Michael Borshuk

Notes on Politics: Rick, Rick, Rick...

2012-02-18T16:38:00.000-08:00

Couldn't help but do a double take at this quotation in an AP story today about presidential candidate Rick Santorum:

At a campaignappearance in Florida last month, Santorum declined to correct a voter whocalled Obama, a Christian, an "avowed Muslim."

Santorum told CNN after thatincident, "I don't feel it's my obligation every time someone sayssomething I don't agree with to contradict them, and the president's a big boy,he can defend himself."

See, I do not expect Rick Santorum to "defend" his political opponents. Such would be a ludicrous expectation in this contentious electoral climate. But, I am immensely troubled that in Rick Santorum's America, it's just A-okay to walk around being ignorant and misinformed. Your obligation to correct your homeboy, Rick, was less about agreeing or disagreeing, but about being true to information you know to be right in the face of error.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #17

2012-02-18T01:04:00.000-08:00

"The Only Living Boy in New York" by Simon and Garfunkel (1970)

I can think of few songs better than this one about loneliness and its bittersweet ache. Beyond its salt-in-the-wounds lyrical beauty, though, there are few tunes more pantheon-worthy for their contextual grandeur. Composed, as any good S&G acolyte knows, around Artie's departure to Mexico to further his acting career, the number documents Paul's left-behind time writing the songs for Bridge Over Troubled Water, the duo's send-off to the 1960s. Its images are striking--Paul, the song-voice, alone, the last among the living in the formerly great city of Manhattan--and the vocals are, appropriately, for-the-ages, a tribute to the echo-chamber's potential for inciting goosebumps, when Garfunkel, in his ever ethereal way, reminds us, "Here I am." My favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs are about friendship: its problems, its valleys, its lesions, its glorious reconnections. This--ever in contention with the "Bookends" suite--might be their very best.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #16

2012-02-16T18:37:00.000-08:00

"Alison" by Elvis Costello (1977)

Midway through Elvis Costello's debut LP--a mostly sneering, attitude-heavy punky affair--is this classic ballad, a song that rivals the best of Smokey Robinson in its melodic weltschmerz. (Appropriately, Costello often mashes this up into a cover of "Tracks of My Tears" in concert.) As a songwriter, Costello is comprehensive in his influences, and here he adds a staple to a longstanding sub-genre in male-authored pop songs: namely, the shaking-his-head, oh-girl, I-don't-care-but-of-course-I-do number. (Cf. Dylan, Bob, "Like a Rolling Stone," or Steely Dan, "Reelin' in the Years.") Costello's Alison is, sadly, one mixed-up woman: having married a chump, and recently doffed her party dress with (ostensibly) another fellow-- Amid the chaos, Elvis insists, pleadingly, that his aim is true. She could count on him, if she notices his longing. Or they could both walk away and he could continue to pretend not to care. But, of course, we know he does.

Whimsies: XXXVIII

2012-02-08T00:27:00.000-08:00

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #13

2012-02-04T20:55:00.000-08:00

"You tell me that you've got everything you want / And your bird can sing / But you don't get me / You don't get me."

--John Lennon/Paul McCartney, "And Your Bird Can Sing"

Whimsies: 99 Reasons Steely Dan is the Soundtrack to My Life #6

2012-01-27T23:24:00.000-08:00

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #15

2012-01-27T21:29:00.000-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 15

"Minute by Minute" by The Doobie Brothers (1978)

Fans of this band fall, I think, into two chief categories: those who dig their sun-soaked post-hippie guitar rock of the early 1970s, and those (like myself) who feel the group did nothing of relevance until the ascension of Michael McDonald as their lead singer in 1976. This song, the title track from their most commercially successful release, features everything I want in a good American pop song: a memorable hook chorus, a world-weary narrative voice, and a groove that stays with you long after its play has concluded. McDonald's songwriting is key here--beginning with a tasty gospel vamp, and proceeding into an irony-laden verse, in which he tells us, unconvincingly, that he could live without the love of his life if he had to (he "might blink" and "find [her] gone" after all), but nevertheless, he'll keep holding on for her to come around by the minutes just in case she decides he's worth it. Bittersweet and funky, and endlessly satisfying; unless, of course, you (unlike me) aren't much for so-called "blue-eyed soul." It reminds me how impossibly adult 1970s popular culture seemed to be in retrospect (songs like this, sitcoms like Taxi or Maude), before 14 year olds began to dominate the marketplace and things changed irreparably forever.

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #12

2012-01-24T09:42:00.000-08:00

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

--Albert Camus

Whimsies: 99 Reasons Steely Dan is the Soundtrack to My Life #5

2012-01-20T17:05:00.001-08:00

Stellar performance from last September's "Rarities" show at the Beacon Theater in New York. Wish I'd been there.

Whimsies: 99 Reasons Steely Dan is the Soundtrack to My Life #4

2012-01-10T21:02:00.001-08:00

Notes on Politics: Life Imitating Art

2012-01-10T20:26:00.000-08:00

Have been unable to chase from my mind over the past week or so how much Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum remind me of Ralph Ellison's Adam Sunraider, race-baiting politician from Juneteenth (or Three Days Before the Shooting), the Big E's long unfinished second novel. Depressing, how as we move forward into these allegedly post-racial times (snicker!) in the 21st century, white conservative politicians continue to raise the specter of the black leech on taxpayers as a means of stoking support from their racist base. I wait for the Cadillac Flambe, figurative or not.

Whimsies: 99 Reasons Steely Dan is the Soundtrack to My Life #3

2012-01-09T19:35:00.001-08:00

Notes on Literature: Poems That Have Turned My Head #4

2012-01-08T19:53:00.000-08:00

Who Killed John Keats?

Who killed John Keats?
"I," says The Quarterly,
So savage and Tartarly;
"'Twas one of my feats."

Who shot the arrow?
"The poet-priest Milman
(So ready to kill man),
Or Southey or Barrow."

--Lord Byron

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #11

2012-01-08T09:14:00.000-08:00

"I'm afraid of horror films and thunderstorms. Jet planes shake me up. But there is no need to be afraid of anything you can control with your skill."

--Muhammad Ali

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #10

2012-01-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

"Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Spring Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The fucking world is running out of gas."

--John Updike

Notes on Popular Culture: Worth Putting In Your Netflix, er, Qwikster, er, Netflix Queue #3

2011-12-29T07:38:00.000-08:00

Worth Putting In Your ~~Netflix Qwikster~~ Netflix Queue, Volume 3

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010)

An excellent documentary about the 1980s art scene's brightest, but most often misunderstood, light. Tamra Davis's film turns, as everybody who's heard of it knows now, on exclusive interview footage that she shot during Basquiat's lifetime. But while the one-on-one time with the Radiant Child is compelling, this one is also memorable for the detailed way she contextualizes the various bohemian and aesthetic sites of JMB's ascendance.

Notes on Literature: Poems That Have Turned My Head #3

2011-12-21T09:51:00.001-08:00

Parker's Mood

Come with me,
If you want to go to Kansas City.

I'm feeling lowdown and blue,
My heart is full of sorrow.
Don't hardly know what to do.
Where will I be tomorrow?

Going to Kansas City.
Want to go too?
No, you can't make it with me.
Going to Kansas City,
Sorry that I can't take you.

When you see me coming,
Raise your window high.
When you see me leaving, baby,
Hang your head and cry.

I'm afraid there's nothing in this cream, this dreamy town
A honky-tonk monkey-woman can do.
She'd only bring herself down.

So long everybody!
The time has come
And I must leave you
So if I don't ever see your smiling face again:
Make a promise you'll remember
Like a Christmas Day in December
That I told you
All through thick and thin
On up until the end
Parker's been your friend.

Don't hang your head
When you see, when you see those six pretty horses pulling me.
Put a twenty-dollar silver piece on my watchchain,
Look at the smile on my face,
And sing a little song
To let the world know I'm really free.
Don't cry for me
'Cause I'm going to Kansas City.

Come with me,
If you want to go to Kansas City.

--King Pleasure (Clarence Beeks)

Whimsies: 99 Reasons Steely Dan is the Soundtrack to My Life #2

2011-12-20T00:42:00.000-08:00

Whimsies: Notable Pipe Smokers Throughout History #6

2011-12-15T03:56:00.000-08:00

Jacques Tati

Legendary French film director, speaker of unintentionally political bons mots ("I find people with the worst English talk more than others."), sporter of striped socks.

(With thanks to nerdboyfriend for the image.)

Whimsies: 99 Reasons Steely Dan is the Soundtrack to My Life #1

2011-12-13T00:03:00.001-08:00

Given the state of the economy and everything else, this is an excellent place to start.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #14

2011-12-09T22:51:00.001-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 14

"If You Want Me to Stay" by Sly and the Family Stone (1973)

A few years removed from the Family Stone's hit parade pinnacle, this is, in my mind, Sly's greatest vocal performance: understated, growly, unapologetic. He rides a slow groove into the night, offering an assertive statement about the brash inflexibility of his character. Want him to stay? Well, gotta put up with the man's business. Deliciously funky and indispensable.

Notes on Literature: Poems That Have Turned My Head #2

2011-12-09T21:55:00.001-08:00

Disorientation

I am riding my bike at night;

it's 65, December

fourteenth. I eat an apple

and stare at naked houses

braced for cold that isn't

there. The breeze comes

richly from the South some-

where down there. James

Wright puts out the trash,

and Wendell Berry walks

the river bank, dressed

in a nylon jacket; Jim

Dickey swills his bourbon

sitting alone on a porch,

saying shit: it is all

on the breeze. Three miles

of night Detroit; I head

for home, surprised, amazed.

I sit on my front porch

smoking a White Owl;

although I do not smoke,

the night demands it. (One

day past, I watched

a mosquito hatched

by our winter heat flit,

crazy, against our window,

astonished, lost.) The night

floats up from Tampa,

from the Gulf, from Cuba, si;

it is December and I think

of the men camped by fires

in the mountains of '58.

The slow death of yesterdays

floats like smoke on the air.

I write in a roomful of books.

A poinsettia is in front

of me, ready to grace

a frigid feast; it is as red

as Carmen. Night earth

is stirring with the crocus

of misbegotten lusts.

A gust of thought of woman

sweeps down from Canada,

torrid and parched. I head

for a drink, a phone, a gun,

for baby Jesus, or a poem.

--John Ditsky

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #13

2011-12-08T23:13:00.001-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 13

"Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" by Culture Club (1982)

Lost, perhaps, in the spectacle that was Culture Club's emergence into the music video explosion of the early 1980s, was their talent for sometimes-soulful, impeccably produced pop songs like this one. An impassioned narrative about regret and a sorrowful request for a stay of retaliation sit perfectly atop the tune's pseudo-dub groove. Like their fellow Brits The Police, The Specials, and General Public, Culture Club was excellent at integrating rhythmic innovations from the U.K.'s island former colonies into their so very London sound. Bohemian and warm like a late-spring breeze, this one remains a lovely sing-a-long after all these years.

Notes on Literature: Poems That Have Turned My Head #1

2011-12-04T10:15:00.000-08:00

"I Apologize"

My mind wasn't even there.

Mirage, sir. I didn't see

what I thought I saw.

Que sera, sera. That's that.

I was in my woman's bedroom

removing her red shoes & dress.

I'm just like the rest of the world:

No comment; no way, Jose;

I want spring always

dancing with the pepper trees.

I was miles away, I saw nothing!

Did I say their diamond rings

blinded me & I nearly lost my head?

I think it was how the North

Star fell through plate glass.

I don't remember what they wore.

What if I said they were

only shadows of overcoats

stooped in the doorway

where the light's bad?

No, no one roughed me up last night.

Sir, there's no story to change.

I heard no names. There were no

distinguishing marks or other clues.

No slip of the tongue. This morning

I can't even remember who I am.

