Alt.Indie.Kerouac

(Note: the following’s by Jeremy Griffin, who also wrote this and whose name makes Google-stalking him sort of tough [note: he's not the comedian from Raleigh-Durham], though this is him)

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur by Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard

I confess that I’ve never been a fan of Jack Kerouac, and I say “confess” because I realize that, as a white male in his late twenties who attended a liberal arts college, I am obligated by law to adore the man, particularly On the Road, his breakthrough novel, which was based on his travels with fellow Beat Neal Cassady. But the truth is that Kerouac’s influence on pop culture has become so pervasive over the years that the themes in his work, while regarded during his lifetime as wildly unconventional, now seem passé and unoriginal to me. And I understand, of course, that this isn’t actually his fault, that I just missed the boat in terms of age and that maybe I just have bad taste in literature, but, well, there it is. I don’t like Jack Kerouac.

And so of course I was apprehensive about picking up One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Music from Keruoac’s Big Sur, the new collaborative album by alt country pioneer Jay Farrar (Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt) and indie poster boy Ben Gibbard (Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Zooey Deschanel’s husband). This was also due in large part to the fact that I am a long-time Farrar fan and that I have yet to cultivate the kind of appreciation for Gibbard that would probably entitle me to write album reviews in the first place, but whatever.

It turns out, however, that One Fast Move showcases some of the most elegant songwriting I’ve heard in years. The album (which is actually the soundtrack to the documentary by the same name) was written in a span of five days utilizing lines from Kerouac’s poem Sea and the novel Big Sur—a fitting homage considering the author’s affinity for stream-of-consciousness writing (allegedly, he wrote On the Road by gluing together many single sheets of paper to create a long ream and did not pause while typing to edit or to even consider what was to come next).

That Farrar has cited Kerouac as a major influence on his own work should come as no surprise; alt country’s mission to resurrect the spirit of Depression-era folk music and to legitimize working class America owes a great deal to the author’s interest in fringe cultures and his conception of America as a country that is constantly rediscovering its own potential.

Indeed, Gibbard and Farrar seem particularly well-suited for such an album, or at least Farrar does, mainly because so many of the songs he’s performed over the years with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt seem to be about Kerouac, the mythology of the man’s character.

Stylistically, the songs fall on Farrar’s side of the court: calm, loping acoustic ballads, heavily rooted in his Appalachian folk aesthetic and accentuated by a healthy dose of pedal steel. However, while each track is fantastic, the ones that truly stand out are those sung by Gibbard (the duo trade off singing duties), whose voice provides a kind of new school vitality for the songs, which even a long-time Uncle Tupelo/Son Volt fan like me will admit can get a little repetitive after a while.

Ultimately, however, it’s the lyrics and their marriage to the melodies that really give the album its resonance. As one would expect, the songs are loaded with rich and often unusual imagery and tend to be thematically structured around that old Beats-y ideal of capricious travel, as evidenced in “Willamine”:

With her sad abstract letters

She talks with a broken heart

We’re going to get married and fly away

Roam the Genghis Kahn clouds

Anybody who’s never done this is crazy

It’s easy to imagine a musical project of this sort falling flat on its face; after all, how many shaggy, brooding, would-be singer-songwriters have tried unsuccessfully over the years to memorialize the Beats? (I’m looking at you, Dashboard Confessional.) Yet, Gibbard and Farrar manage to do so with what seems like a minimum of effort. And maybe that’s really the trick here, how bare and understated and fleeting the songs are. The album itself runs a meager thirty-eight minutes. However, after listening to it in its entirety the first time, I found myself suddenly wanting to reread all the old Kerouac paperbacks I’ve picked up over the years, and I guess that for this kind of album, that’s pretty much the definition of success.

 

Fucking Incredible

Hot Damn is Ed Skoog a master. I don’t know if or where you may’ve seen his stuff before—I can’t remember where I first saw him—but you have no excuse now not to see and know his stuff: his debut, Mister Skylight, came out recently from Copper Canyon, and it’s as gasp-inducingly great a book of poetry as any I’ve read this year, and has to certainly be counted among the very best debut books of poetry in the last decade.

