Price=Master

by Weston Cutter

In Old Town Square, in Prague, there’s this phenomenally ornate and gorgeous clock, and the story I’ve heard about it is this: the king found the best clockmaker in the world at the time (or in Bohemia), had him build the clock. On the day the clock debuted, the clock maker and the king both watched it, and soon thereafter the king had the clockmaker’s eyes put out so that he couldn’t make another clock as beautiful as what he’d just made for the king. (Wikipedia says the story is false: I say, who cares, it’s a better story than history usually is).

I don’t know who the reader is in that equation, but the master clockmaker, for sure, is Richard Price. I finished his eighth book, Lush Life, on Sunday morning, and I spent the rest of the day almost mopey because it was finished. I felt like a good friend had decided to ditch me. I felt, no joke, sad. I felt at a loss.

Which, if you’ve read any Richard Price book, is a common reaction, I think. I’d never read anything by him until recently, when I finally got tired of passing his stuff every time I was at a book store looking for Richard Powers books, and so I picked up Clockers…and like four days later I had that same, desolate response, that feeling of loss.

Here’s what’s easy to find out: everyone and their cousin thinks Price writes dialogue better than anyone anywhere ever, and everyone and their cousin are correct. On every single page, the dialogue is so musical and exact and true you less read the book than you hear it.

His books are also, almost freakishly, tightly wound. That feeling you get when you’re around someone who is an absolute, to-the-bones master of something? That equal mix of comfort and excitement? That’s like reading Price. You end up turning pages just to see how he’ll do it, how he’ll make the story unfold in a way that’s so inevitable the story feels less created than simply discovered and transcribed.

At the center of Lush Life are a number of characters, the big four being Matty Clark, an NYPD Detective; Eric Cash, a 35 year-old restaurant manager slash writer; Tristan, a projects kid with a voluminous hunger for power or violence or attention or anything that’ll give him an out from his own life; and the Lower East Side itself. The story revolves around the murder of one of Cash’s co-workers, a murder that is accidental, casual, the product of an environment where violence and predation is as part of the air as oxygen.

And that environment, the Lower East Side in the midst of gentrification and shift, is as weirdly troubling and complex as every other character in the book. Price does well illuminating the history of the Lower East Side, how it once was tenement housing and synagogues and now is projects bordering trust-funder hipster spots, but he does an even better job of showing the weird declivities and gaps that open up seemingly out of nowhere in that area. If you haven’t been to the Lower East Side in New York, go: what’s weird is not just how one block’s excesses and expense pushes right up against the next block’s poverty and lack, but how the two blocks, and the people from the blocks, negotiate all that.

Price is also, happily, a satisfying writer. Not in the sense that everything has a happy ending, but that the story moves toward a resolution that feels complete, that seems to offer something of a click of finality. Not that Lush Life ends with the reader smiling—though, perhaps, sure. But the ending doesn’t skimp on the complexity, doesn’t shunt any untoward or messy aspect of the previous 450 pages in service of just being done.

It’s a stellar, incredible book, as are seemingly all the books Price has done. It’s not just worth the $26 or whatever it’ll set you back: it’s worth your time and energy and concentration and attention. It’s worth buying a copy for friends, just because you’ll want someone to talk about this story with.

An Old Interview

by Weston Cutter

This interview was originally done over email like 2 years ago, or at least a year and a half, but the magazine it originally ran in was both small and based exclusively in the midwest, and so it seemed like a good idea to put it up somewhere more lasting and public.El Perro Del Mar has a new disc called From the Valley to the Stars coming out near the end of April, and it’s gorgeous and luscious and also a strangely sort of left-field-sounding follow-up to her American debut—it’s a disc that trades some of the more overt pop elements from the first disc for more orchestral touches. More on that other disc later. For now, enjoy an old-ish interview.

El Perro Del Mar’s self titled debut is maybe one of the most striking, singular-sounding discs of the year. If you’ve heard the music, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t, it’s like trying to describe strawberries to someone who’s never tasted them. The soft hesitancy of the voice might remind you a little of Camera Obscura or super-quiet Yo La Tengo songs; the instrumentation could as easily be from a pop song from 2006 or 1976; the feel, though, of how those two things come together is just mesmerizing. El Perro Del Mar translates to Dog of the Sea, and though there’s a story behind that title for the band, what it ends up doing best is invoking a feeling of a weird, mysterious mermaid or something, singing from some strange shore.

 

 

What are some of your musical influences? Your music is in this classic mode of perfectly-constructed 3 minute perfect things—is that just a style you’ve always loved and therefore respond in? Does it feel anachronistic?

