Blogcritics Author: Carlo Wolff

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Word Down: Book Expo in the Shadow of Print Death

Carlo Wolff — Fri, 8 Jun 2007 20:41:20 EDT

Book Expo America is always interesting. I just attended my third, which was my first in the shadow of print death. Okay, so 30,000 attended the May 31-June 3 book trade show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, and, as usual, there were tons of books available for the snatching. But it seemed there were fewer “big” books being touted, and no matter your position in the literature field, the fact that the outlets for book reviews — if not books — are shrinking, created anxiety.Consider: Teresa Weaver, former book editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, was laid off and, fortunately, landed as book editor at Atlanta magazine. Starting June 25, she’ll be doing the entire book reviewing there, so that’s one market down or, at least, highly constricted. At the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where I’ve been publishing reviews for years, the book section has been running reviews — mainly short ones — by staffers and wire for the past two months. The book section editor at the San Francisco Chronicle just told me that that paper, which has always had an eccentric, really wonderful book section, is laying off 100 of 400 editorial employees. At the Boston Globe, another outlet of mine for years, the space given over to book (and, for that matter, other arts) coverage is shrinking, too.Because of that shrivel, a disconnect hovered over Book Expo. The gap between the publishing industry and the print outlets is widening, and online hasn’t stepped in - at least not in ways similar to the traditional print model. Sure, bloggers are legion, and plenty of blogs and websites deal with books. But the standards, authoritativeness and legacy of older print models are waning, giving people like me -- who were raised on print and who work within its milieu with expectations to be paid professional rates for their opinions -- the willies.At the same time, there was plenty to warm one’s literary cockles at Javits. My inner groupie was pleased to get these autographs: Pulitzer Prizewinner Richard Russo (whose novel, Bridge of Sighs, is due out from Knopf in October); Lee Child (his recent Delacorte book is Bad Luck and Trouble); Stephen Hunter (the mystery novelist and Washington Post film critic’s The 47th Samurai will be published by Simon & Schuster in September); and Walter Mosley (Little Brown will publish his Blonde Faith in October). I also got imminent books from Alice Sebold (The Almost Moon, Little Brown, October) and Philip Roth (Exit Ghost, his latest Nathan Zuckerman installment, due from Houghton Mifflin in October). I had two boxes of books shipped home. Reading will not be an issue. Neither will ethical questions like ones raised during a panel on book reviewer ethics. Moderated by assiduous, entertaining Philadelphia Inquirer book critic Carlin Romano, it featured the colorful Christopher Hitchens, the acerbic Francine Prose, Harpers Magazine book editor John Leonard (who wore his liberal heart on his sleeve) and Leonard’s more measured counterparts at The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times Book Review, David Ulin and Sam Tanenhaus. (For a podcast of the whole panel, check out website of the National Book Critics Circle.)Flamboyant Londoner Hitchens believes “in the gutter ethics of Fleet Street,” noting that he once praised a book written by an enemy simply because it was so good he had no choice. None of the panelists had great difficulty with writing about their friends, an issue that queers most daily newspapers - for good reason. Leonard noted that since he’s been writing about books for decades and has been a liberal even longer, essentially all he knows and likes are literati of similar bent. “Who else am I supposed to be friends with?” Leonard asks. “I’ve been in this business for 40 years. Ethics questions when it comes to book reviews are such small potatoes when it comes to the corruption of the culture.”Prose said she’s sent back review books that she doesn’t like because she doesn’t want to ruin careers. She also reviews books by friends. “The ethics question objectifies book reviews,” she said. “They’re matters of opinion, matters of taste ... the primary objective of the book reviewer is to write interestingly about the book.“I think the most unethical thing to do is write about a book boringly.”Tanenhaus, who runs arguably the most influential book review periodical in the country, said that the reader is the key. A champion of the uneven novelist Jonathan Lethem, Tanenhaus noted that when he took over the Times book review a few years ago, relationships of any degree between a reviewer and a book writer were suspect. Should Lethem be barred from reviewing Ian McEwan because the two once had lunch? No, said Tanenhaus, adding he considered Lethem’s lead review of McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (skewered earlier that same week by New York Times literary hatchet lady Michiko Kakutani) a “superb essay.” It was published in Tanenhaus' mag June 3.Ulin said disclosure is critical and necessary. “I do draw the line at having friends review friends,” he told about 100 people packed into a Javits conference room rendered nearly uninhabitable by spotty air conditioning. “It’s cleaner not to have that.“I don’t trust a critical voice that isn’t willing to be negative,” he added. “Can you praise or criticize a book even though you don’t want to?” Ulin also said he thinks book review sections should “champion” authors. “I no longer really want to tear somebody to shreds,” said Leonard, a self-styled “old man” of 60. “Keep silent or lose the friendship and write an excoriating review.”I didn’t attend many other panels, but I’ve been reading a lot about this Book Expo. Karen Long, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer book section, reported that HarperCollins teamed up with MySpace this winter on a teen writing contest, soliciting kids older than 13 to compete to write the best paranormal plot. The contest generated more than six million page views and an upcoming book, Reflection Perfection. That’s certainly a novel way to build a market. What the quality will be is a question.I did, also, go to the $50 author luncheon June 2. It featured Alan Alda, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, DefJam founder Russell Simmons - and Valerie Plame Wilson, the former CIA agent whose outing led to the conviction of “Scooter” Libby for perjury. The panel was a motley, predictably liberal crew. Plame, her blonde bouffant at odds with her outrage at the government, was the star, receiving a standing ovation from a crowd whose revulsion toward the Bush administration was palpable. Simon & Schuster, which is scheduled to publish her autobiography, has joined her in a lawsuit against the CIA, CIA chief Michael Hayden and National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell. The suit claims the CIA is withholding information about Plame’s dates of service even though those dates already have been aired. Plame’s book, for now, is in legal limbo.Simmons, who’s pushing his Do You!, a Gotham Books tome about the interface of spirituality and business (what, you didn’t know there was one?), was unexpectedly engaging and refreshingly casual; Alda was avuncular and funny; and Krugman said that this country stands, potentially, on the threshold of a New Deal, adding he hopes George W. Bush will be “seen as the Herbert Hoover of the 21st century.”

