay outta the way. Be clear, be readable. Let me pretend you don't exist.

Which is why I tossed aside John Sturrock's 2006 translation of The Charterhouse of Parma. Sturrock may be a brilliant critic and his version of Stendhal's madcap novel may be rich academic fodder, but dude can't write. Here's his take on the first paragraph of Charterhouse:

On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of the youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi and let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valour and genius of which Italy was the witness within a few months reawoke a slumbering people; a week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still saw them only as a bunch of brigands, used always to taking flight faced by the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty: that anyway was what a small newspaper the size of a human hand, printed on filthy paper, repeated to them three times a week.

Did that go down smooth for you?

When I started reading Sturrock's Charterhouse, I thought I had turned stupid. Entire paragraphs would go by and I wouldn't understand a thing. I would have to reread dialogue. Dialogue!

Then, to spare my ego, I began to blame Stendhal, that oversexed insomniac. "You're overrated!" I screamed. "And you're French, not Italian! Just accept it!"

One day at a bookstore, out of curiosity, I picked up Richard Howard's 1999 Charterhouse translation, and lo and behold:

On May 15, 1796, General Bonaparte entered Milan at the head of that young army which had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valor and genius Italy had witnessed in a few months wakened a slumbering nation: just eight days before the French arrived, the Milanese still regarded them as no more than a band of brigands who habitually fled before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty: at least so they were told three times a week by a little news-sheet the size of a man’s hand, printed on dirty paper.

Ah. Fresh air. "The miracles of valour and genius of which Italy was the witness" has become "The miracles of valor and genius Italy had witnessed." "Reawoke" has become "awakened." (One of my students used "reawoke" in a paper and I wrote in the margin, "If this is the second awakening, when was the first?" Ha! Look at me. The wit.) My favorite: the magical transformation of "a bunch of brigands, used always to taking flight faced by the troops" into "a band of brigands who habitually fled before the troops."

If Sturrock's translation is more accurate than Howard's, I don't care. I'm enjoying Charterhouse now, and if I ever write a scholarly paper on Stendhal - well, maybe I'll just have to learn French.

Pretty Pretty Saro

2008-01-22T14:08:00.000-08:00

Forkcast. Gorilla vs. Bear. Moistworks. Said the Gramophone. Stereogum.

I follow these music blogs, and most days I wish I didn't. They all skew hipster, so every morning I get a well-nigh fatal dose of snobbery and overheated prose. But I also get free mp3's.

Listening to mp3's on these sites is like rutting through a bargain bin: You find a lot of crap-pellets, but also a few jewels, rewards for your persistence and discernment.

One such: "Saro" by Sam Amidon.

"Pretty Saro," a traditional folk ballad, has been covered into the ground, but Amidon finds a new, rangy loveliness in the familiar melody and lyrics. The horn and string arrangements are models of taste, drifting in and out, never settling, never going for cheap uplift. An ambling acoustic guitar and Amidon's modest tenor anchor the song, and it all ends too soon.

Friday Top Five: Radiohead YouTube Clips

2008-01-18T16:40:00.000-08:00

The two finest studio bands in contemporary rock - Radiohead and LCD Soundsystem - are also the two tightest live bands.

Today I'll focus on Radiohead's body of YouTube work, which stretches back to the Era of Flannel.

5 "(Nice Dream)" (MTV, 1995)

A bleached and spiked Thom singing a deep cut from The Bends and accompanying himself on a twelve-stringer. Unsurprisingly, his vocal performance is flawless, but take a look at his fretwork. He's an underrated rhythm guitarist. More proof?

Defining moment: 3:16. Falsetto fade-in, a la Jeff Buckley.

4 "How to Disappear Completely" (Paris, 2001)

A more flatteringly coiffed Thom singing the otherworldly ballad from Kid A. Check the ondes Martenots. Is it just me, or do they sound like prepubescent whales calling to each other?

Defining moment: 4:49. Pop music's greatest chord change? It happens again at 5:16.

3 "Go to Sleep" (Later with Jools Holland, 2003)

Dig how the instruments play off each other. Colin Greenwood's bass is especially tight.

Defining moment: 2:43. The beginning of Jonny's bizarre pointillist guitar solo. This was on television?

2 "The Tourist" (MTV, 1997)

What this performance lacks in polish (Thom's vocals are a bit off) it makes up for in sheer emotion. Close all other browser windows and watch it straight through.

Defining moment: 3:34. Jonny shows he can blow your mind with a conventional guitar solo, too.

1 "You" (Astoria, 1994)

Not the best clip on this list, but probably the most interesting. In 1994, Thom and the boys had just put out the abysmal Pablo Honey and, more famously, the America-conquering single "Creep." A year later they would release The Bends, a legit classic. So this clip captures them in transition: They weren't yet a great band, but they were about to become one.

Just like something happened to the Beatles in 1965, something happened to Radiohead in 1994. 1993 Radiohead, 1995 Radiohead.

Defining moment: 2:09. Typically sedate back-up guitarist Ed O'Brien jumps around like a teenager in a punk band. I think he misses rocking out.

Des-i-i-i-i-ee-yer!

2008-01-17T18:29:00.000-08:00

A character should want something. Desire is a driving force of human nature and, applied to characters, it creates a steam of momentum to drive a story forward.

When I read this in Writing Fiction, a manual by the Gotham Writers' Workshop, I just nodded. Sure. I had heard this line before. Desire is the fuel of fiction, blah blah blah. It's the classic First-Thing-Professors-Say-on-the-First-Day-of-Writing-Workshops.

I like a good old-fashioned yarn, so I tend to support the idea that a character should want something. Lots of collegiate fiction - and pretentious fiction of any sort - sputters and stalls because of blank, desire-less characters.

But I balk when I see stuff like this, also from the Gotham book:

... think of a specific desire for this character. One driving desire. Make the desire something concrete - money, a career break, the touch of a certain person - instead of an abstract desire like love or personal growth.

One driving desire? Something concrete?

I suppose the Gotham people - who wrote a useful, lively guide - are trying to simplify things, to encourage black-and-white before color. But seriously, how often does anyone say, "Hey, I want that one totally concrete thing," and then proceed along an upside-down check mark to obtain it?

Well, earlier today I wanted to get my freshly crumpled car fixed, so I called my insurance company, found a nearby auto body shop and drove there. The climax came when the mechanic said, "Two to three weeks, I'd say." In an extended denouement, I walked along Clement Street and bought some tangelos.

A local desire, easily satisfied. And the sad part? Most of my desires - at least the ones I'm conscious of - are just like that. Desires for personal upkeep, for convenience. And they make for brutally dull stories.

This is not a new insight. You surely know that not every day of your life is worthy of a literary rendering - unless, of course, James Joyce does the rendering. Only when you're possessed by an intense, multidimensional desire do you become a compelling character. Remember in NBA Jam, that old arcade game, when a player would literally catch fire after making a few shots in a row? It's like that.

