Category Archives: Reviews

Jesus Christ Superstar

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 1, New York: Coming out of middle school I was a wrestler. I know, strange. I’d been casting about for hobbies and sure enough, going into freshman year of high school I was on the Wrestling team. Squad? I was terrible. I had no upper body strength, was dreadfully bored by exercise, and was heavy enough to be in a weight class with 5’9″ dudes that were 100% muscle. I won zero matches.

Come sophomore year I found my salvation: theater. Oh yes, it was obvious. Loud, obnoxious, perpetually on stage: I was a theater kid in the biggest possible way before I even learned what the word “thespian” meant. My high school had a small and underfunded theater program and I quickly trod the boards to lead roles. I loved theater. It gave me community. It gave me identity. It gave me a way to release the wild, pent-up emotion of teenaged angst. When my Dad passed away, half of my therapy was going too deeply into every single character I played and yelling, stomping, screaming my way through every performance. Theater turned out to also be a wonderful way to meet the ladies.

Jesus Christ Superstar was my favorite musical. I listened to my two-disc edition of the London Cast Recording until the laser in compact disc player nearly wore a hole through the plastic. I would have loved to have performed it, but I was forever stunted in my ambition because my voice, while great for a scream, was terrible for a song. Had my high school had the resources to produce a musical (we didn’t) I never could have been cast in any lead roles. (In Superstar I maybe could have eked out a Caiaphas.) As it was, we stuck to Neil Simon and I was a big fish in a little pond and things worked out great.

But, oh I loved to sing along to Jesus Christ Superstar, lack of talent be damned. This is another one of those albums from which I know every lyric. In fact, I know this album so completely, that the time I finally did well on the SAT, I spent the entire test singing this musical to myself front to back accompanied only by two bottles of Jolt Cola and a #2 pencil.


From the movie, not really my jam. But I do love this song.

I loved, loved being on stage but theater never felt like a calling. I wanted to create worlds, to write the stories. I acted here and there in college, but eventually moved completely on. And around the same time, grew a distaste for the artifice of musicals. But man, with the headphones on? Turns out I do still love to sing along to this album.

Sure, it’s a musical, but just imagine you bought this album so you could get out of reading the New Testament. It’s like a funky Cliffs Notes.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 1, New York: I realized, reading On the Road that I am in a period of reading books ‘that defined a generation.’ The Sun Also Rises has that description emblazoned on its back cover, as does The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. And of course, the Kerouac classic. In which he does not just define, but describes and names a generation: a ‘whole beat generation’.

It’s hard not to love this book. It has a very simple formula. Kerouac takes jazz, its rhythms, its explorations, its improvisations, and he fuses it into prose. It works because he does it so artfully; his prose is so incredible. One of his most common introduced improvisations is geography, and as he crosses and criss-crosses the country, he will take one tiny scene outside one tiny town and zoom it back: to the whole of the Mississippi River, or the whole of the Rocky Mountains, or standing at the edge of Long Island or San Francisco, visualizing that whole continent at your back. It’s really quite lovely.

This is youth well-spent. Exploring, experimenting, being largely enthusiastic about the journey and about what you find. (Unless you’re Cassady/Moriarty, in which case you are an ethereal spirit animated solely as a force of enthusiasm.) I like to think we, like all the generations that followed the Beats, captured some small bit of this. Did we write it as beautifully as Mr. Sal Paradise? No. Was it so culturally different that it would have been described by the New York Times Book Review as a Book That Defined a Generation? No. It’s hard to imagine any book capturing that title today, regardless of the beauty of its prose. In fact, I wonder if that’s a phase that’s passed in American literature? I can’t imagine any of the writers laboring away over their laptops in Brooklyn or Echo Park will actually produce the fabled Book That Defined a Generation. At least, it’s too late for mine, probably.

The one new thing I loved out of On the Road the second time around was having lived in San Francisco and New York. The details that make this book a historical vision of the Forties are fascinating in the following millennium. Imagining them bouncing along from SoMa to the Richmond in five minutes flat, from jazz joint to dive bar jazz joint. It’s a totally different city. That in New York, people were finding ‘cold water flats’ in the east 80s. Or that they go to a party in the slums of the West 60s (i.e. where Lincoln Center now resides.) This book is thoroughly modern and accessible to a contemporary reader, yet with a backdrop that is slightly unfamiliar.