Carlo Wolff is the author of Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories and a long-time book and music critic. He works full-time as a business writer at Penton Media, specializing in articles about the hotel industry.

Music Review: Nine Inch Nails - Year Zero

Carlo Wolff — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:00:34 EDT

Trent Reznor's latest broadside is an expectedly paranoid, unexpectedly stymied look at the future. Fifteen to 20 years from now, Reznor opines in 16 largely chilly tracks, the world is bleak, underpopulated and hopeless. The original Nailhead rants against George Bush (the sloganeering, militaristic "Capital G"), evokes the romance at the heart of George Orwell's influential novel "1984" (in the first -- and yes, catchy -- single, "Survivalism") and almost breaks on through to the other side in "My Violent Heart," the scariest and most adventurous track.This largely self-produced CD is peculiarly single-minded and solitary, even for Reznor, an obsessive and perfectionist auteur. It's even more hermetically sealed than other NIN productions, though it's likely to be explosive live, when NIN frontman Reznor surrounds himself with the best young guns in the business. On the CD, there are occasional helpmates like a backup singer or two, "hyperdrummer" Josh Freese, and brass and winds on the virulently anti-Dubya "Capital G," the tune that makes this sci-fi-oriented album somewhat topical.Several tunes hearken back to early NIN, like "Head Like a Hole" from Pretty Hate Machine and "Happiness in Slavery," one of Reznor's darkest forays, from Broken. Certainly NIN's longest single album, Year Zero also evokes The Fragile, his flawed, unexpectedly romantic double disk of 1999; instrumental tracks toward the end, when Year Zero settles down, lend the new CD an almost wistful cast.What makes Year Zero less compelling than [With Teeth], its more pop-oriented 2005 predecessor, is that it's beating a dead horse.Other rock auteurs like Roger Waters (in Pink Floyd's The Wall) and even The Who (in the bloated Tommy) have tackled social distortion and alienation to more dramatic effect. Waters and Pete Townsend at least attempted story lines. Year Zero seems all point, no plot, and when the point's the same in every tune--the world is getting darker and there's not much we can do about it--the work begins to pall no matter how varied the soundscape.And there is variety in the soundscape for sure; that's what makes Year Zero worth listening to. Reznor, after all, is a master craftsman of addictive sonics. He downplays his voice here; there are virtually no solos and minimal guitar pyrotechnics (what is that startling shredder stuff in "Violent Heart"?), and almost all the tunes build relentlessly and hypnotically. This is an album of sound far more than sense, and the sound almost carries.Year Zero is beautifully sequenced and, as usual, very well built. How it was constructed remains opaque, much like the graphics in the disk booklet. Fans eager to explore other dimensions of Year Zero should scour the booklet for clues to online brand extensions, like http://anotherversionofthetruth. There, they'll find a "banner" explicitly equating guns and God, the sick, all-American equation Reznor aims to explore in Year Zero. Too bad he didn't take his probe farther.