But something else bothers me about Gotham's formulation. When a writer says, "Shaniqua wants X," it's assumed that Shaniqua knows she wants X. After all, a key corollary of the Conventional Fiction Treaty of 700 B.C. is that Shaniqua must take action to obtain X. Otherwise Shaniqua will just sit on her couch eating Fritos, thinking about how much she wants X.

But when's the last time you were aware of having an interesting, durable, acute desire? Or an even better question: When's the last time you took conscious action to pursue such a desire?

I should stop asking rhetorical questions. Desire is chaotic, circuitous, uncertain and mostly subconscious. Fuel of fiction? Sure. But it's all kinds of inefficient.

If you had asked High School Garrett whether he wanted to get into a good college, he would have said, "Yeah, dude." He might have even said, "Oh, definitely. Dude."

But I wasn't set on a particular college, and in my daily routine I hardly ever thought about college. I never said, "I have to ace this test because I must get into Princeton." When application season rolled around - and for me it rolled around about a week before the due date - I was finally conscious of pursuing a desire, and by then it was a local desire. Must. Finish. Application. Then. Sleep.

I did work hard in high school, however. I took action. Someone without access to my psyche might have assumed I did so because I wanted to be a Bonesman. And you know what? Back then I might have agreed. That explanation would have made sense to me, even if it was patently untrue.

The fact is, I worked hard automatically. I didn't know why I did, and I still don't. Maybe I was boxing the shadow of my older brother, who was a star at my high school. Maybe I was just a perfectionist. But there was definitely a force pressing against me, because whenever a "B" loomed, I freaked.

Aren't you glad you weren't friends with me in high school?

Actually, if you're reading this, you probably were.

Anyway, since desire is so tough to pin down, it seems wrong to "invent" a single, specific desire for a character before writing a story, as the Gotham guide suggests. A more honest method would be to let your characters live naturally, to discover their desires as you write. They act, you interpret - and they certainly don't need to be the wiser.

But that brings us back to the old collegiate fiction conundrum: What if the characters don't end up doing anything?

Wad up and toss out, I guess. Sigh.

I'll go read some Chekhov now. He figured all this out.

To All (Three of) My Fans

2008-01-16T23:49:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the radio silence round here recently. I have excuses, but they're boring. Posting shall pick up presently.

As Grace Kelly coos, nightgown in hand, in Rear Window, "Preview of coming attractions:"

- Musings on desire in literature
- Thoughts on The New Yorker's Winter Fiction Issue, which featured an early, surprisingly maximalist version of what would eventually become Raymond Carver's story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
- Ramblings on Distortion, the aptly-named new album from the Magnetic Fields
- A top five of... something

Hope you're still there, and I pledge to be here more often.

Friday Top Fifteen: Songs of 2007

2008-01-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

The greatest songs of 2007 can be found, back-to-back-to-back, on LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver: "North American Scum," "Someone Great," and "All My Friends."

But that's old news.

So is "1234." And "Umbrella."

But unless you waste your life scouring indie rock blogs, you probably haven't heard most of the following tunes. They're good, I'm telling you. Click on the links.

15 "No One Does It Like You," Department of Eagles
A good song for walking while sad on a sunny day.

14 "Darksided Computer Mouth," White Denim
Spiky, scratchy.

13 "A-Punk," Vampire Weekend
Ivy Leaguers aping Afro-pop and somehow sounding like the Violent Femmes.

12 "Lost to the Lonesome," Pela
I wish U2 still made songs like this.

11 "You! Me! Dancing!" Los Campesinos!
That riff! Makes me want to gyrate!

10 "I Miss You Someone," Cloetta Paris
Sally Shapiro got the accolades, but Cloetta - another blonde, electropopping Swede - gots the songs. She also does a killer cover of "St. Elmo's Fire."

9 "Sleepdriving," The Grand Archives
A sentimental pick: I had this one on repeat when I moved to San Francisco earlier this year. The ache and swoop of the melody, the warm production, the layered falsettos - all perfect for moments of extreme self-dramatization.

8 "Stars," Au Revoir Simone
One tasty slice of synthcheese.

7 "Summersend," Misha
What a chorus, what a chorus, what a chorus.

6 "Next Train," Miracle Fortress
This song got me at :49, when the finger-snaps and the lead guitar line enter the mix. Then it got me again with that chord change at 3:16.

5 "re: Stacks," Bon Iver
At first I was like, "Oh, that sounds just like 'Have You Forgotten' by Red House Painters." Now I think it's better.

4 "Don't You Evah," Spoon
Will someone please rap over this bass line? Please?

3 "Wet and Rusting," Menomena
An oddly shaped song with about 74 different hooks that will stick to your brainpan.

2 "The Body's Only Rental," Katie Dill
Put on your headphones. There's a sense of space in this song, like it was recorded in an empty auditorium - just Katie, her ukulele, and a really high ceiling. It's one of the loneliest things I've ever heard.

1 "Gospel," The National
The National's Boxer is packed with standout tracks: "Mistaken For Strangers," "Brainy," "Slow Show," "Apartment Story." I didn't notice "Gospel," the last song on the album, until my brother turned it up when we were driving down to Santa Barbara for Christmas. "That's just brilliant stuff," he said.

Since then I've learned the song on both piano and guitar. I can't stop playing it; I'm sure my neighbors have already called my landlord and I'm on the verge of being evicted. Whatever. The chords in "Gospel" are so exquisite. First there's the instantly memorable hook - E, D, E, A - doubled on piano and acoustic guitar, matched with the chords C, D minor, C, F. Then, after three repetitions, an E major chord comes out of nowhere and leads beautifully, elegantly, Jonny Greenwood-like into an A.

None of that makes sense to you, probably. Oh well. Just listen to the song. Buy it on iTunes. Listen to the chords.

2007: It Was 365 Days Long

2008-01-03T12:22:00.000-08:00

Ahem.

Is this thing on?

Hi. I'm back.

I know I should do some sort of year-in-review piece, but I didn't see many new movies or read, um, any new books (the old stuff is better!), so I'll stick to music. A list of albums today, a list of songs... someday.

Disclaimer: I am aware of the existence of the genres known as "Hip-Hop" and "Really Boring German Electronica" and "Mainstream Crap" and "Music Made By People Who Are Not White Brooklynites," but ever since I listened to Rubber Soul on my dad's turntable when I was eight, I've had this hankering for guitar pop. Sorry, I guess.

The Canon
... just as canonical as the bloggers say
Sound of Silver, LCD Soundsystem
Tight dance tracks played by a real-ass band.

Boxer, The National
Doom and pretty chord progressions. Also, a robot drummer.

Person Pitch, Panda Bear
Brian Wilson choruses looped and played back through a cardboard tube.

In Rainbows, Radiohead
Coolest dads ever.

The Slightly Underrated
... should have gotten four-and-a-half stars instead of four

The Flying Club Cup, Beirut
Drinking songs by Santa Fe-born Francophile who's barely old enough to drink.

