January 25, 2018 In Memoriam Ursula K. Le Guin: The Rabble-Rouser with a Gentle Smile By Neil Gaiman Ursula K. Le Guin. Photograph: William Anthony/The Nation The thing about Ursula K. Le Guin was that she didn’t actually look like a rabble-rousing, bomb-throwing, dangerous woman. She had a gentle smile, as if she was either enjoying herself or enjoying what the people around her were doing. She was kind but firm. She was petite and gray haired, and she appeared, at least on first inspection, harmless. The illusion of harmlessness ended the moment you began to read her words, or, if you were so lucky, the moment you listened to her speak. Read More
January 4, 2018 In Memoriam Aharon Appelfeld: You Cannot Be a Writer of Death By The Paris Review Aharon Appelfeld. You know, God is everywhere. He is in the human heart. He is in the plants. He is in the animals. Everywhere. You have to be very careful when you speak to human beings because the man who is standing in front of you has something divine in himself. Trees, they have something divine in them. Animals of course. And even objects, they have something of the divine. —Aharon Appelfeld, The Art of Fiction No. 224 Aharon Appelfeld, one of Israel’s foremost contemporary writers, died today at the age of eighty-five. Appelfeld was the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and memoir, many of which derived their inspiration and force from his childhood in war-torn Europe. He was born in Romania, where he was apprehended by Nazi-allied forces at the age of nine. His mother and grandmother were shot, and he and his father were eventually sent to the Transnistria concentration camps. Appelfeld described his internment there as a kind of transformation: “I became a small animal. It was the wish for life, the wish to survive.” In 1942, he managed to escape; he spent two years in hiding. At one point, he lived in the forest among a band of thieves, and, later, in the home of a Ukrainian prostitute. He joined the Soviet army, spent time in a displaced persons camp in Italy, and finally immigrated to Palestine in 1946, at age fifteen. Nearly a decade later, after spotting his father’s name on a list of survivors, they were reunited in Israel. Read More
October 26, 2017 In Memoriam Ain‘t That a Shame: Fats Domino By Brian Cullman Nobody but nobody communicated joy and pleasure better than Fats Domino. Oh, the Beatles came close, but early on John got mopey, George got petulant, and Ringo simply kept his head down, so that doesn’t count. But for Fats Domino, happiness was a given. At a time when rock ’n’ roll seemed rife with sex and noise and the wild beat of anarchy, Fats Domino was the odd man out. A date with Elvis would start and end in bed, a night out with Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would probably land you in jail, but a date with Fats Domino would probably just involve pork chops. From his first recordings in the early 1950s through his final album in 2006, his style never changed, nor did it need to. With his sly, loping piano mixing barrelhouse with boogie-woogie, with those warm, casual vocals, his way of stretching words halfway around the block, and with Earl Palmer, the best drummer in New Orleans, and arranger, cowriter Dave Bartholomew in tow, his records sounded like nothing else on the radio. Read More
October 25, 2017 In Memoriam Playing Boogie-Woogie with Fats Domino By Tom Piazza So now it’s Fats Domino’s turn. I guess you could say he was eighty-nine and had had a full life. And, yeah, he did. But it doesn’t matter. It’s like hearing that lilacs won’t exist from now on. Or mockingbirds. They’ve been around for a long time, too. You sort of had to see him perform live to really get it, although there’s plenty of video on YouTube and elsewhere that can give you a good hint. When he was playing, he was the music, he was all of the music. He looked as if he was having at least as much fun as the audience. He radiated commitment to the hilt, humor, total musicianship at the piano, and some other unquantifiable thing, some alchemy that made you want to continue to live. He could steer what the band was doing with a glance or at most a quick, whispered word to the guitarist standing just behind his left shoulder. Fats Domino was one of the indisputable rock and roll pioneers, of course, half a decade before Chuck Berry and Elvis and the rest of the gang, and his recordings (most of them arranged by R & B pioneer Dave Bartholomew) like “I’m Walkin’,” “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blue Monday,” and “The Fat Man,” along with the better-known hits like “Blueberry Hill” and “Walkin’ to New Orleans,” are indelible. His piano style, deeply rooted in blues and boogie-woogie, was infectious and widely imitated, his voice was instantly recognizable, and he expressed all the essentials of the New Orleans spirit in three-minute holograms of recorded sound. Read More
October 3, 2017 In Memoriam Petty in the Morning By Brian Cullman Back when my son Harry was little, I’d take him out early in the morning, usually with Miss Otis in tow, and walk over to Les Deux Gamins. One of those mornings, I got there around eight. They were still setting up inside, but the morning was mild, must have been early October, and I sat at one of the four or five outside tables. Noel, the Moroccan waitress, brought me coffee in a bowl and brought Miss Otis a similar bowl half filled with water. She looked at it with a mix of droit du seigneur and disdain. As if she were thinking both, Mine! and What the fuck do I care? Pugs have that look down solid. Tom Petty walked by and stopped to take in the café. He was with a pretty blonde woman, not a girl, a woman who looked like she’d done some heavy lifting. She was in a T-shirt and loose cardigan, but he was wrapped up in a navy peacoat, hands in his pockets. Anything below seventy degrees was probably winter to him. Read More
September 13, 2017 In Memoriam A List of the Columns Michael Friedman Never Wrote By Robert P. Baird Courtesy of New York City Center. In their post this Monday about the death of the composer and librettist Michael Friedman, Lorin and Sadie Stein mentioned their surprise that Michael had published just a single piece on the Daily. “Over the years we’d talked about his doing so many different things, on so many different subjects,” they recalled, “from a column on new music at Le Poisson Rouge to an online version of an informal seminar he held known as Michael Friedman’s Drunk Music Appreciation Class.” The reminiscence brought to mind another near miss, from just last summer. Though I’d known Michael for several years, our editorial dealings were infrequent, and always ad hoc. An early note I wrote myself reads, in its entirety, “Ask Michael Friedman for his porn-lawyer contact.” (Dated six years ago yesterday, it seems only partially explicable by the fact that Michael was then writing songs for Pretty Filthy, a musical about the porn industry.) It never seemed quite fair to ask him to confine himself to something so limiting as silent pixels in two dimensions, especially when he was having such obvious fun—and such evident success—with a piano and a stage. Still, in June of last year, not knowing much about his previous dealings with the magazine, I asked him, “What would it take to get you to write/sing/dance for The Paris Review?” A few days later he sent me a list of column ideas, which I reprint here verbatim: Read More