Top 10 Albums of '06 - A Geezer Year for Pop

Carlo Wolff — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:45:24 EST

The year just past was a geezer year, with many of my top spots occupied by oldsters. These spanned usual suspects Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, but they also included unexpected old whippersnappers like Cheap Trick, Bob Seger, and Sonny Rollins. The best new albums of 2006 were Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere and Frank Black's Fast Man Raider Man, the first disk I ever "got" by the former Pixies frontman. Also dynamite: Madeleine Peyroux's Half This Perfect World, the sultriest release of the year. Some key duds: Jerry Lee Lewis's Last Man Standing and Christina Aguilera's numbingly narcissistic Back to Basics.Another really cool album by an artist long MIA was After Hours (Columbia), former NRBQ stalwart Big Al Anderson's swinging oddity. On the jazz front, my favorite was Husky, from Skerik's Syncopated Taint Septet. I also must cite Alejandro Escovedo's The Boxing Mirror (Back Porch), a brooding work that brought his battle with hepatitis C into the light.Also memorable: Paul Shapiro's It's in the Twilight, a gorgeous helping of avant garage Jewish jazz on John Zorn's singularly rewarding Tzadik label. But you gotta cut, gotta select. It's called editing. My top 10 albums for 2006 are:1. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere, Downtown/Atlantic. The best Parliament/Funkadelic update in decades, this weird hybrid dances great, sounds better and stars "Crazy," hands down the best single of the year. Don't miss the "Gone Daddy Gone" video.2. Madeleine Peyroux, Half This Perfect World, Rounder. The smoky "Blue Alert" (by Leonard Cohen and Anjani Thomas) is the keeper, the original "Once in a While" suggests Peyroux is getting ever bolder as a songwriter and the killer version of "Everybody's Talking," makes her third "official" album her best. For sheer sonic beauty, it's the top production of the year.3. Bob Dylan, Modern Times, Columbia. One of Dylan's most musical albums, it rocks like crazy, and there are times it's so romantic you swoon. 4. Frank Black, Fast Man Raider Man, Back Porch/EMI. This ambitious double album conjures Exile on Main Street in its darkness and unanticipated tenderness, but it's decidedly clear-headed and perhaps more diverse. Lotsa pedigree and legacy in the musicians, and a very modern point of view.5. Tom Petty, Highway Companion, American. This embering beauty signals Petty's return to songwriting form in tunes like "Turn This Car Around," the Southern Gothic "Jack," and "The Golden Rose," surreal, romantic Americana of a particularly swashbuckling sort. Sharp, minimalist, memorable.6. Bob Seger, Face the Promise, Capitol. It sounds big, the songwriting is deft, and the working class gets its due again. Tunes like "Simplicity" and "Between" put the meat back in Seger's motion.7. Cheap Trick, Rockford, Big3 Records. Effectively sequenced, this rocks hard and it features "If It Takes a Lifetime," the song "The Flame" really wanted to be when it grew up.8. Sonny Rollins, Sonny Please, Doxy. The newly widowed Saxophone Colossus regains his voice in his first independent release. This is supple jazz as swinging as anything Rollins has released in years.9. Skerik's Syncopated Taint Septet, Husky, Hyena. Politically charged, aggressively conceived and gratifyingly gritty, Husky is the funkiest jazz album of the year. 10. John Legend, Once Again, G.O.O.D. Music/Sony Urban/Columbia. Better than his 2004 debut, Get Lifted, this unimaginatively titled effort is the best Stevie Wonder album in decades. Beautifully sequenced, unabashedly warm, it scores points on equal parts musicality and technosavvy. Honorable mentions: If the first had been better edited and the second less calculated, either could have been a solo occupant of the 10 spot: Tom Waits, Orphans (Anti), and Solomon Burke, Nashville (Shout! Factory). The Waits is a sprawling, frequently brilliant three-CD collection of tracks old and new and transmogrified; its very ambition compromises its focus even as it signals its singularity. The Burke is duets and country-oriented, both commercial moves. But Burke's treatment of Springsteen's "Ain't Got You" leaves both Burke and the listener breathless. Other honorable mentions are Big Al Anderson's suave, meaty After Hours (Columbia) and Paul Shapiro's In the Twilight, a loving slice of avant garage Jewish jazz on John Zorn's singular and regularly rewarding Tzadik label.Another don't miss: Eric Clapton and J.J. Cale, The Road to Escondido (Reprise). This is the first Clapton in almost 30 years I've been able to listen to more than once, and that's because it's largely Cale's. It swings, it's mellow, and it's wise. Besides, the musicianship is startlingly cool and sophisticated.Top singles (after "Crazy"): "Bossy," Kelis; "Ain't No Other Man," Christina Aguilera; "Promiscuous," Nelly Furtado (though "Say It Right" smokes, too); "SexyBack," Justin Timberlake; "Fergalicious," Fergie. Some afterthoughts:2006 felt like the Year of the Geezer (me included). Some of the year's best albums were by vets long MIA, like Seger and Petty; Tom Waits, Solomon Burke and Lindsey Buckingham turned in fine work, too. I liked new albums by My Chemical Romance and, for sure, Gnarls Barkley.I still don't listen to much rap, though I caught a lot of singles courtesy of my girls, 11 and 14, who turned me onto cool stuff by Pussycat Dolls, the ubiquitous Justin Timberlake (God forbid he discovers plastic surgery like his model Michael Jackson), even Ciara. I listen to XM Radio, particularly Deep Tracks and particularly, DJ Earl Bailey (give that guy his props). I usually avoid commercial radio, though I've gotten back into it a little now that I've published my first solo book, a perfect talk subject for classic rock radio, which is big in Cleveland: Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories.As its title suggests, CRRM is a book of nostalgia. Focused on the '60s through the '80s, it above all celebrates the fans that give Cleveland its distinctive rock profile. It's an oral history with a factual, narrative backbone that touches on the shows, clubs, promoters, record stores, the fashion and the fans that made places like the Agora and La Cave legendary and gave bands from the Raspberries to Pere Ubu their profile. Producing Cleveland Rock & Roll Memories put me back in touch with my affection for rock - which is a good thing.