God Save the Clientele, The Clientele
Why isn't melody enough for indie critics?

No Shouts, No Calls, Electrelane
They can't sing but sweet Jesus can they krautrock.

The Stage Names, Okkervil River
Very articulate whining.

The Stealth Crafts
... flew under the radar, sort of

For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver
Brokenhearted dude harmonizing with self on eight-track in forest cabin.

Five Roses, Miracle Fortress
Like Yo La Tengo covering the Beach Boys.

The Ryan Adams Division
... would've made excellent ten-song LPs

The Reminder, Feist
Cut "My Moon My Man," "The Park," "The Water," and "Inuition."

Comicopera, Robert Wyatt
Cut the ones with Spanish lyrics. All five of them.

The Shark-Jumpers
... formerly great bands unlikely to make another great album

Cease to Begin, Band of Horses
Less depth, less variety, less melody than Everything All the Time.

Wincing the Night Away, The Shins
When did the Shins become Rogue Wave?

In the Bedroom After the War, Stars
I tried to listen to this all the way through and look what happened.

Happy New Year, all.

Friday Top Five: Led Zeppelin Tracks

2007-12-21T17:57:00.001-08:00

Heard that Zeppelin's reunited*? My dad has.

5 "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp"

4 "Ramble On"

3 "The Song Remains the Same"

2 "Communication Breakdown"

1 "When the Levee Breaks"

No "Stairway?" Denied.

(*How many band members make a reunion? Three of four, as with Zep? At least fifty percent? No less than all? Discuss.)

James Crumley Is Boiled Harder

2007-12-20T14:09:00.000-08:00

Check out the opening sentence of James Crumley's detective novel The Last Good Kiss:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Traehearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine afternoon.

Got my attention.

Like Ross Macdonald, Crumley is a mystery writer who can actually write. But whereas Macdonald published the bulk of his work in the 1950s, during the golden era of hardboiled fiction, Crumley arrived long after the genre's death rattle.

He writes post-hardboiled fiction, which is to say really hardboiled fiction. His private eye, C.W. Sughrue, is a plain old alcoholic, not just a sorta-kinda alcoholic like Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer. The first chapter of The Last Good Kiss features a fistfight, a foot-shooting, a mauling, and a destruction-of-ear-by-beer-bottle.

Violence in the 1950s was far more gentlemanly.

California has also changed. In Macdonald's early Archer novels, the 60s haven't happened yet; in The Last Good Kiss, they're a bitter memory.

The maze of San Francisco lay just across the bay, a haven for runaways, and although the 60s were dead and gone too, young girls still ran there to hide. That hadn't changed, though everything else had. The flower children had gone sour and commercial or middle-class, and even the enemy was tired and broken, exiled to San Clemente.

It's not just history that makes Crumley's California different; it's also his outsider's perspective. Whereas Macdonald spent most of his life in Santa Barbara, Crumley was a Texas boy, a football player. He went to college in Georgia and Iowa, served in Vietnam, and eventually settled down in Montana. When and how he collected his evidence on California, I'm not sure, but he knows the state like de Toqueville knew America. An outsider, he notices the outsiders.

Sadness softened her nasal twang, that ubiquitous accent that had drifted out of the Appalachian hills and hollows, across the southern plains, across the southwestern deserts, insinuating itself all the way to the golden hills of California.

Crumley's characters didn't grow up with sea air in their lungs. They ran from the Midwest to the West, or followed the runaways, or followed something less attainable, like their dreams.

'Tis the Season to List-Make

2007-12-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

All these year-end best-of lists are just shopping guides. Otherwise they'd be published in January.
Rolling Stone's Top 50 Albums of 2007 reads like it was compiled by a team of marketing analysts: There's something for every member of the family.

How about Boomer Dad? You know, the only guy who reads Rolling Stone anymore? Get him Magic (#2), another Really Really Important Record by Bruce Springsteen, or Revival (#11), an album that John "CCR" Fogerty apparently released this year.

For that college kid who shops at Urban Outfitters, buy that new Rilo Kiley album (#8) or that new Bright Eyes album (#12) or that new Kings of Leon album (#19). Lackluster efforts by medium-okay artists, but if you're thinking about the music, you're missing the point.

And for anyone in your family who is a fucking idiot, options abound: Melissa Etheridge (#20), Nine Inch Nails (#21), Linkin Park (#25), Chris Brown (#34), Dropkick Murphys (#49).

Now, I'm not dumping on Rolling Stone for being uncool. That would be very Wikipedia hipster of me, and I'd rather be this guy than a Wikipedia hipster.

I'm dumping on Rolling Stone for not listening to music anymore. The White Stripes, for instance, would have made that top 50 if Jack had throat-sung his way through ten Latvian folk tunes while Meg accompanied him on the shoeboxes. Same goes for Bruce, Radiohead, Lucinda Williams, and Foo Fighters. Reputation is all.

Of course, there are other, better lists. Ludicrous amounts of 'em.

One of the best, Pitchforkmedia.com's Top 50 Albums of 2007, was posted earlier today. It's sprinkled with savvy, surprising choices - No Age, Bon Iver, King Khan & His Shrines - and the sequencing of the top four - Panda Bear, LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A., Radiohead - strikes me as definitive.

Oh Jesus, am I praising Pitchfork? I mean, I can hardly get through those reviews, what with all the adjectives and stoner-grade musings and "check out my record collection!" ostentation.

(If you gag on Pitchfork's prose too, read this parody by David Cross. Happy-making.)

Also, the zine's undisputed status as King of Indie Tastemakers disturbs me a little. Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah probably wouldn't have happened without the Fork's evangelism, and I'm convinced that Miracle Fortress's gorgeous Five Roses would have been this year's Everything All the Time if Marc Hogan hadn't dismissed it with a 6.3 out of 10.

Still, Pitchfork maintains an admirable great power/great responsibility ratio. If an album gets a 9 out of 10 from the Fork, it's good. Period. Once upon a time, Rolling Stone had that kind of cultural authority.

Titles

2007-12-13T11:30:00.000-08:00

I'm suspicious of titles. Too often writers use them as shortcuts to meaning. Ever read a story or poem, squinted in confusion, then said, "Oh!" when you looked at the title again? "I guess I kinda see it now."

I hate that. If a story doesn't work between its first and last words, a title - even a clever one - shouldn't be allowed to save it. Same goes for photographs that make no sense on their own, and Yahweh knows the art world is full of those.

My distrust of titles led to my initial decision to number the posts on this blog. First post = "1." Second post = "2." And so on to infinity. The effect, I thought, would be one of elegant simplicity. Also, it would discourage title-surfing - that is, scrolling through the posts and searching for buzz words in bold type, which is how I suspect most people read blogs. I wanted ... and stuff to be more about the Whole Post.

