A list of stuff

1. At Shadowplay, David Cairns shares two pretty good tales out of Fred Zinnemann, An Autobiography.

2. An anonymous commenter at "my" Beatles blog, Hey Dullblog, turned me onto the videos of Michael Sokil, who has taught himself how to play the guitar, bass, drum, and piano parts to every Beatles song.

3. My old friend James Browning, now of Common Cause in Pennsylvania, talks about fracking with MSNBC.

4. This is just a list of stuff!

Music time

Unsurprisingly, for both men producing at such a rate resulted in works of varying quality. This reality, combined with Dickens’ and McCartney’s investment in audience response, led to ego-bruising encounters with criticism. Despite popular success, both men were stung by accusations of sentimentality and shoddiness, and both constructed a public persona as a screen for this vulnerability. Dickens cultivated his image as “Boz,” the friendly champion of the common folk, and McCartney has usually played the role of upbeat performer still in touch with everyday people. These personas are not lies, I would argue, but selective presentations of their real personality traits and values. Born performers, Dickens and McCartney strove to combine getting the audience and acclaim they needed with protecting a private life genuinely important to them. —"McCartney as the Dickens of Rock," guest blogger Nancy, Hey Dullblog
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“He had a peculiar way of bending the strings,” Mr. Gibbons said, citing Mr. Hill’s linebacker build as the source of an audible physicality he brought to his sound. “The natural way of bending a string is pushing it upwards on the neck. Instead of pushing three or four times and getting a vibrato effect, he would push the note up to the higher note, return back to zero, and then pull the string down and it would stretch up to that same note. You have to be stronger than an ox to do it.” —"Finally, an Album for a Rock Star Who Never Was," Andy Langer, NYT

Lyrics matter

More great comments on Hey Dullblog—on favorite unreleased tracks, Seinfeld and nothingness, and the theory that "Yesterday" and "The Night Before" are thematically identical—from Devin, Nancy, Glavin (Garvin? Gavin? Garmin? Glaven), and Mr. Levi Stahl. A smattering:

Devin: "Seinfeld": it was fatuous and lazy for commentators to use that phrase "show about nothing" as if it spoke the whole truth. But I think it was legitimately used by some to encapsulate the show's peculiar and innovative charm -- that unlike "The Brady Bunch," say (which like all children of the '70s I LOVE), episodes didn't require a moral or even a resolution. The "something" we'd all been spoonfed (by shows like "The Brady Bunch," which did I mention I LOVE) was the real nothing: bourgeois values and stale homily. (LOVE.) Whereas "Seinfeld"'s "nothing" was really "something"--the vigor, absurdity, and random magic of ordinary life, heightened and tweaked to perfection.

Glaven: As for "Yes It Is" ... Formally, it's a lot like "This Boy", in that the chord progression of e verses is exactly the same as TB, just transposed from the key of D to E; also, the rhythm guitar strumming pattern is exactly the same. This suggests that it may have started out as a rewrite of TB, but I agree with you that it is far superior to the earlier song, and, taken all-in-all, is a far different and far richer song. And Ithink the only way one could conclude otherwise, could see it as a mere knockoff of TB, is by ignoring the far superior lyrics. Lyrics matter. Sometimes I think people forget that.

Nancy: My favorite unreleased Beatles track is Lennon's "Child of Nature." I read somewhere that it was left off the White album because it was too close in subject to "Mother Nature's Son," but I think these two songs would have made a great double A-side.

The White Album and other hot messes

Over at Hey Dullblog, the Beatles blog for today's modern listener, Mike asks readers for their favorite unreleased Beatles song. This turned into a skewering of the White Album:

That's my biggest issue with White, how it's totally fashionable and false, just like most Beatle's solo output, and not like what came before. Both it and Let It Be seem like the triumph of each band member's persona over their authentic selves; they are their final refusal to change, when change was what The Beatles did best. Lennon's "honest" and politically aware (in a rockstar way) and intentionally grimy. McCartney's that much more eager to please (which is why his music hall thing gets out of control). Harrison's either wafting away on a cloud or acidly angry. Starr is a good ol' boy who just happened to be born in the North of England...I don't like the White Album anymore than I like The Beatles' cartoon, for the same reasons.