Book Review: Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield

Carlo Wolff — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 13:45:15 EST

This superficially irreverent, contrived revisiting of fact and rumor surrounding the making of Exile on Main Street, the murky, great double album the Rolling Stones released in 1972, proves that access doesn't equal insight. Presented theatrically, with "acts" substituting for chapters, Robert Greenfield's stylishly written, but sloppy, book would like to be an insider's account of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that permeated stop-and-start recording sessions at Nellcote, the mansion in the south of France that key Stone Keith Richards rented in the summer of 1971.Stones fans already know about Richards' drug use, Mick Jagger's chilly business sense and organizational talent, and the subordination of other Stones to those Glimmer Twins. In addition, it's hard to figure out how Greenfield could have made mistakes such as listing "Dandelion" as a track on Their Satanic Majesties Request and asserting that "Jumpin' Jack Flash" surfaced on Sticky Fingers (its first album appearance was on the Through the Past, Darkly anthology.)Did Greenfield think that today, when the Internet bares all and war brings death close to home every hour, transgressions emblematic of a souring culture of 35 years ago could still provoke a frisson? Did he think that pointing out the Stones' dualities -- bad boys grown old, bluesmen gone brand-crazy, former sex idols gone long in the tooth -- was illuminating?There are decent descriptions, and Greenfield's access to minor characters in that summer's narcotic soap opera is impressive in a Fashion Pages sense. An account of the recording -- virtually session by session -- becomes boring, however, like a Warhol movie starring heavy-lidded Joey Dalessandro. Seems Keith did some inspired noodling, but the inspiration was hard to capture for engineer Andy Johns. Here's a paragraph that's revealing and "inside" - but to what purpose? 'Just a riff going round and round and round,' Johns recalls. 'Then he'd disappear. He loved to play but not when I had the tape rolling. So he would disappear and if you did manage to get them all hooked up and trying to do something, it would go for maybe an hour and a half, two hours, then Keith would go, and this was the euphemism, "I have to put Marlon [his son by Anita Pallenberg] to bed." Which meant he was going to go upstairs and have a fix. And of course he would nod off in bed. And we'd all be sitting there. Two, three in the morning. And everyone was too scared to go up there.'Greenfield doesn't get to the actual making of the album until page 94, and even then, doesn't focus on it. Instead, he spends most of his time recreating the atmosphere of the period. At times, he's effective -- his discussion of Mick Taylor, a major guitar talent unsuitable for the Stones in either a psychological or musical sense, carries some weight, and his insinuations about the ease with which the Stones unburdened themselves of a drug bust to tour the U.S. behind Exile is provocative - but you have to wade through a gang of atmosphere to reach the meat.In the end, while he slags the Stones for the formulaic quality of their current product, Greenfield defaults to sycophant. Though he has no love for Jagger, he, like so many Richards' contemporaries, bows down before the Wrinkle God. "Unlike Mick, Keith makes no bones about what he has done and where he has been and all that he has seen," Greenfield writes. "He does not try to hide his sins under cover of the night [get the allusion to the title of a Stones song?] Simply, it is not the way he is made. He was like that at Nellcote and he is like that now. After all is said and done, Keith is our hero. He is also our antihero."Is this supposed to pass for profundity? There's more depth in the grooves of Exile on Main Street.