 

In general I’m drawn to music that is sincere, immediate, complex and harmonically interesting. By some reason I tend to avoid contemporary music. I very seldom look up or consciously listen to new music to be honest. I think it has to do with that I’m afraid of blurring my own vision or maybe just losing that whole ‘mystic mood’ I feel I have to have when writing. Contemporary music or contemporary art in general is so completely full and infected with references and statements that I find inspiration easily gets killed before it is even brought to life.  So I’m more into ’educating’ myself by exploring music history, finding myself and my own part in it by learning what different kinds of music throughout history do to me now.

My song writing is very much based on an instant flash of sentiment whether it’d be a melody or a phrase that speaks to me. I love to see what  you can do with a seemingly short or naive phrase or an almost childish melody. I think I am heavily yet  unconsciously influenced by the old blues tradition where you repeat either what’s eating you in an attempt to make it go away or praise a good thing just to make you’re mind lighter. That’s what makes a 3-minute song I guess. Maybe it’s anachronistic but think I more of it as something very natural and basic. I don’t think about it that much – it just happens – and the song always knows when it’s done.

 

For all us here in the states, it seems like there’s this amazing scene coming from Sweden. Is this just one of the real rare examples of globalization doing some good? Has there always been this scene? Is there a really supportive artistic scene there? Is there a scene at all?

 

I get this question a lot and every time my answer is ‘No, there is no specific scene in Sweden. Not that I know of anyway’. I understand it comes across like that looking from the outside. I can only answer for myself and I know that when I was writing and recording the album I was very isolated and had nothing to do with any musical scene in Gothenburg where I live or in Sweden as a whole. I was very very secretive about what I was doing and that’s how I wanted it to be. But to try to answer you’re question just a little, I do think it’s a nice climate in Sweden for independent musicians or bands. And Sweden, being such a small country in relation to the US, it’s bound to be perceived in the way that you described.

 

Your music is this wonderful, dreamy stuff that seems basically 100% removed from life. And yet there’s this undercurrent of personal stuff that could help our day to day lives—as if what we find in the escape is really vital stuff we should be more aware of day-to-day. Is that something you’re conscious of, or something you’re going for?

 

I would definitely say that that would be an accurate way to describe them. In many ways I write songs as a form of dialogue with myself; trying to make myself remember the important things in life. At the same time my music does have a very important escapist function to me. It brings me back to a kind of innocence and simplicity – a treasure island almost where all is sound and harmony. An ideal place, if you like.

 

This is gonna sound about as bullshit as possible, and I mean it as nothing like that, but here goes: do you have a sense of where your ‘sound’ will go now? I feel like I always read about bands who finish an album that’s got a certain tone or style (the Hold Steady’s last one, for instance), and in interviews they recognize that fact and then talk about what they want to do next. Your songs seem so masterful that I can’t imagine what you can do next aside from trying to do something emphatically not like this stuff. Ideas? Thoughts?

 

This is something I’ve been thinking and am thinking about a lot. The only thing I can say is that it is something that I cannot talk about openly before it is done. The whole process of making a vision come to life is very much based on not talking about it, not flaunting it until it is done. It will die before it is even brought to life. So, I don’t even talk about it with myself. It is just growing and forming itself inside my head and when it’s ready it’s ready. I know I do my best when I see a chance to react to something; to do just the opposite of something already made. This does not mean that the next album will sound totally different to this one but it definitely has to feel as a reaction to what I’ve done earlier. That to me is the whole basis of artistic expression – to react, to move on, to develop and to create.

 

Where have you liked playing and traveling so far? Where do you want to go next? With whom have you enjoyed playing? Do you have a list of people you’d like to work with, either just in sharing a bill or in working in the studio?

 

I love Paris and playing there is amazing for some reason. I don’t know what exactly it is. There is something very special and tender about the response of the Parisian audience that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Maybe it has to do with me and my loving feelings for Paris in general, I don’t know. It’s funny when I think of it… I spent a couple of months in Paris a few years ago. Some of the songs on the album were written in a damp, gloomy apartment in Paris and I was just nowhere near the thought of what El Perro del Mar would be. And now two years later I get to perform these songs on a stage in Paris in front of an audience that knows the lyrics. It’s funny what life does to you. My dream is to go to Africa. To play and record and travel in general. It’s been a dream of mine for a long time.  So far I have no specific list of people to work with. I’m still very keen on working alone to see what I can accomplish. I know there will come a time when I feel I want to bring others into my work but I’m not there yet and I don’t want rush things. You see, El Perro del Mar is very much about me creating my own thing. It was one of the many principles I had when I started this; to be on my own, to be brave enough to rely on myself and my ideas and to not be afraid of taking new steps on my own. I’d like to take that principle as far as I can and when I’ve done that I’ll be ready to look for new things.