There follows a spirited back and forth with the almighty Dev, who decrees:

It's all a matter of what you hear. If you hear something and love it, you'll find ways to give personal context to the importance it has to you. If you don't like it, you'll find those reasons. What you hear as "the Beatles' final refusal to change" I hear as drama--four individuals joined under the skin, that skin withering and wearing, their unity telepathic even as their verbal communication breaks down, fighting within the skin to work together and push the group to new lands: and all of that without, I believe, any conscious intent. White, in the best Beatle tradition, doesn't intend, it IS. Whereas "Abbey Road" for all its magnificent passages is an acquiescence, an abrogation of conflict for bliss, consequently lacking (overall) in drama and even a little inhuman.

White Album is the first principle and the last. It is Moby-Dick. And you thought you were fed up with the praise before!

("Everyone Knew Her As") Nancy steps in, to smooth some feathers:

There's something spooky about the White Album's tendency to engender intense, often negative feelings, both at the time and now. Much as I love parts of it, I can rarely listen to more than a couple of songs from it at a time.

Devin, I agree with you about the way John's comments ("backing band") color the way we hear this album. Certainly there was plenty of tension and bad feeling, but listen to a song like "Dear Prudence" -- what amazing collaboration, especially between Lennon's melody and McCartney's sublime bassline. The evidence of collaboration and enjoyment in many songs makes the overall effect of the album all the sadder.

A lot of food for thought. Great stuff!

And—sorry, Mike—I fall into the pro-White Album camp...I was utterly thrilled when I listened to it for the first time (long before I read any rock crit); if memory serves, a local radio station played an old "classic" album in its entirety every Friday night, beginning at 11. I taped The Beatles off the radio in its entirety, marveling at whole continents of stuff I'd not heard before. Still thrills me. Still have the tape, for that matter!

Disambiguations™ for November 12, 2010

I. Bookforum's Paper Trail catches up with Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Books, and focuses on its most surprising and important piece:

Published last month, Bound to Last is a new anthology for which thirty authors pay homage to their "most cherished books." There are some excellent and in some cases deeply inspired entries: Ed Park geeks out over the Dungeon Masters Guide; Nick Flynn assembles a series of personal, melancholic fragments about Ryszard Kapuscinski's Shadow of the Sun. But the most personal essay is by artist Karen Green, the widow of David Foster Wallace. Her topic is The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, but the essay basically uses quotes from that book as a framework for her reflections about DFW's suicide—about selling the house that they shared, about describing what had happened in the house, about talking to her late husband's psychiatrist. "I was asked to contribute to this anthology because I am the widow, via hanging, of David Foster Wallace," she writes, "whose writing I enjoyed very much, but whose made-up potty humor songs on a road trip I liked even better." Green's humor is on a par with Hempel's: Her description of the gift shop at the L. A. Coroner's Office is both skewed and also, somehow, respectful of life. The piece is the most moving thing we've read about Wallace's death yet.

II. Dullblogger Mike 'fesses up: He loves Magical Mystery Tour! And if you read his post...you start thinking...Hey...

In a related heresy, I always cringe a bit when people call the White Album their favorite. They're free to, of course, but it's a bit alienating because I wonder what they're hearing. I hear all the great raw material of India filtered through a brutal six months of international bloodshed, heroin paranoia, rockstar hubris and internal discord. I suppose what I hear is the conditions that allowed The Beatles to arise—in the Buddhist sense of this phrase—beginning to dissipate. White has some superb tracks and I enjoy those, but it's one long bad vibe for me. I hear the group starting to sicken and die, and it's the group that I love most about The Beatles.

(Side note, love how MMT enters The Social Network. Great moment in that movie.)

John, Paul, George, and Ringo...

...you know, Crime Spree!

Over at Hey Dullblog, Mollie gets drawn into an alternate universe thanks to her tote bag.

Disambiguations™ for August 27, 2009

I. My student Rebecca has a new column at The Faster Times on...vampires! There is actually an interesting backstory that I hope she will write about in a future column...Don't worry, I am putting on the pressure!

II. My student Elijah alerts me to a Donald E. Westlake science fiction story, "The Risk Profession."

III. I love the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks—excitingly, my Beatlesque submission has been accepted for publication!