--Yusef Komunyakaa

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #9

2011-12-02T22:09:00.001-08:00

"Come writers and critics / who prophesize with your pen / and keep your eyes wide / the chance won't come again / And don't speak too soon/ for the wheel's still in spin / And there's no telling who / That it's namin' / For the loser now / will be later to win / For the times they are a-changin'"

--Bob Dylan

Whimsies: Notable Pipe Smokers Throughout History #5

2011-11-30T08:07:00.001-08:00

Capt. Haddock

Slubberdegullions, that navy flake tastes good!

p.s. Can't wait for The Adventures of Tintin on 21 December.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #12

2011-11-30T07:54:00.001-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 12

"Criminal" by Fiona Apple (1996)

If Dostoevsky could have created a sallow and gaunt teenaged girl with bluesy piano chops, a husky voice, and an eerily precocious sense of transgression, gravity, and guilt, you might end up with something that sounds, well, like this.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #11

2011-11-29T04:51:00.000-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 11

"The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" by Grandmaster Flash (1981)

I know. You expected that if any song made it from this artist it would be 1982's "The Message," for its influential position as hip-hop's first socially conscious megahit, right? Well, "The Message" is grand, but it's really an MC showcase, and not indicative of the real reasons that Flash is so important to the history of American popular music. It's too easy for us to forget, in these technologically advanced computer-dependent times, perhaps, that sampling and looping used to depend less on a mouse and a cursor than on manual dexterity and turntable innovation, and damned if I can't think of anyone who ever topped Flash in either category. This record--especially in its 12-inch single, rather than album, version--is but a modest document of Flash's greatness on two decks, as he effortlessly brings together a vast array of musical texts, including some of Flash and The Furious Five's own music. It is effectively encyclopedic, whimsical, self-referential, genius. Imagine T.S. Eliot with two record players if Ol' Possum could backspin and crossfade.

Whimsies: JV = MVP

2011-11-22T03:34:00.000-08:00

val - u - a - ble [val-yoo-uh-buh'l]

adjective

. . .

2. having qualities worthy of respect, admiration, or esteem . . .

Notes on Popular Culture: A Memorable Look of Cool

2011-11-15T21:35:00.000-08:00

A Memorable Look of Cool

Thinking a lot about jazz and visuality these days as I get deeper into my ongoing book manuscript. I've had a love-hate relationship with Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues (1990) for a long time now, mostly due to its, um, predictable rehearsal of many of the worst tropes about jazz and masculinity. (Spike, but for very few examples, has never written male-female relationships well, to say the least--) Nevertheless, the director is a visual master, and this sequence might be my favorite of the film's various musical performance moments. Denzel channels the best of mid-century post-bop cool here.

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #8

2011-11-07T21:08:00.001-08:00

"You know what's the loudest noise in the world, man? The loudest noise in the world is silence." --Thelonious Monk

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #7

2011-10-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."

--A. Bartlett Giamatti

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #10

2011-10-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 10

"Right Place, Wrong Time" by Dr. John (1973)

Oh, that opening groove. Oh, that swampy gumbo feel: part okra, part psychedelia. World-weary Mac Rebennack and The Meters in bluesy ritualistic funk. And the message? You thought you had it all figured out. You thought you were just having a good time. You thought you were in control. Uh-uh. Up come that gris-gris you weren't counting on, a spell cast to send you out of sorts. No worries, son; just time to sit down and give yourself a good talking to.

Whimsies: A Momentary Picture of Bliss

2011-10-07T08:30:00.001-07:00

As a long-suffering Tigers fan, this is what bliss--however momentary--looked like for me last night.

Go Tigers.

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #6

2011-09-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

"Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good. Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honor preferring one another: Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer; Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality. Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not."

--St. Paul, Romans 12:9-14

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #9

2011-09-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 9

"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley (2006)

Funky and philosophical, this song works in two directions: as a mere party jam, an invocation to shake your thang on the dance floor (cf. Prince, "Let's Go Crazy"); or more gravely, as a heart-poundingly exact recreation of the disorienting feel of navigating the wide open spaces of a mind gone array, a place where even your emotions have an echo. In both interpretations, it is effective and brilliant, and worthy of a place in a sub-pantheon: great songs about feeling emotionally out of step--next to, say, Annie Ross's "Twisted" and Jimi Hendrix's "Manic Depression."

Notes on Jazz: Favorite CD Reviews #2

2011-08-07T21:16:00.000-07:00

James Carter, Out of Nowhere (Half Note 4520)

With Out of Nowhere, James Carter offers a second consecutive live disc—this time with his organ trio—on the heels of last year’s tribute to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge in his hometown, Detroit. While these live sessions are less august occasions than the saxophonist’s historical tributes (to Django Reinhardt, to Billie Holiday) in recent years, they’re perhaps ultimately better suited to Carter’s style. After all, Carter’s improvisations are never merely discrete musical statements so much as they are elements within a broader, multifaceted performance: the effortless genius who thrills crowds with acrobatic playing and heart-staggering showmanship, not because he needs the audience’s approval, but just because he can.

Or so he’d have us believe.

Carter seems to thrive on attention, and in a club setting—placed so intimately with an appreciative crowd looking to be impressed—he’s particularly extroverted in displaying his technical range. A notable example here is his early soprano solo on Benny Golson’s “Along Came Betty,” a frenzied invention that proceeds through a long, varied series of tones and textures, and eventually culminates with Carter inventing new notes in the far reaches of the upper registers. Later in the track, Carter returns with a second improvisation that sounds, variously, as though it’s being transmitted from underwater and sung by a chorus of bumblebees. Carter, it appears, never gets tired of invigorating conventions through expressive novelty. This is not your standard organ trio.

Fittingly, the saxophonist shares improvising space on other tracks with guest artists (and fellow extroverts) James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, and Hamiet Bluiett on baritone sax. Ulmer’s metallic picking and plangent effects complement the textural diversity of Carter’s baritone playing on the guitarist’s “Highjack,” and Bluiett’s guttural tone fuses seamlessly with Carter’s as they pair baritones on a sped-up version of the R. Kelly pop ballad, “I Believe I Can Fly.”

The effect of these pairings is rarely understated, but for those of us with a taste for pyrotechnics, it’s undoubtedly enjoyable.

(2004)

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #5

2011-08-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

"You don't want your life to end up as black-and-white newsreel footage scored by a cello in a minor key."

--Woody Allen, Anything Else (2003)

Notes on Writing: In Memory, Tom Borshuk (1952-1992)

2011-07-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

For my father, Tom Borshuk, who died nineteen years ago today.

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #4

2011-07-02T13:18:00.001-07:00

"[R]ight and wrong are not written on the statues for me, nor do I find my code of morals in the essays of long-winded professors."

--Carroll John Daly, The Snarl of the Beast (1927)

Whimsies: Notable Pipe Smokers Throughout History #4

2011-06-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

George "Sparky" Anderson

Sage manager of my beloved Detroit Tigers from 1979 till 1995 (i.e. exactly through the salad days of my baseball-watching career). Master of overstatement (i.e. "Kirk Gibson will be the next Mickey Mantle;" "This is the best club I've ever brought up north from Spring Training."). Warm heart. Lover of billiard-style pipes. Most recent Tiger to have his number (11) retired by the team, an occasion for which I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at today's Tiger game in Detroit.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #8

2011-06-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 8

"Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys (1966)

Never mind that it's the opening track on an LP that changed the face of popular music ("Without Pet Sounds, there's no Sgt. Pepper, and with no Sgt. Pepper there's no...etc"), and that it's a model of mid-1960s production ("Oh, how that first big drum hit always gives me chills...etc."). This one belongs on my playlist-for-the-ages because it's the perfect example of Brian Wilson's singular genius at crafting songs from a fourteen or sixteen year-old's narrative view point, but that speak somehow to listeners well beyond that demographic. The simplicity of the speaker's wish (that it would be nice to be old enough to live together with his girlfriend and not have to part ways when darkness falls) is rendered musically in a way that becomes, well, appropriately pangy in any context. It's about longing, or wanting to be somewhere else, or something else, and it's dreamily executed, as all of The Beach Boys' best work is.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #7

2011-06-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 7

"Night Moves" by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (1976)

Rock and roll is ostensibly a youthful domain, bounded off emphatically from infiltrators on the far side of twenty-five. And yet, Bob Seger's greatest songs--almost without exception--are rock anthems intended for those of us with wrinkling skin and graying beards. Seger specializes in nostalgia with a backbeat, as on this, my favorite of all of his songs. It's a Proustian looking-back at the empty bliss of summertime sex in adolescence, but moves to gravity in a slow bridge. Lest you think you're lost to weltschmerz entirely, though, Bob brings you back to hopefulness with one of the best unspoken "1-2, 1-2-3" guitar-riff returns I can think of.

Notes on Popular Culture: Great Moments in Bargain Vinyl #1

2011-04-29T18:34:00.000-07:00

Great Moments in Bargain Vinyl #1

After years of resigning myself to appreciating music exclusively through digital media, I returned to old technology this March by buying a used turntable in a flea market over Spring Break. In the weeks since then, I have accumulated--no lie--over 110 LPs, mostly by combing local thrift shops and Goodwill stores to scope out what sonic treasures have been cast aside in our constant slouch forward toward smaller, more synthesized ways of listening to tunes.

So, a new feature, here, in which I'll occasionally feature memorable LPs I've found for cheap in my travels. My criteria are these: the LP had to cost me less than three dollars, and has to be a less-obvious choice for personal canonization. (I could boast about the copy of Ellington at Newport I found for a couple bucks, but it's more fun for me to highlight some the more obscure recordings that have warmed my heart in this recent vinyl odyssey).

Joe Cocker, Jamaica Say You Will (A&M Records, 1975) [Cost: One dollar.]

Google this LP online and you'll find that it's not as popular with Cockerites as the earlier, more immediately famous stuff. I fear, though, that the dirty-toed hippie acolytes who first took to Joe doing gritty, late 60s covers of The Beatles and The Box Tops, might have missed the boat, by mistaking the mid-70s studio polish of this one for apostasy or posturing. I took a chance on it merely for the two Randy Newman covers he offers here ("I Think It's Going to Rain Today" on Side One, and "Lucinda" on Side Two) and was impressed with the consistent Me-Decade slick-funk and laidback Hollywood gospel he serves up in ample amounts. Some of the formulae here are familiar from earlier Cocker records--notably, the interplay with his female background singers--but what really wows me is the Dream Team rhythm section of session all-stars backing him: Richard Tee on keys, Chuck Rainey on bass, and Bernard 'Pretty' Purdie on drums. Indeed, Purdie is so in the pocket on "(That's What I Like) In My Woman," and "It's All Over but the Shoutin'" that Joe's trademark guttural non-semantic lyricizing fall back into the mix for me. First-rate, soulful pop, and well worth the 100 pennies it cost me to bring it home.

Barney Kessel, Bossa Nova (Reprise Records, 1962) [Cost: A buck and a half.]

I am a fan of guitarist Kessel's more traditional jazz playing, especially the trio recordings he did with Shelly Manne and Ray Brown, under the name The Poll Winners. This LP stood out immediately to me in a roadside thrift shop for its va-va-voom 60s cover art. The music on the vinyl inside takes that bit of New Frontier decadence two steps forward. I swear, this is the soundtrack for sipping Old Fashioneds in your mid-century ranch home (literally, the use to which I've put it more than once over the past few weeks), or being chased by Soviet bad guys in your Aston Martin on the Autobahn in a Cold War spy saga. It's not bossa nova in the "Girl from Ipanema" vein, but rather, a super-swingin', sun-soaked, twang and go-go beats party. Imagine standards like "Summertime" or "Sweet Georgia Brown" amped up and shot from a canted angle, with a dash of angostura bitters. It doesn't even bother me that the drums are literally the same on every track here.

Whimsies: The Mike B. Wishlist #3a

2011-03-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

The Mike B. Wishlist, #3a

So, once in a while, when I allow myself to think about it at all, I wonder who--if anyone--reads this blog, taking the time to peruse my self-indulgent collage of images and ideas. This past Christmas morning, I found out. Santa Claus! Well, my mother, that is. She surprised me thoroughly by giving me the gift of these Loic Rohmer-designed Miles Davis posters after seeing me gush about them in an earlier post here. Just finally got them back from the custom framer over the past week. Here they are, hanging in my house.

Thanks, Mom!

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #6

2011-01-11T13:30:00.000-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 6

"Get it On" (1971) by T. Rex

God bless Marc Bolan, for understanding that the essence of rock and roll turned on a short list of qualities: infectious guitar licks, beats that beckoned one to the dance floor, outrageous spectacle, and lyrics that leaned one step over the euphemistic line. For its licentious simplicity and its balls-to-the-wall attitude, this number is dirty, sweet, and on my list.

Whimsies: Notable Pipe Smokers Throughout History #3

2010-11-23T11:02:00.000-08:00

Raymond Chandler

"I filled a pipe and reached for the packet of paper matches. I lit the pipe carefully. She watched that with approval. Pipe smokers were solid men."

--from Farewell, My Lovely (1942)

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #3

2010-11-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

"Irrespective of doctrinal and other differences, all major world religions are concerned with helping individuals become good human beings."