Music Review: Bob Dylan - Modern Times

Carlo Wolff — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 14:00:56 EDT

Meet the new Bob Dylan, the first and still the best. The latest version is gregarious, user-friendly, comfortable with new formats, and, as usual, iconic and enigmatic. Dylan's giving interviews and embracing new technology; the iTunes spot for Modern Times is hip and sexy and swinging, like the record itself. This fall, he's even going to be featured on Broadway in The Times They Are A-Changin, another Twyla Tharp collaboration (didn't she just do one featuring Billy Joel?). Dylan countercultural? Hardly. But still intractably trendy and provocative. Modern Times, his 31st album, is very good. So good, it's a pleasure to spin again and again. It's not as dramatic as Time out of Mind, his 1997 "comeback," or as oracular as Love and Theft, the disk (released 9/11/2001) that cemented his reputation once again. But it's more natural than either.It's topical and elusive, referencing everything from 9/11 to Tommy Tucker to the Five Satins to Alicia Keys; even the economy comes into Dylan's focus, on "Workingman's Blues," and Katrina rears her horrifying head (obliquely, or course) in "When the Levee Breaks," one of the toughest rockers.At times, Dylan's in love: "I've been sittin' down studyin' the art of love/ I think it will fit me like a glove," he confesses in "Thunder on the Mountain," the surging rocker that launches the album and sets its multifaceted agenda. At the same time, he can be misogynistic: "Someday Baby," the coiled rocker at the center of the album, features lyrics as spiteful and stinging as its music. Not only is Dylan's writing sharp, he's singing relatively on key (think Nashville Skyline an octave deeper), and this band may be the best he's ever worked with. Leave it to Dylan to assemble a country-rock combo with brushwork-heavy jazz drumming, so the music swings like mad but is soft; move over, Dire Straits. Dylan says it's the best band he's ever worked with (the groups on Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home weren't bad, and there was that gang he worked with called the Band). It's certainly the most sinuous.The tunes are fine, indeed: "Someday Baby," despite its political incorrectness, is as sexy as "Highway 61," and "Ain't Talkin'," the slowly whirling closer, is fabulously connotative, as if to reconfirm Dylan's ability to say something even when he claims he's mute (the guy's a fabulous kidder). "Rollin' and Tumblin'," Dylan's freshly apocalyptic rewrite of the old Muddy Waters tune, rocks like a train, and "Beyond the Horizon," a ballad in the Leon Redbone vein, is downright dainty. Are there conclusions to draw from this? No, as usual. Modern Times doesn't seem to be the completion of a trilogy because Time out of Mind and Love and Theft are more thematic. Modern Times, which covers all sorts of terrain, is an album that stands quite well on its own, resonating fresh and penetrating deeply. And it's a distinct pleasure to listen to. May Dylan record more such triumphantly musical albums with this group -- his personal "cowboy band."

CD Review: Scritti Politti - White Bread Black Beer

Carlo Wolff — Fri, 4 Aug 2006 11:59:01 EDT

As he did in the mid-'80s with the insistent, unforgettable singles "Perfect Way" and "Wood Beez," Green Gartside drops back into the world, his sound of surprise intact and singular. His sonics a cross of Laurie Anderson and the Beatles, Gartside, aka Scritti Politti, confects remarkable tunes that, no matter how opaque their lyrics, quiver with melody. Listen to him and start thinking like him: loopily, parenthetically, dreamily.One could call him psychedelic except his sound -- check out the patience, the purposeful open-endedness (that's no oxymoron for Green) of "No Fine Lines," the cautious optimism of the hurdy-gurdy flavored "Snow In Sun" -- is so spare.Constructed in his home studio,White Bread Black Beer evokes the Brian Wilson of "In My Room," the Laurie Anderson of "O Superman" and, in the way Gartside teases language into new shape and meaning, the under-heard, brilliant American songwriter Van Dyke Parks. Like those others, Gartside creates work that is unique and unmistakable, and he's a master of musical form. "Dr. Abernathy" is a slippery, bizarre drug song that conjures the Beatles of "Revolver"; "Petrococadollar" (the word tells you all you need to know about political finance) is moody, ephemeral; "E Eleventh Nuts" is looped hip-hop shot through with Pacman percussion loops in a complex call for gender equality."Locked," one of the sweetest tunes with its layered guitars and velvet vocals, is a love song. That's all. That's everything. That's the way it is with all these songs. It's pop drenched in technology and philosophy. The complexity and the allusiveness (or is the elusiveness?) are what get you about this disk: It seduces with its sound, then snares you with its thought, the way it runs on verbally in the midst of such tight arrangements, such well-built atmospheres.Gartside put the thing together in his home studio, and there's a technocratic aspect to it in the way it exemplifies the notion of the hermetic genius who creates perfectly sealed universes of sound, a tradition that encompasses rockers from Todd Rundgren to Steely Dan to Stevie Wonder. And dropout geniuses like Brian Wilson, alone with his thoughts in his sandbox.But there's more, of course. There's resonance. Take the lyrics of "Throw," which start "I can't find a stand to take, to or from the road to ruin, sure I've got the sense to make, a record my own undoing..." Parse that; pay particular attention to the commas. And take joy that this eccentric Briton, like spiritual forebear Syd Barrett, has decided to venture from his room into the hurly burly of the pop marketplace and make a record that doesn't undo himself (or even reveal himself that much) but instead, fulfilling the mission of all great pop, undoes and transports the listener.