IV. S. Kirk Walsh's piece at Slate's XX site, a review of Dan Chaon's latest book, mentions ye olde Personal Days, along with works by David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

V. Adrian Tomine on Sixteen Candles et al. (via various FB posts)—it's primo Tomin-o!

Beatleboros

If you haven't already—and even if you don't like/care about the Beatles...

1. First read about this freshly leaked (then vanished) ur-version of "Revolution" (with assorted comments)...

2. Then go bananas over Devin's expert take (headphones included) on its authenticity...

3. Then check out the fresh comments (Mike: "Obviously EMI won't do this--it would be totally against how they've run the catalog for the last 40 years--but unless we want to consign future listeners to a take-by-take version of the Shakespeare/Bacon debate, opening the vaults and establishing the canon once and for all seems like a good idea")...

4. ...and finally (?!), read Dev's comment on the comments:

What I find more impressive, in a way, and certainly tougher to explain, is how the fakers knew about the "mama-dada" refrain. As I noted, neither Lewisohn nor anyone else mentions such an overdub being attempted or mixed in. Yet it's there on the new Take 20 RM1, and seems to dovetail with John's reference to "mommy-daddy" voices on the Yoko tape.

Now, it could be that someone took his reference and invented the "mama-dada" to retroactively "explain" John's "mommy-daddy" voices -- even being so subtle as to alter the parental designations just slightly, lest the subterfuge seem TOO perfect. But then, wouldn't the success of the ruse then depend on some sucker like me uncovering a passing reference on a dull piece of tape no one listens to, solely to work up a fanciful theory to validate the fake?

Maybe someone can cut a straighter path through these thickets than the one I'm on. But I think the kind of ouroboros trickery we're presuming would involve not just superior sound-editing skills, but the six-moves-ahead thought processes of a master chess player.

Thanks to Eric for bringing it to our attention in the first place, and to Mike for his two cents and for prodding Dev, and Devin for everything, including the use of the term "ouroboros trickery."

Oh mighty Devin...

...what do you think of the "Revolution" kerfuffle?

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 24, 2009

I. Booking Bands: You Shall Know Our Velocity Girl...Things They Might Be Giants Carried...you get the idea....Can you think of one that's not already on the list?

(From Dzyd Jen)

II. "A rather aggressive exercise in point-missing": Mike Rutherford's album based on a science-fiction oddity from 1964, Peter Currell Brown's Smallcreep's Day.

III. Odd choice of verb?

Born into an immigrant family living in public housing, Mr. Locke, 59, made it to Yale University and served as a prosecutor, state legislator and King County executive before his election as governor. —NYT

IV. Major Beatles find posted at Hey Dullblog.

(Thanks, Eric)

V. On the red carpet the other night, James Franco gave a nod to Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste!



VI. I'll be reading in Brooklyn this Thursday at 7:30...wait, let me copy the "upcoming readings" stuff from the PD blog!

Thurs., 2/26 Word Books, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m., with Deb Olin Unferth (Vacation) and Brian Baise

Tues., 3/3, New York Society Library, 10 a.m. (WHAT?!)—not a reading, more a panel

Thurs., 3/12 Gallatin Teachers' Reading, 6:30 p.m., Bronfman Center (7 East 10th St.), first floor

Tues., 3/31, First Proof Series at Vassar College, 5 p.m., Class of '51 Reading Room, Vassar Library, Poughkeepsie, NY. (More info here.)

The loves of Parkus Grammaticus

[PD muscling in on Palahniuk/Pamuk/Parker/Patchett turf at the Borders in Portland, Maine. Photo from Matthew Tiffany.]

I love getting "Rick-rolled."

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I love the photo that goes with this caption, in the Guardian: "The NEA makes a convincing case that young people are reading less, but it completely excludes reading done on computers."

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I love this minimalist author bio, on the ARC for the forthcoming The Poems of Mao Zedong:

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) founded the People's Republic of China in 1949.

[Cue: MC Hammer, "Can't Touch This."] (From Dzyd Rachel)

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I love McCain for President...of the Dizzies Discussion Group!: "I think the guy's a medical mess and here are the highlights which were buried in the other news...
"—He has dizzy spells.
"—He suffers from vertigo..."