--His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, via Twitter, 30 October, 2010

Whimsies: The Mike B. Wishlist #3

2010-08-28T14:03:00.000-07:00

Miles Davis Exhibition Posters by Loic Romer

Two exquisite posters by graphic design artist Loic Romer, for a Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition. Miles Davis and a Saul Bass-inspired visual style? This jazz and graphic design fan is literally having trouble breathing at the moment.

Whimsies: The Academic Year Begins

2010-08-26T09:48:00.001-07:00

It is that time of year again. Time, that is, for the ceremonial quoting of Don DeLillo, from the opening page of White Noise (1985):

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationary and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags--onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties; Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

Notes on Politics: Thumbs-Up to John Hartigan, Jr.

2010-08-16T08:33:00.001-07:00

...author of What Can You Say?: America's National Conversation on Race, and a scholar I've admired for a while now, and whose work I've used in my own writing, for this essay in The Chronicle Review on our continuing confusion about how to discuss race meaningfully: http://chronicle.com/article/What-Does-Race-Have-to-Do-With/123890/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Whimsies: Notable Pipe Smokers Throughout History #2

2010-08-13T10:42:00.001-07:00

Bruce Wayne (aka Batman)

(Because an evening canvendish in a handsome billiard helps take the edge off of fighting crime.)

Notes on Art: Three Mid-Century Design Masters

2010-08-10T16:23:00.001-07:00

I've had design on my mind lately, having recently updated my faculty webpage. The task got me thinking about three of my favorite design masters, from my favorite period in American design: the 1950s and 1960s. A minor tribute, then, here:

Reid Miles (4 July 1927 - 2 February 1993)

Miles, of course, created the oft-copied visual style of Blue Note Records, and thus, essentially drafted an iconography for "cool" in the 1950s and 1960s that has aged unbelievably well.

Saul Bass (8 May 1920 - 26 April 1996)

While Reid Miles effectively created what I like to call "the look of cool," Saul Bass pretty much created the visual identity for everything else. Don't believe me? Well, in addition to the scads of iconic film posters that came from Bass's hand, recall the corporate logos he designed: AT&T, United Airlines, Quaker Oats, Kleenex... Yeah, told you. He created the look of the mid-century, and his style has enjoyed a splendid renaissance of late, with Bass-inspired film posters for the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading or Lee Daniels's Precious. (I am so enamored with Bass's style that I taught myself how to do embedded fonts in CSS-style the other day just so I could use a Bass-inspired typescript on my faculty webpage update.)

George Lois (26 June 1931 - )

Lois designed innumerable iconic covers for Esquire magazine in the 1960s, including my personal favorite: Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. There's a wonderful piece linked from New York magazine's website, in which Lois talks about twelve of his most famous covers, including the Ali piece, or the image shown above: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/02/esquire_covers.html#photo=10x40028.

Notes on Popular Culture: Arrivederci, Suso!

2010-07-31T11:18:00.001-07:00

Suso Cecchi D'amico (1914-2010)

Notes on Popular Culture: Those 21st-Century Education Blues, Part II

2010-07-30T09:25:00.001-07:00

A soundbite in the Associated Press this morning from Andrew Hacker, co-author (with Claudia Dreifus) of the new book Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing our Kids -- And What We Can Do About It caught my eye:

"Undergraduates are being neglected. . . . Higher education has become the preserve of professors . . . (who) really have lost contact with the main purpose of higher education, which is the education of students."

The article suggests that Hacker and Dreifus include among their criticisms of the professoriate, emphasis on research and the practice of taking sabbaticals. Hrm. Where, exactly, do these writers presume that quality teaching comes from, if not from the time allotted to do the research which informs the professor's work in the classroom? While I'm game to accept some of their complaints about the current state of post-secondary education, I grimace at their characterization of professors--at least as it comes through in this news report--as a self-involved bunch with no interest in giving students a quality learning experience. Moreover, how much emphasis does their book put on student initiative and the responsibility of students to cultivate a desire to learn?

Just thinking aloud.

Whimsies: Notable Pipe Smokers Throughout History #1

2010-07-29T21:09:00.001-07:00

For nearly six years now, I have smoked a pipe. It began as a joke--a gift from my ironic younger sister on the first Christmas after I became an assistant professor--but it has grown into a regular part of my lifestyle. People call me pretentious, some folks stare, so out of date is the pipe as a means of tobacco transference. Sue me. As this ongoing gallery will show, I'm at least in interesting historical company.

Robert Oppenheimer

(Because how else was Doctor Atomic supposed to unwind as he was leading humanity toward its own potential destruction?)

Notes on Popular Culture: Satchmo as Shaman

2010-07-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

"The mark of a successful shaman is the degree to which he imbues his performance with his own singular style. While he is possessed, in a state where the shaman is very deeply taken by his roles, his ordinary daily self is effaced or replaced. Then follows a transformation of voice, movements, gestures, and even thoughts and feelings. This transformation is strengthened by careful use of makeup, masks, costumes, props, and audience participation."

--Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 1st edition, p. 169

Whimsies: The Mike B. Wishlist #2

2010-07-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

The Mike B. Wishlist #2: The J. Peterman Vintage Baseball Sweater

Wishing I could afford to buy this from the J. Peterman catalogue...

...so that I could try to emulate these guys:

Notes on Politics: The New Face of Diplomacy, and the Same Old Same-Old of Talking About Race

2010-07-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

Oh dear, it must be summer again because my blood pressure's on the rise.

That is, my perennial rollercoaster ride through the Catholic-martyr enterprise of cheering for the Detroit Tigers (yes, they stir me emotionally so much it demands mixed metaphors) has me awake nights with tightness in my chest. And for two weeks now I've felt myself getting tense as I watch another season of our continued inability to talk meaningfully about race unfold.

First, I got to hear Jesse Jackson compare LeBron "I'm taking my talents to South Beach" James to runaway slaves, after disgruntled Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert went on an anti-King James rant over his star player's exodus to the Miami Heat. Really, Reverend Jackson? Look, I admire you to know end. I keep one of your 1988 campaign buttons on my desk at work to remind myself of your historic and important moments of political engagement in trying to make the United States a better democracy. But really? You're going to compare a 90-million-dollar-endorsement-baby-and-celebrity-athlete to men and women who risked their lives to pursue the supposedly inalienable rights white Americans had withheld from them? That's not to say, of course, that I am letting Gilbert off the hook as an altruistic defender of Right and Good either. He's a rich guy pissed off that he's going to lose a lot of coin in his pocket because his biggest gate-draw is gone. It's no great psychoanalytical challenge to ascertain Gilbert's intentions in directing some vitriol LeBron's way. But Jesse Jackson's comments frustrated me because they fell back, it seemed, on a reactionary discourse around race that has great historical applicability in many instances but in this case lacks nuance entirely: namely, white = empowered, black = disempowered. The formulation was overly simplistic, and Jackson's comments seemed to be the misplaced words of a man who's devolving too much into one of those pithy-provocative-soundbite-peddlers that noisy up the cable news stations every evening. (The more shocking thing is that I'm surprised, at this point, given that the comments game from the same fellow who rather indiscreetly once remarked that he wanted "to cut [the president's] nuts out.") Had Jackson left it at, say, "Dan Gilbert is trying to make LeBron's leaving Cleveland personal when really their relationship was always an ongoing business transaction, and what's more American than that?" I'd likely have agreed with him through and through.

Sigh.

Then this week I've watched the Mark-Williams-Takes-on-the-NAACP saga unfold with all the bombast and idiocy I've come to expect around racially provocative debates. There's little I can say critically about Williams's various ignorant turns of late, I guess, that haven't been articulated at length (and better) by other people. (The shortlist he deserves thrown his way, just in case you've been on another planet of late: "The NAACP uses the term "colored people" because it's related to a name for African Americans that had great currency at the time of the organization's founding, you dumbass, not because they're 'racist';" and "Hey jerk, what better way to prove that the Tea Party 'movement' is not clouded by the residue of white supremacy and unbrotherly love than to post a racially divisive piece of 'satire' on your website in which you denigrate the NAACP's president as 'Tom's nephew' and offer a mock plea to Abraham Lincoln to restore slavery?") What I do think is worth saying here about the Williams debacle is that it speaks to the tired way that accusations of racism have become such a throwaway barb and a smelly smokescreen whenever a moment pushes us toward confronting the unresolved problems of a long white supremacist past. Rather than confront how we have all inherited a society infected with the ugly legacy of colonialism's racial inequalities and economic exploitation, we fall back on simplistic accusations of racism. Jesse Jackson did it. Mark Williams did it, inexplicably, in trying to discredit the NAACP's suggestion that Tea Party rhetoric is tainted by white supremacist notions by saying in return that they were racist for deigning to bring race into any political discussion about the Tea Party's aims.

Racists, we all know, are ignorant and irredeemable, the thinking goes. In order to preserve our otherwise smoothly running society, we must banish these infiltrators to the margins since they don't represent our equality-loving, sophisticated society very well. (Why else do we so thrive on pointing fingers at the Michael Richards and Don Imus types who slip up and let their inner Klansman come to the fore, rather than look more closely and comprehensively at the ubiquity of racial assumptions across the board?) And curiously, as the Williams fracas revealed again, to introduce a critical lens on race to any political debate is merely to be some kind of anti-democratic, pot-stirring racist oneself, since obviously racism is over (hell, the president is black, people!) and we don't need to talk about that stuff anymore. (I must email Williams and ask him when this revolutionary moment occurred--the end of racism and white supremacy--so I can pencil it into my planner and celebrate the date each year.)

So, today, Williams tells us--with another backhanded dig at the NAACP--that he urges us all to "fight those who divide us by race, no matter the color of the racist." Golly! My heart feels full with hope now that the next great civil rights leader has emerged: behold, the new face of diplomacy and equality, ready to preserve freedom and opportunity across racial lines. Such nobility!

Yeah, right. And maybe I could step in and replace Lebron at the small forward position for the Cavaliers.

Notes on Popular Culture: Worth Putting in Your Netflix Queue #2

2010-07-05T17:17:00.000-07:00

Worth Putting In Your Netflix Queue, Vol. 2

The Long Good Friday (1980)

If I told you that there was a British gangster film that featured Bob Hoskins as a mob boss so tough he accidentally crushes glassware when he's stressed out and Pierce Brosnan as a mostly silent menace and Helen Mirren as the voice of reason amidst escalating violence and organized crime insanity, would you rent it? Would you be tempted more if I told you that the film also operates as a dramatization of British post-colonial anxiety, with once-mighty Britons watching the glorious might of their imperial power recede day by day as the twentieth century moves to a close? (There's a reason why Mirren's character is named Victoria, you know.)

Go on, go see this if you haven't. You know you want to now.

Notes on Popular Culture: Happy Independence Day!

2010-07-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

For the Fourth of July, here are five Americans whose contributions to American culture inspire my admiration for the United States.

1. Louis Armstrong

2. Robert Rauschenberg

3. Grace Kelly

4. Flannery O'Connor

5. Willie Mays

Notes on Writing: The Inexhaustibleness of Grief

2010-07-02T15:05:00.000-07:00

3 July 2010: The Inexhaustibleness of Grief

Tomorrow is the eighteenth anniversary of my father's sudden death, in 1992, at age 40. While the date is, of course, always a difficult occasion for me, I seem to feel some extra gravity this year. Why? Because after eighteen years, I will have lived the same amount of time without my father as I did with him. Worse yet--that later, more awful portion will grow longer every day from here on.

That melancholy summer, 1992, I'd never have believed that there could be any moving forward, that some kind of acceptance would ever be possible. I was adrift for months, watching my grades slip, crippled by ache, feeling emotionally undone. And yet, as people assured me it would, the searing immediacy of that sudden loss diminished over time. Slowly. I addressed goals again; I looked ahead to the rest of my life. But grief is inexhaustible. It never completely goes away. It is a rare day when I don't think of my father in some way--often pleasantly, I admit, recalling something I loved about him, or rediscovering some way that he inspired any of the many routines and interests that govern the rhythm of my life still. But those memories always remind of a persistent sadness that can't ever go away. It creeps up on me each year through June and resonates terribly on the 3rd of every July.

And so, I offer a minor public display of remembrance here, however exhibitionistic and out of place that may seem. And I offer one of my favorite quotations from my favorite writer, Ralph Ellison, as I look to waking up Sunday, when I will try to stay focused on joy and gratitude as that long orphan period of my life overtakes the sweeter days that came before:

"But what quality of love sustains us in our orphan's loneliness; and how much is thus required of fatherly love to give us strength for all our life thereafter?"

