perfidy

As previously noted, I took a leave of absence last weekend to travel to Savannah in the great state of Georgia to visit my sister and my newly arrived nephew, Sir David the Astonishingly Hirsute. They're both fine.

An added benefit of my trip was that my birthday is coming soon, and therefore I ate particularly well. Every year around my birthday, Chainsaw treats me to a giant seafood blowout the likes of which you have never seen. This year we had a cookout during which I began eating at 4 in the afternoon and didn't really stop until 3 the following morning.

The menu:

• Gigantic bucketsful of three kinds of shellfish (oysters, clams, mussels), steamed with wine and aromatics.
• grilled tuna steaks marinated in soy sauce and sesame oil with ginger and wasabi
• two beer butt chickens
• a spice-rubbed flank steak, medium-rare
• bratwursts
• There was also potato salad. I think.

We also consumed many more beers than seemed likely, or even possible, considering the advancing age of the several participants. While I will incriminate nobody and admit to nothing, a group of six gentlemen consumed between them more than 100 beers plus a glass each Remy Martin (my birthday, you see!) and an odd martini or three.

After a late-night snack of empanadas, I retired. The next day we recovered with a lunch of a gigantic pot of sancocho, a South American soup made with various meats (in this case chicken, beef loin, beef necks, and possibly turkey, though pork, oxtail, and sausages are also traditional) and starches (in this case potatoes, carrots, yucca, plantians, corn on the cob) plus aromatics. Truly there is no more restorative food in the world than a cup of sancocho broth and a nice plate of meat and starch garnished with pico de gallo and hot sauce. Did I mention my brother in law is Colombian, and among our party we numbered two former line cooks, a dedicated amateur (yrs truly) and a restaurant manager?

For dinner that night I made my famous 4-cheese macaroni and cheese, thereby completing the culinary cultural exchange initiated by the empanadas and sancocho, and later I baked bread. I don't often bake outside of my own house, so I was a bit taken aback when I came into the kitchen after taking my loaves out of the oven to find four grow men standing over my bread with a digital camera, pointing and whispering. They turned to me as one, as though driven by some pack instinct, and asked "when can we eat it??" So that was nice.

When my family get together, we eat good.

Then, of course, I came home to my loving wife who was suffering from a deficiency of Vitamin Me.

Having recently returned from a junket to the Ministry's Southern division in Savannah, GA (what... you think Sherman gave up out of the goodness of his heart??), I am in recovery mode. As a placeholder to occupy your small minds while I get back up to full strength is this page of the funniest unanswerable questions ever asked of Snopes.com.

[wik] I have to wonder what circumstances bring a person to that exquisite point of desperate loneliness where the only recourse they can imagine is to send an emailed query in all-caps to the anonymous researchers at a website, asking whether the deep welling sadness they are feeling is really caused by pearls. There's something melancholy and poetic in the idea.

Country music has a problem. As I opined a while ago writing about a career retrospective of songwriter and singer Rodney Crowell, Nashville tends to eat its dead. At the first sign of weakness, great artists with storied careers eventually find themselves unable to get radio play, press attention, or a cup of coffee on the strength of their good name. Within Nashville society, this means that elders are given lip service but shunned in public. In the larger picture, this means that country oldies radio is at best a niche genre, relegated to a late-night set or the far reaches of the AM dial. Instead, most country radio dedicates itself to whatever’s hot on the Country Top 40 chart, wasting good time on fatuous dreck by Toby Keith (he’s a Ford Truck man!) or the animatronic wonder called Shania Twain.

From time to time, country does return to its roots. After the great Countrypolitan revolution of the 1980s came a revival of classic sounds, boosting the careers of Randy Travis and Clint Black among others. Currently artists like Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes (talented ladies both) have released albums reasserting their down-home credibility, correctly sensing that actual people in Kentucky, Wyoming and even Maine mostly drive pickups and wear blue jeans, not BMWs and Manolo Blahniks.

But this unfortunately does not mean an actual rediscovery of the past. There are literally dozens of incredible artists who once had massive careers who now languish in semi-obscurity. The living at least have a chance at redemption through a comeback record. The departed are not so lucky, and it falls to dedicated cadres of fans at record labels, radio stations, and in the record-buying public to keep their flame alive.

In a fortunate confluence of purpose and commerce, Sony has been compiling excellent best-ofs from their catalog under the “Legacy Essential” series for several years now. Already country greats like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Earl Scruggs have gotten their due, and now Legacy have added the great, half-forgotten Marty Robbins to this list.

Casual music fans might be forgiven for thinking Marty Robbins was a one hit wonder. Everybody knows “El Paso,” one of the biggest hits in the history of country music and one of the catchiest tunes ever written. The opening line “Down in the old Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican girl” is probably better known to most people than “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union....”

In truth, “El Paso” is only one hit among dozens more. Robbins spent the mid-1950s through the early 1980s in the country and pop charts, logging 81 country Top 40 hits, 31 pop crossover hits, and spending a collective 63 weeks at #1. That’s a run not unlike Sir Elton John’s, who nevertheless remains a household name while even casual country fans need to struggle to remember the name of... ohh... you know that one guy? Who did that song? You know, “Down in the old Texas town of El Paso?”

Moreover, just as Robbins was not only a country star, he was not merely a country singer. Indeed, the two disc The Essential Marty Robbins makes a case for Marty Robbins as the country-flavored counterpart to chameleonic phenomenon Bobby Darin. Like Darin, Robbins is remembered for a major novelty hit or two (“Mack The Knife,” “El Paso”) and a rock and roll hit or two (“Splish Splash,” “White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation).” Like Darin, Robbins worked in many styles throughout his career, defying easy pigeonholing. And like Darin, Marty Robbins was not blessed with a perfect voice. Not as rich as Elvis,’ not as resonant as Cash’s, and not as emotive as George Jones, his slightly brittle tenor nevertheless featured an affecting quaver and technical ability that made up for any shortcomings, and he turned in outstanding vocal performances in a wide variety of genres.

Also like Darin, Robbins’ legacy is a victim of his biggest hit. Although the chronological running order on Essential shows that Robbins excelled in many genres (rock and roll in several styles, Western swing, country, blues, countrypolitan, and straight pop) throughout his career, and although he wrote his own material, it is still necessary to for the compilation to prove that there was more to him than just one long story song set in New Mexico.

Discovered by Don Law and signed to Columbia in 1952, Robbins’ first hits were in the country style of the day, featuring acoustic and steel guitar and melodies reminiscent of Hank Williams. One of his early hits was an Elvis-like cover of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama,” suggesting that he had not quite yet figured out who he was going to be.

By 1957, however, the answer seemed clear: Mary Robbins was going to be everybody. In 1957 and 1958, he charted two doo-wop teen-love pop ballads (“A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” “She Was Only Seventeen (And He Was One Year More")), two country/rockabilly tunes (“Just Married,” “Ain’t I the Lucky One,”), a poppy tune reminiscent of “Mr. Sandman, Send Me a Dream” ("Stairway of Love"), a country blues (“Knee Deep in the Blues”), and the Hawaiian-tinged “Story of My Life.”

In 1959, Robbins was astute enough to pick up on Johnny Cash’s success singing cowboy songs, and began turning out western swing and Mexican-flavored tunes. The most famous of these was of course “El Paso,” one of the biggest hits of the year, but there was also “Ballad of the Alamo,” “Big Iron,” “Devil Woman,” and several others.

He would continue to have success in the western style throughout the 1960s, charting with songs like “The Cowboy in the Continental Suit,” and “Tonight Carmen,” all the while also turning out straight country hits like "The Shoe Goes on the Other Foot Tonight."

The 1970s and 1980s blunted Robbins’ attack in the way it did so many others - by drowning his songs in an ocean of strings. His go-to producer in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was Billy Shirell, known for his devotion to overproducing every song to the point of parody, and – yep – strong songs like “Among My Souvenirs” "Some Memories Just Won't Die" are nearly unlistenable under the thick film of keyboards, strings, choirs, and noise-gated drums, forcing Robbins to belt like Jim Nabors to be heard over the din. Many songs from this era seem more suited to the tacky spectacle of Elvis’ Vegas showroom than to Robbins’ simple delivery.

The final song on Essentials is “Honkytonk Man,” the title song from the 1982 Clint Eastwood film of the same name. Though near death from chronic heart disease and nearly overpowered by the overproduction, Robbins nevertheless gives an affecting and lovely performance. His voice is deeper and rougher, and he seems finally to have discovered how to sing a ballad without crossing into maudlinness. It seems that Robbins died just as he was entering another chapter of his career, one where he finally figured it all out.

But Robbins’ voice wasn’t the main attraction. He was also top notch songwriter, and the diversity of the songs collected here make a strong case that he was one of the very best. He was audacious enough to write “El Paso” after all, which hit #1 on both the country and pop charts in 1959 despite clocking in at nearly 5 minutes long.