This is absolutely a book that you should own and keep in your permanent collection.

Ani DiFranco: Living in Clip

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

September 1, New York: My wife had a tough week. So I cleaned the house while she napped and I listened to this double album of live Ani DiFranco with my headphones on. I confess, I missed this music. There was a moment in my life where I so strongly identified with being a fan of Ani’s, couldn’t tell it to enough people, and then the epochs of personality shifted and I left her behind when I left for college.

In high school, though, I listened to Living in Clip on repeat for nearly a year. I loved Ani for her virtuoso guitar-playing, for her lyricism, for her politics. I loved this music honestly and without artifice. “Out of Range” is particularly close to my heart; I once totaled a car because I was pressing forward on the CD player to get through the tracks to “Out of Range”, the final track. (Yes, I should have hit back twice.) I knew enough to wait for it this time and to enjoy the songs that came before. And then I played it three times through.

With this listen, too, I knew enough to hear all the love songs with a different ear. I suddenly realized why we all had such tortured and tumultuous relationships in our youth. This was our model! I lived my teens and twenties like an Ani DiFranco love song, without ever realizing how subconsciously I’d been prepared for it. I was either the protagonist or the villain, alternating back and forth between the roles (or always a villain, I am sure). Every relationship was a study in protracted yet beautiful collapse. Like “Gravel” or like “Untouchable Face” or like “Firedoor” or like sitting in a dark room with this album on repeat for hours.

Just as I left Ani behind on my way to college, I eventually worked my way out of those patterns in the years that followed and I now enjoy and indeed relish the stability of adulthood. And connecting back to my teenage self over the gulf of years spent, I must say I’m happy with the way things have turned out. And I think my Ani DiFranco period teenaged self would have been proud to see me, married happy and stable, listening to songs about gender roles while I quietly cleaned the house for my napping wife.

Revisit your Righteous Babe and pick up this masterful double disc live album.

This Is Spinal Tap

August 31, New York: The funny thing about Spinal Tap is how great the music is. Don’t get me wrong, the lyrics are rotten. But man they are playing some really fantastic rock and roll. Also, they are hilarious. Christopher Guest as Nigel gives the best dim-witted rocker the world has ever seen. Yet his face every time he plays a solo, that genuine excitement, the ‘holy crap I’m doing this, I’m really doing this’ makes you love him.

Coming from the video production generation, I’m always impressed to see improvisation shot on film. You have to have enormous confidence in your cast to roll expensive, expensive film on a couple of actors goofing around. And here, it works wonderfully. Left to his own devices, Christopher Guest will deliver line after line after line of pure gold.

The songs, though puerile, are so catchy. I woke up the next morning with “Sex Farm” stuck in my head. I even, at one point, bought the Spinal Tap CD and listened to it… as music. But the film is really the gem. I could watch this movie a hundred more times in my life. And I probably will.

Buy Spinal Tap and brace yourself from some Heavy (heavy) duty (duty) heavy duty, rock and roll.

Dazed and Confused

August 30, New York: Let me start by saying this was not my experience of high school. Not really even close. I would have been Adam Goldberg if anybody. Certainly not Randy ‘Pink’ Floyd. And definitely not Matthew McConaughey. “All right, all right, all right.”

I watched this for the first time in college and we laughed at how people did it in the bad old days, and then my roommate Andy from Texas told us it was all still true. His senior year of high school he got grounded when he taped a naked freshman to a lightpole. He spent his punishment in his bedroom reading Das Kapital in protest. Andy was an awesome dude. Texas is a crazy place.

The best thing about this movie is you keep getting older and it stays the same age, yes it does. It so enjoyable to watch this film. Everyone is so authentic, the music is the best, the dialogue is so natural (and often improvised, apparently). And have I mentioned Matthew McConaughey? Holy crap, he’s so good.

All right, all right, all right. Watch it again.