I’m presently teaching a poetry class, which can be fun as flying or shitty as surgery depending on the day, but one of the great things about teaching poetry is that one’s allowed real great and uncomfortable proximity to what, exactly, it is that good poetry’s doing. You put up, say, Ginsberg’s “America,” next to Cate Marvin’s “I Live Where the Leaves Are Pointed,” next to Brenda Shaughnessy’s “I’m Over the Moon,” and you’re suddenly facing this cliff: they’re all great, but how? Is there anything that conjoins these greatnesses?

And, of course, if you spend enough time with this stuff (and, I suppose, if you’re of a certain temperament), the stuff that’s typically in the “Holy Shit” category is stuff that’s using words in deft and dazzling ways—using, like Marvin, for instance, a title and first line that shocks you over and over with how she takes language in a direction you not only didn’t see on the map but could’ve barely imagined (ditto, in fact, Shaughnessy).

All this has much to do with Skoog, be appraised. There can only possibly be one complaint about Mister Skylight, and it’s ridiculous to even call it a complaint, actually—the thing that Skoog makes you do, over and over, line after stanza after page, is slow the hell down. It’s tempting to write of Skoog, like I would about other poets, that he’s using words in certain ways or something, but the truth is that the verb to consider re: Skoog is less use as place, as in bricks and mortar, as in archery or something. Just try these lines:

Sweat collects on the waterpitcher lip

like the goodbye of a woman I loved.

The clerk bends his body to pray the miracle

of the handwashing station, turns knife to loaf.

The present pours into the pepper shaker.

It settles on the silk ivy of the now. Odds fade

in the sports section fallen between the counter,

where paying my bill I orphan a dime

for a silver mint, and the window snows sun

brilliant on Fairfax, demanding the commute.

(“Recent Changes at Canter’s Deli”)

This used to be a sailor’s bar, and what

remains is this form of their loneliness,

and it becomes mine for a few hours,

reminding my body of its lusts

for close skin and how different from light

skin is, more like glass, or the breathing

of a horse in a dark, sodden field.

(“West Coast”)

Meanwhile, Cindy still sleeps nude

in the apartment overlooking the river,

and old people talk about each other.

My students find, in hallways, love;

next-door children find toys in the forest

and break them. Try looking under the porch.

(“Help in Seven Languages Written on the Skeleton Coast”)

I actually feel bad even including this much of Skoog’s stuff, simply because, as with a really great album, to tease out snippets is just not fair to the thing as a whole—believe me when I say every page of Skoog’s Mister Skylight includes miracles of compression and language.

To say nothing at all of meaning, too, though. Take a line as off-the-cuff simplistic as orphaning a dime: just that choice of words heaves loneliness into the equation’s view, imbues the simple act of getting a mint with this connect/disconnect dichotomy. Ditto the comparison of skin to both light and glass—and then, suddenly, out of the greatest left field ever, skin like the breathing of a horse in a dark, sodden field! If your heart doesn’t race from lines like that you’re totally hosed.

Because here’s the other thing that’s both fun and un- about teaching poetry: you have to be clear about what poetry actually does, what it can do. And good poetry can do a whole hell of a lot if it makes the stakes high enough. And how does one raise the takes in poetry? By trying to touch or say what’s untouchable or unsayable. Mister Skylight is, for the record (from the book’s back), “an emergency signal to alert a ship’s crew, but not its passengers, of an emergency.” So: a warning that only some of us can hear, a call to those who can/must do something.

Which is the real glory of Skoog’s book: he’s calling to those willing to listen, to those ready to slow down + let these astonishingly evocative lines into their ears and mouths. You know how little kids sometimes mouth along to what their reading? You may find yourself doing that with Mister Skylight: its firing on all cylinders of linguistic pleasure, and your mouth’s gonna want to get in on the act as soon as the lines enter your head. If you’re looking for autumnal gifts for yourself, you’ve found the best one possible: Ed Skoog’s Mister Skylight. Also: pray for more.