Notes on Art: Three Baseball-Inspired Works I Love

2010-07-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

As we near the halfway mark in another baseball season, three baseball-inspired works of art (or in the third case, design) that I adore.

1. Hard Ball III by Robert Moskowitz

2. Vacant Lot by Ben Shahn

3. The "Joe" Chair by Heller

Whimsies: Three Things I Will Never Do

2010-06-30T16:47:00.000-07:00

Because I'm feeling fussy today, I want to distinguish my own future behavior from these three things that annoy me in various degrees (from very minor to very major). So, three things I promise now I will never do.

1. Pronounce the word "memoir" in the French manner, like this: "mem-wah." *

* Note: Unless, of course, I am speaking in French at the time.

2. Wear my mobile phone in a little holster on my belt.

3. Live in a gated community.

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #2

2010-06-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

"Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is."

--Clint Eastwood, The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

Whimsies: Quotations to Live By #1

2010-06-23T12:48:00.001-07:00

"You know, hipness is not a state of mind, it's a fact of life. You see what I mean? You don't decide you're hip, it just happens that way. You see what I mean?"

--Cannonball Adderley, introducing "Gemini," on Cannonball Adderley Sextet in New York (Riverside Records, 1962)

Notes on Literature: Ever Wonder What Kind of Portable Computer a Literary Master Favors?

2010-06-22T13:56:00.000-07:00

As I learned while reading Adam Bradley's wonderful book Ralph Ellison in Progress last weekend, The Big E. composed part of the long manuscript to his second, ultimately unfinished novel on one of these:

Whimsies: The Mike B. Wishlist #1

2010-06-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

The Mike B. Wishlist #1: Movie Posters I Want

I love old movie posters. I'm crazy for them. If it wouldn't be excessive, I would decorate my entire house in them. Here are a few that I'm dying to acquire.

The Conversation (Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) [This is the poster used for the Polish release of the film.]

Blow Up (Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) [This is the poster for the German release of the film.]

Anatomy of a Murder (Dir. Otto Preminger, 1959, music by Duke Ellington) [This may well be my favorite movie poster of all time.]

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #5

2010-06-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 5

"How Deep Is Your Love?" by The Bee Gees (1977)

This song is likely to get lost in the gloss of the phenomenon that sounded its release: white-suited, hip-shaking John Travolta and the cinematic ascendancy of disco. Moreover, it's likely not the first tune by this group that most people would put on their one-must-have-song-by-an-artist list. "Jive Talking" or "Staying Alive" or "Night Fever" likely would earn that honor for most listeners, in their kitschy, can't-miss invitations to dance ironically as though it's the late 1970s all over again. I prefer this ballad, likely the prettiest song that Barry Gibb ever composed. Dismiss this tune as sonic fromage, the 45 rpm equivalent of a Frank Frazetta-muralled van or an orange deep shag carpet or a velour shirt? Think again. Check out the stripped down covers recorded more recently by The Bird and the Bee (on 2007's Please Clap Your Hands) and The Bad Plus with Wendy Lewis (on 2008's For All I Care) and you'll recall what a lush, gorgeous melody this song features at its very center.

Notes on Literature: The New Yorker's 20-Under-40 List

2010-06-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

Behold! The Future of American Literature

So, I finally started making my way through The New Yorker's summer fiction issue, which, this year, features their vaunted 20-under-40 list: i.e. twenty writers who are not yet forty years old, and thus, might be presumed to stand in as the face of American literature for this generation. Or something like that.

I guess my reading tastes have changed over the past decade, or, more grimly, at thirty-six, I have to admit that I may be turning the corner toward curmudgeonly status, because I am much less excited (so far, anyway) about this group than I was at age twenty-five, for the 20-writers-for-the-new-century list that the magazine compiled back in the summer of 1999. Granted, I've only read 2.5 stories thus far, but I swear, I can feel my patience waning. And, in the interest of warding off cliched dismissals of the criticism I am about to voice-- I know, I know, that almost as trendy as a list of young, urbane writers who might possibly best represent their generation is the two-decades old complaint that too much American writing now suffers from the worst qualities of the creative-writing-workshop-revolution: i.e. all style, no substance; much gloss, little profundity. (The ur-text for this line of argument might be John W. Aldridge's 1992 study, Talents and Technicians: Literary Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction.)

But. Um. Sometimes, commentary that seems to arise again and again is so ubiquitous because it's, well, true?

That is, I'll just be all upfront and impolite about what I've read so far. Joshua Ferris's story, the ironic yarn about the recovering alcoholic would-be television writer self-destructing at a celebrity party? Come on. The premise is old news; the writing is self-congratulatory in its ironic, wink-wink references to popular culture. And the ending, frankly, seems like low-grade Salinger, ca. "Perfect Day for Bananafish." Sadly, Jonathan Safran Foer's story--and admittedly, I love JSF's novels--is equally flimsy. It's a stylistic exercise; it's a series of poignant details about a relationship; it's playful. But it's just not compelling narrative. While I admire JSF's eye in the piece, and I like the willingness to exploit repetition and to toy with syntax, wouldn't a greater show of his talents (so completely on display, I think, in his first two novels, which are both entertaining and insightful at once) have been to craft those details and that ludic facility with language into something that reads more like a story and less like a litany?

Now, I don't think Jonathan Safran Foer is a creative writing program alum. Ferris? I'm too lazy and annoyed at this point to look up his CV. But both of those stories that I read completely yesterday suffered from that quality that Aldridge associated with creative writing programs (of which, I must admit, too, I am a graduate), and which burned the aging literary critic up so entirely back in 1992. They're clever, these stories, but they feel somewhat empty. I started the third story, Philipp Meyer's "What You Do Out Here, When You're Alone," this morning, over my coffee, and enjoyed the fact that it seemed a little more narrative driven, but even that piece had a too-easy, too-attempting-to-be-clever line of description (a wife described, in unimaginative shorthand, as having adopted a "Martha Stewart look" after moving to a suburban subdivision), that I had to yawn and push the magazine aside.

Anyway, I will continue plowing through all of the stories in the issue, because that's the kind of OCD reader I am, but my first response is a disappointed one. Fitting, though, that I just started having to wear glasses recently. Fitting, that is, because it's a sign of my advancing age, and perhaps directly related to the aforementioned onslaught of curmudgeonly reading tastes. Now somebody get me my slippers and my John Cheever book, before I really get cranky.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #4

2010-06-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 4

"Fight the Power" by Public Enemy (1989)

In the wake of Flavor Flav's ongoing move toward outright television buffoonery, and Chuck D.'s progressive mellowing, away from hip-hop reactionary and toward campus-friendly public intellectual, it may be hard for some listeners to recall what excitement this group generated back in the day. They were the first hip-hop concert I attended, at age 16. I got waved down with a metal detector, man! (That moment was less, I realized even then, a necessary precaution than it was cartoonish old-fashioned racist zeal from the local police...) This song, is of course, the theme to Spike Lee's incendiary film, Do the Right Thing (the last good American movie of the 1980s, confronting as it did the repressed effects of Tawana Brawley's accusations, the Howard Beach incident, Michael Stewart's murder, and Bernard Goetz's vigilante action, among black and white Americans in New York) and the track reverberates throughout the mounting tension of that movie's narrative. Even separated from its crucial contextual place in Lee's film, though, the song still has legs. Chuck D's lyrics were angry and inventive, and the group's production team (the fabled "Bomb Squad") were virtuosic in the cacophonic textures they crafted out of beats and disembodied samples. Play it loud.

Notes on Popular Culture: Those 21st-Century Education Blues

2010-06-16T12:42:00.001-07:00

Teaching, as anybody who's attempted it knows, is hard work. That is, imparting skills, encouraging reason, nurturing critical thinking-- That's hard work. Providing information is not so difficult. Loading up a classroom of students with information to be memorized and then offered back later in some rote-friendly method of assessment (like, say, the dreaded multiple-choice exam) is not such a burden on the educator. And isn't rote the norm, in the age of excessive standardized testing and No Child Left Behind?

All of this grumpy prelude is a way of introducing how fascinated I was by the interview I heard with MIT professor Sanjoy Mahajan the other day on Robin Young's public radio show, Here and Now. Mahajan discussed the Benezet experiment in New England public schools in the 1930s, in which teachers, realizing how much rote had come to dominate pedagogy, taught less math to students before the sixth grade. The result? Students outperformed those who were memorizing their arithmetic functions from the get-go in elementary school. The rationale behind the experiment was that creativity and reason and common sense were being outright stifled by the emphasis on memorization that governed most arithmetic training. As Mahajan proposed in his interview, this rationale might be extended across the curriculum, up into post-secondary education. It's a worthy challenge for professors: that is, how might we force ourselves away from asking students merely to internalize undigested information--a skill that seems virtually needless to me, given how easily information can be accessed these days--and move, instead, toward nurturing creativity and problem-solving in a more developed sense.

There's a brief, accessible article about the Benezet experiment, from Psychology Today, posted here: "When Less is More."

Notes on Popular Culture: Worth Putting in Your Netflix Queue #1

2010-06-16T11:45:00.000-07:00

Worth Putting in Your Netflix Queue, Vol. 1

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Silly twentysomething videophiles! And you thought that the Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson had invented quirky, elliptical dramas about complicated family relationships and/or hustles gone bad? Check out Bob Rafaelson's follow-up to Five Easy Pieces, with Jack Nicholson in the kind of understated role of which he became physically incapable later in his career: as a morose monologist on some kind of public access radio who's summoned to Atlantic City when his brother ends up in jail. (The movie opens with a fascinating, if disorienting, soliloquy that begins with Nicholson sighing heavily into his microphone, "Did I ever tell you why I don't eat fish?") Bruce Dern is an excellent foil as the gregarious sibling, the Misstra-Know-It-All with some kind of sketchy real estate plan in mind. Add, too, Scatman Crothers as an enigmatic crime boss and Ellen Burstyn as a mentally unstable lover, competing for Dern's affections with her stepdaughter. The story doesn't move according to any kind of recognizable narrative schematic, and--if you believe Roger Ebert's review anyway--there's maybe a bit too much heavy-handed symbolism drawn from the game Monopoly, but if you're looking for something different, this it it.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #3

2010-06-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 3

Bruce Springsteen, "Born to Run" (1975)

Maybe it's because I just spent the past two and a half days on the highway, winding in out of truck congestion on crowded interstates, discovering classic rock radio stations across five different states. Maybe it's because the lyric is so dead earnest as to be charmingly kitschy ("Did he just say, 'Strap your hands 'cross my engines'?"). Maybe it's because of the desperation in his voice when he tells Wendy he'll love her with all the madness in his soul. Maybe it's because every great rock and roll song has either a countdown (1-2-3-4..!) or a "woah woah woah" part, and damn it, this one has both. Maybe it's the Phil Spector-inspired wall of sound, with Clarence Clemons's wicked big tenor tone and the--is that a glockenspiel? Maybe it's for the wonderful album cover, with the oh-so-1970s ubiquitous san-serif font. (Check out the movie posters for Annie Hall and All the President's Men, if you don't believe me.) Maybe it's because this is when Bruce effectively became Bruce, appearing simultaneously on the covers of Newsweek and Time.

For whatever one of the above possible reasons, or for all of them at once, it's an essential track.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #2

2010-01-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 2

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "The Tracks of My Tears" (1965)

Fitting, for a singer who once referred to the opera Pagliacci in a later hit, that he would contribute this heartbreaking soul aria to the pantheon. The thematic range that Smokey brings to his writing is limited, but potent, with the sad songs often falling into one of two categories: a regretful mea culpa ("Ooh, Baby Baby") or an acknowledgment of the pain that a heartbroken lover willfully masks and hides from the world (this tune, obviously, or "Tears of a Clown," which features the Pagliacci line). This tune begins slowly, with a mellow guitar statement and doo-wop intro, as Smokey lets us in on the narrative concisely: "People say I'm the life of the party / 'cause I tell a joke or two / Although I might be laughing out loud, honey / Deep inside, I'm blue." From there, it escalates into a full-scale anguished crescendo. The string arrangement on the chorus is expansive as our man cries for understanding. And by the time we reach the staccato hits of the bridge finale ("My. smile. is. my. make-up. I. wear. since. my. break-up. with. you) there's no doubting the immensity of his heartbreak. I can listen to this song ten or fifteen times in a row. Hell, I have.