However, as our resident commenter-slash-anagrammist Norm A. Version pointed out a couple of weeks ago, all those numbers looked amateurish. And they weren't too helpful if you wanted to find a particular post.

So I caved. There are titles now. Most are purely functional, because "witty" titles bother me as much as "profound" titles.

Happy browsing. I mean reading. Intensely. Focused. Reading.

Ross Macdonald on California

2007-12-11T11:43:00.000-08:00

The detective story was born in the cobblestone streets of Poe and Doyle, but when those tough bastards Cain, Hammett, and Chandler came around, it relocated to California, somewhere between Beverly Hills and the Sunset Strip.

Why there?

The mystery genre has a lot in common with the western. The Marlowes and Spades of hardboiled fiction are like displaced John Waynes, lonesome searchers in suits and fedoras, and their California will always savor of the Wild West, no matter how many strip malls line its avenues.

And since the detective story is all about appearance vs. reality, mystery writers love the state's dichotomies: rich and poor, fog and sun, Pacific and Mojave, redwood forest and asphalt jungle, beauty and grime.

Then there's the simple romance of SoCal. Sun. Beaches. Bikinis.

Ross Macdonald was born in Los Gatos and died in Santa Barbara, and in his great Lew Archer mysteries, that pedigree shows. No one - not Chandler or Hammett, maybe not even Robinson Jeffers - describes California with such accuracy, elegance, and hate-love.

From the first page of his first Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949), Macdonald has his state pegged.

The scrub oak gave place to ordered palms and Monterey cypress hedges. I caught glimpses of lawns effervescent with sprinklers, deep white porches, roofs of red tile and green copper. A Rolls with a doll at the wheel went by us like a gust of wind, and I felt unreal.

He goes on to compare the "light-blue haze in the lower canyon" to "thin smoke from slowly burning money." This place, called "Santa Teresa" in the book, is clearly my hometown - and Macdonald's death-town - of Santa Barbara.

In the second Archer book, The Drowning Pool (1950), which I'm halfway through, Macdonald continues his blunt survey of the Golden State. Here's his take on a valley oil town at night:

Fenderless jalopies threatened my fenders. Hot rods built low to the ground and stacked with gin-mill cowboys roamed the neon trails with their mufflers off. A man in a custom-made Buick stopped in my path abruptly to kiss a woman in the seat beside him, and drove on with her mouth attached to the side of his neck. Eats, Drink, Beer, Liquor, the signs announced: Antonio's, Bill's, Helen's, The Boots and Saddle. Little knots of men formed on the sidewalk, jabbered and laughed and gesticulated, and broke apart under the pull of the bars.

Oh yeah, and the story's good. Been missing my bus stops lately.

Craig Finn Is Pretty Good With Words

2007-12-05T14:44:00.000-08:00

Assorted wisdom from the Hold Steady's 2006 Springsteenerpiece Boys & Girls in America.

He said, "I surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers, but big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers."

She said, "You're pretty good with words, but words won't save your life." And they didn't, so he died.

It started recreational. It ended kinda medical.
Guys go for looks, girls go for status.

And forgive me for quoting a whole scene from "Chillout Tent." (A chillout tent is where they take overstimulated kids during concerts. Purportedly.)

She looked just like a baby bird, all new and wet and trying to light a Parliament. He quoted her some poetry. He was Tennyson in denim and sheepskin. He looked a lot like Izzy Stradlin. They started kissing when the nurses took off their IV's. It was kinda sexy but it was kinda creepy. Their mouths were fizzy with cherry cola. They had the privacy of bedsheets. All the other kids were mostly in comas.

Can a pop song get a Pushcart?

Book Review: 70s Ian McEwan vs. 00s Ian McEwan

2007-12-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

Incest. Uxorcide. Public copulation. Pedophilia.

Ian McEwan took on some, um, pressing issues in First Love, Last Rites (1975), his debut short story collection, which is so gutsy, so vibrant that readers at the time must have been asking, Where can he go from here?

Well, he's gone onto a Booker Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a lifetime residency as England's Premier Novelist, but that first collection encapsulates, and in some ways overshadows, everything he has done since.

Like his much-bemedalled novels, the stories in First Love center around some terrible event, usually a perverse crime.

(Before I move on, a spoiler alert: This review hints at plot points in McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Amsterdam. If you intend to read those two novellas, steer clear. But really, if you're gonna do McEwan, do Atonement, First Love, Enduring Love, and Black Dogs first.)

On Chesil Beach, McEwan's latest, also hinges on an atrocity of sorts. Let's just say it involves a wedding night, two virgins, and warm sticky gobs of... pent-up English tension.

Al Alvarez, in his excellent New York Review of Books piece (which inspired me to pick up First Love), argues that McEwan has softened since his debut collection, that he has left behind his fascinating "unruly fantasies," that his prose has lost its wildness.

No doubt McEwan's sentences have smoothed out through the years, but that doesn't bother me. In fact, his prose - so musical, so clear, so efficient at juicing the human mind - is beyond reproach. The problems in his recent work have more to do with narrative.

In those old First Love stories, the atrocities emerge naturally from atmosphere. Even the childhood paradise in "The Last Summer" is fragrant with menace, so when bad stuff happens, the reader thinks, "Well, that was inevitable." And promptly goes to throw up.

McEwan's latest novels are comparatively benign. The rooms are furnished with upper-middle class elegance, and the characters are well-spoken and well-reared. One gets the sense that nothing really horrible could happen. And yet it does.

This makes for some surprises, but also causes believability issues. The central crime in Atonement, for instance, comes out of nowhere - the lone flaw in one of my favorite novels. And the double-murder in Amsterdam is so unlikely that I actually yelled at the book.

The "atrocity" in On Chesil Beach is plausible enough, but its effects are not. Given the married couple's intelligence, kindliness, and erudition (hadn't either of them read D.H. Lawrence?), it's hard to believe they wouldn't have forgiven each other and moved on.

I guess McEwan needed his tragic ending.

But a final page rewrite wouldn't have saved Chesil. As the ever-incisive John Crace points out, a happy ending would have rendered the whole thing pointless.

So it seems that Chesil was doomed from the start. But what if the husband were creepier, the wife's sexual history more explicitly described... scratch that. Too young-McEwan-y.

Friday Top Five: Scintillating Athletes

2007-11-30T18:26:00.000-08:00

Sports can be art, right?

Top Five Most Scintillating Male Athletes

5 Diego Maradona

4 Bo Jackson

3 Allen Iverson

2 Mike Tyson

1 Roger Federer

I would like to see a tennis match between Federer and Tyson. Then a boxing match between Tyson and Federer.

Movie Review: No Country For Old Men

2007-11-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

It's hard to say how the Coen brothers have grown. The filmmaking duo - Joel the director and Ethan the producer - burst fully-formed onto the scene in 1984, with Blood Simple, a masterpiece. The Coen style was already in place: the nightmarish atmosphere, the cartoonish characters, the restless camera, the trick-maze plot, the wacky dialects, the tone hovering somewhere between grave noir and black comedy.