But not many people know about the followup song, “Faleena (from El Paso),” an 8-minute LP track from 1966 that tells the story of the ill-fated woman from “El Paso,” including the events from the original song from Feleena’s perspective. The songs together spend thirteen minutes on what is admittedly a maudlin and thin little tale, but Robbins’ songwriting is so strong that the two songs together come across as grandly, epically tragic.

Robbins would even return to this well again in 1972 with the #1 hit “El Paso City,” about a man visiting El Paso and half-remembering how “long ago he heard a song about a Texas Cowboy and a girl” though he “don’t recall who sang the song, as I looked down on the city I remembered each and every word.” That’s three songs drawn, Rashomon-style, from one little story of a love triangle and a gunfight. That’s talent to spare.

While far from comprehensive (more than half of his 81 Top 40 hits are missing) The Essential Marty Robbins is an outstanding introduction to one of the forgotten legends of country music. If ever we needed more proof that country, rock and roll, and pop were for much of the 20th century the same thing, we have it. With country starting once again to rediscover its roots, hopefully Marty Robbins will get the credit he deserves as one of the master songwriters and mainstays of country music for thirty years.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org

Things I'm considering for t-shirt slogans:

• College
  
• Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
  
• Go Lemmings Go
  
• You bastards are... Bastards
  
• i hate clowns
  
• Stay back 200 yards :: Court Order
  
• RTFM
  
• WAR
  
• Hateful, talentless, war-loving trailer trash

With my offering only my fourteenth entry in the 50-Book Blogger challenge now, in the end of July, readers may wonder if I have an ice cube's chance in hell of actually finishing twoscore and ten volumes before the close of the year. Don't be silly! Ha! Although I have only written about fourteen books, I just finished book number 41 yesterday. I've been busy readin', like Bill Hicks in the Waffle House.

i'm eating and I'm reading a book. Fine. Right. Waitress comes over to me (chewing), "What you reading for?" Now, I said, "Wow... I've never been asked that. Goddang it, you stumped me! Not, 'what am I reading,' but 'what am I reading for?' I guess I read for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones....is so I don't end up being a fucking waffle waitress. That's pretty high on the list." Then, this trucker in the next booth gets up, stands over me and says, "Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader."...It's like I walked into a Klan rally dressed in a Boy George costume or something.

So, you feckless mob of Waffle waitresses, here is what I've been reading.

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness (two novellas, count as one in my world!)

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

Deep thoughts and other blather below the cut.

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

Chernow has delivered yet another in a long string of reassessments of American Founders. Along with Joe Ellis’ American Sphinx, David McCullough’s John Adams, a slew of books about Ben Franklin by everyone from Walter Isaacson to Edmund Morgan, and most recently by Joe Ellis again writing on George Washington. Of all these, it is probably true that Hamilton was the figure most deserving of a second look. (After all, even if John Adams has been remembered largely as a crank, he was still President. Jefferson, he just needed to be taken down a peg or two.)

Apart from a fairly recent but thin appreciation by Victor David Hanson, Hamilton has languished in the second rank of American founders alongside Thomas Paine, Governeur Morris and Elbridge Gerry. This is particularly unfortunate because, as Chernow demonstrates in admirable detail, we owe a great deal of our political culture and national infrastructure to Hamilton’s machinations.

Chernow’s command of detail is particularly impressive. Aggregating every scrap of paper he could find on Hamilton from his boyhood in Nevis to his secret correspondences with his eventual blackmailers, Chernow traces not only Hamilton’s trajectory through the world of the Americas but also the effects of his passing. Finally I have a good sense of exactly how Hamilton came up with his revolutionary ideas for taxation and finance that helped fund the young United States, and this after I taught it for two semesters!

Numerous small details set this above the standard historical appreciation. One is how Chernow treats Hamilton’s father. He seems to have been a hard-luck man with a self-destructive streak, and he was almost totally absent from the young Hamilton’s life. Through a series of vignettes we see Hamilton as a child pass from guardian to guardian, finally moving into the house of his best friend’s family, which friend resembles Hamilton to a striking degree. (Hmmm.) Meanwhile, Hamilton’s “father” is in and out of the picture, asking for handouts, being a bum, periodically trying to be a dad, and so forth. Throughout the book, Chernow keeps us in mind of his sad fate as Hamilton ascends to the stratosphere: aide to George Washington, Secretary of the Treasury and so forth. As Hamilton rockets upward, Chernow traces his father’s slow decline from island to island down the Caribbean, each time to meaner and meaner surroundings. He periodically checks in with his son, usually looking for a handout, until finally he dies lonely and nearly forgotten at the very bottom of the Caribbean to where the scum and villains drained.

Although I tend to distrust biographies that psychoanalyze their subject, especially if that subject is long dead, Hamilton left such copious writings, and was screwed up in such evident ways, that Chernow’s analysis along these lines is convincing. What made him rise to Aaron Burr’s bait? Was it the knowledge that in the past, the mere threat of a duel made his adversaries back down? Was it grief over his son’s death in a deul a few years before? Was it the narcissist’s realization that his star was fading and his prominence at an end? Was it a simple death wish? Or was it a stupid idea and a tragic mistake? Chernow explores each of these possibilities and balances each of them against what the reader has come to understand about Hamilton’s inner mind.

The only thing that might be said against Chernow’s treatment is that he does probably engage in a little character assassination of Hamilton’s peers and competitors – notably James Madison and Aaron Burr – by way of burnishing his subject’s own image. This is a common fault of historical biographers, and by now readers probably know to read past the hagiographical leanings when they encounter them.

While I die a little inside at the idea that some enterprising author might soon cough up Governeur Morris: A New Appreciation, if the current fashion for books about the Founding Fathers continues, Alexander Hamilton, is an overdue and worthy addition to the current Founding Fathers canon.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I regret to admit that it has been more than two decades since I read any Charles Dickens. When I was a young boy I had a bunch of abridged classics volumes for kids, and I remember reading A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. I may also have read A Tale of Two Cities as a sophomore in high school, but I can’t be certain. I don’t remember high school so well.

My consternation stems from the fact that though I profess to be a great lover of vivid narrative fiction and excellent writing of all kinds, I have read more than twice as many pages of Piers Anthony than of the greatest novelist ever to write in English.

So, Great Expectations, of which I expected great things. I did not get them, at least not in the way that I expected. Dickens belongs to another time, an era where novelists did not engage in nonlinear narrative or postmodern trickery. In a way, Pynchon has ruined me for Dickens.

But to read Dickens is to be reminded of the unassailable virtues of masterful writing. Foreshadowing, mise-en-scene, settings that are actors in their own right, and sharply defined characters who are consummately confused about their motivations: these are Dickens’ tools, and he uses them incredibly well. From the first graveyard scene where Pip encounters the escaped convict to the ending, when Ms. Havisham wrecks her own rotted wedding tableau and Pip finds that he has cut himself out of everything he valued, Dickens hangs a plot built mainly of coincidences and hidden machinations on the believable inner workings of a few key characters. There are Tom Gargery and Ms. Havisham, each of them in their own ways the model of constancy. Pip is the evanescent youth, oblivious to the harm his actions can do. Estella is a wind-up weapon, set on her path by Ms. Havisham to wreck everyone she meets. In short, it turns out the hype is true: Dickens tells a hell of a story.

If you ever end up reading Great Expectations, make sure to get an edition that includes Dickens’ original downbeat ending as well as the happy ending his publishers insisted he tack on instead.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness

For having seen Apocalypse Now about fifteen times, I had never gotten around to reading the source text. Not that necessarily means anything, because the similarities between Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are mainly superficial; there’s a boat, a river, and a deranged quasi-warlord/philosopher at the other end. There is one other similarity that runs deeper, though it fails to unite the stories so much as set them further apart: discursiveness.

Conrad can be an extremely economical writer. In fact the novella The Secret Sharer packs a huge amount of psychodrama into a short sixty pages or so. The Secret Sharer is about a young sea captain in charge of a restless crew in the Philippines in the early 19th century. On watch one night, he rescues a naked swimmer from the water. The swimmer turns out to be a mate from another British vessel in the same waters. The young captain takes a liking to this man, who is much is age and from a similar background, even after he finds out that the other man killed his captain and swam away to escape.

The remainder of the story involved the captain’s effort to hide the man from his crew and eventually aid his escape, nearly wrecking the ship in the process. Conrad spends a lot of time detailing the numerous ways in which our young captain sells out his ethical and moral obligations as a captain in the British Navy and as a human being, though he leaves unsettled the answer as to quite whether our young captain is feeling restless and bored, insubordinate, or merely self-destructive. For all its brevity, The Secret Sharer is uncommonly richly textured.

The opposite could be said of Heart of Darkness. Speaking through his narrator, Conrad hides everything – motivations, descriptions, actions, even scenery – behind a heavy scrim of words. In fact, since the framing device of the novella is that the story is being told by a man to his friends as they sit becalmed in London Pool waiting for the tide to turn, everything that happens, happens at two removes from the author’s point of view.