Wu-Tang Clan: Enter the 36 Chambers

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 30, New York: This post is about a different friend named Chris. This Chris was the sports anchor of our high school television show. I was the news anchor (“news” = announcements). Chris and I were good buds and he was often forceful of opinion. In this particular case I don’t recall the beginning point of contention, but Chris one day took me to school about hip hop. He had merciful pity for his poor white friend and graced him with some wisdom. He handed me a cassette tape of the Wu-Tang Clan and said “Go home, listen to this twice through, and then bring it back to me.” I did that (and I copied it) and oh man, did Chris save my life.

Enter the 36 Chambers was the first time I really experienced incredible hip-hop for what it was. Sat down and listened to it. Most of my youth had been dirty south dancefloor rhymes and radio hits. Sure, I’d heard Dre and Snoop and Tupac, but I’d heard all of them through the filter of a white, suburban, MTV-viewing audience. And that ended up not being my thing. Around the time people-who-were-not-in-gangs were really into acting like they were in gangs, I got into techno and Fiona Apple and punk. Hip-hop to me was just what was on the radio (this is probably the root of the disagreement Chris and I had.)

This album, though, this album revealed a whole different world to me. This gaggle of guys was awesome and awesomely talented. Fantastic beats. Incredible rhymes. And so many artful movie samples— by which Wu-Tang creates a whole WORLD within their mythos. I once took a class on hip-hop from Dr. Todd Boyd who dedicated an entire day to discussing the majesty of the Wu-Tang Clan, drawing an incredible parallel between them with their Shaolin vocabulary and Parliament-Funkadelic with their space alien world. Best day of class ever.

And you know what? I didn’t hate the skits on this album. They were little snatches of life. “Where my killer tape at?” This album is the best. Thanks, Chris.

You should own a piece of the Wu-Tang, like the secret Shaolin you are.

Fiona Apple: Tidal

August 28, New York: I have a confession to make: I went to the Lilith Fair. Twice. One of those times was with a girlfriend. But the first time was with my best friend Chris and we went as two straight dudes with the best of intentions— we just loved the music! (We loved it so much we drove all the way from St. Petersburg, Florida to Atlanta.)

Why go so far? Well, a lot of it had to do with Fiona Apple. We loved her. Loved her music and both had monster crushes on her. It came from an honest place! We listened to Tidal and were blown away. Before the hyper-sexual “Criminal” video, before her VMA acceptance speech sass, Chris and I were obsessed with how damn talented this woman was. She could play a mean piano, had a completely unique sultry voice, and WHOA could she write a song. We were superfans.


Forget “Criminal”, here’s “Shadowboxer” instead.

Tidal was at the beginning of a lengthy period in which Chris and I were obsessed with female singer/songwriters. Which, perhaps unsurprising for teenagers, the radio was conveniently obsessed with as well. This is the period of Jewel, Sarah MacLachlan, Shawn Colvin, Sheryl Crow, Lisa Loeb (those glasses!). We unabashedly loved them all. And we unabashedly wore our Lilith Fair t-shirts. To our high school. For real.

Tidal is still a pretty great album. It stands outside of its place in time, to my ears at least. I love a Fiona Apple turn of phrase in the lyrics and I love the way the piano drifts along. Happy to have given myself an excuse to re-listen to this one.

Relive the Lilith Fair yourself and buy this gorgeous little album.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 27, New York: It’s funny that we have high school kids read this book. Funny considering how much of the book is dedicated to inebriation. And for some of us, reading in high school, we were unfamiliar with the details of such topics. And when we made jokes to our English teachers about keeping up with the characters drink for drink, we were roundly laughed at as inexperienced in our aspirations to lushiness. I honestly, today, cannot imagine drinking that much that often without dying. But I loved reading The Sun Also Rises then and I loved reading it now.

ErnestHemingwayCAT
Look at this handsome fella, with his cat! Thanks to @VLoustalot for finding this.

The Sun Also Rises is, of course, the perfect inspiration for traveling to or living in Europe. For me and a few friends it served as the backbone of our own European trip in college (a story I’m sure is true for about fifteen thousand of those trips a year). Thanks to this book, I desperately wanted to spend my life in exile in Paris and very nearly did so, but more on that in later posts.

In this post, we’re still focused on teenaged Andrew and his first experience with Jake Barnes and company. At that age, I wanted so badly to hang out with these very fun people. To drink and laugh and travel with them. To have grand adventures and loud, boisterous dinners. I wanted to fall in love with Lady Brett Ashley, with her clever short hair and her careless discarding of men. Brett is one of the first fictional characters that set me up for poor decision-making about relationships and romance.