 

(Your Ad Here)

Adland by James P Othmer

I’m like congenitively drawn to books on advertisements and products and the navigatory dance each of us does each day as we try to get through our public hours without feeling at every second like we’re gigantic targets, aimed at squarely and increasingly brilliantly by those who want our dollars (if that sounds anti-capitalist, I don’t intend it to; there’s something literally dehumanizing about spending some megachunk of each day feeling like nothing more than, essentially, meat with money, cattle with a coin purse). And so of course Othmer’s Adland was almost like torture-porn or something for me: dude’s a former ad executive. I came to the book chin totally forward, looking for secrets, apologies, occult whisperings…I didn’t even know.

And what’s stranger: I’m not totally sure what I ended up getting from the book. Adland reads like a half-organized book written by someone who has been in the enviable position of being able to bullshit his way out of things before; the book’s got an unshakeable off-the-cuff vibe. We bounce roughly chronologically through Othmer’s time as a career adman, and, maybe halfway through the book, we’re treated to this sort of academic-ized take on one man’s day and the tonnage of ads he lives through. It’s a decent take on things, though the half-academic-ization of the enterprise does nothing but make the thing feel pseudo-stuffy.

The final bit of the book—the last 100 pages (so, really, the last third, though the middle section is only 60 pages, so the math’s dicey)—is about the future of advertising. I suppose personality tests could be crafted around how a reader reacts to these pages. Because here’s the thing: Othmer’s got withering irony and self-awareness and cynicism in spades, as the reader’s picked up thoroughly by page 200. And so the reader likely comes to this prognostication section with, at very least, a slightly raised eyebrow: fortune-telling’s predicated hugely on attitude, and Othmer’s almost schizy rapture/shudder response to advertising makes it hard to read his views on what may come next.

Hard to read, doubly, not just because Othmer’s got certain attitudinal stuff that prohibits anything approaching objectivity, but also because of—well, let’s just say it—because of Black Swans (bone up on N. Taleb if you’re unfamiliar, though the term got used in last week’s episode of “Flash Forward,” too, so). The black swan in Adland? The subservient chicken. I won’t got into it—it’s worth reading Othmer’s take on it—but Othmer puts himself in a dicey position by the book’s end, even trying to pretend to approach charting what might come next in advertising. As we’ve all likely experienced: good fucking luck guessing what comes next. Advertising, like good art, succeeds in exact proportion to its ability to surprise, zig when we expect zag, etc.

Still, for all that: I’d argue for reading Adland. I’d argue for reading that and, also, Branding Only Works on Cattle (I liked Adland a hell of a lot more than Branding, but the former’s for everybody and the latter’s real specifically for those in the biz). I’d argue for reading this stuff not just because the golden arches are supposedly a more recognized global symbol than the cross, and not just because the Fox-News-ization (or, I suppose in fairness, the NPR-ization as well—if one side’s doing it, so is the other, to some extent) of daily life makes brand-awareness and a certain marketing savvy necessary just to navigate the simplest social interaction (meaning: you might literally, fundamentally disagree with someone about something as factually beyond-debate as the president’s birthplace, simply because you get your news from different outlets. I’d love to hear someone argue that that development is not drastically and terrifyingly new and different). I think we all need to read these books just because everything is run by ads. That episode of “Flash Forward” I saw recently? It was on Hulu, which is free, and which is only free because of ads.

I don’t need to vent, and there’ve certainly been plenty of diatribes which’d cover exactly what I’d here say re: ads. And maybe it’s just because I’m in education, but still: the best way to disempower something is to understand it better. Read what you can about advertising, starting with Adland.