Notes on Popular Culture: The Pop Song Pantheon #1

2009-09-14T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Pop Song Pantheon, Vol. 1:

Note: In the age of the mp3, as popular music becomes disassociated ever more from long-playing albums, and is consumed in cannibalized fashion, as individual tracks set in opposition to each other in idiosyncratic ways, or arranged increasingly in user-defined playlists, I've come to think more and more about what are the essential popular songs of the past fifty years that every mp3 player should have. I'll add them here as I find time to write a short blurb on each, in no particular order. Imagine my list as a playlist of essentials on shuffle play.

"Life During Wartime" by Talking Heads (1979)

No playlist is complete without a little art-school nerd-dom. Everybody knows this song, even if they can't name the title properly. It's the chorus that stays with you, a hook for the ages in the "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, etc" refrain. And of course, by the ageless criteria of American Bandstand ("It's got a good beat, and I can dance to it, Dick."), the tune's a winner. But pay attention, too, to the lyrics in the verses if you've not in the past. They're vaguely political in capturing the chaos of battle (hiding out, carrying multiple passports, dressing in disguise), while turning emotionally on the existential edgy-nerviness that I think of as David Byrne's stock in trade. ("Psycho Killer," anyone?) An essential track on all accounts to get my pantheon going.

Notes on Politics: Amen and Alleleuia

2008-11-05T15:05:00.000-08:00

After growing up a river's-width away from the USA and after living here for four years, I've long thought of myself as a kind of sometimes-envious step-son of this big nation. There are moments when I want in on the American party: when I hear jazz, when I watch baseball, when I read Walt Whitman or Ralph Ellison.

But almost as often during the past decade, I've also taken solace in my outsider status. I've shaken my head at the misguided policy and malicious politics that defined the past eight years and said, many times, with relief, "Well, I'm not really from here." I can observe, I would remind myself, but this is not a mess with which I have to deal intimately. This is not my family, and the dysfunction I see around me is not a force with which I have to contend.

Last night, though, I found myself wanting in again. Perhaps with more vigor than I've felt at any point in my life.

The wonder and admiration with which I read the Declaration of Independence; the chills I get when I hear Ray Charles sing "America the Beautiful;" these individual moments of wanting-to-belong rushed into something bigger, a wave of confirmation of all those qualities to which I've previously been attracted in America. The sudden embodiment of hope and expectation about what America was supposed to be.

And it's not the cult of personality, as right-wing pundits dismiss. It's not the cynical sheen of televised performance. No, those things didn't move me. What did was the conflation of ambition, hope, and democratic responsibility made real. That combination struck me.

So here's to the next four years. Not for the miracle cure that the simple-minded supporters may see Barack Obama as representing, but rather, for a return to the kind of rhetoric that's drawn me always to the best of American culture: the celebration of diversity, the re-emergence of personal civic responsibility, and an unblemished faith in the power of collectives working together, across potential division, toward an ever far-off but eternally shared set of human ideals.

Notes on Writing: Reason #73 Lubbock Has Managed to Depress Me

2008-10-08T14:36:00.000-07:00

On my half-hour walk to campus this morning (an often treacherous journey, given the lack of sidewalks and the prevalent disrespect for pedestrians in this town), I saw two stray dogs running about, venturing dangerously close to the thick traffic on one of the city's innumerable four-lane thoroughfares. Immediately, I was upset. This city is overrun with loose dogs, an infuriating characteristic that, in my mind, speaks to a) a general disregard among the population for pets; and b) a municipal inability to punish sufficiently those who don't take better care of their animals. (I propose a five-hundred dollar fine for people unable to keep their dogs collared and contained at home--a move that would ensure animals and us stubborn pedestrians stay safe.)

What began as a common enough annoyance, though, soon devolved into a pretty sickening display. The dogs, running wild, did wander into traffic, and while one was able to avoid the mess of cars flying by at 50-60mph, the second did not. He was hit by a passing motorist, and pinned beneath one of the car's wheels for a moment. Amazingly, the dog got up from the impact, and, likely rushing with adrenaline, sprinted, yelping, away. I ventured after them for a block or so, trying to find the hit dog so I could take him back to my house and bring him to an animal hospital, but he disappeared into an alley and I couldn't find him. I imagined he had, at least, a broken limb.

Meanwhile, the offending motorist stopped for maybe a second or two before hitting the gas and flying on his/her morning way. Maybe this reflects a lack of concern for the hurt dog, or maybe it speaks to the danger for all of us on Lubbock's major thoroughfares. There were, after all, a whole army of speeding trucks--that is, ugly monstrosities like the vehicle pictured above--approaching ever-so-fast from the rear.

I would voice my rage in some local public forum over the whole depressing incident--and the multiple ways that the culture of the city allows such things to occur--though I know that the response I've often received in the past when getting openly critical around here is usually this: "Why don't you leave and go back to where you came from?"

Notes on Popular Culture: How Good is Vampire Weekend Anyway?

2008-09-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

OK, I admit it. Last spring, when Vampire Weekend became ubiquitous on hot-new-music lists everywhere, and enjoyed a figurative coming-out on Saturday Night Live, I completely threw myself on the bandwagon. "You gotta check this group out," I announced, to anyone who'd listen. "It's the most exciting new pop music I've heard since the early 80s." Vampire Weekend enjoyed constant play on my mp3 player throughout the end of the spring semester. When I visited San Francisco in March, I lamented the fact that the show they were playing in the city that weekend had already sold out.

Recently, though, I went back to Vampire Weekend, with a little bit of temporal distance, to see if, in a pop-cultural context that ebbs and flows with ever-increasing rapidity, the band still holds their own with the historical "titans" to whom I'd earlier compared them: Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, The Police.

I can say safely that my ear wasn't off last spring. These fellows are good. Their music is rhythmically interesting. It's melodic. Their lyrics are clever. ("Oxford Comma," anybody? A pop song whose conceit begins with a punkish line about syntax? I'm in!) And months later, I'm still charmed by their self-presentation as the great collegiate hope. After suffering through endless vapid dyed blondes and guys sporting mock rebellious sneers among the American Idol crowd, I still find myself attracted to the nerdy liberal-arts prepdom that VW adopts as their sartorial signature.

But, sadly, I think the greatest impetus for my earlier enthusiasm for Vampire Weekend is really the tragically barren wasteland of popular music context into which they've emerged. That is, their greatest contribution is merely a return to qualities I associate with most artists who ascended the hit parade in the late 1970s and early 80s, the period in which my taste in pop music was formed: namely, melodic hooks and choruses and clever lyrics. In their self-conscious return to those characteristics, VW had, as I felt intuitively, placed themselves in a genealogy that included The Police, Costello, Talking Heads...

Thus, the disappointing point at which I've arrived regarding Vampire Weekend, in the end, is that good pop songs should seem so exceptional at this point. Talking Heads--good as they are--weren't messianic; they were merely part of the New Wave norm.

Notes on Writing: Can We Really Have an Apolitical Classroom?

2008-05-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

This semester I encountered much debate here on campus at TTU about the place of political views in the classroom. The talk was largely inspired (I'll grudgingly admit) by the activities of the campus chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas, who started the "Professor Watch List" to monitor the unwelcome intrusion of professors' political views in the ostensibly neutral space of the classroom.

(I wrote my opinion about it in the Daily Toreador here: "Rogue Professor Seeks Political Persecution." )

As a follow-up, though, I wanted to share an interesting comment that a reader of The Chronicle Review posted online about this very debate, addressing the argument that for a professor to introduce his/her politics in a university classroom is to exploit the "power imbalances" of the instructor-student relationship:

Comment from "/case hardened":

"How about those other 'power imbalances' students will encounter after graduation? Will their bosses in the corporate world refrain from political discussion and pressure? How about the senior partners in their law firms? Their superior military officers? Why shelter students from the expression of political views? Just make certain not to test them on it."

Food for thought anyway. After a semester of writing op/ed pieces, I'm actually feeling less inclined than ever to be openly political.

Notes on Writing: Stop the Presses!

2008-02-20T21:18:00.000-08:00

For months now, I've been telling myself I should blog more. "It's the twenty-first century," I say, trying to rally myself to sit down and do it. Still, procrastination and indolence persist. It's not that I haven't been writing at all, of course. I'm still at work on a number of academic publications, some fiction, my writing on jazz for Coda, including--since September--a regular column on jazz and film. As well, this semester, I've been contributing a regular column to The Daily Toreador, the campus newspaper here at Texas Tech. (And lending a voice to the oft-silenced old-guy faculty perspective in those pages.) So, to end my blog silence at long last, here are the op-ed pieces I've written for the paper here, to date:

18 January: "On being liberal"

25 January: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a pacifist"

1 February: "Spectacle in U.S. politics"

8 February: "Of dog ownership, civic duty"

15 February: "Rogue professor seeks political persecution"

Enjoy. Or not.

Notes on Pop Culture: *757 and counting...

2007-08-09T11:18:00.000-07:00

OK, I admit it: two things that I am boyishly sentimental about are dogs and baseball. (And dogs and baseball in tandem, especially. This past Opening Day, my first since my beloved golden retriever Mingus passed away, saw me watching the game with the dog's ashes. I balanced a miniature Tiger cap on top of the urn.) I find myself perennially unable to suspend that adolescent sense of hopefulness and wonder about either topic. There is no such thing as a bad dog. And every spring marks the beginning of another championship run. As well, my disappointment is disproportionate at news of a dog being hit by a car, or reports of a Tigers loss. When the team fired my boyhood idol, Alan Trammell, as manager a few years ago, I nearly renounced my fandom forever. (Fortunately, though, the Tigers responded with a near-championship season and assuaged my bitterness substantially.)

...all of which is a roundabout way of getting to the fact that I can't decide how I feel about Barry Bonds's deposing of Henry Aaron as baseball's all-time home run king. Now, let me say up front, I'm not one of those pious Bonds-haters predisposed to churlish attacks on his character because he doesn't make a show of hitting taters for hospital-bound children. (And I would like to remind this finger-waving faction that the ol' Bambino, Babe Ruth, the ostensible paradigm of big-hearted American sports heroism, once missed part of a season because he contracted syphillis. Now that's a round-tripper I imagine the Sultan of Swat wished he could undo...) Indeed, I have defended Barry Bonds for several years now. So what if he's inarticulate and surly in post-game interviews, I'd say, the man is the most dynamic player in the game! Even before his ostentatious muscle-up in his 21st century seasons, he'd already amassed Hall of Fame credentials and commanded my vote as the finest player of his generation.

And yet.

While I delighted in the narrative rush of Bonds's pursuit of Aaron, now that the chase is over I feel undeniably empty inside. Maybe I thought that something more dramatic would occur en route to the record. In the wake of Bonds's alleged steroid use, I wondered if at the eleventh hour, with 754 homers under his belt, he might retire to preserve the sanctity of the record and restore his honor for the pious crowds. Or what if somebody tried to assassinate Barry to keep an alleged cheater from usurping ever-honorable Hammerin' Hank? (I didn't wish for this outcome, I must clarify. I'm a pseudo-Buddhist.)

Instead we got only an anti-climactic longball launched into the San Francisco night. And then--and here's where the boyish, sentimental me felt his heart drop--a pre-recorded message from Hank Aaron, projected on the ballpark scoreboard, in which he congratulated Barry and expressed his hope that Bonds inspired America's youth to pursue their dreams just as Hank hoped he had as the homer king for all those years. Oh, Henry Aaron. He who challenged threatening racists determined to take him off his game; who stayed healthy and strong through diet and conditioning; who had the mental fortitude to pursue the most hallowed record in American sport.

And I guess what all this verbosity amounts to is this: while I enjoy watching Barry Bonds, and I defend him to a degree, I do not find in him that level of inspiration that the child in me looks to baseball for. Henry Aaron--unlike syphillitic George Herman Ruth--always seemed to me one of the great dignified heroes of the game.

And for the life of me, I just can't imagine Barry Bonds offering such a model of eloquence and grace when his record gets shattered on some far-off summer night.

Notes on Fiction: My First Podcast

2007-03-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

I like hearing writers read their work aloud--even writers with unexceptional voices, as mine is. Some of the finest readers I've heard (say, Alistair MacLeod, Derek Walcott, Austin Clarke) imbue their fiction with new meaning when they read narrative for an audience.