Nothing just “happens.” Instead, events and people lurch out of an obfuscating fog of words like mountain peaks through an ocean mist, complicating and deadening what is otherwise a perfectly straightforward story of a trip up a river. And, indeed, words are central to the story. The blandishments of the narrator’s colonial contacts fail to understand anything beyond what is in front of their nose. Half the novel is spent waiting for boats to be repaired, and as they sit in river mud the crew festers in jungle clearings, endlessly talking about trade, fortunes, and the natives upriver.

And the natives are the other key. Set apart from the narrator and made to seem totally alien, Conrad even lets the words “Booga-booga” slip at one point by way of setting his European “heroes” apart from the native Congolese they encounter. Not blessed with the cushioning power of words, the natives instead cause (and largely engage in) the only direct actions taken in the entire novel: shooting, killing, running, dying. It is only as the river boat comes upon Kurtz’ camp in the heart of the Congo that the novella arises from its torpor of glancing allegations and sideways half-gestures to chronicle the moment when everything turns to shit. And as our narrator heads back down the river toward the colonial outposts he recently left behind, the scrim of words comes down once again to hide the blood-slicked deck, the dead crewmen, and the pointlessness of the mission.

I can’t say that I thoroughly enjoyed Heart of Darkness, but sometimes fascinating displays of writing don’t have to be enjoyable.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

Nathaniel Philbrick’s previous book was the tale of the whaleship Essex, which was lost at sea when an 85-foot whale they were attempting to harvest got angry and kicked the ship’s ass. Only eight men survived the wreck, and that after a months-long ordeal lost at sea. The news of this incident, once it made it back to Nantucket, formed the basis of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

This time, Philbrick tackles the story of the U.S. Exploring Expedition, an attempt to do for American navigation what Lewis & Clark did for American orienteering. Although the Expedition was a nominal success, in that the ships did circumnavigate the globe while making detailed sea charts of heretofore uncharted regions of the Pacific and Antarctica, that success came at a very high price.

The book may as well have been called Ego On The High Seas. The eventual captain of the Ex.Ex. (as the Expedition was dubbed), Lt. Charles Wilkes, was a great theorizer and organizer, but an awful captain. A green leader without command experience, a commission, or a stable personality, Wilkes was a martinet who led his motley assortment of ships into disaster after disaster. Through a stunning series of achievements – sailing closer to the South Pole than any other expedition ever had done, charting a number of uncharted South Seas islands, circumnavigating the globe, taking gravity readings around the world and atop remote mountains – the expedition did great things.

But as Philbrick shows, the expedition was barely given halfhearted attention by the Federal government, and Wilkes was made commander mainly by dint of the fact that he made a pest of himself on the issue. Through his poor and sometimes insane leadership, Wilkes managed to lose several ships, alienate all his officers and crew, and get several crew members killed in both shipboard accidents and in attacks by cannibals.

Fans of Neil Stephenson and Patrick O’Brian would enjoy this book as well as In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Both are cracking good sea yarns full of texture and detail about shipboard life in the mid-nineteenth century. Philbrick is lucky that the Ex.Ex. was peopled by memorable personalities, and these characters and the high adventures they happen into keep Sea of Glory going through a few patches of didactic writing.

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos

Many years ago I read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Unlike most people, I actually finished it, but like most people nothing really sank in. Until recently the best I could claim was to have heard of String Theory, but I would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly what it was all about. Did it have something to do with timelines and the synchronicity issues that stem from the communication limitations imposed on the universe by the speed of light? Or was it something to do with particles. (Answers: no, and sort of.)

Brian Greene, a respected physicist and researcher in the esoteric new field of SuperString theory, has now written a book that like Hawking, tackles questions of the nature of the universe we live in, but unlike Hawking, one that is actually readable and explains the issues and debates in a clear and comprehensible manner. A couple years ago, travel writer Bill Bryson wrote a book called A Brief History of Everything in which he took a layman’s approach to the the cutting edge of a number of scientific disciplines; astronomy, cosmology; geology; evolutionary biology; physiology. It was a fascinating tour de force that really did make me feel smarter for having read it.

Greene is an actual scientist, which means that his explanations of modern cosmology are necessarily more detailed than Bryson’s naïve approach. Luckily, he is also an outstanding writer, deft with analogies and metaphors that illuminate the fundamental issues of a given field of study without letting the metaphors get in the way of the facts. For example, his discussion of why using wormholes for time travel is even more difficult than we would think, using Bart, Lisa, and the Quickie-Mart as his subjects, is perfectly lucid and entertaining to boot. Of course! Bart would end up trapped in the future! It’s so obvious!

Moreover, Greene is a generous writer, readily acknowledging when a debate is far from settled. While he does of course have his own opinions, he allows the copious footnotes to carry some the weight of the various controversies that are not particularly urbane to a lay discussion. The footnotes are also where he puts a lot of the math for advanced readers, thank goodness.

I like to think of myself as a generalist, a modern day Renaissance man or natural philosopher with a keen interest in a number of fields. This only gets more difficult as every field of study bifurcates and balkanizes, splitting into mutually unrecognizable sub-sub-subfields each of which require specialized knowledge to navigate. Greene’s book goes a long way toward making the lives of true modern renaissance men - yes, yes, like me (thank you so much!) - that much easier.

The BBC has a story about a production of Big Willie's Troilus and Cressida that is being done in close-to-authentic Tudor English. That's kind of cool: the wordplay makes more sense, the meter probably scans better, and rhymes and puns actually work. The Beeb has a clip of one of the actors reading the same passage in modern English and then in mock Tudor, and the difference is pretty profound. They claim that the dialect is closest to the way some North Carolinans talk today, and although I don't hear it all the way (most folks from the Ashtray State have less of a brogue and straitch aut theyah vowahls more), the similarities are there. I more hear Newfoundland than North Ashtray, but that's just me. Either way it's cool, and the name Ajax becomes a potty joke.

Alright, everybody on the floor. I'm hijacking this blog and flying it to Cuba!

Can't get enough of that Harry Potter? Me neither! The Guardian this week sponsored a contest for readers to re-write a certain crucial scene from the most recent Harry Potter book in the styles of other famous authors. The two winners I can identify are damned hoots!

Chaucer

"At Hogwarte's, schoole of wizardrye,
Unfoldeth drede folle tragedie!
Yonge Ron Weasleye, and classmayt Pottyr:
Fallen preye to 'tvyle rottyr,
Who, throughoute Harry's sadde lyfe,
Hath been the source of muche stryfe;
Hys parente's lyves, rendyred shorte,
By naughtie manne: Voldemorte!

Pottyr and freynd, in't towyr trapp'd,
At mercie of thyss eevil ratte!
What woe! What payn! Unluckiness!
To looke upon poor boye's dystresse.
"Fore all thysse tyme, my plans you've foyled,
Designs divertyd, and schemes despoyled!"
So began the Dark Lorde's awfolle gloatyng,
And standarde badde guy showéboatynge,
"But not todaye, you little shytte!
Payn's true meanynge, thou shalt wytte!"

And then it sort of goes on from there in the same vein and the whole thing is pretty brilliant. As is, by the way, the Irvine Welsh:

The sweat wis lashing oafay Ron; he wis tremblin. Ah wis jist sitting in the Gryffindor Common Room, focusing on ma new Choaclit Frog jizz mag, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried to keep ma attention oan Wendolin the Weird, who wis takin oaf her bikini toap.

- Potts. Ah've goat tae see the Professor, the boy Weasley gasped, shaking his heid.

Ah wanted the radge tae jist fuck oaf ootay ma specs, tae go oan his ain and jist leave us wi wee Wendolin. Oan the ither hand, ah'd be needin a Cheerin Charm n aw before long, n if that cunt went n scored he'd haud oot oan us, the sick basturt.

Doonin the Great Hall, some a they shitey wee Slytherins were hingin aboot.

- Square go, then, speccy cunt! C'moan ya crappin basturts! one ay thum shouted.

- Fuck oaf, ya plukey-faced wee pureblood! Ron snarled as we piled up the spiral staircase wi the wee Slytherin cunts flinging hexes eftir us.

Ah wisnae chuffed at Ron. - Fuckssake, ya fuckin radge. That wis wee Draco - he hings aboot wi they Death Eatin casuals frae Hogsmeade, ah sais

- Harry, the ginger fucker snaps, clenchin his wand tightly - ah want tae see the Professor n ah dinnae give a fuck aboot any cunt or anything else. Goat that?

'The Professor' wis Albus Dumbledore, a teacher whae supplied the Hogwarts scheme. Ah preferred tae score ma tricks fi Albie or his sidekick McGonagall rather than Snape and the Slytherin mob. Better gear, usually.

Pure gold, thanks to the beautiful and talented Gary Farber.

After the fold, some of my overheated fanboy theorizationings about the outcome of the new Harry Potter book. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT click unless you have either read the book or are quite comfortable not caring about knowing important information that could ruin future reading experiences.