Over the next fifteen years the Coens made brilliant film after brilliant film, each a permutation on their established style: Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

I haven't seen the three post-O Brother films. I'm scared to. I hear they're mediocre, and I'd rather see a bad Coen film than a mediocre Coen film.

No Country For Old Men, the latest Coen opus, is not mediocre. Sometimes it's breathtaking; others, infuriatingly bad. Never mediocre.

That's the good news. The bad news: it's not great, or even particularly good.

The problem, I think, has to do with Cormac McCarthy. See, the Coens based No Country on a McCarthy novel, which I haven't read but I'm going to diss anyway. (Ah, blogging.) McCarthy, one of our most garlanded writers, sucks. Pretentious, ham-handed, derivative, boring. His characters are cardboard cutouts, his plots either absurd or nonexistent, his philosophy bush-league, and he tries to cover all this up with long, thudding, repetitive, comma-less, "literary" sentences.

Funnily enough, McCarthy's suckiness tends to get exposed in the movie adaptations of his books. Without all those twisty, page-long sentences, his characters and plots crumble.

No Country, the movie, plays like a battle between good-Coen and bad-McCarthy.

Only the Coens could have cast and dressed and groomed this villain. Only McCarthy could have given him a name as ridiculous as Anton Chigurh.

Only the Coens could have made chase sequences as bristling as those in No Country. Only McCarthy could have padded them with macho philosophizing and unnecessary characters.

Only the Coens could have drawn such powerful performances out of Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and (of all people) Josh Brolin. Only McCarthy could have set up this triangle structure, then drained it of all tension.

And only McCarthy could have farted out that ending. At a couple of key moments the camera cuts away for no good reason. Other than, you know, to make some dickish point about the arbitrariness of Fate. Or should I say the futility of Free Will?

Whatever.

What Brian Boitano Does

2007-11-26T14:05:00.000-08:00

I will get around to posting my reviews of No Country For Old Men and On Chesil Beach. I swear. But first I must alert you to the most important artistic event of my lifetime - or possibly human history.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular with... [nothing less than a Keith Moon drum roll will serve here]... Barry Manilow.

That's right. Boitano. Manilow. In San Francisco. At that ballpark where the other Barry used to play.

Tickets only $50-150.

Thanks to M.R. for the tip - and this suggestion: "Barrian Boitanilow."

Friday Top Five: Artistic Burnouts

2007-11-23T12:31:00.000-08:00

Some artists age well and die early. See: Anton Chekhov, John Keats, Elliott Smith.

Others keep themselves hooked up to the Juvenation Machine well after they start paying senior rates at the movies. See: Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Robert Altman.

Most burn out.

For this edition of the Friday Top Five, the Top Five Most Spectacular Artistic Burnouts.

(Note: Links on the first names will take you to the good, early stuff; the last names will give you a semi-toxic dose of the late stuff. Clickers beware.)

5 Rod Stewart

4 Ernest Hemingway

3 Francis Ford Coppola

2 William Wordsworth

1 Michael Jackson

Yes, the last qualifies as a "well, duh" choice. But who else could be number one?

Music Review: The Shepherd's Dog by Iron & Wine

2007-11-20T16:28:00.000-08:00

2002: Iron & Wine releases The Creek Drank the Cradle, a collection of homemade beauties. Tape hiss suffuses every song. Sam Beam's double-tracked vocals and finger-picked banjo dominate the mix. The sound is timeless, placeless. Along with Kid A, Agaetis Byrjun, and Boys & Girls in America, this is one of the best albums of the new millennium.

2004: Our Endless Numbered Days. The tape hiss is gone. Beam still whispers as if he's locked inside a cabinet with a microphone during a game of hide-and-seek, but this time he has a high-quality microphone. On some tracks there's a whole damn band behind him. But Beam remains Beam: The melodies - especially on the gorgeous "Naked As We Came" and "Each Coming Night" - stretch and ache in a way that would make Paul McCartney jealous.

2007: The Shepherd's Dog. This is a big-sound studio album. There are electric guitars, pedal-contorted sitars, whorehouse pianos, handclaps, even synthesizers. Synthesizers!

It could have been a trainwreck, but Beam's sense for the bizarre saves him. These songs, though laden with studio-ness, are never mundane. In fact, they sound markedly different than anything I've heard.

Beam only stumbles when he forgets to write a song. On "White Tooth Man" and "Peace Beneath the City," verse follows verse follows verse follows verse until headache. Repetition is fine, but there'd better be a melody worth repeating.

The similarly strophic "Innocent Bones" and "The Devil Never Sleeps" fare better, actually building momentum through their repetitions. But the best tracks are the throwbacks. The beautiful "Carousel," "Resurrection Fern," and "Flightless Bird, American Mouth" wouldn't have been too out of place on Our Endless Numbered Days.

Like Elliott Smith, Beam is most at home in the bedroom, whispering. Which isn't to say that's all he should do. I'm happy he's aiming high and, for the most part, hitting his marks. But while he's a good all-purpose songwriter, he's the best songwriter in the world in one particular style, and he wore out that style on his first two albums.

Stuff Changes... and Stuff

2007-11-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

Last week I went to see No Country For Old Men, the new Coen bros flick, at the Century San Francisco Centre. The Century Centre is in the Financial District, my least favorite part of the city. Aside from the venerable Stacey's Bookstore and other holdouts from better days, it's all familiar franchises: Macy's, Quizno's, the Apple Store. Clean buildings, clumps of tourists, neon lights.

I live in the Richmond for a reason.

The Century Centre, in typical downtown fashion, is on the fifth floor of a mega-mall called the Westfield Shopping Centre. I arrived early and hungry, so I descended, Dante-like, into the food court. The room was enormous. Food stands lined the walls. Stovetops sizzled. People stood in tidy lines, airport-style, in front of the counters. They ordered and waited for their numbers to be called. Then they took their piled-upon trays to the tables, which were arranged in long rows, like at a dining hall.

Places like this depress me. Or, if I'm in the mood for hipster detachment, they amuse me.

I was feeling depressed when I started thinking about old black-and-white photographs of cities. I've always found these interesting. They capture how people used to live, what they saw every day, what they took for granted.

Say someone snapped a picture of the food court at the Westfield Shopping Centre and put it up on Wikipedia. In 2107, would post-collegiate dilettantes find it fascinating? Quaint? Would they be nostalgiac for an inaccessible, mostly imagined past?

Maybe they'd just think, Ew.

Anyway, this week's theme on ... and stuff is Change. Not historical Change, which I've been prattling on about, but artistic Change. Growth, if you want to call it that.

The artist's mandate is to grow from work to work yet somehow retain his identity, especially if he's been successful in the past. How well the artist deals with this conundrum defines his legacy.

The Beatles? They both grew and remained inimitably the Beatles. No easy trick.