BookExpo America 2006: Checking Into Bookland

Carlo Wolff — Thu, 25 May 2006 15:01:03 EDT

Want to get a read on the book market? Visit BookExpo America, the book industry's biggest annual trade show. I spent May 19 and 20 at BookExpo as part of a horde of some 25,000 plumbing the Washington, DC Convention Center for the latest literary buzz. I didn't go to any of the formal dinners or lunches, so I missed Tim Russert, Barack Obama, and Frank Rich hawking their imminent, undoubtedly buzzworthy publications. But I did cover panels focusing on blogs, the graphic memoir, and the "official" buzz books of the fall. Let's take them in reverse order. A buzz book panel May 20 featured the chief editors of Doubleday, HarperCollins, Farrar Straus Giroux, Public Affairs and W.W. Norton. Presented by Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson, this consisted of pitches for these buzz books, targeting booksellers both retail and wholesale, librarians, and chains. It was packed.I predict that Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games, a 900-pager due this fall, will be the biggest hit of the season. HarperCollins' Jonathan Burnham said he was glad his house outbid Scribner's and Little Brown for what he called a "masterpiece" reminiscent of Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Dickens's Bleak House; and A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry's acclaimed novel of '70s India. HarperCollins is sure to market the hell out of this, serializing it before publication and, I am sure, raising a high profile for it in stores.Other buzz books I look forward to are Heist, a FSG book National Journal reporter Peter Stone has written about Jack Abramoff; Ward Just's Forgetfulness, a "novel of moral suspense" Houghton Mifflin's Eamon Dolan praised to the skies; and The Wonga Coup, Economist reporter Adam Roberts' geopolitical non-fiction thriller about Equatorial Guinea coming from Public Affairs.On to graphic memoirs. Stoked by the success of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books and Harvey Pekar's long-running American Splendor series, graphic memoirs are gaining respect - and marketability. "Pictures of a Life: Comics & the Memoir," a panel moderated by Publishers Weekly comics expert Calvin Reid, featured the chronically prolific Pekar, who's working on an anthology of comics for Houghton Mifflin; Alison Bechdel, the outspoken and eloquent creator of Fun Home, Houghton Mifflin's first foray into the field; David Axe, writer of War Fix, a graphic novel about being a war junkie in Iraq; and Marisa Acocella, author of the imminent Knopf graphic memoir, Cancer Vixen.It's fascinating to see Pekar evolve into an elder statesman of pop culture. Since he launched the mordant, naturalistic Splendor in 1972, he's made a career of cantankerousness and contrariness, playing the role of griping proletarian Everyman in the public consciousness. Since 2003, when the movie of American Splendor made him a counterculture icon and brought him some measure of stability and comfort, Pekar has been turning out ever more graphic novels, graphic memoirs and anthologies. His was the panel's voice of reason, particularly compared to that of Axe, a self-promoter who seemed to have little regard for the truth.Axe said he likes graphic novels because the graphics "cut out the middleman" in narrative and are an efficient way to tell the story. Besides, he said, "we see the world in pictures." He said that before he went to Iraq, he told his artist, Steven Olexa, "How I intended to feel about it... I was there to sort of live a story." Is his book fiction or non-fiction? "I don't believe in non-fiction," Axe responded to Reid.Bechdel told Axe she couldn't "make anything up." She crafts graphic literature because a memoir "is a way to put my life in order."The other panelists danced around Axe, whose comments suggested an approach similar to that of the mendacious James Frey and journalistic fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. "I wanted to escape the party line," he said, explaining his self-financed trip to Iraq to absorb the meaning of war addiction. "I wasn't alone in having a good time in Iraq.""I'm not bloodthirsty," Axe said. Neither are U.S. soldiers in Iraq, he added, "but they do like killing bad guys...they don't feel any remorse about killing somebody who deserves to die."Graphic literature has been on the BookExpo agenda for some time, but the blogosphere is still coming into view. In the May 19 panel, "Blog 2.0: How Blogs Continue to Redefine Author, Publisher and Reader Dynamics," venture capitalist Dan Burstein suggested the blogosphere and traditional literature will continue to converge.Bloggers and/or blog readers don't naturally patronize bookstores, he suggested. Rather, they surf the net for the information and commentary blogs provide. He called for more books about blogs and aggressive crossover marketing.Blogs will become "more responsible," he said, and look more like traditional media. The deliberate creation of rumor and slander in blogs will decrease, even as "the voices of traditional media" become more opinionated. At the same time, newspapers are struggling to reconstitute their authority and probity in a universe in which the hegemony of the individual voice is valued. Markos Zuniga, founder of Dailykos.com, said that "in today's world, if you don't have an electronic voice, you're not being heard." Anna Marie Cox, who started the sex-and-politics blog Wonkette, suggested she and Zuniga started blogging because they "didn't have a voice elsewhere.""What blogging does is it identifies people with really good voices that resonate," Zuniga said. The blog is a medium that "should identify the best voices per niche."