(From Dzyd Ed)

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I love everything about this song!

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I love that I completely misread this headline yesterday! I thought it said "dialectics"!

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I love that I saw some of you in Chicago, and that I will see some of you tomorrow (Downtown at Happy Ending) and Thursday (Beantown)!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for April 25, 2008

1. Levi runs with the tag!

2. Becky plays Carcassone! (Carcass 1? Carcass own?) Remind me to tell you about playing Settler of Catan, translating slowly from the German!

3. Madonna's "Four Minutes"! I feel like this is an Ouroboros....I'm calling everything an Ouroboros these days...OK...maybe it's just a pretzel thingy...a song that it about its own duration!


Also those vivisectional views are very unsettling, like the cover of this Ballard Re/Search thingy!









4. Molls: "Whew! Are you poped out?"

5. Is that Jude Law in the window of the Beatles' limo?...Various new Personal Days notices...I thought this headline [Jennifer Lopez to star in a TLC reality series (AP)] meant that J.Lo was starring in a series based on TLC the group...

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for March 22-23, 2008

I. Hey Dullblog's Devin appears on the Upper West Side on Tuesday, March 25, to talk about the Beatles in 1968; in the meantime, read his take on the great (?) Beatles movie project that never was.
II. On Style; for Moderns meditates on Elton John's sartorial choices:

The background looks like a stock background on offer at your local overmodernized, ruined-a-good-thing photo booth. It's like Hi Mom! Here's me and my fake visit to Yellowstone! Except it's not me in 1997. It's Elton Freaking John in 1974, hairy chested in some pre-JNCO jeans, with less (head) hair than his contemporary self, and holding his hands as awkwardly as hands have ever been held.

III. A friend has unearthed a blog post (I am not quite clear what the blog is called!) devoted to the iconography of Idiocracy. Here's one for tax season:

Table-talk for March 14, 2008

I.
The Other Ed organized a bloggers' roundtable on Nicholson Baker's latest book, Human Smoke, which ran on his site this week. Lots of interesting dialogue (and a small contribution from this Ed)...and today, Baker himself concludes the discussion!

II.
On Hey Dullblog—which is anything but dull!—Euge finally answers the trivia question that's had Beatlemaniacs stumped for weeks. You remember:

Over the decades, each of the Beatles worked on a musical collaboration that included a member of Black Sabbath (there have been 29). Name at least one such project for each of the four Beatles. Hint: Don't fear the snot running down the reaper's nose.

Eh?!

Click here for the answers.

III.
As soon as we touched down, guy on plane was on his cellphone or rather his Blackberryish device, saying EVERYTHING THREE TIMES: "Brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant." "See you, buddy...See you soon, buddy....see you, buddy." "Great. Great. Great."

IV.
DVDs brought on trip: Rules of the Game, The Power of Nightmares (disc 2), Gilmore Girls Season Four Disc Four.
DVDs watched on trip: Gilmore Girls Season Four Disc Four (first two episodes)

V.
Up at the Poetry Foundation, Dizzyhead Rachel looks at Grace Paley's poetry career:

Paley often spoke of her own indolence (“I laze. I mean really hang out”) and was rarely able to write pieces longer than five or six pages. She blamed it on her temperament: she was fairly happy.

"The hidden is more interesting": Three case studies

1.

[...]The paragraph quoted above is followed directly by a breathtaking instant of self-exposure: “For me,” Marsh writes, “to see this sour Dave Dexter Jr. is to remember the face of my father.”

My marginal note at that point: Marsh comes clean? Could this explain the gouts of contempt he sprays at Dexter’s ghost, the extremity of which have by this late point rendered the book irretrievably unpleasant? Marsh has written elsewhere — in this and other books — about his father, a Rust Belt racist (“angry,” “square,” “rednecked”) who hated rock ‘n’ roll, belittled his son for loving it, and withal was a working-class exemplar of “jaundiced snobbery and proud ignorance.” Now, father-hatred could be a compelling psychological explanation for the anti-Dexter excess. But no. Marsh lets fall the clear implication, refusing to follow up the psychic connection he has himself made and to which the reader is inevitably drawn — if only because its suggestion of the hidden is more interesting than what Marsh has made visible. —Devin McKinney on Dave Marsh, Hey Dullblog

2.