Upcoming case studies:

- Iron & Wine, The Shepherd's Dog
- The Coen Bros, No Country For Old Men
- Ian McEwan, First Love, Last Rites and On Chesil Beach

Friday Top Five: Second Tracks

2007-11-16T17:25:00.000-08:00

I defer to the wisdom of Rob Gordon:

You got to kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don't wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch.

So for this edition of the Friday Top Five, we're kicking it up a notch with my Top Five Second Tracks:

5 "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?" (Ted Leo / Pharmacists, Hearts of Oak)

4 "Pictures of You" (The Cure, Disintegration)

3 "Naked As We Came" (Iron & Wine, Our Endless Numbered Days)

2 "River Man" (Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left)

1 "Loose" (The Stooges, Fun House)

Is "Loose" a greater song than "Eleanor Rigby?" Hell no. But I try to leave off the "well, duh" choices.

Interview: Jeremy Robbins of Inconvenient Molly

2007-11-15T11:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I g-chatted with Jeremy Robbins, creator of "Inconvenient Molly," a new internet sitcom - or "sitdotcom," as the cool kids say.

"Molly" documents the post-collegiate strivings of Molly (co-creator Eli Clark), the former Welch's Grape Juice girl. She has an enormous poster of Lindsay Lohan on her refrigerator. Inside the fridge, there's nothing but Jell-O. Her roommate, aspiring auteur George (Justin Noble), has Sharpied his name on all the Cherry Cherries.

Watch it. Really freaking funny.

(Full disclosure: Jeremy was my college roommate. Which doesn't change the fact that his show is really freaking funny.)

Garrett: So why internet TV?

Jeremy: Mainly because it's the only medium that college graduates can exploit with no money. We were almost positive nobody was going to hand us ten million bucks to make a film or write a pilot.

G: Once you realized it was going to be a web show, did your ideas change?

J: The original idea was about a teenager, like fifteen, a high schooler. It was the same premise, but it centered around a family. When we considered doing an internet series, we realized that doing a show about a family would require a wide range of actors - age-wise, that is. And we didn't really want to use actors we didn't know. So we went ahead and tweaked the idea, making it a more ensemble piece about twentysomething year-olds.

G: Do you think your audience mostly consists of twentysomethings?

J: I know my parents watch it and they're in their fifties. In terms of marketing our show, however, [twentysomethings are] who we're focusing on.

G: I think that's the case with most web shows. Anyone can watch them, but they tend to be aimed at artsy indie kids. And a lot of these shows have young, aspiring artists as main characters ("quarterlife," "Clark & Michael," "KateModern"). "Inconvenient Molly" sort of parodies that. Are you aware of playing with the genre in that way?

J: Not consciously... We really love "Clark & Michael." I can't say I've seen the other ones. Given the constraints of the web, doing a "documentary" is really open for possibilities, and we also wanted to sort of parody things that we knew something about - child actors, mainly.

G: I guess parody is the key. Most other shows - "Clark & Michael" excepted - take the whole young artist thing so seriously, as if neither the characters nor the creators realize how ridiculous most young artists are.

J: I mean, doing things deadpan, which is sort of how we approach the show, automatically lends this self-conscious irony to the entire project. The actors are very aware of it, and so it both pokes fun at them while also warmly embracing them.

G: That seems to be the theme of one of your "extras" (short vids that supplement the longer webisodes) - what's it called?

J: The "What Is Art?" video?

G: Yeah.

J: We really want the extras to flesh out the characters and the world of the show. For example, in episode one, Molly auditions for a commercial. The ensuing extra is that commercial, which she does not get, but another actor in the show does.

G: That's unique to web TV. Actual TV shows are far more linear. Everything that happens, happens between the commercials.

J: That's true, though I think that's something that may change quite soon, given how many people watch network shows online now. I think "The Office" actually does special webisodes that are unique to the internet. As for our extras, it allows us to try to do a steadier, more constant stream of output, since two minute extras are easier to complete than full-length episodes.

G: How do you think the presence of extras changes the storytelling?

J: I'm not sure it changes the story, since I feel like we come up with extras based on the plot we're developing. But it does allow us to play up certain aspects of a character's personality. We had so much fun doing George's short film that we want to continue to do other George short films. It gives us certain character traits to home in on. With George, he's trying to figure out what kind of filmmaker he is. So he does that political film from episode one.

G: What other types of films will he do?

J: We want it to be a surprise.

G: It sounds like the extras give you opportunities to digress that you wouldn't have in a conventional, linear framework.

J: Which is great, especially since we're approaching the actual episodes as if it were a TV show, with character development, plot development. We want it to be a sitcom, but something with a larger, crafted, overarching storyline.

G: How about audience interaction?

J: A lot of great websites have things like character blogs and ways for the audience to interact with the creative team, things like script submissions. While we're not opposed to those things, we aren't focusing on them yet.

G: Can you conceive of the audience actually influencing the storyline in the future?

J: I can say, with almost one hundred percent positivity, that we won't be doing something like that. This is really a format for us to get our ideas out there.

G: All the actors in "Inconvenient Molly" are also in Madam?, an improv comedy troupe. How do the show and the improv group rub off on each other?

J: Performing and the like is a great way of networking with other similarly talented comedians and writers, and to have a show to direct people to - to see us in a different context - is invaluable. It's also great since everyone in the group is also in the show. Since we're all great friends, it's just another excuse to hang out and fuck around.

How to Make Internet TV Not Suck

2007-11-14T13:18:00.000-08:00

Some deadbeats in bars have can't-miss ideas for novels. I have a can't-miss idea for an internet TV show.

Actually, it's not an idea. Just a sense for how to exploit the medium fully.

The characters would be in high school, maybe college. (Know your demographic.) They'd post their own videos, rant in moderation, respond to each other. Their webcams would venture outside of their bedrooms occasionally, but always return. The sense of the quotidian would be maintained. No guns, no shadowy gangs of bad guys, no kidnappings. Pure domestic dramedy.

Boring? Not if a compelling storyline is parceled out from vid to vid. As the early webisodes of "lonelygirl" demonstrate, not much has to be shown. Fans will imagine the rest.

Speaking of fans, they wouldn't get to contribute their (crappy) story ideas, but they would be in touch with the characters, because each character would have a blog.

In other words, the show would take advantage of what's unique about the medium:

1 The idea of characters making the show themselves
2 The freedom to post webisodes of any length at any time
3 The illusion of "real time"
4 The shroud over the "real," off-camera story
5 The opportunity for the fictional world to expand across cyberspace - into character-run blogs, forums, chat rooms, and websites
6 The intimate involvement of fans

Perhaps "lonelygirl" shoots for something like this, but the show has gone creatively bankrupt. Another, more talented filmmaker needs to step in.

And yes, there are some primo web shows out there, but none of them follow a fully interactive model. So I guess they might as well be on, you know, TV.

The Lost Innocence of Lonelygirl

2007-11-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

The first four months of "lonelygirl" videos will never be surpassed.