CD Review: Neil Young, Living With War

Carlo Wolff — Mon, 15 May 2006 07:03:33 EDT

Neil Young's new album, Living With War, puts me back in touch with my idealism, which has been pummeled the last six years. He uses melodies he's used before, which some might call lazy and others might call expedient, and the album's raw, befitting a burst of creativity of less than three weeks, so it's not the kind that lends itself to critical parsing. It's bigger than that; so what if it's aesthetically uneven? It's ragged. It's also glorious. It's urgent. It has intent, purpose, power. It's album as change agent.I'm proud of Neil Young, happy he's a conscience that rocks. Isn't it ironic that a Canadian is the one to remind us of what's best about America? The country has lost sight of itself, no matter how the Bush administration spins and obfuscates. Build a wall around it? I thought it was founded on openness, on a notion of community that includes rather than rejects. But that's another discussion.In 1979, Neil Young wrote about artistic vitality, in Rust Never Sleeps. In 1975, he stared down death, in Tonight's the Night. He has been associated with the reactionary, in his touting of Ronald Reagan in the '80s, something I still don't understand. Above all, he has been associated with contrariness and outspokenness, and some of his best work is bulletins from Despair Central, like "Ohio," the classic he cranked out for Crosby, Stills Nash & Young just days after the shooting of four Kent State University students by the National Guard in 1970. Young is often topical, his best music immediate.I prefer the hard rock Neil Young to the pastoral, agrarian side exemplified in "Heart of Gold" and Old Ways. I like Young to speak truth to power. That's what he does in Living With War, perhaps his most immediate release ever. Recorded in 20 days, in the distribution pipeline and into record stores in another 20, Living With War is Young's update of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, a landmark 1970 release that summed up the zeitgeist of the times, too. Here, Young grapples with ecology in "After the Garden"; scolds all us materialists in "The Restless Consumer," the third track and the one in which the album finds its groove; calls the empty, toxic rhetoric of the Bush administration to account in "Shock and Awe," a fierce slab of metal chamber music; connects the Vietnam and Iraq quagmires in the wan and wistful "Roger and Out"; and nails Dubya in "Let's Impeach the President," a bitter and long-overdue suggestion that Young's in a better -- and politically safer -- position to make than Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold.Living With War is protest music; how heartfelt it is comes through best on the impassioned "America the Beautiful" that ends the album. Young is nowhere to be heard here; instead, there's a 100-voice choir in fulsome throat, reminding us how beautiful the song is -- and how striking it is that Young is the first legacy rock (not classic rock; Young is always contemporary) artist of stature and gravity to articulate once again those principles - freedom of religion, at a time when the government ennobles religiosity; freedom of speech, at a time when the government would prefer speech be the right kind and only the right kind; and diversity, when the nation is divided into red and blue states - that used to define this country.Call Young na�ve for believing there's a leader who can keep this country from turning to stone. Call him simplistic for believing there's no point in waging the same old war. Call him a goddamn foreigner, meddling in the affairs of a country he's not even from, as I'm sure some right-wing bloggers are doing. Call Reprise Records an arm of those leftie pinkos in Hollywood for rushing this album to market, as I'm sure those same bloggers are doing.Call the release of Living With War an act of conscience and courage, too. As Gaye did in 1970, when Dubya's spiritual, dysfunctional forebear Richard Nixon held his paranoid sway, Young is calling for a return of civility and community, for an end to the divisions that now characterize this country, for a vision that embraces, not excludes. It's a tough call, and a necessary one.