Feel free to use the comments as an open Harry Potter thread, with spoilers.
Okay. So we know that Snape killed Dumbledore. But why? And if Snape hates Harry so much, and is such a badass evil guy, why was he intent on not allowing Harry (or Malfoy) to cast any of the Unforgiveable Curses?

I'll tell you: Snape already made an Unbreakable Promise to Dumbledore that he'd do whatever was necessary to keep Harry alive to thwart Voldemort. That's why Hagrid overheard Dumbledore pleading with Snape in the woods. Snape didn't have the upper hand on old Albus, Dumbledore was reminding Snape of the paramount importance of Harry surviving and his remaining a double agent. You think when Snape and Big D were having their showdown on the rooftop that they weren't mind-reading each other like crazy? Snape isn't evil; he's just a really good spy. Moreover, his killing Dumbledore accomplished other ends: it kept Malfoy from taking a life, which would be a very bad thing; it kept Dumbedore from dying more painfully at the hands of a werewolf; it got the Death Eaters out of the castle promptly with a sense of accomplishment, thereby minimizing casualties among the students and other defenders; and now, do you really think anybody is going to question Snape's devotion to Voldemort's cause?

As for the horcrux thingy. Here's my theory: Voldemort was killing Lily Potter to make his seventh horcrux. The spell went wrong and... Harry is a horcrux. It explains his parselmouth ability, his affinity for the wand, part of why Professor Quirrell couldn't touch Harry in book 1, why Harry could read Voldemort's mind... Voldemort doesn't know this, and probably assumes that he only has the six to work with.

The death of Lily Potter also may partly explain why Snape is on the good side (assuming I'm correct about the above). Dollars to donuts that Snape was in love with Lily before James came along and always carried a torch for her. Her death may have marked Snape's apostasy from the Death Eaters. This may also help explain why Snape, who clearly hates Harry, has sucked it up and agreed to try to help him so much over the years.

As for the "missing" horcrux that is the Slytherin amulet... 1) We believe it was in the Black family treasure at one time. Certainly, "RAB" could stand for Romulus Black, Sirius' brother and a Death Eater summarily killed for treason by Voldemort. Is he... really... dead?? 2) There was a mention in either book 5 or 6 of Kreacher having a hoard of Black family stuff, coins and baubles, and wasn't there an amulet/locket thing in that stash? If, say, Romulus hid the horcrux amulet at Grimmauld Place? 3) Why else to have Mundungus Fletcher show up with a bag full of looted items from Grimmauld Place toward the end of Half-Blood Prince, unless he accidentally got ahold of something verrrry important, like say, the missing horcrux??

And doesn't the foregoing mean that Harry has to die for Voldemort to die?

Finallly... how much does J.K. Rowling kick ass for tying together plot points from as far back as Book II and making them crucial parts of the puzzle? That takes some serious author-mojo.

[wik] Also, check out the very long comment thread on my blogcritics posting of my Harry Potter review for more fan theories. Turns out I did manage to get up one of the first reviews in North America, and blogcritics' server proved more resilient than other fansites, which means that my review turned into a fan forum. Cool.

Any review of the latest installment in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, really needs to answer only one question: is it good… enough? Author J.K. Rowling has built up enough of a following with her previous five books that it is a fair bet that anything short of a total disaster will sell millions of copies over the next few weeks, and fans that stayed put through the bloated (but thrilling!) 870 pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will surely flock to give Half-Blood Prince a chance.

I was lucky enough to get my copy the minute (well, almost) it was available, and read it in a marathon speed-reading session that now culminates in the review you are reading. I suppose all those all-nighters I pulled back in college are finally paying off in the real world (unlike, I may add, my actual degree). For the sake of you who have not yet turned the last page, I will refrain from any major plot spoilers. Readers who wish to remain utterly ignorant of everything, however inconsequential or cryptic, should read the book instead. I will only say this: Horcruxes.

So: Is it good enough?

Oh. My. God.

Each volume in the Harry Potter series has grown progressively darker as the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort draws nearer, and Rowling does little to reverse that trend in the new book. In fact, she ups the ante considerably. As much as I hate to draw pat connections like this, Rowling's treatment of the war between Voldemort and his Death Eaters and the rest of the wizarding world is unavoidably coming to resemble, yes, the War on Terror™: people die in random attacks; the Ministry of Magic releases useless pamphlets about protecting yourself against hexes; and people engage in endless discussions about whether they know anyone in the obit section today. But whatever I say, you’re still not going to believe me on this point until you read the book for yourself.

What's striking is that Rowling handles these points of comparison admirably well, raising doubt as to whether the parallels were intentional or whether it's just hard these days to read a novel about an evil cabal set loose on society without coming to those conclusions. Either way, what was once a wondrous world full of Fizzing Whizbees and cutesy pointed hats has become a dark and treacherous place where murderers hide in plain sight and bad things happen to innocent people. Whereas Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’s dementors occasionally cast a shadow over the story, and Books 4 and 5 regularly featured acts of cruelty, now that same pall hangs over the whole novel. That's not to say that Half-Blood Prince is an unrelenting slog from bloodsoaked battle to bloodsoaked battle, but the hints of peril that have been growing since Book 2 now fully dominate the scenery.

This change has happened organically as Rowling's protagonists have grown from naive 11-year-olds to teenagers wrestling with maturity, responsibility, and hormones. Many critics (notably Slate’s Chris Suellentrop) have complained that in past volumes Harry has gotten away with murder (figuratively speaking), making him less a sympathetic character than an overprivileged brat. But now cheating in class and sneaking around at night are no longer larks, and the burdens that Rowling gives Harry to shoulder more than make up for his special treatment. In Half Blood Prince, actions now have real consequences.

Now that the main characters are fully adolescent (16 years old in this volume), the interpersonal relationships have become much thornier than they were in past novels; gone are the halcyon days of butterbeer and wizard chess. Even more than in Book 5, Rowling spends a great deal of Half-Blood Prince deepening the relationships between Harry and those around him: Hermione, Ron and Ginny Weasly, Hagrid, Snape, Malfoy, Dumbledore, and others. There are still plenty of cute touches and light moments, but even they have other sides to them: Professor Trelawney, outraged that she must share teaching duties with a centaur, has taken to raiding the kitchen's sherry stock; The Weasley twins have opened their joke shop, but some of their products aren't necessarily all that funny sometimes.

Although the nominal plot of the book concerns Harry's search for the "half-blood prince," the real action takes place in two arenas. The first is Harry's growing awareness of his part in the fight against Voldemort, and his struggles with the reality that he must be on guard at all times. This leads him to make decisions that sometimes hurt his closest friends and allies, and ultimately decides the course of the plot. Second, someone at Hogwarts wants someone else dead, but nobody knows who.

The major themes of this story are duty, obligation, and loyalty. The very first chapter upsets what we think we know about some major players and the side they are one, and throughout the book loyalties are tested and alliances formed, all against the backdrop of Voldemort's growing power and the swelling ranks of the Death Eaters. The second half of the book gives Rowling an opportunity to show off the depth of the world she has created, as characters that started out as cute little cutouts now share in pain, elation, rage, grief, and shame. If this series ever was really for children, it has now grown into fully realized and emotionally complicated material suitable for adolescents not much younger than the characters themselves.

At nearly 300 pages shorter than the just-previous release, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince is tighter, and its impact more profound, than the last two books. However, Rowling could still use an editor to clean up some of her messier sentences and paragraphs. Since this installment turns more on inner struggles and subtle (though frantic) infighting than the past volumes, some of the talkier parts do lose focus somewhat. Rowling still has not managed to make everything pull together fully within the bounds of the single installment, leaving some plot threads (as well as characters like Remus Lupin and Tonks) to hover around the margins too long. But these are forgiveable sins, considering that Rowling has finally managed to hang her rapidly growing tale on a few key unifying themes. Everything that has happened from Books 1 through 5 has been tied in to the main plot and the entire train is picking up speed. By the end of Half-Blood Prince the story is hurtling forward from astounding revelation to astounding revelation, some of which you sort of saw coming, some of which you really, really didn't.

So, yes. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is good enough, and then a great deal better than that. While she still needs an editor like Ted Kennedy needs a 40-day chip, Rowling only raises the stakes in what has become one of the biggest phenomena in publishing since the invention of moveable type. She has admirably constructed a penultimate chapter that sets the table for the final showdown we've all been waiting for since the first book, and leaves the action at just the right point to have her millions of fans clamoring for the final installment.

If you have been waiting for this for months, rest assured: this is the series’ The Empire Strikes Back. The stakes are even higher and the surprises bigger than you imagine, and despite the usual problems of editing and focus, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince delivers the goods. But... whatever happened to Grimmauld Place?

Thank you ladies and gentlemen; and now, to bed.

I was hoping in this space to offer an enthusiastic review of Ray Charles' 1984 album of country duets, Friendship, recently reissued by Sony Legacy. Certainly, with guests like George Jones, Chet Atkins, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash and Ricky Skaggs it's almost a sure thing that I would love it.

