This episode is sponsored by the poem “The Day Lady Died”

 Literature, Music, This Episode is Sponsored by  No Responses »
Jul 182011
 

The Day Lady Died by Frank O’Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the FIVE SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

7/17/59

_________________________________________________________

In an attempt to read more of the poetry that occupies my shelves but never gets read, I’m going to try to read at least a poem a day. I hope to highlight a poem here every so often and do a short, very unprofessional write up.

I’ve been wanting to read O’Hara ever since I heard he was a favorite of Jim Carroll. I have to admit I had to look up who the lady in the poem was. Sad, I know. It was Billie Holiday for all those wondering. The poem definitely has a “beat” feel to it, which is apropos for the year it was written and the jazz legend subject matter. O’Hara showcases his love for the city and his ability to capture detail through the constant motion and activity. The poem ends with his memory of how everyone became still and silent when Holiday began to sing.

 Posted by at 9:52 pm  Tagged with: , , , ,

Rock And Roll Always Forgets by Chuck Eddy

 Culture (or lack thereof), Literature, Music  No Responses »
May 262011
 

I had not heard of Chuck Eddy before reading Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism.  I can say now that I wish I could write about books the way he writes about music.  I don’t always agree with Eddy, especially about Kix, Def Leppard, and Nirvana, but even when I don’t agree with him, I recognize the intelligence, honesty, and passion in his writing.  Eddy has made a name for himself in music criticism being provocative and fearless.  It is certainly evident in this collection.

Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism, published by Duke University Press in October 2011, is over 300 pages long.  The back cover states:  “Essential reading for music scholars, critics, and fans, it may well be the definitive time-capsule comment on pop music at the turn of the twenty-first century.”  It’s not something you sit down and breeze through.  I admit I struggled with the sections on hip hop and country simply because I don’t care about the subject matter, but Eddy’s writing is excellent throughout.

Most of the sections in the book deal with specific genres, except for the first section, “Predicting the Future” and the last section, “Singles Again and Again.”  Those two sections happen to be my favorites.  “Predicting the Future” is simply eerie.  Maybe Eddy just made some lucky guesses.  He heralds rap becoming an art form in 1981.  He talks about a Pacific Northwest music scene that is “the making of a muck-megalopolis on the level of Michigan in ’69” in 1987.  He talked about the power of the internet in music marketing in 1997.

The only article in the “Predicting the Future” section that I take exception with is a review of Radiohead’s The Bends, but that review is a perfect example of Eddy’s writing because there are so many cross references and so much thought.  And even if you don’t agree with him, it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  He makes comparisons and references to Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Jesus and Mary Chain in one paragraph.  In his closing paragraph he references the Beatles and Nirvana, and then writes:

There’s more nice guitar gush (e.g. the sub-Tom-Scholz anthemic stairclimb of “Black Star”), but the rest of the album mostly reminds me of Suede trying to rock like Sparks but coming out like U2, or (more often) that hissy little puissant in Smashing Pumpkins passive-aggressively inspiring me to clobber him with my copy of The Grand Illusion by Styx.

What?  He just ripped an album I like, but I’m going to have to educate myself in three bands (I’m familiar with U2 and Smashing Pumpkins) just to understand what he’s saying before I can try to refute it.  I wonder if he liked OK Computer better.

I liked “Singles Again and Again” because it’s such a great education in music history.  In “Radio ’86: Dead Air,” Eddy writes “Rock’n’roll radio has never been as boring as it’s been this year.  Not in the middle ‘70s, not in the early ‘60s, not ever.”  He goes on to explain.  By the end of the article I wanted to get one of those best of the ‘80s mixes and compare the hits year to year.  I also like this section because the shorter reviews of singles are simply funny and smart.

I don’t want to dismiss the genre sections of the book.  There are great articles about the indie scene and rock in general.  Eddy wrote a lot about metal and hard rock when few critics took it seriously.  There is a nice section about the mixing of hip hop/rock/dance etc., which is fitting since it is rumored that Eddy’s review of Aerosmith’s Done with Mirrors inspired Rick Rubin to have Run-DMC cover “Walk This Way.”  There are sections on hip hop, country, and pop as well.  I’m simply not interested in all of the genres and artists, and I’m not a serious student of music criticism.  That being said, it’s a great collection, and Chuck Eddy is a great music critic.