 

3 Quick Reviews I Meant to Post Long Ago

by Weston Cutter

The Translation of Dr. Apelles by David Treuer

The Translation of Dr. Apelles is just fucking ridiculously good. David Treuer is a fucking genius. This has to be one of the best paperback book released this year (and, no shit, it was released last year as a hardcover by who? Guess.)

Seriously, have you read this book? This seamless, haunting, lyrical book of a man growing toward not simply love, but self-understanding, self-awareness?

It’s mildly postmodern, in the sense that there are fractured narrative strands, that the reader is invited pretty far “into” the text (take that how you will), that there’s a self-awareness of the book as book. For those of you who might, for reasons totally unclear, be scared off by touches of post-modernity like these, I say: do not be afraid. Do not avoid this book because of what might seem like literary ‘tricks’.

In ways that are wonderfully reminiscent, to me, of Richard Powers The Gold Bug Variations (which is certainly in my top 5 books ever), The Translation of Dr. Apelles is a love story built around reconstruction, built around how old stories get newly understood.

It’s incredibly sweet and unabashedly hopeful and my ass left the chair all of three or four times in the process of reading the thing. That line, supposedly said by Salinger, about how great books seem less written than whispered? Yeah, this is one of those books.

 

Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser

 

I’m probably unqualified to talk about Millhauser simply because I’m so hopelessly partial to his work. Have you ever read “The Knife Thrower”? Have you read that whole collection? And then, what, three years back (no: it was five years back)—did you read “Revenge” from The King in the Tree? Chills, seriously, each of those stories (and in most of his other stories, especially his first person plural stories (which The Knife Thrower has, I think, the most and best of any of his collections)).

Is Millhauser’s world something magic? Yes, in ways both good and bad. At its worst, his stories seem somehow cranked, as if put through some hypothetical machine or borne from some prompt (for instance, “Cat ‘N’ Mouse,” seems, to me, to work pretty well as an idea (like: “wouldn’t it be rad if you wrote a story where…?” but less well as a story). They feel, at those moments, tricky, and almost gaudy in their trickiness. Well executed, gorgeously written, but not deeply felt.

That said: when Millhauser gets into your guts with one of these stories, dear fucking god, look out. He’s one of a handful of contemporary masters—Jim Shepard’s another—who have rabid followings, and as soon as you read him you understand why.

 

The Bill McKibben Reader

 

Buy it. Read it. Read everything the man’s written. Not because it’s hip or cool, or because he wants to save the world, or because his The End of Nature is compared (rightly) to Carson’s Silent Spring, or because Al Gore has a blurb on this book. Read McKibben for two reasons:

1. He writes really, really good sentences (like: memorably good. I’ve got half the details of one of his sentences (something from “The Cuba Diet,” about how it’s only been for a short period of time, and for a small percentage of people, that the question “what’s for dinner?” hasn’t (literally) been a matter of life/death/the day’s work/etc) still bouncing around in my head, and I read the article when it came out in Harper’s in 2005.

2. He’s got hope. His hope feels, to me, pretty contagious. At least as important as anything else you can do to change/fix/help the world is the sense that you can change/fix/help the world, right?

Bang Bang

by Weston Cutter

Michael Hodges’ AK47: The Story of a Gun is brutally fascinating reading. It’s relatively slight in length—it’s just over 200 pages but actually feels shorter than that (in a good way)—but the scope of the story, spanning from 1947 to the present, from the USSR to Afghanistan to New Orleans, is pretty monumental.

Hodges’ background, according to the jacket copy, is newspapers and magazines, and this might be the place to mention, as well, that he’s British. What these things have to do with anything is unclear, other than the fact that if this is what British newspaper writers write like this, then they need to come teach NYTimes and WPost writers how to do things better. Not once in Hodges’ book does the writing either get 1) clunky or 2) in the way of itself. Which is actually a huge deal, considering Hodges is ranging over pretty wide territory here, and territory that is, let’s be real honest, hopelessly loaded. Can you imagine how you’d write a scene of hanging out with two London-born muslims, whose families were from Pakistan, and who’d just returned from Pakistan with video of jihad training camps?

I would, I’m guessing, have a hard time writing a scene like that for any number of reasons. But Hodges is incredibly honest, tough and (to these eyes) fair in his treatment of that scene, and in the other, almost-equally (zero pun intended) loaded scenes (like: hanging out with General Kalashnikov himself and hearing the old Russian talking about making stock for elk soup; like: talking to old Viet Cong soldiers. Regardless of where you stand on any political issue, it seems like those conversations would just create higher temperatures, period.).