But I can't. Unfortunately, Sony's proprietary Digital Rights Management scheme has thus far prevented me from hearing the music on the disc. These days I mainly listen to music in three places: on my computer as quiet office background listening, and more seriously on my Ipod and on my car's cd player. So far, my car stereo won't even read the disc, so no go there. The disc informs me that to play Friendship on my computer, I must first let the CD install proprietary Sony software that will monitor and limit the number of copies of any kind I can make of the music thereon. This is distateful at best (even more so if I had bought this rather than gotten a review copy), but I want to hear this record: I’ll bite. Unfortunately, my computers, work or home, won't just play the music even after installing the software; instead, rather than the little player starting up upon disc insertion, I must go into the disc's menus to find the proper .exe file to make it work. And forget about using Windows Media, Real, itunes, or other media software to play it; you must use the disc's own jukebox software only.

Similarly, to put the music on my IPod requires that I download further software, in this case ActiveX 9. I have the choice of ripping to a proprietary Sony audio format (ATRAC) or .wma. Given that Sony promises that ATRAC is "technology that compresses your music so efficiently it’s hard to detect the difference," and given that .wma's audio quality isn't so hot either, Forget all that. My ears are good enough to hear the high-level compression dulling the hi-hat cymbal in some mp3s, so it’s a cinch that “hard to detect” isn’t going to cut the fricking mustard. In fact, I have tried – and failed – to get legitimately copied .wma versions of the album’s tracks onto my Ipod. Guess what: access denied.

Since it is now clear that I have a choice between listening to Friendship on small speakers at low volume in my office while I work (which is no way to form a serious opinion) or not hearing it at all, I am going to pick a third option: chuck Friendship in the trash and make sure never to pick up one of Sony’s pathetic, insulting, crippled, DRMed jokes again.

But I'm sure that the album itself is a winner.

A few weeks ago I got it into my head to write a piece about popular music and political violence. You know, from "John Brown's Body" up through Bob Dylan's Masters of War and Rage Against The Machine's Bomb Track, plus Irish songs like "Rising of the Moon," and Fela Kuti too. But to do justice to a piece like that would really take a mound of sociological and demographic data that I neither have, nor would gladly research and cook down just to put on the interweb for free. So the piece I had in mind lolled and languished, half-started and nowhere near any conclusions. Everything I grasped at dissolved into air.

The problem is at the end of the day bullets have killed approximately a billion more people than guitars have. Including the unfortunate cases of former Yardbird Keith Relf and former Shadow John Rostill, both electrocuted while playing the guitar, I think the score is something like bullets: a billion, guitars: threeish. That disparity has to be accounted for. It seems that words draw less blood than weapons, and the very question of how to relate music to violence is a difficult one to frame. As Frank Zappa said, music is just decorated bits of time.

But then again that is letting musicians off the hook too easily. Sometimes music can matter, or Union soldiers wouldn’t have sung an anthem to a domestic terrorist (“John Brown’s Body”) when they marched into battle against the Confederacy.

The reason I started the now defunct piece in the first place was because of M.I.A. M.I.A. is a 28 year old conceptual artist from London who came by a secondhand drum machine and started creating beats and laying down tracks. Those tracks eventually became an album, Arular, that has become a chart hit in the UK and a critical sensation on this side of the Atlantic.

M.I.A.'s real name is Maya Arulpragasam. She was born in Sri Lanka and grew up dodging bullets and capture by the Sri Lankan army before escaping to London with her parents at age 11. She spent her teenage years in some truly dire London council estates (that's "the projects") and at first found she could not start school because her English was not good enough. Safe to say, she has had an "interesting" life, if by "interesting" you mean dangerous, bizarre, and difficult. The nickname “M.I.A.” is a double entendre which in London is understood to primarily mean “Missing in Acton,” Acton being (I am told) the council estate she grew up in.

As for “Arular,” that’s her father, a former member of the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan dissident group recognized as a terrorist group by several nations including the United States. This is the reason for her family’s flight from Sri Lanka and the direct inspiration for a good amount of her music and artwork.

M.I.A.’s music amalgamates an entire world's beats into one exhilarating stew. Imagine a Sri Lankan woman from London rapping Jamaican dancehall style over Atlanta crunk spiced with Indian bhangra and you get the picture. Her debut single "Galang" is a rattling minor masterpiece that some people have hailed as the harbinger of a new era of world music. And it does seem that M.I.A.’s naïve newcomer approach has resulted in a truly “world” music that does not make distinctions between bhangra, crunk, baile, dancehall, and techno.

However, I have a problem.
More to the point, I wonder why other critics don't see a problem with the daughter of (what some would call) a terrorist appropriating the rhetoric and imagery of war and terrorism for the sake of pop music? Watch the video for "Galang" here and then come back. It's actually worth it; the song really grows on you. I'll wait.

Check it out. Graffiti, stencils, spraycans, chainlink fences, tigers, tanks, Molotov cocktails, Hueys, burning palm trees, and bombs. Being that M.I.A. grew up in a war-torn nation and then saw the worst of what Margaret Thatcher's England had to offer newcomers, it's not particularly surprising that she draws her inspiration from what she's seen. But something about how she, a grown woman, deploys this imagery of war and suffering comes across to me as unspeakably crass. You see, the Tamil Tigers invented the suicide vest and the modern practice of suicide bombing, and in light of this, lyrics like "I got the bombs to make you blow" don't read as ambiguously political party starters. They read - whether M.I.A. meant them this way or not - like half-assed slogans from someone who hasn’t thoroughly thought through the politics of the suicide vest. Given her past, I seriously doubt that's the case, which makes her lyrics all the more puzzling.

It is possible for political music to be fatuous. For example, Madonna cemented her slide into cartoonish irrelevance on stage at Live8 with the cry, "Aah you ready foh a REVOLUTION?!?" and "We Are The World" was a study in smug self-contradiction. But on "Galang," M.I.A. does the opposite, turning a slight but entertaining slice of clangy pop music into something strange and slightly disturbing.

Some critics have discussed M.I.A.’s background, but very few of them have addressed the contradictions she seems to embody. The closest anyone has come has been Robert Christgau writing in the Village Voice:

Sinhalese depredations have been atrocious. But my reading suggests that more Sri Lankan Tamils want equality than want Eelam, and from this distance I'm not pro-LTTE. Hence I strongly advise fellow journalists to refrain from applying "freedom fighter" and other cheap honorifics to M.I.A.'s dad. But I also advise them to avoid the cheaper tack taken in last week's Voice by Simon Reynolds: "Don't let M.I.A.'s brown skin throw you off: She's got no more real connection with the favela funksters than Prince Harry." Not just because brown skin is always real, but because M.I.A.'s documentable experience connects her to world poverty in a way few Western whites can grasp. Moreover, beyond a link now apparently deleted from her website to a dubious Tamil tsunami relief organization, I see no sign that she supports the Tigers. She obsesses on them; she thinks they get a raw deal. But without question she knows they do bad things and struggles with that. The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda--the same stuff that got her nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2001. They're now assumed to be incendiary because, unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans are assumed to be stupid.

M.I.A. has no consistent political program and it's foolish to expect one of her. Instead she feels the honorable compulsion to make art out of her contradictions. The obscure particulars of those contradictions compel anyone moved by her music to give them some thought, if only for an ignorant moment--to recognize and somehow account for them. In these perilous, escapist days, that alone is quite a lot.

I respect Robert Christgau, and much of what he writes above is dead on the money. But I feel he gives M.I.A. too much leeway. By minimizing the symbolic freight carried by pastel tigers and burning palms, he trivializes both M.I.A.'s art and experiences and the real world events those stenciled images refer to. Moreover, by simultaneously assuming that M.I.A. is fully in charge of how these symbols are deployed, and arguing that these pastels (and the rest of Arular) show that she is undoubtedly deeply conflicted about South Asia's history of violence, he gets to have it both ways.

But "[G]uns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians" can be both empty images and incendiary in exactly the same way Che Guevara or Red Army t-shirts can, or swastikas, or the idiot slogan that from time to time appeared on blackboards in my high school: “The south will rise again!” Similarly, M.I.A. can namecheck the PLO, the Tigers, and bombs to make you blow. But this duality doesn’t any of these things more profound or less crass.

Whether or not M.I.A. is using them as mere decoration, people still have the right to ask if there’s something more for these images to say. Journalists have been having a joyous field day with M.I.A.'s exotic background, and rock fans are stupid. But if we the listeners have to confront the contradictions in M.I.A.'s music, that goes triple for M.I.A. herself given that those contradictions originate in a war whose participants have contributed, however inadvertently, to the ongoing misery that rocks Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and now London.

A grenade is a grenade, a tank is a tank, and terrorism isn't much more fun in a club track then it is on stage at a white seperatist convention. M.I.A. is using political violence for her own artistic ends, and it's impossible to tell what - or how unserious - those ends are. In a way, political violence is the "momma joke" of the music world. Christgau wants to give her a pass for that; my gut won't let me.