Add to that that one of my Spring Break resolutions was to teach myself how to create podcasts, I present for your amusement (or probably for mine, mostly), my first ever podcast: "The Can Drive," a story about Yuletide events some time ago, at a Catholic high school in Windsor, Ontario, not unlike the one the author attended in the late 1980s.

You can find the podcast--and perhaps others in the future, if I find the time--here, at The Short Stories of Michael Borshuk.

Notes on Literature: A (Silent) Poetry Reading

2007-02-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

In response to Reya Mellicker's (Silent) Poetry Reading invitation, I wanted to share this favorite of mine by Michael S. Harper:

Here Where Coltrane Is

Soul and race
are private dominons,
memories and modal
songs, a tenor blossoming,
which would paint suffering
a clear color, but is not in
this Victorian house
without oil in zero degree
weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;
it is all a well-knit family:
a love supreme.
Oak leaves pile up on walkway
and steps, catholic as apples
in a special mist of clear white
children who love my children.
I play "Alabama"
on a warped record player
skipping the scratches
on your faces over the fibrous
conical hairs of plastic
under the wooden floors.

Dreaming on a train from New York
to Philly, you hand out six
notes which became on an anthem
to our memories of you:
oak, birch, maple,
apple, cocoa, rubber.
For this reason Martin is dead;
for this reason Malcolm is dead;
for this reason Coltrane is dead;
in the eyes of my first son are the browns
of these men and their music.

(from Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. 37.)

And while I'm at it, here's one more favorite of mine, by Yusef Komunyakaa--

Elegy for Thelonious

Damn the snow.
Its senseless beauty
pours a hard light
through the hemlock.
Thelonious is dead. Winter
drifts in the hourglass;
notes pour from the brain cup.
Damn the alley cat
wailing a muted dirge
off Lenox Ave.
Thelonious is dead.
Tonight's a lazy rhapsody of shadows
swaying to the blue vertigo
& metaphysical funk.
Black trees in the wind.
Crepuscule with Nellie
plays inside the bowed head.
"Dig the Man Ray of piano!"
O Satisfaction,
hot fingers blue
on those white rib keys.
Coming on the Hudson.
Monk's Dream.
The ghost of bebop
from 52nd Street,
footprints in the snow.
Damn February.
Let's go to Minton's
& play "modern malice"
till daybreak. Lord,
there's Thelonious
wearing that old funky hat
pulled down over his eyes.

(from The Jazz Poetry Anthology. Ed. Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Komunyakaa. Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1991. 120.)

Notes on Writing: On the Day of Mingus's Death

2006-12-23T22:31:00.000-08:00

Words fail me. They’ve always failed me. In moments of crisis, when my grief is most profound, I long to open up some part of me, to find some unforeseen inspiration that will allow me to express the anguish I feel within. Yet nothing I write ever seems to approach a satisfying revelation of the pain that lies inside. No sentences I can craft evoke the burn within my chest.

My dog of twelve years has died.

All the clichés about dogs are true, of course. They’re wonderful animals because they give so much but ask for so little. Mine was content with a daily walk, with two meals, with the occasional biscuit—to reward waiting for wet paws to be wiped on rainy days, or to be baited back indoors on obstinate afternoons when he roamed the yard in his own sure way. And in the best cliché fashion, he was my faithful companion, man’s best friend, beginning on my 21^st birthday, and offering unbound joy and good company until this morning, when he died in my arms, two days before Christmas, just weeks before my 33^rd birthday. He was the tripping presence underfoot when I cooked dinner in the evenings; he was the celebratory barker when I cheered on my beloved sports teams; he was the warm body at the end of the bed on nights when I’d otherwise have slept alone.

Those people who don’t like dogs—those folks whom I’ve always had trouble trusting, frankly—won’t understand why I’m writing now. They’ll fail to understand the need for a public tribute, in writing, for a fallen dog. They’d scoff maybe at the spectacle of a grown man weeping all day for an animal gone. But I cry without shame. And I indulge that seering pain. Me, who makes sarcastic jokes about the maudlin, who tries to turn a stoic eye to the hysterical and the sickly sweet.

I write, and I yearn for one more walk with him at dusk, or to once more yell for quiet from a dog who barked to express himself, and whose voice operated only at loud volumes. It’s people who stir me to sarcastic barbs, really; it’s people with all our vanity and our occasional malice and our petty shortcomings who pique my cynical nerve.

Dogs I have no trouble weeping for. And it’s this dog—my dog! my sweet neurotic beloved dog, so like his master in his worried brown eyes, and his love for food, and his comic fixations, and his irrational fears—to whom I pay unabashed tribute as the day of his death recedes.

It was in the company of my dog, that perfect example of nature’s grace, and life’s potential, that I experienced such dizzying heights of love. And now, in the loss of his company, such profoundly moving depths of grief.

For Mingus, beloved golden retriever (10 December 1994-23 December 2006). I miss you. Good boy.

Notes on Fiction: A New Story Publication

2006-10-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

Just in time for the Detroit Tigers' miraculous appearance in the 2006 World Series, my short story "The Old Neighborhood" has just been published in the Fall 2006 issue (vol 23, number 4) of Elysian Fields Quarterly.

The story is set in 1984, and is, in part, about my beloved Tigers, who roared to a World Series title that autumn.

Notes on Jazz: Favorite CD Reviews #1

2006-10-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

[Note: Occasionally, I will feature reviews I've written of some of my favorite jazz recordings of the past few years. This review originally appeared in the November/December 2005 issue of Coda.]

Sonny Rollins, Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert) (Milestone MCD-9342-2)

Given the extraordinary context from which this album emerges—recorded in Boston just four days after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 had forced Sonny Rollins from his Manhattan building six blocks north of the World Trade Center—it’s difficult not to be convinced of its grandeur before even one listen. One might note, after all, how thoroughly (and forcefully) post-9/11 popular culture has tuned us to the sentimental, inviting us to search for deep meaning in extreme home-makeovers or ubiquitous magnetic ribbons affixed to SUVs on the freeway. Less cynically, one might even look forward to a Sonny Rollins performance as the salve for 9/11’s collective trauma. We cling to the hope that art might lift us from the futility of mass violence perhaps. Maybe it takes the enormity of a Saxophone Colossus to fill the psychic gap of so much televised loss.

Rollins’s record succeeds, to some degree, on the latter terms. That is, in performing amidst such disorienting adversity, the saxophonist offers a model of heroism through creativity, and that alone makes this record an uplifting document. But the disc is all the more moving for eschewing a self-consciously epic or elegiac tone. In the face of hysteria, Rollins offers merely a humble set of buoyant standards. This isn’t Rollins the vital improviser of the mid-1950s, but it is Rollins the timeless artist at his most fitting. His weathered, resonant tone suggests strength; the unaffected bounce he brings to familiar standards like “Without a Song” (a reprise from his seminal 1962 album, The Bridge) or “Where or When” distracts from grief in its demonstrative joy.

At one point in the record, Rollins opines between songs: “We must remember, ladies and gentleman, that music is one of the beautiful things of life.” He then adds, more modestly, “Maybe music can help, I don’t know, but we have to try something.” As the crowd roars back with applause in affirmation, Rollins the artist—so wise, ever insightful—brings the horn to his lips and offers a more immediate sign of salvation and understanding than words could ever provide.

Notes on Pop Culture: A Top Ten List

2006-09-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

I love making lists. I am a sucker for the easy to digest, bullet-point brevity of top ten lists. Care to animate me over coffee or at the dinner table? Ask me for the top ten outfielders in major league baseball history; dare me to enumerate a dozen-less-two best movies set in Manhattan; prompt me for ten greatest books not written by Nobel Laureates... Here is a personal (i.e. by definition, mildly self-indulgent) list I scribbled down ages ago in a writing-ideas notebook. I was supposed to be brainstorming story ideas; instead, I went deep into the wellsprings of pop music memory. Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons. Me? In three to five minute tracks.

Top Ten Songs That Make Me Nostalgic for My Hometown

1. Fontella Bass, "Rescue Me"

I used to mistake this song for a Motown record, and I suppose that's where the hometown association began. It certainly echoes Berry Gordy's sound. The song is, of course, a call for salvation to a long-distance lover in its lyrics, but I can't help but hear it as my heart crying out to where I'm from, especially as my exile from that smoky town persists. Can't - you - see - that - I'm - lonely?

2. Martha and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"

Similar reasons. This one gets me for the exhortation, "Can't forget the Motor City." I can't. This song is, for me, a Friday night Tiger game in the summer of 1993. A fireworks display after the game and when Martha paid tribute to Detroit as they played this song on the ballpark PA system, the crowd roared. I got chills. I still do.

3. Sawney Beane, "Lenten Love Song"

This is a local ditty from way back. My friend Kenneth MacLeod's lyrics are so Windsor in my mind: the crummy part-time job; the overindulgence afterwards; the fleeting glances at love. This song is so many nights in 1995-96, when Sawney Beane were regular performers at the Bridge, the Loop, the DH.

4. The Stylistics, "People Make the World Go 'Round"

This is the summer of 1989, and the first of my parents' annual backyard parties over the long weekend in August. Guests stayed late. As the clock crept up on 6 a.m. we gathered around the piano for a sing-along. A tenor sax player got his horn out; a bass player joined in; my father on piano. Our crazy neighbor from next door stood arm in arm with me and shared his beer. This might have been the first time I heard this song, but I caught on to the chorus well enough to sing along and I've never forgotten it since.

5. Bob Seger, "Rock and Roll Never Forgets"

My first concert at age 13: Seger at the Joe in Detroit. He opened with this tune and the hometown crowd--predictably--went wild. At the time, I dug the peppiness of it, but now the song as special appeal for its homecoming narrative. Sweet sixteen's turned thirty-one... Wow, and then some.

6. Rickie Lee Jones, "Weasel and the White Boy's Cool"

Rickie Lee Jones's whole first album reminds me of my parents--along with other memorable artifacts from their record collection: the Joni Mitchells, the Steely Dans... This song probably gets me for its finality about the past. Sal, the main character, is leaving his people, his geograpy. Sal, say goodbye to your mom and your dad. Sal, say goodbye to your barrio...

7. Madonna, "Vogue"

You laugh, but-- A bubblegum favorite from that bittersweet, about-to-start-university summer of 1990. This song is listening to the dance mix on vinyl in my best friend's bedroom, or endless, aimless drives through dark country roads in another friend's car. It's ironic dancing at the prom and the promise of clubs and long nights and freedom to come.

8. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, "Our House"

This is the house in which I grew up, scored for pop song.

9. John Sebastian, "Welcome Back"

A song I love without irony. It evokes those too-short visits back some since I left for good in 1996. Walking the dog through my old neighborhood and wondering if I'll ever be back for any length of time.

10. Donald Fagen, "Maxine"

The summer of 1988. A stray dog shows up in our backyard to drink water from my sister's Slip and Slide. This occurred on 21 June, the official start of the summer, and the night my father and I saw the Tigers beat the Yankees on an Alan Trammell grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. The dog stayed, became ours. After a few days of haggling over the name we agreed on Maxine, after this Donald Fagen tune from The Nightfly, a ubiquitous recording on the family stereo that summer. The dog lasted four years, till she died of grief and old age not long after my father's death in 1992. I can't hear the song and not think of her, or those sun-drenched happy days in my family's history, even now.

Notes on Jazz: On Ken Burns's Jazz

2006-09-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

[Note: This is an excerpt from the conclusion of my book, Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2006).]