 Posted by at 9:57 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

 Culture (or lack thereof), Literature, Music  1 Response »
Apr 042011
 

Eleanor Henderson’s debut novel Ten Thousand Saints is set in the late 1980s and moves between small-town Vermont and New York City’s Lower East Side.  The topics range from gentrification, hardcore punk, drugs, death, teen pregnancy, sexuality, AIDS, straight edge culture, family dysfunction, misguided loyalty, and generation gaps.  Needless to say it’s an ambitious debut novel.

The novel begins-

Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy’s life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas.  If you were to spy them from above, between the slats of the bleachers—or smoking behind the school gym, or sliding their skateboards down the stone wall by the lake—you might confuse one for the other.  But Teddy was the dark-haired one, Jude the redhead.

Teddy and Jude are the stereotypical small-town misfits in the late 1980s.  Their families are dysfunctional.  Their fathers are painfully absent.  They’re bored and constantly looking for highs.

Last night they’d shared a jug of Carlo Rossi and the pot they’d found in the glove box of Teddy’s mom’s car, while they listened to Metallica’s first album, Kill ‘Em All, which skipped, and to Teddy’s mom, Queen Bea, who had her own stash of booze, getting sick in the bathroom, retch, flush, retch, flush.

Henderson spends the first fifty pages or so building this relationship between the two boys.  Jude is brash and stupid, looking for confrontation and escape, and Teddy is his lovable sidekick, quietly wondering if he can rebuild a relationship with his brother and find his father.  He is secretly planning to leave and go to New York.  And then Teddy dies.

Teddy’s death is the impetus for the rest of the novel and eventually, Jude’s coming-of-age.  Much is done in Teddy’s name, though the characters are so flawed, it’s hard to tell if they are being genuine or if they are just clinging to anything that may have a little meaning.  The frustrating absurdity of teenage logic may put some readers off, though Henderson captures it perfectly.

For example, take this stream of thought from Eliza, who is pregnant with Teddy’s baby:

She had wanted to make something happen; she had asked for heartbreak and she’d gotten it.  And it was bigger than anything in her life.  She wanted to forget Teddy, and she wanted something to remember him by.

She was aware of this paradox in a subliminal way, and of Johnny’s and Jude’s part in it.  She wanted to know them, too; she wanted to forget them.  She tried hard to drown them out.  She ignored the blank page of her underwear…

Jude makes the pilgrimage to New York that Teddy wanted to make.  He becomes a passionate recruit of the straight-edge punk scene and forms a proxy family with Teddy’s brother, his mentor, and Eliza.

Family is a strong theme throughout the book.  Among all the teenage angst and tribalism, Henderson captures the grown-ups too.  Jude’s mom is the most realized of the bunch, as she struggles with her mistakes as a parent.  She wants to reconcile, but feels hopeless.

Harriet watched the boys come and go.  From the basement to the van, from Jude’s room to the fridge.  She listened for them on the stairs, on the fire escape, to the ring of the phone and the drone of their showers and puerile wail of their guitars.  She observed Jude’s romance with straight edge as she might have observed his first love—warily, with a mother’s pride, hoping that, in the end his heart wouldn’t break too hard.

Jude’s pot-dealing father and Eliza’s wealthy mother also play significant parts throughout the book.

I have to say I was predisposed to like the novel simply because I can relate to it so much.  I grew up during this time period playing in a band traveling up and down I-95.  I knew kids who were eerily similar to these characters.  It’s obvious that Henderson did her research for the book.  She recreates the time and place with precision, but I imagine the details may be too much for some readers.  The writing is good, and there are plot elements that I did not expect.  If I have to have a complaint, it would be the ending, but I don’t want to give anything away.  Nostalgia or not, I enjoyed the novel and look forward to Henderson’s next book.

 

Ten Thousand Saints will be published by Ecco in June 2011.

 Posted by at 9:44 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,
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