 

Tokyo Vice

Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

Adelstein’s got a pulpy, noir-ish voice that all but lights its own Chesterfields and will seduce you in about the first three pages. Overtly about his time working for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun (largest newspaper in the world–read the wikipedia article + proceed to gasp), Adelstein’s debut’s actually got quite a bit more mileage than a simple this-was-my-job story.

Picture him, too: tall, white, midwestern, Jewish guy who goes to Japan and gets a position with the country’s best newspaper. Also: gets a position on the police beat, which is almost criminally (ha ha ha ha) hard to do for anyone, let alone a gringo.

And in his sights as a reporter? The yakuza, Japan’s organized crime operators. The book actually, cinematically, opens with a scene of Adelstein getting threatened by a member of the yakuza, so the reader knows from the start how the story will end: Adelstein smoking cigarette after cigarette and listening to a man threaten his and his family’s existence. And, I suppose, just by knowing that much, you know what Adelstein decided.

Still: it’s fascinating, the story of how he got to that threatened and threatening point. Along with a cast of characters that’ll keep the reader fully plugged-in and laughing, and along with casual but significant doses of more abstract stuff (honor gets significant play throughout Tokyo Vice, and that virtue ends up being one of the big muscles behind the book’s heart; the yakuza have, of course, their own notions of honor, as does Adelstein [as both a man and as a foreigner]…it all gets real complex, but the quickest and easiest thing to say is that this book’s got a hell of a lot more on manners and virtues than you’d necessarily expect from some pulpy shoot-em-up/bang-bang book), Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice is, ultimately, about human trafficking—about various ways in which people use each other. Of course, overtly, the crime story of human trafficking is the book’s main emphasis—a young woman disappears, and she’s disappeared into a world in which young women are lured to Pacific islands and forced into sex work—but it’s hard, once that story’s threads start flapping, not to notice how the issue resonates through the whole book, every character.

It’s also worth at least noting that I’m a bastard who finds, in just about every first-person work of nonfiction, that voicey-voice crap that ends up being about as pleasant as the sound of microwaved cats. I’m happy to here acknowledge/report that Adelstein’s voice is not voicey-voicey, is not troublingly frustrating or me-me-me or in any real significant way annoying.

And so: what are you waiting for? The thing’s on sale, right now, probably not too far from where you’re sitting.

 

Dinosaur Jr.

Dinosaur Jr., Farm

Here’s what the average listener knows about post-grunge outfit Dinosaur, Jr.: 1.) their only big single, despite a career spanning over two decades, was 1994’s “Feel the Pain, and 2.) that the video for this song was exceptionally cool; it featured the band, decked out in turn-of-the-century golf apparel, putting their way across New York City. What most people don’t realize about the band, however, is that singer/songwriter J. Mascis is an amazing guitar player—a fact made clear on the band’s latest release Farm. Maintaining the crunchy, loud, indie aesthetic that the band has honed over the past twenty years, the album strikes a balance somewhere between hook-heavy power pop and jam band solo showcase—this latter from Mascis’ skillful yet often longwinded solos, which don’t add the depth that the band was probably hoping for (and in some cases, like the eight-minute “I Don’t Wanna Go There,” become just flat-out annoying), but do offer a melodic counterbalance to the thick layers of distortion and feedback and cymbals.

While all of the songs on the album are “good,” inasmuch as they don’t all out suck, none of them are especially memorable. And in a weird way, this seems almost intentional: like most of their indie/grunge peers, Dinosaur, Jr. is much less interested in establishing any sort of musical legacy and much more interested in contributing to an already extensive catalogue of catchy guitar-driven songs that consciously refuse to lend themselves to any sort of in-depth analysis (I guess this is one of the larger lessons borne out of Seattle in the early nineties: music doesn’t have to have staying power in order to be good, and in fact sometimes this is even preferable). Farm is raucous and sharp and, above all, fun in an uncomplicated sort of way. It offers few surprises in terms of originality or craft, but it’s sure to satisfy those looking for a solid rock album that sounds better the louder you play it.

(A note: this is by Jeremy Griffin, a hell of a writer who lives in Virginia)