When Ken Burns's Jazz aired in ten parts on PBS throughout January 2001, at the start of the new century, the occasion seemed a palpable marker of jazz music’s ascendancy in the American popular imagination. It was a grand gesture of acclamation, maybe, that sought to reverse the rough–going to which the music had been first subjected in the century of its birth. After being denounced by Anne Shaw Faulkner as a primitive threat to national decency in the 1920s, celebrated by Norman Mailer as the “music of orgasm” in the late 1950s (4), and even pronounced prematurely dead in the 1970s, jazz was now being widely fêted. Burns himself said in a number of interviews that the jazz film completed an “American trilogy” for him, a three–part historical panorama that included his previously acclaimed documentaries on the Civil War and baseball.[i] After decades of being “outside” the mainstream, or worse, just plain forgotten, jazz had, through Burns’s work, attained an incontrovertible place in a virtual American hall of fame: it was now placed alongside the war that had helped define the country’s turbulent character and the pastime that had later tried to distract us from it.[ii]

And though few people I know actually sat through all nineteen hours of Ken Burns’s Jazz, the new century began, it seemed, with jazz music everywhere. Promotional tie–ins for the Burns film abounded. Record stores advertised the documentary with posters bearing the black-and-white likenesses of jazz giants ranging from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman. There was a series of compact discs associated with the film on sale everywhere, a pile of “greatest–hits” type collections for nearly every major artist in the pantheon. Booksellers offered the “companion volume” to the film, a weighty coffee table book, authored by Burns and his creative partner Geoffrey C. Ward, which featured hundreds of stunning archival photos to complement its narration of the music’s history. And this frenzy of Jazz cross–promotion was not limited to predictable goods. Never one to miss out on a marketing occasion, even Starbucks got into the game. In the winter of 2001, one could not order a latté without being pushed to buy the coffee–chain’s “Light Note” blend or hearing “West End Blues,” “Ornithology,” or “Maiden Voyage” over the café sound system.[iii]

Of course, jazz had been building in exposure. In the accumulation of interest since the 1980s, jazz experienced an unprecedented period of celebration that ran almost parallel to the career of its supposed savior, Wynton Marsalis. Indeed, as the career of the young trumpeter developed, straight–ahead acoustic jazz appeared to be in the midst of a mainstream reclamation that carried throughout the last two decades of the century. For instance, jazz was frequently showcased on television’s top–rated sitcom, The Cosby Show in the mid–1980s: there were allusions to classic bebop records by the show’s jazz–loving patriarch, Cliff; a poster of Marsalis that hung prominently in the bedroom of the family’s teenaged son, Theo; and guest appearances by famous jazz musicians like Lena Horne and Dizzy Gillespie.[iv] In 1987, Marsalis and his quintet, dressed in tailored suits and performing hard bop, appeared as musical guests on NBC’s Saturday Night Live—generally a high–profile platform for rock acts riding the top of the hit parade.[v] Moreover, in 1990, Marsalis appeared on the cover of Time magazine for an article advertising the emergence of a jazz renaissance, while in the summer of that same year, Spike Lee released Mo’ Better Blues, a glossy feature film about jazz musicians starring Denzel Washington and offering lush performance scenes with music dubbed by trumpeter Terence Blanchard and the Branford Marsalis Quartet.[vi] Then in 1991, Marsalis, Murray, and Crouch founded the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, a high–budget repertory that presented concerts, film programs, and lectures, in the interest of celebrating and preserving “classical” jazz. The program eased jazz into one of the country’s prominent artistic institutions, and six years later, Marsalis was awarded the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for his jazz oratorio, Blood on the Fields, a piece performed and recorded with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra under the aegis of the JALC program. The Pulitzer honor marked an obvious highpoint in the trumpeter and composer’s career, but also constituted a telling sign of the mass acceptance and institutionalization of “traditional” jazz. The music had come a long way since its early denigration, or even since 1965, when the Pulitzer committee had rejected Duke Ellington’s nomination for a special award for composition.

However, in citing these various events I do not mean to suggest that they are merely fortuitous, an arbitrary and collective change of heart regarding jazz among the American public. Rather, I would argue that the move that jazz made in the last quarter of the twentieth century, away from the so–called margins and toward the center of institutionalized, “accepted” American cultural life, came in part as a result of the political–aesthetic strategies of the writers whose work I have charted throughout this project. That is, while jazz influenced the modernist literature of Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Michael S. Harper, and Albert Murray, these writers, with their aggressive social involvement and appeals to the African American vernacular, established the music as an inviolable part of the hybrid cultural landscape to which they all attest. All four writers break down racialized borders in American culture and underscore how black expressivity is inextricable from the mainstream. And all four look to that expressivity with the historian’s eye in reclaiming the stories, myths, and songs imperiled by cultural hierarchies and the menace of racism. Unsurprisingly, three of the four figure into the text of Ken Burns’s Jazz, the cultural document I read here as the culmination of this jazz renaissance. Burns’s segment on Duke Ellington and the Cotton Club quotes from Langston Hughes, citing his criticism of the venue’s Jim Crow practices; the film’s reconstruction of bebop’s origins draws on Ralph Ellison’s reminiscences of Minton’s Playhouse from his essay, “The Golden Age, Time Past”; and Albert Murray appears on–camera at various times in the documentary, offering commentary on the music’s capacity for ritual and salvation.

Notes
[i] For example, in a January 16, 2001 interview with Eleanor Wachtel for CBC Radio’s Arts Tonight, Burns says:

I realized that this was not just this epic story and its sequel, but a trilogy that had to approach the only art form that Americans have invented — one that's suffused with the American story and the American experience. So the film I would make would not be just about the music and the extraordinary musicians who made it, but, having larger fish to fry, about two World Wars and the devastating Depression, and the music that got people through the toughest of times.

In that same interview, Burns, by his own admission a less-than-knowledgeable jazz fan, reports that his decision to make Jazz the trilogy’s third part was influenced by African American cultural critic Gerald Early who, while being interviewed for the Baseball documentary, told Burns that “when they study our American civilization two thousand years from now, Americans will only be known for three things — the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. He said they're the three most beautiful things that Americans have ever designed.”

[ii] I discuss Burns’s film in mainly positive terms here because ultimately its celebratory attention seems preferable to me than the various types of denigration to which jazz was subjected historically. But I also wish to make note of the controversy the documentary stirred. Many viewers—including myself—were put off by the film’s lopsided chronology, with three of ten episodes focused on the Swing Era, but only one—the final episode—covering jazz from 1960 to the present. The fact that this rushed ending to Burns’s long narration of the music’s history summarily dismissed the importance of free jazz—by racing through its period of emergence—enraged many of the same critics of the JALC’s representation of the tradition. Also, given Burns’s relative inattention to jazz’s most politically radical period, with the black nationalism of the sixties and seventies, it seems the filmmaker appears least interested in the music when it is most “threatening” to the American mainstream.

[iii] These various cross–promotions were certainly lucrative. For instance, as Steven F. Pond notes, halfway through the initial airing of Jazz on PBS in January 2001, “sales of related merchandise had already topped fifteen million dollars,” at a time when “domestic jazz sales [ . . . ] were roughly twenty million dollars” annually (12).

[iv] I do not mean to seem overly anecdotal in arguing that the occasional presentation of jazz on a half–hour sitcom constitutes a widescale re-emergence of the music in the popular imagination. But indeed, I am perennially surprised when teaching undergraduates how few students know who Dizzy Gillespie is until I remark that he portrayed Vanessa’s balloon–cheeked music teacher on Cosby’s show. Invariably, at that point, the number of students in the class familiar with the famed trumpeter doubles or triples.

[v] Saturday Night Live had featured a number of jazz musicians in the past, before the Marsalis appearance, but these were generally very avant–garde features in the early days of the show or spots by artists working with electric or electronic groups, that offered some pop crossover appeal. (Of the former type I am thinking, in particular, of Sun Ra’s May 20, 1978 appearance and Ornette Coleman’s spot on April 14, 1979; and of the latter, the plugged–in appearances by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock that appeared on October 17, 1981 and December 8, 1984, respectively.) In the 1970s, the show had featured a few performances by acoustic jazz musicians like vocalist Betty Carter (March 13, 1976), the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (July 24, 1976), and Keith Jarrett (April 15, 1978), but by the 1980s, its music segments were purely devoted to pop acts like Simple Minds, Bryan Adams, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The Marsalis appearance seems so significantly anomalous, then, because by the time of its airing on March 28, 1987, viewers of Saturday Night Live had not seen any kind of “traditional” jazz act since pianist Eubie Blake’s appearance with dancer Gregory Hines on March 10, 1979.

[vi] I single out Lee’s film here because its presentation of jazz musicians is remarkably different from the representations that dominate jazz films by white directors in the 1980s, namely Bertrand Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988). While the latter films thrive on the mythology of the self–destructive jazz genius (emphasizing the alcoholism of the Lester Young–like protagonist in Tavernier’s film, or the heroin addiction of Charlie Parker in Eastwood’s project), Lee’s movie portrays jazz musicians as an industrious, straight–shooting faction, without a whiskey bottle or syringe in sight.

Notes on Fiction: Arrival Stories

2006-09-27T12:52:00.000-07:00

[Note: Two mostly unedited sketches here, that don't seem to fit into any other fiction I have on the go at present.]

1.

A rainy day in Windsor, in the car. My father and I are out for the afternoon, running errands. I am maybe four, or five, and sitting in the back seat, though I can’t recall why. I was beyond the age of car-seats at that point. The rainwater is relentless, a constant rattle against the windows and I can recall no visual details, no features limned, outside the windshield. Instead, I see a wash: the blur of the wipers, a field of grey.

At some point in the afternoon my father bought me a Coke. This I remember. The empty can between my legs. The congealed syrup of the soda in droplets on the silvery top of the can. The straw that protrudes.

There is smoke in the car too. The familiar smell of tobacco. And the radio plays, but the music I can’t remember.

“This is a whopper,” my father says, reassuringly.

A Whopper is a hamburger at Burger King. It’s too big for me to order, says Mom. But Dad, I realize after thinking about it, means the storm.

“Will we make it home?” I ask.

“You bet, Baba-Looey,” he says in one of his cartoon voices. I don’t know the character but he’s told me who he’s imitating: Quick Draw McGraw, a cowboy character. Baba-Looey is his sidekick.

“Are you going the right way, Dad?”

He comes back with one of Quick Draw’s catch-phrases, one I’ve heard a lot: “Hey. I’ll do the thinking around here, Baba-Looey.”

I look at the Coke. Out of boredom, I pick it up and try the straw. The slurp echoes loudly against the tinny emptiness of the can. Nothing there.

The rain continues to beat against the car.

“Ah no,” my dad says suddenly, with an urgency that alarms me.

“Dad?”

He begins to pull the car over.

“Are you going the right way?”

He doesn’t respond playfully, in the cartoon voice. He doesn’t respond at all this time.

Suddenly, the passenger door is opening, from the outside, and someone is getting into the car. It’s an old man. Old like my grandfathers. His clothing is soaked. His thinning grey hair is pressed tight with wetness to his head. The man coughs as he wrestles himself down into the passenger seat of our little car.

“You’re going to get sick standing out there,” my father says to the man.

The man coughs again, forcefully. “I didn’t think anybody would stop. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes I was out there and not a goddamn car to stop.”

The man’s profanity startles me. My mother would punish me if I used the word.

“Well, Al,” I stopped, my father says. “Where we headed?”

The man is looking at my father intently. I see his eyes staring, wide, in profile. He seems just as surprised as I am that my father knows his name.

“There are smokes there if you want one,” my father says to the man. “But we gotta get moving. Where you off to, Al?”

The man, Al, takes one of my father’s cigarettes and lights up with my father’s matches, as Dad pulls the car away from the curb.

Exhaling, the man says. “You know me, son?”

The rain has picked up. My father concentrates harder in keeping the car on course. There’s a long pause before he answers.

“Everybody knows you, Al. The champ.”

Al nods. “Yes, I was the champ.”

“You don’t know me, though, Al?” Dad says. He looks disappointed.

Al smokes his cigarette thoughtfully. He surveys my father for some time. “Did we drink together some night, son?”

My father shakes his head. “We never have. No.”

Al looks confused.

“Where are we going, Al?” Dad says. “Tell me where to take you.”

Al thinks. “A motel. I’m at a motel out by the highway.”

“I can do that,” Dad says.

“You’re a young man, son. I don’t know a lot of young men unless I drank with them.”

“How’s your family then?” Dad asks.

“My wife?”

“Your brother. How’s your brother. How’s he doing?”

Al waits a long time to answer. Then he smiles. He laughs. He laughs so hard he coughs. After he’s cleared the phlegm from his throat he laughs again.

“Alan,” Al says. “Little Alan. How’s your dad? How’s Bill?”

“Which motel?” Dad replies. “There’s a bunch.”

2.

A sleepover with Zizi, my grandfather, when I’m seven years old. I’ve stayed before at this place, his new apartment, an underfurnished one-bedroom in an old walk-up by the university. This is a new arrangement; he’s recently separated from my grandmother. My parents keep offering me as a consolation prize between the two of them, available for overnight visits, a grandchild to assuage the loneliness of their middle-aged estrangement. I am packed off with a tootbrush, a shopping bag of toys, a book. Zizi promises pizza and Jiffy Pop popcorn and probably more television than I’m usually allowed.

His apartment has one chair in the bedroom and a couch in the living room. We sit together on the couch. We watch an old TV. Normally this arrangement would be enough to satisfy me, a Friday night well-spent. But Zizi is unsettling at times. He is strong, and gruff, and sometimes unaware of my needs.