Reading The Sun Also Rises as an adult, the only part of the book I want to join the characters for is the fishing trip in Spain with Bill Gorton. To my adult eyes, Pamplona seems like a shit-show and Paris seems dour and desperate. But on the river? They eat well, they get lots of sleep, they drink wine during the day, they catch fish. And Bill is hilarious.

I do love to read Hemingway, though and reading this was a treat. This book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, his short stories— his prose is as crisp and refreshing as the river Jake and Bill go fishing in. For some reason, though, he’s the one writer I’ve loved whose style I’ve never tried to imitate. I don’t know why. Probably I am just a bit of a rambler.

You’ve read this book already, of course. But if you, like me, let your copy slip out of your collection, buy one and have it around like a good, old friend.

Branded to Kill

August 27, New York: I’ve watched Branded to Kill twice before. This post will be two posts, one for each of those times. The first post we’ll call “Why Branded to Kill is Awesome.” Here’s the trailer to get you in the mood.

Japanese cinema apparently had a period in which cookie-cutter gangster films were all the rage. This movie was supposed to be one of those, but Seijun Suzuki got ahold of it and made it epic. We follow the Number 3 killer in Japan, a master assassin. He loves his work, hot sex, and boiled rice. The whole movie is scored with jazz and gunshots. The final third is spent in a surreal buddy thriller with No. 1. The movie is so weird and so awesome and when I first watched it, I knew I’d found something special. I took great pleasure in claiming my allegiance to this film and even buying the Criterion Collection “digital video disc”.

Then many years later I forced a viewing upon Jill and Robin. They hated it. This second post we’ll call “Why Branded to Kill is Terrible.” It’s too weird and too arty and the sex is gratuitous and violent and what does it ever matter that No. 3 likes the smell of boiled rice? The movie seems never-ending and is only exacerbated by the editing— which hops and jumps around and leaves the viewer often lost. And what’s with all that dissonant jazz? After my second viewing, I began to suspect that I just loved Branded to Kill because I loved having an allegiance to something weird and obscure. That I’d wanted to love an arty, weird film that was picked up by the Criterion Collection.

Which brings me to my third viewing, just this past weekend. The truth is, watched alone and without the expectations of others, this film is actually quite good. Weird and hard to get through at times, but awesome. That final third of the film, where No. 3 and No. 1 are locked in an epic standoff had my laughing out loud. And the final scene with its repetition of “This is the way No. 1 works.” is really powerfully tense.

Get into the smell of boiled rice and buy the Criterion Collection edition of this film. Then watch it alone and not with the expectations of your loved ones.

Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 26, New York: I put my headphones on and went for a walk with this album. It starts so soft with the orchestral arrangement and then the string-dominated “Tonight, Tonight”. I all but forgot I was listening to a rock album until “Jellbelly” kicked off. When this album wants to rock, it rocks. “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” caught me by surprise when all of a sudden, in my headphones, Billy Corgan stated declaratively: “The world is a vampire.” Rock ensued.

This album is pretty fucking great. I wasn’t sure how time would treat it, but it’s a good one. Wide variation and great songs. There does not seem to be much distance between hits and filler, it’s just one solid album. I remember when this album was released, the pride I felt as a fan of a band that took a big risk. That booked an orchestra to weave into their crazy-long double album. And it worked. So many hit singles from such a great total album. For a song like “Tonight, Tonight” to be in regular rotation on MTV, that’s something.

I saw Smashing Pumpkins on the tour for this record. They were fantastic. They played a giant stadium venue and they must have played for nearly two hours. The set dragged at the end, they lost themselves in a fifteen minute rock jam and people began to file out. I was there with a girlfriend and the poor friend of mine who had driven us (who found himself the very definition of a third wheel) and while the friend was desperate to leave, my girlfriend and I were determined to see the end. Wrapping up their jam and my friend checked his watch, Billy Corgan looked up to the half-empty stadium and gave us a little speech about being the real fans, and fuck ‘the MTV fans’, and then he played “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”. It’s great to see a band you love in triumph.