The details of this particular gun and it’s creation and spread are just fucking incredible, too. True: an AK47 has only 8 moving parts (!!). Also true: Kalashnikov and his family, when he was a kid, were sent to Siberia. Also true: an AK47 can be held underwater, then dragged through sand, and can still fire accurately without jamming. Just about every nightmare tidbit you could possibly care to imagine about the machine gets treatment: it can fire 650 rounds a minute, it’s (relatively) cheap and (seemingly) easy to procure one in many parts of the world, and the damage one of its rounds can do when it enters the human body is absolutely nightmarish.

What’s maybe most impressive about Hodges book is the fact that it’s quietly political in clear-headed and -eyed ways, political in ways that are humbling instead of enraging. Almost all political writing and speech is polemicized lately, as we’re all well aware, but Hodges’ book is a different beast: guns facilitate violence seems to be about the most overtly political he gets in the book (which isn’t to say that there aren’t moments it feels as if he’s holding back from letting out far more lecherous invective against, well, the U.S. (it seems less than mere coincidence that much of the problems in the world that’ve been resolved (or left unresolved) with AK47s have featured the United States in at least one aspect of the conflict)).

It’s a humbling, good book, and necessary reading for all of us who are, like it or not, living in a world in which these guns are way way way too available.

(Also, as a sidenote: how great is MacAdam/Cage? These guys are publishing monsters. I’d be willing to bet that whole years could be well spent reading only books released by MacAdam/Cage and Graywolf.)

She and Him

by Weston Cutter

M Ward and Zooey Deschanel’s project She and Him: Volume 1 is coming out soon from Merge and the track that’s already leaked everywhere, “Why Do You Let Me Stay Here,” is a perfect example of the strengths of this pairing. It’s an instantly hummable song, something that sticks in your head about as quickly and easily as the last few Feist singles. It sounds sort of old, and, in the way of the best songs and short stories, the song ends up sounding something like inevitable: it sounds effortless and pure, something unworked-for and, to me at least, all the better for the ease of it. The song, and the album as a whole, aligns pretty conveniently with the word delightful.

But the best part of the song? It’s around 5 or 6 seconds in, and it’s the sound of, presumably, Zooey Deschanel either clearing her throat or laughing just a little. It was that sound that sold me quickest.

There was an article on Slate not too long ago, all about music compression and how not enough artists are making albums that sound (it probably wasn’t Slate’s word, but it may have been) organic, that sound natural. The examples of this sort of compression are about limitless; the examples of that natural, easy sound, a lot more rare. I’m not a huge stickler one way or another, but I am super pro recording-what-happens. There’s an old Irish line that says “The most beautiful music is the music of what happens,” and She and Him Volume 1 seems very much to live up to that adage.

The backstory’s almost as compelling as the music that eventually was made: Ward and Deschanel met, according to the Merge page, when they recorded a Richard and Linda Thompson song. Deschanel admitted that she wrote her own songs and recorded them at home. Set aside whatever preconceptions you have about actors trying to make music: just think of her as someone who wrote songs and recorded them by and for herself. Just for fun. If you need further reason to let go of any conceivable hang-up about an actor choosing to cross over: you think Deschanel had to wait for Ward or Merge to make a record? It seems pretty likely she could’ve, if she’d wanted, made an album any time.

But what happened instead is even better: she and Ward made this disc. And it’s just a fucking treat. As fun and rewarding as “challenging” or whatever albums can be for me, my first love was the Beach Boys, and I’ll always, happily default to sing-songey, major-keyed stuff that sounds good. This is an album made for just that: it’s an album that sounds freakishly close to old Phil Spector-produced stuff. Remember that box set that came out like three years ago, called One Kiss Can Lead To Another, the 4-disc set of old girl group songs? Any of the songs on Volume 1 could’ve been on that collection.

But they’re also more than just throwbacks, these songs. If you enjoy anything by people like Caitlin Cary (who anyone with ears should adore), Kelly Willis (ditto), or Patsy Cline (come on), this disc is up that same alley. There are great background vocals. There’s great guitar playing (which Ward does basically every time he touches the instrument, but this is a different sort of great: different from what his albums usually sound like, anyway). Deschanel’s voice is transfixingly good—enough so that it’s borderline frustrating/jealousy-inducing that she’s clearly loaded down with way more talents than most of us likely possess.

Buy it. Share it with friends. This is the disc we should all be playing when summer finally starts rolling around, warming us all up.