May 20, 2011 Letter from Our Southern Editor Charles Hardin Holly; Clovis, New Mexico; May 27, 1957 By John Jeremiah Sullivan Dear Lorin, A time comes when it’s healthful to put aside obscurantism and turn to bedrock, if only briefly. And while I flatter myself in thinking you know me as a man not prone to get overly excited about digital-remastering projects, nevertheless there are instances in which the beauty of the original song lay precisely in a primary attempt to expose its elements, and in these cases the additional stripping away of hiss and other shit can be revelatory, or in this instance (Best Ever: Buddy Holly, Techniche 2009), transformative. That plane crash was a Hindenburg of pop. It’s taken me into my midthirties to mentally recover the true damage of it from Don McLean’s rhymes. Ever really listen to “La Bamba”? You’ve probably unconsciously sold yourself on the idea that the Los Lobos version is slightly superior. Not so! It’s not the guitar, either, but the voice. When angels sing rock for fun they sound like Ritchie Valens. Did you know it’s Carol Kaye playing rhythm guitar there? Did you know Valens was seventeen when he died, that “La Bamba” hadn’t even been released yet? Snowy field in northern Iowa, flames. If you listen to the live versions of “La Bamba,” Valens played it basically like a sped-up Mexican folk song. Only in the studio did the ecstatic thing happen–at the point of intersection. I read somewhere that Valens didn’t even like it. On “Not Fade Away,” Jerry Allison plays a cardboard box (he’d ripped the idea from Buddy Knox’s lyrically creepy “Party Doll”). The beat is cartoonishly African. If you want to hear where it came from, listen to the song I hope to keep if the people in charge of the survival pod say you can keep only one, Charles Barnett’s “Run to My Jesus for Refuge.” Barnett was a Georgia man in his nineties. Alan Lomax met him at the end of a sand lane near the Sea Islands, right around the time Buddy Holly was making his song. Lomak asked, “Know Any Tunes?”. Barnett flipped a washtub over and started beating on it with two sticks, playing some of the most tenth-dimensional counterpoint you’ve ever heard, with galloping runs that suddenly freeze into cosmic pauses. “Mary, she wore a golden chain, / Every link was Jesus’ name. / I’m gonna run to my Jesus for refuge.” Supposedly Barnett could still jump into the air and click his heels together, at ninety-he-didn’t-even-know-what. Read More
May 19, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tom Nissley, Writer and Game-Show Contestant, Part 2 By Tom Nissley This is the second installment of Nissley’s culture diary. Click here to read part 1. DAY FOUR 11:55 A.M. The pinnacle of my first day after I left my job in March was going to see a weekday matinee of The Fighter. I joked it would be matinees every day from then on, but I hadn’t indulged since, until today when my wife, Laura (who also works from home), and I play hooky at a noon show of The Lincoln Lawyer (H). We are two-thirds of the audience. As nice as it is to be out with my honey, and as indelible a spot Matthew McConaughey has in our hearts thanks to his early turn as Wooderson, The Lincoln Lawyer is no Fighter, sad to say. I go in hoping for an expert course in plot mechanics (a refresher I can always use), but feel instead like I am walking down the “Thriller” aisle at Plot Depot. A small prize, though: spotting a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet on top of a stack in McConaughey’s nicely cluttered office (my eye always shoots to the bookshelves). 5:30 P.M. I meet two newish friends, Maria and George, for a quick dinner before trivia night at the Washington Athletic Club. I think I had played pub trivia once (and lost) before going pro, and afterward, becoming a post-Jeopardy! ringer was the last thing I had in mind. But my friend Ryan made an offer I couldn’t refuse: joining him for trivia night with two transplants from LA I wanted to meet—Maria, a fellow novelist who used to write for, among other things, Arrested Development, and George, who seems too unassuming to enjoy being called legendary but what else can you say? Last month we trampled the competition, but tonight, in between talk about Ryan’s and Maria’s upcoming novels, the pecking order at TED conferences (which may have inspired this), the Luna Park/Largo heyday of LA comedy, and even last month’s Paris Review Revel, where George and Maria got to talk to Terry Southern’s widow after seeing his papers at the New York Public Library, we finish second, which still pays for our drinks. 9:40 P.M. Back at home, to the more orderly trivia territory of Jeopardy!, for the first half of the teachers’ final. Okay, Coryat of 37,600, but I need to read up on Biblical women, astronomy, and country music. Read More
May 19, 2011 At Work Michael Azerrad on ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life’ By Dawn Chan Published in 2001, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life featured the story of thirteen seminal indie bands from 1981–1991. Since then, his accounts of the decade’s underground do-it-yourself punk ethos has inspired a generation of music geeks, connoisseurs, and professionals—many of whom have gone on to found or play in various contemporary indie bands of note. On Sunday, a ten-year anniversary show at the Bowery Ballroom will unite fourteen such bands—from the Dirty Projectors to Titus Andronicus—each covering songs by one of the groups he documented. I recently sat down with Azerrad, an old friend and former bandmate, to talk about his book’s ongoing role in the music being made today. Just the other day, I was reading your book in a cafe, and a waiter who saw it immediately came up wanting to talk. You describe underground indie fans back in the eighties wearing the SST record-label T-shirt, or sporting a Black Flag tattoo. In a sense, to certain people, your book’s now as powerful an identifier, even ten years after being published. What’s going on with that? To have read that book means that you’ve been exposed to a certain philosophy, and odds are you agree with some of it. It spells out an ethos inherited from those eighties underground indie bands—opting out of the corporate machinery, keeping money inside the community, thinking for yourself, doing it yourself. You can apply those ideas to lots of things besides music—that’s why the book is called Our Band Could Be Your Life. This same waiter paused to ask if I was reading your book for class. What’s it like to know that Our Band Could Be Your Life is now thought of as required classroom reading? I had a very classical education, so part of me is very dubious: You’re reading my book in a class? You should be reading about the Revolutionary War, or studying Plato! But I suppose the story is part of cultural history. The mandate to think for yourself, and to do it yourself, and to live responsibly—that’s a thread woven deep in our culture. I asked Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat and Fugazi) if he’d ever read Walden. He didn’t know anything about it, but philosophically he’s a Thoreau descendant to the core. Read More