Buy yourself a little Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

MTV Party To Go, Vol. 5

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 24, New York: This is a post about high school dances. And middle school dances, too. I grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida; we knew it as the Dirty South. Our anthem was “Tootsie Roll” by the 69 Boyz.


Do you remember what it was like in nineteen ninety quad?

“Tootise Roll” played at every school dance and it defined our dance culture. I don’t know what it was like in your mid-1990s high school, but we grinded. We freaked. Male and female pelvises came together and remained inseparable for the length of every song. When I later went to college, I was astonished to discover that this style of dancing was not universal. (Perhaps it was my dance partners who were astonished.) But in Florida, in the 1990s, it wasn’t “grinding” it was just “dancing”.

MTV Party to Go Volume 5 has many of the other regular tunes at those dances. Smooth slow jams like “Anniversary” and “Weak” and dance floor fillers like “Whoomp There It Is” and “Boom! Shake the Room”. “Slam”, which for no good reason other than the repetition of the title, used to inspire a mosh pit of slam dancing at every dance. And of course, that cultural high point “Come Baby Come”.

Fun fact: The first show I ever attended was K7. It was in a teenage dance club called “Sponges”, opened by local Top 40 shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge. It was open for kids from 12 to 19, and you know there were some 19 year old Floridian creep dudes making moves on 14 year old girls. “Come Baby Come” is a ridiculous song. Comically sexual. It makes you wonder if these guys had ever had sex before releasing this track. Well, at least you can understand the words; twenty years later and I still can’t decipher the lyrics to “Informer”.

Buy this album and relive a little bit of nineteen ninety quad.

Wonder Boys

August 24, New York: There was a period in which I watched this film nearly a hundred times in the space of a few months. It was just always on in our college apartment. And it never got old. Still today, this movie fits like a perfect pair of jeans— so comfortable, so enjoyable. Such fantastic acting: Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr., Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, even Katie Holmes is great in her red cowboy boots.

And Curtis Hanson, the director, is great, too. There’s nothing fancy about how Wonder Boys is directed, but everything about it works. Pittsburgh as a character. The Director’s commentary explains that every time Grady makes a decision, a bridge is featured. (If you watch a movie 100 times, eventually you watch it with the commentary on.) The weather as a character. The cold, wet rain is palpable. The crisp winter nights actually made Jill and I miss winter as we were watching it (which says a lot, because after last winter we are stridently pro-summer right now.)

I think Curtis Hanson is a masterful director. He gets out of the way of letting a film unfold. Wonder Boys, like LA Confidential and 8 Mile, begins with incredibly strong source material. And Hanson manages to enhance it. Let’s please give Curtis Hanson some more big movies to adapt.

Buy Wonder Boys. Watch it again and again. Fall in love with Pittsburgh, fall in love with Curtis Hanson.

Operation Ivy and Rancid: Let’s Go

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 24, New York: My punk phase was brief, if it was a phase at all. I found my way to punk via ska, to ska via Less than Jake, whose song “Johnny Quest Thinks We’re Sellouts” was one of my absolute favorites. I saw Less than Jake a few times at St. Petersburg’s State Theater, a last bastion of the era in which the Tampa Bay area had a large and thriving punk scene. I was not a part of that scene; I was too late for that.

I guess I would be a third wave punk kid? Fourth wave? I listened to Operation Ivy and Rancid, riding around with my best friend feeling cool with the radio cranked up. The ska was great, sometimes cheerful, always danceable. I loved to skank; I’ve many times demonstrated that I could skank to any music. But Operation Ivy and Rancid always felt far cooler. More true.

These two albums were my favorites of that time. Fast, fun, rebellious. I still knew every word listening today, still enjoyed them just as much. With the perspective of over a decade gone past I heard the anti-authority message much more crisply. As a teenager, everything is anti-authority, so those messages kind of wash over you. “Fuck the cops” is what you feel you’re supposed to say. As an adult, I recognize that these were, at the time, other adults making this music. People for whom cops were a real threat and the warnings about them had to be spread far and wide.

Turn your speakers up and skank along to Operation Ivy and Rancid.