Reviews: The Beatles: The Biography, With the Beatles

Carlo Wolff — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 16:20:16 EST

Bob Spitz's The Beatles is a startlingly well-reported and consistently engaging revisionist biography of the most familiar, and arguably the best, pop group in history. Even though the Beatles story is well known, Spitz has fleshed it out fully, revealing the flawed, singularly creative human beings behind that lovable moptop image. He traces the Beatles from childhood to their 1970 breakup and suggests that what followed -- their individual recording careers, the murder of John Lennon, George Harrison's death -- is far less interesting. What makes the exhaustively bootlegged Beatles so engrossing is they seemed to speak as one voice, creating music that transcended category and embodied community. They were so good that for a brief period in the volatile, aspiring 1960s, they made us believe that all you need is love. Their story, however, suggests otherwise.Also catching part of the Beatles vibe is Lewis Lapham's With the Beatles, an aesthetically appealing but ultimately disappointing little book with nifty pictures. Although charming and smoothly written, it feels like an extended footnote. That's too bad, especially considering that Lapham is the editor of Harper's magazine. The only journalist allowed into the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi when the Beatles visited it in 1968, Lapham has delivered more ''with" than ''Beatles," dropping too many of the other names in attendance at the maharishi's getaway and shortchanging the Beatles themselves. This trifle is sure to become a collector's item; not particularly illuminating, it covers ground Spitz treats in greater and more interpretive detail.In a recent question-and-answer session with Publishers Weekly, Spitz said his book took nearly eight years to prepare and, when initially presented, was 2,700 pages. It's still huge, but it's captivating and by no means too long. Spitz meant it to be sober and truthful, he said. It is. It's also heartfelt.What Spitz does exceptionally well is contextualize. He details the separate social contexts of each Beatle, re-creates their heady early years (the Hamburg gigs where they sharpened their craft and the Cavern gigs that seeded Beatlemania are particularly vivid), makes their oppressive, even frightening popularity palpable (fans nearly tore them apart, rushing them at concerts and making their getaways hazardous), and explains how Lennon and Paul McCartney separated under pressure from women, business, and fame.Spitz spends several hundred pages on the formative years as Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison evolved from schoolboy band to the Quarry Men to the Beatles. Before settling on permanent drummer Ringo Starr, they shed notables such as the frail, artistic Stu Sutcliffe (awful on bass, a pro at image) and key loser Pete Best, the Beatles' penultimate drummer. The usual ranking is Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr, but it's not that simple. Spitz makes it clear that Lennon's drive and cold ambition got the Beatles off the ground, but he also suggests that McCartney was at least as talented, was a better musician, and kept things together (albeit in his own condescending way) in the middle and toward the end.As early as 1961, when the Beatles' young manager, Brian Epstein, began to prettify them, their dynamic, with its built-in fault lines, was apparent. An early associate calls Paul ''Mr. Show Business," adding that Lennon ''greeted each concession, each nod to conformity, with unmasked hostility."''That was the intricate nature of the band," Spitz writes. ''It put Paul and John at cross-purposes, terrific cross-purposes, that would grow in intensity over the years. Passing was the perfect harmony that marked their songwriting relationship. In its place was a distinction so contrary, a conflict so profound, that the friction it produced built up an armor. Both men schemed aggressively to impose their vision on the Beatles. Always there was Paul's need to impose their vision on the Beatles. Always there was Paul's need to smooth the rough edges and John's need to rough them up. Somehow, it drove them to fertile middle ground. But the constant compromise was ultimately a debilitating position, and the balance on both sides could not be sustained forever."Spitz also gives credit where it's due, to Epstein and, above all, to George Martin, far more the ''Fifth Beatle" than sycophantic New York DJ Murray Kaufman, a.k.a. Murray the K. The remarkably open-minded Martin not only encouraged the group, he held it together during such glorious efforts as Rubber Soul and Revolver and such bitter non-collaborations as The White Album, a double LP that was brilliant, though it's the sound of things falling apart.Unlike many celebrity biographers, Spitz doesn't sugarcoat. Lennon's childhood was indeed troubled, but that doesn't excuse his meanness to his first wife, the pliant Cynthia, or how infantile he was with Yoko Ono, whom Spitz portrays as a conniving social climber and the true force behind the Beatles' breakup. Spitz doesn't spare McCartney, either, depicting him as both a musical genius (''Yesterday" is all his) and a smiling opportunist.It's all here: the brilliance, the waste (Spitz's look at the Beatles' Apple Corps-related business is appalling), drugs soft (Dylan turned them on to marijuana) and hard (John and Yoko were deeply into heroin), and legal disputes, with ''a tough little scorpion named Allen Klein" backing Lennon-Ono against McCartney, wife Linda, and Lee Eastman, Linda's lawyer dad.The Beatles is a dark, riveting fable about a group that in breaking up let the whole world down. Although they made music as one, the Beatles were individuals, too. Their complex equations are thoroughly and movingly explored in Spitz's memorable biography.This was published in The Boston Globe on Oct. 23, 2005.

Little Richard, ripping it up for real

Carlo Wolff — Sun, 15 May 2005 17:47:55 EDT

Little Richard King of Rock and Roll: The Complete Reprise Recordings Rhino HandmadeBefore he devolved into a talk-show celebrity best known for saying "shut up," Little Richard found his truest muse.It wasn't the same as the one he consulted to conquer the world in the mid-'50s, when Georgia peach Richard Penniman staggered rock and roll and all other possible circuits with pompadoured, wildman hits like "Tutti Frutti," "Long Tall Sally," "Rip It Up" and the (could it be?) semi-autobiographical "The Girl Can't Help It." Little Richard found his core muse in 1970. Call her southern soul. Call Little Richard one of her greatest exponents. The proof is this limited edition, three-disc set, the sad and thrilling document of a comeback that failed.It collects 1970's stunning The Rill Thing, 1971's less cutting, cover-heavy King of Rock 'n' Roll, 1972's desperately titled, incandescent The Second Coming, cuts from the movie "$," and 10 astonishingly profound, country-flecked tunes from the unreleased album, Southern Child.As the set progresses, it becomes more experimental and surprising, as if Reprise (and Little Richard) had ever less to lose. Such are the exigencies of commerce.Even though Little Richard did tunes by the Beatles, Stones - and, particularly, Martha and the Vandellas - proud, it was his originals that propel this remarkable collection. "The Rill Thing," in particular, is fantastic. Driven by Little Richard's lower, more honest and less exhibitionist voice, it's southern soul of the most snazzy and heartfelt kind. "Freedom Blues," a minor hit written by Richard and doppelganger/secret role model Esquerita, and Travis Wammack's "Greenwood, Mississippi" launch it, and there's no looking back.What's great about this is the music and the art and the reminiscing. What's not so great is that, just as in the original liner notes, there's little commentary on the sessions themselves.The startlingly definitive Muscle Shoals Rhythm section contributed; so did long-time Richard associates Lee Allen on sax and the masterful Earl Palmer on drums. Both cut tracks with him at Cosimo Matassa's New Orleans studio in 1955. But that's a minor beef. The set is exceptional, southern soul (and all it connotes) at its finest.