I'm not here to indict M.I.A. for anything; Christgau is right that she doesn't come out and endorse the Tamil Tigers at any point. I also agree that it’s vanishingly unlikely that she has any designs on using her music as a PR campaign for such a cause. Moreover, I really like "Galang" a lot. But to use terrorism and revolutionary insurgency in the service of pop music in this day and age is either a pop-culture triumph of the highest order or a tasteless and ill-considered act of exploitation, and I can't for the life of me figure out which one.

[wik] This post also appears on blogcritics. All good sentient creatures read blogcritics.org daily for the latest in entertainment and other news, opinions, and kvetching. You are sentient... aren't you?

I see from the comments that few people got the point of my last post. Well, you got the point about Ebbers, fine, but not my little gedeankenexperiment. I am glad that all of you are upstanding, law-abiding boy scouts. I am an upstanding, law-abiding boy scout. I'm with you.

I know that none of you would want to steal from the little people, or leave the sick and hungry old without their pensions. The shame of being incarcerated for something like fraud would bring you to your knees. You don't even get the street cred of a felony murder rap. Fine.

Let's assume that some perverse trillionaire makes you an offer. He will staff an unused prison with felons on loan from the penal system. He will hire guards. He'll buy a set of free weights and subscribe to basic cable. How much money would you need to stay for three years in this facility that is in every respect just like a minimum security federal prison except that when its all over, you don't have a police record to sully your good name?

How much for a similarly staffed and equipped facility that instead models a federal maximum security prison?

What is the minimum amount that would make you say, "All right. I will risk my ass for that kind of money?"

The Holy Father may not approve of the Harry Potter books. But I am eagerly awaiting the arrival by parcel post on Saturday of my copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I spent too much time explaining to the more religious members of my family why D&D was not actually Satan worship with dice to worry about what a German thinks of the morality of a fantasy novel.

For those interested in some of the (skimpy) information available about book six, you can go here and here. It's not much - who'd a thunk that scholastic books could keep a secret better than the CIA? Maybe we should put them in charge.

Via loyal reader #0017, EDog, we are made aware of two developments with Google worth checking out.

First: Gizoogle. Get dizzle with the gizzle, bizzle! Fo shizzle!

Also: Welcome to erf. Download Google Earth now, and mortgage hours of your life. Google has aggregated a planet's worth of satellite maps into one globe simulation that you can navigate at will. Zoom in, zoom out, tilt, get driving directions and watch turn-by-turn instructions and a bright purple line spread out across a richly detailed terrain map. I can see my house from here. I can see my parents' house from here. I can see the Drug Van parked outside Chainsaw Mick's place, from an application on my computer desktop! The future, folks, is here.

I recently kicked off a review of a Don Byron album by complaining about how hard it can be to review albums in genres whose followers are particularly devoted to their cause. Well, before proceeding I would like it to be known that I am wearing sackcloth, rolling myself in ashes, and beating my head repeatedly into the brick wall out behind CBGB, ‘cuz it’s Punk Rock Reviewin’ Time! Outraged jazz fans might lob flaming emails in my direction if I dare to compare Greg Osby to Coleman Hawkins. But be stupid about punk in the wrong room, and you might find yourself (so I fancy) running for your life.

The object of today’s scrutiny is the pretty good sophomore effort from Roger Miret & The Disasters, titled 1984 (2005; Epitaph). According to Miret, “’1984,’ was originally written about 1982. But the chorus ‘1982’ doesn’t sound as good as ‘1984.’” Ok, then. Orwellian it ain’t, for a change.

Roger Miret was born to Cuban immigrants fleeing Castro's Cuba, and grew up on New York's Lower East Side. Since 1982 he has been the frontman of the great New York hardcore band Agnostic Front (except for those couple years in jail). It seems that despite his spotless hardcore credentials, Roger has a relatively softer side to him, because on 1984 he trades the brutal thrash of NYC hardcore for a more melodic but no less raucous street-punk sound. Plenty of punk bands these days do the football-chant chorus thing, but Miret, having decades of experience on the young pikers (and having been around when the thing began), generally does it better.

Part of the difference is that Miret knows how to write a song. 1984 is full of loud guitars, fast tempos, shouted “oi!”s, and aggressive melodies, and with its thirteen songs clocking in just under 30 minutes, nothing hangs around long enough to get old. But the rest of the difference is that Roger Miret is older and smarter. Street punk isn’t all that interesting a genre without good stories to tell, and Miret has 25 years of experience behind his songs.

Lyrically, 1984 is about the glory years of oi, the bad old days when Times Square was about porno and New York seemed to be imploding. Songs like “Hooligans,” “New York City” and “Lower East Side” are shouts out to the kids of 1982, and others like “Kill for Cash,” “Shot Stabbed and Fooled” and “Turncoat” revisit the ground-level political themes of betrayal and responsibility that have been Miret’s mainstays for years. But Miret sings with the earned wisdom and nostalgia of someone who’s seen it all. The lyrics to “New York City” go:

New York City, a city so great
Her pride, her beauty so pure
Her birth of my soul, so honest, so strong
Her mecca – how I adore

As I child I remember her dark alleyways
Where we learned how to fight
And we learned to be brave

We played handball all day and kissed girls all night
Fought off rival gangs
How we were so alive

I grew older and watched the neighborhood change
I saw my friends perish
To ruthless violent ends

I remember just yesterday’s city streetlights
Where the boys hung all night
And the gang fought with pride – in New York City.

Outside the world of activist punk, out where people have desk jobs and Toyotas, the world doesn’t seem as dark and desperate as this. Not, at least, in the same hope-againt-hope, true-grit, darkess-at-the-edge-of-town sense. Not every corporation is actively plotting to take your home (well, not yet), not every person has to scrabble for every nickel, and not every boss has secret plans to impoverish your neighborhood. People don’t get stabbed all that often.

But to the same degree that Straight Outta Compton was actually about how some dumbass teenagers with uncommon talent for marketing sold drugs and shot other gangs up, 1984 is about the dedicated individuals who remember where they came from and find in punk rock the inspiration they need to keep fighting the good fight. In this, it’s not that different from the last five Rancid albums or whatever the kids are playing down at the V.F.W. hall tonight. But Rancid get boring, the kids have no talent, and Roger Miret has 13 good songs, 30 minutes, and 25 years of sticking to his guns.

And it is the “sticking to his guns” part that makes Roger Miret & The Disasters a little more interesting than the thousand other worthy street-punkers out there from the Dropkick Murphys to the Unseen. With Agnostic Front, Miret has been actively involved in political music since 1982, and considering his background he has come by his activism honestly

As AF’s website puts it,

In today's civilization, people continue to suffer undergoing the grief, corruption, oppression and exploitation without a way to elude their troubles. Many have lived through these problems for ages, and the moment one tries to fight for what they believe is right, the elite brings them down and their voices are disregarded. Since 1982, AGNOSTIC FRONT has helped get these messages across to the populace to help solve these problems through socially driven music known as “Hardcore.”

It is easy to scoff at a band who claim to help solve problems through their music. After all, last Saturday Bob Geldof got Paul McCartney to play with U2, and here it is Wednesday already and Africa is still a mess.

But it takes a certain kind of bullheaded integrity and tenacity to fight the good fight for twenty-five years in the face of Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, gentrification, yuppification, and the coming of the abomination known as Emo-core. Despite the fact that AF’s manifesto isn’t incredibly articulate, Miret’s songs are. Generally speaking, his politics and causes are those of the street, of the Irish immigrants of the last century and of the Latino immigrants of this one; justice, loyalty, fair policing, giving people a break, and taking care of one’s own.

Populism as a political mode is custom made for punk rock, and Miret's music is compelling in a Studs Lonigan way. That his cause seems a little quixotic is unavoidable as true old-Left style social activists have been supplanted by a bunch of talkers spouting paranoid rants and conspiracy theories. Whatever else you might say about them, unions have fed more people than Moveon.org ever will. It also helps that Miret’s songs are born of personal experience rather than youthful idealism, which is the difference between the old neighborhood organizer trading punches inside City Hall and the idiot kid burning the flag outside.

If through 1984 Miret wins more fans for his music and good fight he fights (even if it’s not my fight), great. Thanks to him and the scene he helped found, generations of hardcore fans have grown up understanding the power of grassroots organizing, how to put on a show in your garage and make a few bucks doing it, and how to deal with the cops when they come around. For that alone it is a sure bet that Roger Miret has done more good in the world than Bob Geldof, Bono, and “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” put together.

www.epitaph.com

(This post also appears at blogcritics.org. All good sentient beings get their entertainment news and reporting from blogcritics.org. You are sentient, aren't you? You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?... You are watching television. You see a wasp crawling on your arm. What do you do?)