Mikhail Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 24, New York: I am buying new copies of many of these books. They were once owned then later lent or lost. Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, for some reason, has never left my library. This slender volume has moved from Florida to Los Angeles to San Francisco to Washington to New York. And this is only the second time I’ve read it. This is my copy. Note the artful additions.

photo (24)

The first time I read this book I was a freshman in high school. In addition to my idle doodlings over Lermontov’s face, the inside cover is inscribed “Andrew Fitzgerald, Period 2”. The occasional page features deeply faded yellow highlighter.

Whoever had the idea to give this book to teenagers was a genius. Pechorin, the “Hero” of the title, is a feckless dick of a twenty-something. He’s needlessly evil from boredom, toying with the lives and emotions of others for his own amusement. He’s smart, confident, charming, and, again, a total dick. He’s basically a 1990s American teenager.

photo (25)
“An enthusiast turns me cold as ice…” What a teenage dick.

I don’t know how influential this book was on me directly, but I recognize in Lermontov’s Pechorin a persona I spent many years trying to affect. Distant, mildly amused, disaffected. (Though to be honest, I ended up less Pechorin and more Grushnitsky, the lovelorn twenty-one year old cadet who convinces himself he has an air of mystery because he wears a greatcoat.)

I included this book in this theme, because trying to be a Pechorin occupied so many years of my teens and twenties. Who didn’t want to be a smoldering Byronic Russian exiled to the Caucuses? Oh, what’s that? No one else did? Yeah, well.

Rediscover your teenage side with a trip to the Caucuses, a copy of this book in your valise.

David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust

August 23, New York: I’ve had David Bowie on the mind a lot lately. It started when I read VALIS, which includes “Mother Goose”, a thinly-disguised fictional version of Bowie during his Ziggy Stardust era. Then I rediscovered the Nirvana Unplugged album and had “Man Who Sold the World” stuck in my head for two days. On the second of those days I was walking to work, singing it to myself, when I saw this store window at Saks.

It was a sign. This was the week to listen to Bowie.

There is a lot of Bowie to love, but Ziggy Stardust is by far my favorite. The select individual songs and the album as a whole. It is just a great rock album. But I’m also a sucker for a concept album that tells a story, and the (full-name:) Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust certainly does that. From “Five Years” to “Ziggy Stardust” to “Rock n’ Roll Suicide”. All three of those are three of my favorite songs to sing along to. “Ziggy” was even briefly a go-to karaoke song for me. And in this listen, in my kitchen, making pizza, I was singing and dancing like I was on a tiny under colored lights, perhaps in spaceman makeup. These songs make you feel like you’re on stage.

Buy this album and dance around your kitchen singing it to yourself and/or your cat.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 22, New York: In the introduction to The Gunslinger, Stephen King talks about how he was inspired by Tolkien. That he wanted to write a Tolkienesque epic, but he wanted to do it his way. And he did, spread over seven completely surreal volumes, this being one the first. I love that. That makes me adore this series even more. The Lord of the Rings infused with horror, sex, and death and cross-bred with spaghetti westerns. The books don’t feel derivative at all, but in fact feel like high post-modernity— a weaving together of sources as diverse as the Beatles and the Bible and even (especially in later volumes) King’s own books. That latter bit is fascinating to me.

The story takes inspiration from a poem by Robert Browning, which was itself inspired by a line of Mad Tom’s from King Lear: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”. Funny for me because a) I saw Lear performed for the first time this past weekend and b) I just read The Invisibles which has a whole character derived from Mad Tom. The Dark Tower series is truly epic. The universe King creates is weird and awesome. The whole Gunslinger mythos that King introduces into this world— Gunslingers as knights of their age— is a really enjoyable conceit. And the deeper you get into the books and the weirder it gets, the more you think Stephen-King-the-popular-novelist might just be Stephen-King-the-post-modern-genius.

When I first discovered The Gunslinger, I wasn’t thinking any of this. This was one of the very first adult novels I read. I pulled it down from my parents’ shelf and devoured it. This was in a period where I was taking great pride in breaking free of the young adult fare I’d been reading for so long. Length was really the only difference (and the occasional sexy scene). My pride at that age in reading a long book may have become my adult-age weakness for any doorstop of tome. I just love a ridiculously long book. And The Gunslinger, though not particularly long, was pretty adult in content.