May 18, 2011 The Culture Diaries A Week in Culture: Tom Nissley, Writer and Game-Show Contestant By Tom Nissley DAY ONE I am, in theory, living the dream: I made a lot of money on a game show and quit my job to write. In December, I won eight times on Jeopardy! and suddenly found myself the third-leading money winner in the history of the show (aside from tournaments and John Henry–style man-versus-machine battles). I left my job (as an editor on the Amazon.com Books store) in March, and ever since I’ve been trying to sort out how to get all the things done for which there still aren’t enough hours in the day: reading, working on a novel every day instead of once a week, blogging, umpiring Little League, writing another book that the world might want more than a weird novel about silent movies, saying hi to my wife more than I used to, and, crucially, preparing for the next Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, which hasn’t been announced yet and which I haven’t yet been invited to, though it seems like a safe bet. For better or worse (better!), being a game-show contestant is now one of my jobs. Read More
May 17, 2011 On Film Eating and Acting By Jennie Yabroff Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan from The Trip. The British actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon met for dinner recently at an Italian restaurant in New York. As a plate of cheese and meat was passed around the table, Brydon, who was wearing a pink shirt, grabbed his midsection and sighed. “I’ve gained so much weight, and I haven’t been able to shift it,” he said. “It makes me so mad.” The men were in town because their new film, The Trip, was playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. In The Trip, Coogan and Brydon play slightly fictionalized versions of themselves and drive around England’s Lake District reviewing restaurants for The Observer. (The film originally aired as a six-part series on the BBC.) During filming, the men ate each meal three times, to allow for different camera setups. “Steve was smart,” Brydon said. “He just pushed the food around his plate. But I ate everything. Eating makes you a better actor because it distracts part of your brain. It’s like driving—if you’re eating or driving, you’re doing something real, so the acting seems more real, too.” (Much of The Trip takes place on the road, but Coogan did all the driving.) The salad arrived. Brydon said that Michael Winterbottom, the film’s director, decided to make The Trip after noticing how many movies about food were playing at film festivals. Winterbottom chose the itinerary for the trip. (At dinner, a publicist suggested that the director needed a vacation after his previous movie, the ultra-violent The Killer Inside Me.) Brydon and Coogan worked with Winterbottom on Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, playing similarly exaggerated versions of their public personas: Coogan, the hedonistic, self-destructive comedian unable to shed his most famous role, the blissfully boorish Alan Partridge; Brydon, the contented family man whose fame as radio host and comedian is slowly eclipsing Coogan’s. In The Trip, Coogan spends evenings smoking pot, sleeping with comely hotel staff, and staring discontentedly in the mirror, while Brydon calls his wife for cozy long-distance tuck-ins (“speaking of boiled eggs, I’m not wearing my pajama bottoms”). Read More
May 17, 2011 At Work Chris Adrian on ‘The Great Night’ By Sam MacLaughlin Photograph by Gus Elliott.In The Great Night, Chris Adrian recasts A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Gone are the Rude Mechanicals, replaced instead by a homeless troop staging a musicalized Soylent Green; the duped lovers are more heartbroken than confused, though they’re all lost in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park on the way to a party. The faeries remain, but they’re heartbroken too (the faerie queen, Titania, mourns the death of her human child and the departure of her king, Oberon), or malevolent and vengeful (the now scary Puck). In all his work, Adrian takes stabs at figuring out what to do in a world brimming with sin, dead brothers, and broken hearts. I recently spoke with him; he called from San Francisco, where he’s a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology. This new book is a modern retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What’s your relationship to the play? How does the book stand against it? My relationship is one of abject admiration. I had it in the back of my head to do a story or a novel that’s a retelling of a Shakespeare, and I thought I’d probably like to retell A Midsummer’s Night Dream but could never figure out what the actual story would be. What could I possibly come up with that would add anything to something that was already perfect, or at least make the retold story urgent and compelling? So it took a while. I figured it out in part from walking back and forth to work through Buena Vista Park at dawn and dusk, when it’s a fairly creepy and magical place, and in part from having a relationship fall apart in just the right way to generate an obsessive need to tell a story about love. You’ve called this a less ambitious novel compared to your other work. How so? Is that even something you should be admitting? In some ways it felt less ambitious, though it didn’t turn out to be any less work. The story, at least when it started out, was about love, something of a lark as a topic compared to untimely death or the end of the world. Untimely death and the end of the world crept into the novel anyway, so it became just as ambitious as any of the others. Read More