Some albums are not easy to review. This is especially true in genres that reward a great deal of inside knowledge such as opera, jazz, or indie rock. God forbid the reviewer ignore the soprano’s nods to Maria Callas, the wayward Raincoats cover, or the faint soupçon of early Sun Ra suffusing the latest and greatest release to cross your desk. Furthermore, I believe it is the job of a good reviewer to educate, and it is difficult to do that when you yourself have to learn as you go along. None of us are omniscient even though we would all like to be. But I suppose that if learning as I teach is good enough for the Baltimore public school district, it’s good enough for me.

My only firsthand knowledge of jazz clarinetist Don Byron comes from his work on Bill Frisell’s excellent album Have a Little Faith. On that record, Frisell remade various landmarks of American music in his own image: Madonna’s “Live to Tell,” Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” Aaron Copeland’s “Billy The Kid Suite,” and John Philip Sousa’s “The Washington Post March” all got the Frisell treatment. In my opinion Don Byron was a major reason that album worked. In his hands, the clarinet was by turns dark and comic, regal and frivolous. He made the “Washington Post March” into a kid’s parade and Copeland’s “Open Prairie” into an empty and contemplative quiet before the storm. It was far more than I had come to expect from jazz clarinet, whose practitioners generally have to struggle with avoiding lazy comparisons to Benny Goodman.

But Don Byron doesn’t have to worry about sounding like the Father of Swing. His music contains nods from everything from klezmer to the militant spoken word funk of Gil Scott-Heron, and (appropriately, considering these two influences) has been for years a mainstay of the New York City downtown jazz scene. He has played with everyone from The Duke Ellington Orchestra to Vernon Reid and counts Stravinsky among his key inspirations. Although he can pull out a good old diatonic line when he wants to, his playing more frequently splits the difference between cerebral post-bop complexity and Loony Tunes.

On his new album, Ivey-Divey, Byron tackles the music and legacy of the great saxophonist Lester Young. Taking a cue from a bassless trio Young played with for a time, Byron recorded much of the album with young piano wonder Jason Moran and telepathic drummer Jack DeJohnette. Freed from the stabilizing effect of a bass player, the trio are free to range from swing to clouds of notes at will, which they do with impressive ease. On a few tracks the trio are joined by bassist Lonnie Plaxico and trumpeter Ralph Alessi, additions that complement rather than blunt the trio’s impulses toward loose swinging.

That’s a funny word, “loose,” because at no point on Ivey-Divey do the players lose the beat or lay back into a groove. Instead, the players are loose like a great double-play combo are loose: everything locks into place in a ballet of perfectly timed split-second moves that look effortless but are in fact halfway superhuman. This is fitting, because Lester Young was the Godfather of loose. A player of enormous talent and discipline, he played softly, gracefully, and yet forcefully. The surface attractions of his style masked a deep cerebral side that only emerges when you look closely at the careful harmonic and melodic composition of his solos. Moreover, Young seemed to make things fun for everyone playing with him, even when he played ugly.

Fittingly, Ivey-Divey is a fun record. On the four tunes taken from the Lester Young repertoire, “I Want To Be Happy,” “Somebody Loves Me,” “I Cover the Waterfront” and “I’ve Found a New Baby,” the trio dig in with verve and wit, with Moran scattering harmonies underneath Byron’s fleetfooted lines as DeJohnette holds them both together. On these selections, Byron sticks to a relatively tonal Lester Young script for the most part, only moving into growly harmonics and outside sounds on “I’ve Found a New Baby” and an alternate take of “Somebody Loves Me.” But where Young would have laid back Byron steps into space, transforming lines reminiscent of Young into energetic outbursts. For all Byron’s pyrotechnics, all four Young pieces are anchored by Moran and DeJohnette to a sense of lighthearted and generous… fun.

The rest of the album revisits Lester Young’s legacy from varying points of view. But more than simply being a lesson album: Don Byron Plays The Great Lester Young, the band bring Young’s influence to the table as just one ingredient of their sound. Sometimes the connection is literal: Byron picks up the tenor saxophone to lay down some lines a la Lester on “The Goon Drag” (which Young recorded in 1941). But on other cuts like quartet readings of Miles Davis’ “Freddie Freeloader” and “In A Silent Way,” the group walk a line between Davis’ chilly cool, Young’s gentle beauty, and Byron’s own playful mania before taking off in unexpected directions. “In A Silent Way” also features Byron on the bass clarinet in a groovy turn that evokes Bennie Maupin’s work on Davis’ Bitches Brew. (Jack DeJohnette actually played on Bitches Brew and helps out by hinting at the “chakaCHAKAchakaCHAKA” groove he laid down on cuts like “Pharoah’s Dance.)

Also intriguing are the four Byron originals. “Leopold, Leopold” is an homage to long-time Loony Tunes conductor Leopold Stokowski (and to Bugs Bunny) that chugs along with manic energy contrasts nicely with the gently swinging “Lefty Teachers At Home.” Both of these cuts also appeared in the PBS documentary “Strange Fruit.” The other two originals, the contemplative “HIMM” and “Abie The Fisherman” round out the collection.

While I am not necessarily in a position to pass judgment on the finer, obscurantist points of Don Byron paying homage to Lester Young, I can definitely pass judgment on the album as a whole. As the man said, “I know what I like.” Since I am not a hardcore jazzhead, one trio record can often sound pretty much like the next, but Byron and company have made a distinctive and original album that stands head and shoulders above the crowd. I’m sure the hardcore are already hard at work elucidating for me what I’ve missed and what I’ve gotten wrong, and I apologize in advance for any sins of commission, but the bottom line is that Don Byron makes music that, like the old Loony Tunes shorts, rewards listeners on many levels at once.

This post also appears at blogcritics.org, where all sentient life forms get their up to the minute entertainment news and opinions. You are sentient, aren't you?

Since my cobloggers here seem intent on talking about stuff like boring old politics, I am going to hew to my usual tactic of changing the subject entirely. (With one dangerous and discussion-sparking aside to Buckethead: I smell what you're cooking regarding fetal rights, but arguing that a nine-month fetus is a person so therefore a one-month fetus is logically so strikes me as a perfect expression of the sorites paradox. I am sympathetic to your argument but don't think it's as clear-cut as you do.)

So. To business.

Record label retrospectives can often be spotty affairs – many labels who put out 10- 20- or 25th anniversary discs ought to be arrested for public self-pleasuring. I can think of a couple recent cases where outstanding labels with otherwise sterling reputations have sold out their big anniversary compilations in the name of pushing mediocre current releases, a shortsighted move that makes the whole affair a waste of time and good money.

On the other side of the coin is the retrospective that tries too hard to be good. A prime example is an old Matador set my wife has. Whoever put it together chose well; all Matador’s big names and proud moments are spread over three discs. But there is one drawback: Matador have hewed to their guiding vision with almost Puritanical devotion. Hearing so much of the label’s self-chosen best moments in super-duper indie rock integrity in one place is overwhelming, sort of like eating two pounds of exquisitely delicious pulled pork barbecue in one sitting. (I don’t recommend trying this; my last barbecue bacchanal put me down for 24 hours, and I still can’t listen to Superchunk without bolting from the room.)

Concord Picante has recently decided to celebrate their 25th anniversary with a 4-cd collection celebrating their quarter century at the top of the Latin-jazz heap, and it turns out they have put out a lot of really good stuff. As a relative newcomer to the wonders of Latin Jazz, I have to say that this collection is a great place to start learning. If the single-disc sampler I received is any indication, Concord Picante have not only managed to sum a quarter century but have done so without becoming didactic, boring, or presentist. The full set’s four discs seem like the right length to contain 25 years of music of this variety and uniformly high quality.

The challenge for Concord Picante is that Latin Jazz is sometimes seen as being a niche market within a niche market. However the sampler proves the opposite, showcasing a surprisingly diverse (and excellent) collection of recordings by artists from all over the Americas. Tito Puente is of course well represented, but so are other Latin music eminences like Pete Escovedo and Eddie Palmieri. Vibraphone great Cal Tjader is here too (his debut with the label won the label its first Grammy in 1980), as well as Concord Picante stalwarts like the great conguero Poncho Sanchez’ groovy soul-jazz-blues-Latin hybrid, the sparkling Brazilian bossa nova of guitarist Charlie Byrd, and the hot Brazilian dance of Tania Maria. On the jazzier side, Concord Picante offers recordings by reggae-tinged Jamaican keyboardist Monty Alexander and harmonica great Hendrik Meurkens, and many more. Far from being a niche product, it seems that in the hands of Concord Picante “Latin Jazz” is almost anything they want it to be as long as it’s got a little duende, a little especia.