I’ve only ever read my way through five of the seven books. It took King a long time to complete the series and once he did I kept telling myself I’d read it straight through, but have never gotten around to it. Reading the first volume was pretty fantastic though. Completing the Dark Tower series might need to be a 2015 project. Creating my own series this epic and this amazing might need to be a life goal.

You should buy and read the whole series before I do and then simmer with spoilers until 2015.

Nirvana: Nevermind & Unplugged

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 20, New York: I’d originally planned to listen to Nevermind exactly once through, then write up a post and move on to the next album. Nirvana, it turns out, it pretty fantastic. I’ve spent the last two days listening to Nevermind a bunch and falling back in love with the Unplugged album. This music is really something great.

I was of the Nirvana generation— that cohort of teens and preteens for whom this album was the Beginning of Music. As it was a musical turning point, it was the turning point of my adolescence. Post-Nirvana I wore my Dad’s old flannels and one time tried to sing in a rock band (I was terrible, by the way). All the guys at my school grew their hair long and shaved underneath it. I asked my barber to do the same and he tried to talk me out of it; I didn’t really understand the difference between curly and straight hair. I had that mushroom haircut for at least a year.

I’m so happy that this was the music that defined my cohort. We could have done a lot worse. This music feels original, and to listen today, it feels timeless. It’s of its time, but stands outside it, too. It’s haunting to watch the videos of Cobain now, particularly this one from the Unplugged show, making wry jokes about David Geffen buying him a $500,000 present. It’s a shame to have lost him.

Nirvana is always for sale. David Geffen still needs the money.

Guns n’ Roses: Use Your Illusion 1 & 2

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 18, New York: First off, spending a work day listening to Guns n’ Roses sure does make for an odd mood. This is a music that is so unlike what I listen to now— loud and energetic and adolescent. I was never a GNR superfan (or a concert attendee, even once), but I was a teenage connisseur of popular music. These two best-selling albums were the first that I bought to follow a trend, and it felt great. I bought them from BMG, as a part of my introductory eight albums. The songs on my new CDs were all over the radio. They were all over my MTV. I was a part of a movement! I’d bought a subscription to a movement!

It’s surreal to listen to Guns n’ Roses now— particularly the blatant adolescent shock value of the lyrics (I cringed all the way through “Back Off Bitch”). More surreal perhaps to watch the video for “Estranged”, in which Axl— who lacks a second vowel in his name and is ALSO TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD AT THIS POINT— wears jeans shorts for the majority of the whole video.

Upon a re-listen, there are really two albums here. Not Use Your Illusion I & II, but rather Use Your Illusion: The Hits and Use Your Illusion: The Filler. Through the lens of time they are very, very different experiences, yet they are mixed and muddled together. And the hits hold up because holy crap there were so many hits off of this album! The Rock: “Civil War”, “Live and Let Die”, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. The Ballads: “Don’t Cry”, “Estranged”, “November Rain”. And each and every one these I found myself singing along to.

And then in the filler I was just lost. Half of it was entirely unfamiliar. The music sounds foreign today, this hard-rocking band in a studio where so many notes are punctuated with guttural exhalations and every drumbeat echoes like it was recorded in a silent and empty stadium. I bet for the actual Guns n’ Roses fans this album was a bit too polished. But hell, Slash sure can play a guitar. And Axl, for his faults, sure does have a vocal range.

For kids my age, Axl and Slash were quickly supplanted by Kurt and Eddie. But “November Rain” is the song that followed all of us dance to dance, through middle and high school. It was the super-long slow dance song. It was the song you had to make sure you were dancing to with the right person. With the right person, November Rain was the only song that came anywhere near to the eternity that you wanted to spend awkwardly circling with hands limply draped on shoulder and hips. With the wrong person, it was an endless prison. I spent every school dance both loving and dreading November Rain.

PS— How fucking cool of guitar player must Slash have been to get HELICOPTERS to shoot his solo? New thesis: Slash is the coolest thing about Guns n’ Roses/rock n’ roll.

If you find yourself compelled, go listen to them on Rdio.