He jogs every day. Once he took me for a run with him and made him leg it out the full three miles. My legs ached for days.

He’s a health nut and takes vitamins. Once he gave me a big glossy red multivitamin and insisted I take it with my breakfast. I put it in my mouth, expecting the hard red shell to dissolve sweetly—a candy coating—but was disappointed by the bitter taste I discovered. When he turned around I put it in my pocket. Who knows what happened to it from then on?

He is clearly not a man used to dealing with young children.

When he makes the Jiffy Pop (shaking the pop corn over the open flame of the gas stove impatiently), he leaves me in charge for a moment so he can go answer the ringing phone. I can barely reach the handle of the popcorn pan; when the corn starts popping within the foil, explosion after small explosion of kernel flowering, I feel like I’ll lose control. The blue flame of the gas burner is at my eye-level and I’m mesmerized by its threatening hue as the popcorn tray slides percussively, like a manic tambourine, in my grip. As the force of the popcorn threatens to overtake me, Zizi returns.

“How’s it going?” he says.

I don’t answer, concentrating instead on the task I’ve been assigned.
“You’ve got to keep it right on the flame, or else they won’t all pop.”
With his usual grizzly bear impertinence—does he realize how big he is?—he forces me aside and takes control of the pan himself.

Later, eating popcorn that he’s covered in seasoning salt, we sit together on the couch in the living room. Zizi makes conversation.

“Do you have lots of friends at school?”

I am shoveling popcorn into my mouth, two small fists at a time. I swallow and reply. “I have at least three.”

“Kid like you should have more. You’re very likeable.”

“I have three I met just at school. Some are friends from the street.”

“Do they go to your school?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Then they’re school friends, too.”

“If you say so,” I reply.

“Are any of them girls?”

I eat more popcorn and look away.

Zizi, uncharacteristically, leaves the matter alone.

“You like Wonder Woman?” he asks, after some time. “The show?”

I nod, risking embarrassment. He may lay into me for liking a woman superhero.

Instead, he smiles. “Me too.”

Then, out of nowhere, he says, “You like to talk on the phone? You can call one of your friends, if you want.”

“That’s OK.”

But he doesn’t let it rest. “You should talk on the phone. It’s good to be social.” I scrounge through the bottom of the popcorn bowl, picking out half-popped kernels.

Abruptly, he rises and disappears into the kitchen. I hear a drawer opening. He comes back briskly with the phone book in hand.

“Who are you going to call?” he says, brandishing the book in a way that seems menacing.

I say the first name that comes to mind. “Chris.”

“Who’s Chris?”

“He’s new at school.”

(And in fact, Chris is so new that I’ve talked to him only once. He’s a grade above. We we’re lined up at the school door, waiting to go inside at the morning bell. I was wearing running shoes my mother bought for me and he spoke. “Those aren’t Adidas, you know,” he said. I looked at my shoes. He spoke again. “Those are supposed to look like Adidas, but they’re fake. Those are cheaper, I bet.” I nodded. He said, “My name’s Chris. I saw you in my neighborhood. Do you live on Tournier?” I nodded. “Baby Street here,” Chris said. “We moved in with my Uncle Joe Marentette.” The bell rang and we went in.)

“So what’s his last name?”

“Marentette,” I say. “Maybe. He lives with his uncle.”

Zizi, determined, goal in place, begins leafing through the phone book. “OK,” he says. “What street is he on?”

“Baby.”

“Huh?”

“Baby.”

“B. A. B. Y.?”

“Yes, Baby.”

Zizi shakes his head. “It’s prounounced Babby.” (He rhymes the word with “tabby” or “cabbie.”)

“Why’s it spelled Baby?”

“It was a guy’s name. Historically. He was a historical guy.”

“I’ll say it Baby.” (Rhymes with “maybe.”)

“Then you’ll be wrong. It’s historical.”

Zizi’s head goes back to the phone book. He peruses listings for some time. Finally: “There’s no Marentette on Baby. But there’s one on South. Did you mean South?”

“No, Baby.”

“I think it must be the one on South,” he says. “Let’s call.”He grabs the phone abruptly and begins to dial, mouthing the digits of the phone number silently to himself. “It’s ringing,” he says. Then he thrusts the receiver into my hand and smushes it against my face.
There is an old woman on the other end of the phone.

“What?” she says.

Zizi: “Say hello.”

“Hello.”

“What?” the woman says again. She coughs. It’s a horrible, phlegmy sound.

Zizi: “Ask for Chris.”

“Is Chris there?” I say. My voice is quavering.

“Who’s Chris?” the woman shouts into my ear. More phlegm.

Zizi’s watching me, trying to summarize the situation in my ear. “Where’s Chris?” he whispers.
I ignore the shouting old woman in my ear long enough to say to him, “I don’t know. She doesn’t know him.”

Meanwhile, the woman bellows: “Why are you calling me? Who are you? Who’s Chris?” She has a whimper in her voice. She might cry.

“Hang up the phone,” says Zizi.

So I do.

“Go brush your teeth and get into your pajamas.”

I head to the bathroom.

As I’m brushing my teeth in the tiny bathroom, standing on a stool he’s left out so I can reach the sink and the mirror easily, I hear the phone ring. Zizi answers and is conversing with someone while I’m away. I finish brushing my teeth and reach for the mouthwash bottle he’s left on the counter. The liquid inside is a tasty-looking mint green. But when I get a capful of it in my mouth I’m surprised by the burn, the unbearable mintiness of it on my tongue.
Then I notice a spider crawling out of the drain of the ancient sink. I almost swallow the mouthwash in shock, but at the last moment spit it out, mostly in the drain, on the spider, some on my t-shirt.

Then, bam, Zizi’s knocking on the bathroom door in his imperious manner.

“Are you finished?” he says.

I put the mouthwash back and exit.

“What’s all over your shirt?” he asks.

“Listerine.”

“You’re supposed to spit it in the drain.”

He shakes his head. “Get into your pajamas.” He’s holding them, Superman pajamas folded and packed by my mother.

As I’m changing, he says, “Somebody’s coming over.”

“Now?”

“Yes. You can say hello but then you have to go to bed.”

“Who is it?”

He smirks. “A friend of mine.”

“What’s his name?”

Zizi comes over. “You’re putting this on wrong he says. It’s inside out.”

He tugs my pajama shirt back over my raised arms and readjusts it, brusquely.

“There.”

“What’s his name?” I ask again. “Your friend.”

“It’s a lady.”

“Oh.”

“You like Wonder Woman, right?”

“Sure.”

“She looks like Wonder Woman. Better even.”

“Oh,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant, but suddenly excited. Wonder Woman is beautiful.

“And her name’s Tammy.”

We sit on the couch together, him with his hair combed nicely, me in my Superman pajamas, waiting for Wonder Tammy to arrive. It feels like forever because he leaves the television off. Finally, the apartment buzzer rings and he gets up from the couch to buzz open the door.
We wait another minute while his friend climbs the stairs from the lobby to the apartment.
Then a knock at the door.

When he opens to let her in, I stand and turn. I expect beauty, a heartstopping woman in spangles and stars. Instead: somebody old like him. A woman in make-up and blue jeans. She chews her gum loudly.

He lets her in and turns to me. “See? What’d I tell you? Just like Wonder Woman!”

The woman, Tammy, smiles at me. “Hi. I’ve heard about you.”

“Hello,” I say, trying to be polite.

Zizi kisses her then. Like I’ve never seen him kiss my grandmother.

Then he hurries me off to bed.

Notes on Jazz: Whither Eclecticism?

2006-09-27T12:25:00.000-07:00

[Note: This was a guest column I wrote for Coda. It appeared in Issue 328, July/August 2006.]

Listening recently to Morph the Cat, the new album by singer-songwriter Donald Fagen, I was struck by something peculiar midway through the quirky ballad, “The Great Pagoda of Funn.” The minor oddity is a muted trumpet solo by Marvin Stamm, voiced in a jazz vocabulary that explores the upper structures of the song’s handsome changes. It’s a long solo by pop music standards, extending a full minute, and moving through an entire run of the tune’s verse structure. Moreover, at the song’s close, Fagen offers another curiosity: a second long instrumental solo, this time by guitarist Wayne Krantz, that runs for two minutes on the tune’s fade-out. Thus, “The Great Pagoda of Funn” offers two jazz-inflected instrumental breaks, running a combined three minutes (the entire duration of a standard pop song in AM radio days), and which help stretch Fagen’s ballad to nearly seven and a half minutes in length.

Now, if you know anything about Donald Fagen’s musical sensibility, you’ll recognize the staged, rhetorical quality of my surprise. Fagen’s indebtedness to jazz has been part of his press kit for more than thirty years now, through three solo albums and his long tenure as one half (with Walter Becker) of the pop group, Steely Dan. The Dan efforts, in particular, evoke a jazz “ethos” in a number of ways. Fagen and Becker allude musically, for instance, to Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father” in the intro to “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” They covered Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” on 1974’s Pretzel Logic (trading a wah-wah electric guitar for Bubber Miley’s growling trumpet), and made lyrical reference in other songs to various jazz legends, including Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. Most famously, Fagen and Becker enlisted jazz players like Wayne Shorter and Victor Feldman on 1970s’ albums, or Chris Potter and Bill Charlap on more recent recordings, to contribute solos. What might be Steely Dan’s signature song, “Deacon Blues,” is itself a wistful meditation on the tragic mythos of the jazz musician’s existence, ironically celebrating a life of “drinking scotch whiskey all night long,” before “dying behind the wheel.”

Thus, Fagen, is a pop music artist who marks his relationship to jazz music habitually and self-consciously. But what makes him stand out, perhaps, is the lack of ostentation he brings to that connection. In the past twenty-five years, moments of intersection between jazz and popular music seem invariably to have been raised to the status of “event,” a point of aesthetic uncommonness that—as marketers like to insist—should command notice. Think of the hype around Sting’s first solo album, Dream of the Blue Turtles back in 1985. The presence of Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland on the release elevated Sting in reviewers’ estimation from competent writer of pseudo-dub tunes (with the Police) to genre-crossing auteur. (The exceptional quality of the venture was unintentionally aided, no doubt, by Wynton Marsalis’s public tantrum over brother Branford and associate Kirkland’s concession to the dark lure of pop music.) Even more understated collaborations between jazz musicians and pop musicians suggest just enough incongruity to invite special notice. Ron Carter’s appearance with hip-hop artists A Tribe Called Quest, for example, on their 1991 album, The Low End Theory, shouldn’t have appeared unlikely, given the Tribe’s fondness for mellow loops and laidback samples, but somehow did, perhaps because it challenged the technological rigidity of hip-hop’s generic conventions.

Fagen’s turns to jazz—or blues, soul, or country—on the other hand, work against the continuing separation of American musical genres, and look back to earlier periods when ostensibly different styles bore a more organic relationship to each other. His approach resists the file-under-x commercial compartmentalization of music, and tries to recuperate the eclecticism of, say, the 1950s and 60s, when Fagen admits his sensibility was established. In a 1993 interview with Melody Maker magazine, Fagen listed, among the recordings that most influenced his approach, work by Miles Davis, Oliver Nelson, The Band, Dionne Warwick, and the Lovin’ Spoonful. Indeed, his formative models all date from a fifteen-year period when jazz was less removed from the Top 40, an era when Miles Davis and John Coltrane still recorded Broadway tunes and established their currency in jazz circles, or when Louis Armstrong and Cannonball Adderley might occasionally still approach the upper reaches of the pop charts. (Now, on the other hand, Wynton Marsalis has a minor visibility in lush, blue-tinted iPod commercials, but it’s unlikely we’ll see his “Sparks” near the top of the charts—or among the most frequently downloaded iTunes—anytime soon.) Moreover, it’s perhaps unsurprising that maybe the most dominant of Donald Fagen’s self-professed influences is Ray Charles, an artist who effortlessly defined the best of American musical eclecticism in a mix that kept recognizable elements from jazz always within earshot. When Brother Ray passed on in 2004, Fagen composed a memorial for his website that praised the catholicity of Charles’s approach, and announced, “No exaggeration: with the death of Ray Charles, we come to the end of American culture as we have known it.”

While Fagen’s commemorative announcement here is, of course, ripe with hyperbole, it does call attention to that musical eclecticism’s steady disappearance (even more threatened by the fact that a younger eclectic like Fagen is now in his late 50s), and with it, sadly, the continued dissipation of jazz music’s own relevance in the popular sphere.