As I’ve gotten older, my tastes in music have changed. Somehow Jethro Tull don’t seem as deep as they used to, and I no longer think it’s quite as funny to put together a one-hour set of Japanese noise rock, TV show themes, and Tibetan throat singing. I still like these things (well, not so much the Tull), but I have matured into a less smugly elitist music fan. Now I want something with some teeth, something I can dance to, something with great playing that I haven’t necessarily heard a million times. Right now for me, Latin Jazz is filling that role to perfection. The Concord Picante box set sampler hasn’t left the cd player in my house for three weeks, and it is the most played album of late on my ipod too. That my wife, whose tastes are wildly different from mine (Tracy Chapman versus Frank Zappa), also digs the Concord Picante indicates that there’s really something here for everyone.

One final thought. Record reviewers are in an interesting position. Lester Bangs once observed that the fact that most of the music reviewers come by is free of charge, meaning they are under less of an obligation to care whether it’s any good. When you buy an album, your investment – however small – biases you toward finding something of value in it. On the other hand, getting lots of music for free tends to make you bored and jaded. With this in mind, I am prepared to give the Concord Picante 25th Anniversary Collection the highest possible recommendation any reviewer can: it’s so good, I’m buying my own copy.

This review also appears, without the political parts, at blogcritics.org.

There are two publications whose obituaries I always read. The Economist, which does a single obituary as a full page item to close each issue, always provides interesting facts about important, though sometimes little-known, people of our time.

And then, there's the Telegraph, which does the same, but with taglines such as this:

William Donaldson

Wykehamist pimp, crack fiend and adulterer who created Henry Root and produced Beyond the Fringe.
27 Jun 2005

How, I ask myself, could I not read such a death notice?

Last night, some folks got together to drink and play pool. Some took in dinner and a movie. Other people went to a ballgame, or had a clambake, or fought a couple guys before passing out, or dealt out a few hands of Texas Hold 'Em.

Last night my buddy Brendan came over and we all made flavored vodka. We decided to go the low road, utilizing a theory first promulgated by the website Oh My God It Burns! which posits that a home water filtration unit (such as a Brita filter pitcher) can remove the impurities from cut-rate vodka and render it the near-equal of top-shelf brands.

What we found was that filtering a bottle of cheap (plastic-bottle store-brand distilled with pride in Somerville, Massachusetts) grain vodka five times does in fact remove nearly all the nasty smell, aftertaste, and burn, making it almost but not quite as delicious as the magically smooth Luksosowa brand potato vodka we used as a control. Although a faint hint of the gluey flavor of cheap vodka remains, the newly enspiffened and filtered liquor is nevertheless the full equal of Skyy, Stoli, or Ketel One, and will work very nicely once infused. Brendan had already made some raspberry and lemon vodkas, both of which were delicious in lemonade.

We ended up making four different vodkas: pepper, orange, ginger, and cranberry. Think about it! Instant seabreezes with just soda water! Orange vodka in cream soda! Ginger vodka in ginger ale! And the by-now hackneyed spicy martini!

We expect the pepper and cranberry vodkas to be ready within a few days based on past experience. The orange zest can sit in the vodka for months, though we anticipate maximum flavor extraction to be achieved in a month or so, possibly sooner. The ginger vodka is a total toss-up, (just a little ginger flavor so far) and I expect I will end up adding another quarter cup or so of grated fresh ginger to the 500ml of vodka and quarter cup of sliced ginger already in the jar. For the pepper vodka we chose one lone poblano pepper. Both Brendan and I have tried making pepper vodka in the past, and have learned caution accordingly.

My first attempt at pepper vodka used 750ml of Luksosowa and three fresh cayenne peppers fresh from Chainsaw Mick's garden. Within three days the vodka had turned green and was spicy enough to kill a lesser man. I enjoyed every drop of that vodka in a succession of my own patented "filthy" martinis, the recipe for which follows, until I got to the dregs. It seems that capsaicin, the active heat ingredient in chili peppers, is both alcohol soluble and heavier than vodka. The last martini from that bottle nearly killed me, but through generous applications of ancillary oral analgesics (shots of Jim Beam) I managed to get through it. Brendan's prior experiences were similar, so for this new iteration we chose to employ the mild and flavorful poblano chile. If after 48 hours the vodka has not taken on any heat, I can always drop in a leftover cayenne for a little while to kick it up, but I expect I won't have to.

We also chose to try to make our vodkas extremely concentrated, so that when the infusions are ready we can dilute them down with freshly filtered cheapo liquor to a usable strength. We have future plans for combo infusions, say, ginger and lemongrass or orange and vanilla. I am hoping to try out more savory flavors as well like cinammon, clove, and cardamon. If anybody has any hott drink ideas, please send them along. Perhaps I could substitute dark rum for the vodka in the last instance and make insta-mulled cider when winter comes. Nummy-num-num-num.

So that was my Saturday night. Any of my friends living nearby can expect fancy-pants liquor for Festivus this year.

Filthy Martini

2 oz. ice-cold pepper vodka
dash chilled dry vermouth
2 tsp chilled green olive juice
1 Tbsp chilled kosher pickle juice (use fermented pickle juice with live cultures, not just vinegar pickles)
2 green olives

In a shaker, pour vermouth over ice and drain, leaving behind only a residue. Add vodka and olive and pickle juice, and shake or stir as desired. Strain into martini glass and garnish with olives.

This installment of my ongoing bread-blogging is about mediocrity. Although I sometimes forget it, it is entirely possible for a highly reputed artisan bakery to be nothing more mediocre.

I don't mean to say bad. Bad bread is another thing entirely, and usually comes as a gummy sliced loaf touted as "whole grain" but packed full of lethicin and additives to make the texture over as something akin to Wonder Bread. A loaf of oversweetened spongy whole wheat bread studded with toothbreaking seeds is as appetizing as cat vomit, especially for $4 a loaf for the Pepperidge Farm and Cape Cod offerings at my local Stop & Shop. No, my object today is mediocre bread.

This morning I took my weekly summer jaunt into the yuppie haven of Marblehead to hit the weekly farmers' market. While stocking up on six different kinds of greens, locally made cheeses and the first beets of the season, I picked up what looked like a beautiful baguette with which to enjoy the aforementioned cheese. I specifically chose this baguette because another vendor at the market recommended them as the "best bread in Boston."

I now know that this statement is not only a lie but also a calumny and an act of treachery.

A baguette is among the very simplest of doughs: nothing but water, flour, yeast, and salt gently kneaded together to form a fairly soft mass without a great deal of strength. True baguette dough is always made one of two ways: with a pate fermentee, which is basically yesterday's dough left overnight and incorporated into today's bake; or a poolish, which is a mix of equal weights flour and water with a tiny amount of commercial (or wild) yeast added and left to stand overnight to ripen. Either method results in a slow-rising dough that contains a surprising depth of flavor. Pate fermentee generally contributes a slightly sour note to the loaf, where poolish is slightly more sweet and wheaty tasting. Either way, you end up with a very flavorful loaf.

Like the best French recipes, making a baguette is simple but not easy. There is a highly refined set of techniques for rising, shaping, slashing, and baking that helps achieve desired result.

And what is that desired result? You want a caramel-brown and very crisp crust with well-defined flaps rising from where you slashed the loaf, a proper ratio of crust to crumb (the baguette must be neither to fat nor too skinny), and a crumb that is creamy yellow in color and rather springy and interspersed randomly with a lattice of holes ranging from smaller than your pinky tip to the size of a large marble. No holes or larger holes means you need to work on your shaping technique and possibly on your dough formula.

These simple ingredients, when handled according to the best techniques, add up to one of the culinary wonders of the world. I have bought French baguettes in Paris that rank among the very best things I have ever tasted, and despite the fact that baguettes made here in the USA can never quite replicate the fleeting and transcendent flavors of their French counterparts, they can come awfully close to equalling this perfection.

So what of the highly touted and expensive baguette I bought today? Well, eww. Up close, the crust proved to be a tawny gold color several shades short of brown and devoid of any of the crispness or delicious browned flavors that baguette crust promises; the loaf as a whole was nearly floppy. The thing had been made much too fat and a bit too short so there was far too much crumb for the amount of poor crust. The crumb itself was pillowy and nearly snowy white and the hole structure was more like that of Italian scala bread with its fine network of tiny holes than a true baguette. The flavor was insipid and lacked any of the depth and complexity that comes from pre-fermenting. It tasted more like a straight dough whipped up start to finish in about five hours. In short, everything that could possibly have gone wrong did, except for the slashing. The slashes on top were perfect, with the desired trademark "ears" that ideally allow one to pick up a baguette by one of these flaps. At least that was done right.

I can (and have) do better than this in my own kitchen, and I am not a master baker by any means, merely a dedicated amateur. The Bread & Butter Bakery in Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA should be ashamed to offer such half-assed product for sale anywhere, especially for better than $3 per loaf. If they cut the amount of dough per baguette by an ounce or so, increased the bake temperature and oven steam, and paid more attention to flavor, they could not only get a fair $3 for their baguette but would cut production costs as well. I can only hope that this was just an unlucky day for the baguettes; I dimly rememember being fairly happy though not impressed with their breads last year, including their epi, which are made with baguette dough.

People keep telling me I should open a bakery; if this is my competition, maybe I should think more seriously about it.