Jimi Hendrix

August 17, New York: This post will launch a new theme: Constructing an identity through media. (Note: The last theme is not complete, but I’ve got two big honkers to finish and that will take some time.) Where A Long Waltz Through Nerddom was about quiet, private identity, this one is about consciously building a public face and doing it through the music, books, and movies I consumed. I was typical for my age in this way. In my teens, you were judged by guests in your bedroom on the CD rack you displayed. In my twenties, that same collection became the cornerstone for digital identity: your favorite books, movies, albums were crucial fields of Friendster, Myspace, Facebook.

As best as I can remember, the albums of Jimi Hendrix were the first instance of this in my life. For a lengthy period in middle school I became a MASSIVE Jimi Hendrix fan. It was my differentiator. I had Jimi t-shirts, I bought as many Jimi albums as I could, I listened to Jimi constantly. I knew the music was great and it was indisputably not nerdy. My Dad was thrilled; better to hear “All Along the Watchtower” blaring from my room than more of that ‘rap crap’. It was also, importantly to me, not what everyone else was into at the time. I had my own thing.

If I’d ever had a talent (or more than passing interest) for guitar, this would have been a life-defining period. And my Hendrix phase would have lasted a lot longer. As it was, it was just a phase. I never got past the strum. I’ve not really listened to a ton of Hendrix since middle school; I’d really burned through that library.

For this project, I focused on six albums: the three canonical Jimi Hendrix Experience LPs, the live Woodstock album, the Band of Gypsies album, and a compilation Blues album that I loved. This music really is incredible. It makes me inordinately proud of middle school Andrew to have been a big Hendrix fan. The songs are loud and dense and varied and so full of sound. There were just three guys in the Jimi Hendrix Experience! Making so much noise! And it is fun that I still know many of these songs note by note, like “The Wind Cries Mary”. Or “Voodoo Child”. My lord, that song. It was fun too, in this listen, to track his career through these albums and his soaring arc toward deep blues. Electric Ladyland is my favorite of the Experience albums, and it’s really thanks to “Voodoo Child”. That song should be in everyone’s canon. It’s like Jimi Hendrix was the Christ-figure messiah of the blues, he took it from Old Testament to New. Introduced a new epoch.

Much of this theme will not be as satisfying as listening to six Jimi Hendrix albums. The next few posts are going to move solidly away from distinctive identity and start to flow right on into the sometimes-lamentable mainstream of my youth. But this should be a fun one nonetheless.

Of all of these Jimi Hendrix albums, I would most recommend you pick up the Blues album. It’s really something special.

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

This post is in the theme “A Long Waltz Through Nerddom”. Read the first.

August 17, New York:

“10. Apollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trimegistos, said, “That which is above is that which is below.” By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.” p. 104, VALIS

This is not your ordinary Philip K. Dick novel. Not that there is an ordinary Philip K. Dick novel, but if there was, this wouldn’t be it. VALIS is the first in a trilogy through which Dick tries to make sense of an encounter he had with an other-worldly intelligence or a diety or a higher self of some kind. VALIS is the most autobiographical of these accounts. In it, there is the first person “Philip K. Dick” and then there is “Horselover Fat” (basically also Dick). Fat spends years working on an exegesis based on his mind-altered experience and trying to figure out why it happened and what it means.

VALIS is a frightening book because so much of it is truth. There was this inexplicable thing that happened to this intelligent and rational man and the attempt to explain it was driving him crazy. But the book is so valuable, so important because who better than a science fiction writer to try to puzzle out this mystery. To follow all the different paths and pull on the different threads. Unlike The Invisibles, which starts from the premise that this secret world is true, the burden is on Horselover Fat to prove it.

I came to VALIS from The Invisibles. The story here is familiar because much of it is the blueprint for the comics (for example, the satellite BARBELiTH; like the satellite from VALIS, the film). It’s a similar experience to one that Morrison says he had— a theophanic encouter.

Dick digs deep into gnosticism in VALIS— this forgotten mystical Christianity that was left out of the canon and rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. Gospels that speak of secrets for the initiated. It’s a subject that follows me through many of my favorite texts. It’ll come back up again in Evangelion, with its many not-so-subtle references to early Christian themes. VALIS though is the one text that makes it real. It is sometimes sad and sometimes desperate, sometimes funny and often with a gallows humor, it is truly human experience which can be unsatisfying but is all we have in the end.

Buy VALIS. Read VALIS.