Those webisodes, posted originally on YouTube, mostly consist of "Bree" sitting on her bed, talking about herself. They resemble nothing so much as webcam porn, a popular genre in which girl-next-door types sit on their beds, talk, and strip.

Bree doesn't strip, obviously; that would kill half of her sex appeal. She says she's 16. Good age, good age. She has nymph-like looks and suspiciously well-shaped eyebrows. In chirpy, girly cadences, she talks about "Daniel," strict parents, astronomy, and Richard Feynman.

And she claims to be real.

You Tubers - those young, tech-savvy males - collectively orgasmed. "A pretty girl! With a webcam! Who reads! Who's lonely!"

They commented on her videos en masse. Bree responded. Score! Many of them questioned her authenticity. Weren't her videos awfully well-edited? Wasn't the storyline a little too cohesive? Why were all of her bedroom decorations from Target?

Bree did not deign to address such accusations.

There were filmed responses, too. Some offered consolation in couplets. Others serenaded her prepubescently. Most just ranted.

Then there was Daniel, a.k.a. "Danielbeast," editor of Bree's videos, "best friend," crooked-nosed horse-toothed regular guy. If he could get her, any YouTuber could.

When he started posting clips of his own, the series really picked up. Does she like him? Will her parents approve? Will there be a Bree-Daniel sex tape scandal?

In one Danielbeast webisode, he sits in a chair wearing a button-down shirt. A tie hangs loosely around his neck. He's about to leave to see Bree's summer camp play. They've been quarreling lately and he wants to make it up to her.

A few early comments: "YEA! Go Daniel." "your nose is huge." "That seems so romantic. LOL i can see her jumping into your arms when she sees you."

The full potential of internet TV is on display here: the cinema verite style, the excitement of characters making and posting their own videos in "real time," the involvement of the cyber-community, the two-minute glimpses that hint tantalizingly at the "real story." Just look at how vividly the last commenter imagines Bree "jumping into" Daniel's arms. A web show doesn't show; it implies.

Then, in mid-September of last year, the whole Jenga tower crumbled. Someone traced lonelygirl15's email to a talent agency. Brian Williams reported on it. Bree was outed as Jessica Rose, a Kiwi actress who liked to chill with Lindsay Lohan. Mass disillusionment ensued.

More importantly, the series lost its identity, morphing from a believable suburban sitcom-soap into a thoroughly improbable action-adventure. Bree and Daniel hit the road, chased by an evil organization called "the Order," occasionally joined by poorly-written secondary characters.

In the first season finale, uploaded two months ago, Bree dies, allowing Jessica Rose to go forward with "other projects." Yet the show continues to this day, "lonelygirl" without the lonely girl.

Shut Up About Your Quarterlife Crisis

2007-11-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of people like me*?

(*Overeducated, "creative" twentysomethings drowning in quarter-life crises.)

I explored similar territory in Post 6 and concluded that good fiction is good fiction, no matter the subject.

But damn, shows like "quarterlife" tempt me to pull a Whitman.

A new web series with unusually high production values, "quarterlife" details the angst of a "writer" named Dylan, who disses her friends on her "blog" and acts shocked when they flip.

"Things just come out of me," the epicenely-named one explains. "I'm a writer."

Why do writers in movies and TV shows always need to write about their personal lives?

Easy source of conflict, I guess. Fatuous writer airs dirty laundry, friends and family get pissed, fatuous writer airs more dirty laundry, friends and family get used to it. Go art!

It's a shame that "quarterlife" is such a mess. I like this newish medium of internet TV. The possibilities - fans responding to webisodes with videos of their own, storylines getting altered by chatter in the forums, advertising being limited to banner ads and product placement - are intriguing. But so far most attempts at filmed online drama have failed. Spectacularly.

This week on ... and stuff I'll focus on internet TV - its history, trends, and potential. I'll do my best to be generous.

Before I sign off, a few choice quotes from soon-to-be late, great "quarterlife:"

Hey, you're a writer. You have to write what moves you.

It's my curse that I can see what people are thinking, what they want to say and can't say, who they want to be with. And what good does that do me if nobody can see me?

What is a blog? Why do we blog? We blog to exist. Therefore, we are... idiots.

Friday Top Five: Opening Tracks

2007-11-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Lists are bad. Lazy. Vacuous.

Therefore, every Friday I will post a list. E.g., "Top Five Movies Featuring Harvey Keitel in a Supporting Role" or "Top Five Novels By Women with Masculine Pen Names" or "Top Five Songs About Your Mom." I'll call them "Friday Top Fives."

So, in honor of the inaugural week of ... and stuff:

Top Five Opening Tracks

5 "Stuck Between Stations" (The Hold Steady, Boys & Girls in America)

4 "Return to Hot Chicken" (Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One)

3 "Modern Kicks" (The Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantic)

2 "Teen Age Riot" (Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation)

1 "Thunder Road" (Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run)

Come on, tell me I'm stupid. "Where's 'London Calling?'" "Did music exist before 1975?" "Isn't listing both the Hold Steady and Bruce Springsteen redundant?"

Sensitive Fiction About Sensitive Teenagers

2007-11-08T12:57:00.000-08:00

Is anything more tiresome, in fiction, than the problems of sensitive adolescents?

A tidbit I underlined in John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," which I found in The Worst Years of Your Life, a new anthology of short stories about teenagers. Perhaps Barth is quoting an actual source. Probably not. You never know with Barth.

"Funhouse" follows - or attempts to follow - 1940s family on a bland, all-American daytrip to Ocean City. Ambrose, 13, the younger of two brothers, is the smart and gawky one, the author in chrysalis. The author himself becomes the second main character, compulsively interrupting his own narrative, doubting his skill, reminding himself of fiction workshop mantras like:

The more closely an author identifies with the narrator, literally or metaphorically, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative viewpoint.

Hm.

This being metafiction, nothing is unironic. But as with many of the random writing tips in "Funhouse," the caution against dramatizing "the problems of sensitive adolescents" rings true.

Too much bad undergraduate fiction - mine included - centers on awkward, bookwormish kids who bear a not-so-coincidental resemblance to the author.

But I'm still drawn to that kind of story.

Check out Kelly Link's "The Faery Handbag," a fascinating mash-up of teen romance and surrealism.

Or Junot Diaz's stories, which buzz with the voices of sensitive-horny-semi-autobiographical Dominican-American boys.

Craig Thompson drips melted cheese all over his graphic novel Blankets, but it's as tasty as Say Anything.

And don't forget that Huck Finn is thirteen. What did Papa say? "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

Speaking of Papa, adolescent fiction doesn't get better than "Indian Camp" and "The End of Something" from In Our Time.

So I guess what you write about is less important than how you write about it.

Proof: The Worst Years of Your Life. So far I've read potent stuff by George Saunders ("Bohemians"), Stanley Elkin ("A Poetics for Bullies"), and yes, John Barth. The stories by Julie Orringer and Jennifer Egan are disappointingly blah, but so it goes with anthologies edited by Iowa grads.

Tone is a tricky business when you write about teens. Too po-faced and you sink in melodrama; too wry and you glance off the reader's heart. But there are plenty of comfy nooks in between, and for the most part, the stories in The Worst Years find them.

Music Review: In Rainbows by Radiohead

2007-11-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

Remember how the critics semi-panned Kid A? And two months later they were like, "Just kidding! Kid A is the best album ever."

It took me several listens to find Kid A, too. And I was still miffed that it wasn't OK Computer.

Point is, you have to let a Radiohead album marinate. Which is what I've been doing for the past almost-month with In Rainbows.

On first listen, In Rainbows doesn't seem a likely candidate for grower status. It's immediately likable and hummable, the band's most straightforward effort since The Bends. The instruments resonate crisply, the melodies are long-limbed and pretty, and Thom Yorke's voice is mixed high and clear. It sounds... warm.

Warm?! Radiohead? Have they lost their edge?

No, no. They just knew they had good songs - some of their best, actually - and all they needed to do was record them with sensitivity and low-key brilliance.

Not that they've dispensed with the crazy. Just listen to the intertwining of programmed beats, clattering snares, stop-start bass, and liquid guitar lines in "15 Step." Or the bizarre, arrhythmic percussion that nearly sabotages "Videotape," one of Yorke's loveliest ballads.

(I'll keep linking to that performance of "Videotape" until you watch it. Seriously. Watch it.)

The main sonic story is Radiohead's increasing mastery of the breakdown-buildup. Ever since "Airbag," they've shown a knack for dismantling songs and putting them back together. On In Rainbows at least half the tracks undergo this kind of de- and reconstruction.

Example: At the 2:20 mark in "Reckoner," the rhythm section drops out, leaving a quartet of Thoms and cottony guitar chords. A string section edges in, then edges out to make room for some drums. Finally the strings return, along with Colin Greenwood's bass, and it all adds up...

... to something really, really pretty.

Putting a Price on Radiohead

2007-11-06T12:29:00.000-08:00

Jonny Greenwood, guitarist-slash-genius (so much cooler than "actor-slash-model"), wants you to ask yourself, How much is music worth?

A few weeks ago Greenwood's band, Radiohead, released its new album In Rainbows online, and in a move that has marketing analysts lactating, let fans decide what to pay for it.

62 percent didn't pay at all.

Me, I paid 20 pounds. Which I thought was about $10. Turns out it's closer to $40.

(Incidentally, I need some pasta. If you'd like to help me out, I'll email you my home address. Farfalle is good, fusilli is better.)

So what's Radiohead's music actually worth to me?

Pablo Honey. "Creep," the underrated "You," and a bunch of REM clones. $5.

The Bends. That octave-jump in "High and Dry." That Hendrix-like solo in "Just." That throwaway guitar hook at the end of "Planet Telex," which Chris Martin would kill to design an entire song around. Has he already? $57.

OK Computer. I even like "Fitter Happier." $76.50.

Kid A. If I had a dime for every time somebody told me, "Dude, I got stoned last night and totally like discovered Kid A." $2.3 million.

Amnesiac. "Pyramid Song." $23.

Hail to the Thief. Somebody should have been in Thom Yorke's ear: "'Myxomatosis?' You sure?" $13.99.

In Rainbows. People forget that Thom writes really good songs and Radiohead plays them really well. $36.

You've seen mine; now show me yours. How much is Radiohead's oeuvre worth to you?

The Original AND STUFF

2007-11-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

There used to be another blog named "AND STUFF." Subtitle: "STUFF." Creator: "Ashley."

Opening sentences: "bored bored bored. this sucks so much. i have so many things to think about lately. god, it was so great to talk to eddie again. i miss him so fucking much. i want him so much. i love him with all my heart. i know very well that if eddie was to come back home and stay, then ask me out i would drop danny and go with him."

Don't laugh at Ashley. Okay, laugh a little. But then stop. It's too easy to laugh at girls like her.

Now read those sentences again, aloud this time. They've got a certain rhythm.

As far as I can tell, Ashley was 16 or 17 - going into her junior year in high school - when she started and abandoned this blog in the summer of 2001. She's not an outstanding writer, but better than most juniors I've taught.

By the time I reached her sixth and final post, I found myself wishing her happiness, whether it was with Eddie, Danny, Brian, or Adam.

I was even a little moved. By her purity, I guess. Or maybe it was the whole just-before-9/11 thing.

But let's not get too serious.

How about another highlight:

"While I was at Ozzfest, [Danny] called me and we chatted a bit, but I cut him off because Disturbed was coming on. So later I check my phone and I have a voice mail. I see it's from him. He said that the relationship was going nowhere... He also said it sucked. I cried for a bout [sic] 30 seconds, then I just got pissed off. Slipknot came on so I cheered up."

And finally:

"I have a need for male attention, since I didn't get it when I was younger."

Some "real" writers have wasted thousands of words making exactly that point.

So there you have it. The original "AND STUFF." Six rants trapped in 2001, incomplete but surprisingly symmetrical. In the first post (June 10) Ashley is pining for Eddie and waffling on Danny; in the last (July 15) she's pining for Brian and waffling on Adam.

Somewhere in the world, Ashley is about 23. My age.

And she's sitting on my preferred URL.

Um, I Haven't Read Hamlet

2007-11-02T16:54:00.000-07:00

It's Fall Fiction Week at Slate, and a handful of writers have taken on that terrifying question: "What's the most important book you haven't read?"

This seems to call for a self-deprecating response, right? Not so. Take Jennifer Egan, whose gravest literary omission is apparently Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Or Margaret Atwood, who's such a philistine that she hasn't gotten around to Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. But only because she hadn't heard of it until recently! She'll read it soon, she assures us. Presumably after she finishes Witold Gombrowicz's letters.

Am I sounding Gawkerish? If so, it stems from jealousy.

At least no one pulled a Harold Bloom: "I cannot think of a major work I have not ingested."

And props to Laura Lippman, who comes right out and says she hasn't made it past Page 2 of Ulysses.

So in that spirit...

I haven't read Hamlet. It's too iconic! It can only disappoint!

This is an attempt to inject some drama into this blog. Will he read Hamlet? What will he think of it? Tensions are running high.

I don't know how I've avoided Puportedly the Greatest Play Ever for so long, considering I majored in English. Maybe my degree should be revoked.

Professor Biggs, if you're reading this, Hamlet was the only play on your syllabus I didn't read. Actually, I didn't read Antony and Cleopatra either.

I'll stop there.

1

2007-11-01T13:03:00.000-07:00

So here's a blog about art and stuff.

By "art" I mean books, music, and movies. Not art art. I don't really get that stuff.

By "stuff" I mean overheard conversations, randomly encountered places, not-too-esoteric personal experiences, and the like.

I'll treat the stuff as art and the art as stuff.