Reich’s preference for the exaggerated, at least in part, led him down the orgonomic path of starry-eyed prophetic cloud-busting. Reich’s story can thus be read as kind of allegory about psychoanalytic thought itself. Reich took up the least appealing parts of Freud and pursued them to their most absurd ends. Our inclination to ridicule Reich every few years becomes a way of conducting proxy skirmishes in the perpetual debate about Freud’s legacy and relevance. When we exaggerate the discontinuity in Reich’s life, casting him in dual mythical roles as Freud’s most promising student and Freud’s most berserk deserter, we seem to be staking out our own ambivalence to Freud’s discomfiting ideas. We incarnate in one person what seems most preposterous about psychoanalysis, and then we place that person at once as close to and as far away from Freud as we can. —Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Wilhelm Reich, Nextbook

3.

I think something curious and heretofore unacknowledged has been taking place, an unconscious disavowal on the part of some viewers and critics—a phenomenon that could make for a chapter in The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. Through misquoting, mishearing, and misreading, people have turned this careful scholar into a veritable Kinbote, a moral scapegoat to whom can be assigned all the darkest theories—as if he were the one who had applied the delicate wash of watercolor blood at the base of a severed head, or imagined the force-feeding of body parts to children. What do we want from John MacGregor? Perhaps this: to saddle him with all our deepest anxieties about the possible actions of Henry Darger, so that the madman-scholar can be rejected with a show of presumptuous indignation. It is the secret expiation required to enjoy Darger without tears. —EP on Henry Darger and John MacGregor, PTSNBNES

Weekend Table-Talk for February 16-17

I. Dizzies Team Member Devin on Dave Marsh's The Beatles' Second Album (at Hey Dullblog)—ouroboric and brilliant:

Dexter’s Capitol mutations, whatever their lack of propriety, decency, or respect for the art of the Beatles — something not even the Beatles were convinced existed at that early date — are lovable, explosive, crass, and exciting albums. Mutated or not, slick with stereophonic grease or not, they are the essence of pop as commerce and con game, gaud and gift, bang for the buck. But because Marsh so hates Dexter, he must make the case for hating Dexter’s mutations — though this is obviously counterintuitive to him, not least because here he is himself making money writing a book about how great one of those mutations is.

II. The Guardian profiles Mountain Goats' maestro John Darnielle:

Today, he is drinking warm ale and discussing his new record, Heretic Pride. It is, he explains, "a much more fun record than I've made in a long time", full of songs about Prince Far I, cheap motels, religious cults and swamp creatures. "Now, there's real kinship between your monsters and your pulp-fiction figures and your cult leaders and all these two-and-a-half dimensional creatures that you can then invest with all these things that you yourself bring to the table," he says with an exuberant thwack, then launches into a tale of Michael Myers and Sax Rohmer and HP Lovecraft and Michel Houellebecq, and of his days as a "scrawny little fella" when an ingrained iggishness prevented him from watching any slasher movies. "It is," he concludes, "a sort of cataloguing of my old obsessions."

III. Bookcase challenge II:


How many books can you ID? (That's NBCC prez John Freeman and agent Nicole Aragi.)

(From an old Bookforum piece)

IV. Dizzyhead Dennis reports from the Berlin Film Festival. (Um, not for us, oddly enough, but for the NYT.)

Dizzies Newsfeeds for February 13

I. Molls reflects on A Hard Day's Night over at Hey Dullblog.

II. Time for self-reflection: I tend to use "over at" a lot, when I'm linking.

III. Heart-wrenching Pinakothek; Waughdehousiana from Levi.

IV. I'm a big Light Reader, but now I'm also reading Jenny's other blog—Triaspirational! It has stuff like this, which I don't understand:

2 x 50 free on 1:05

3 x 50 choice on 1:20

2 x 50 free on 1:00

3 x 50 choice on 1:20

2 x 50 choice on :55

50 easy swim

But also a delightful use of "Hmmm...":

One reason I know I'm fretting about half-marathon pace and times is that I am (pointlessly; procrastinatorily!) thinking ahead to my first marathon in November.

Like many runners, I obsess about arbitrary times that end with zeroes!

(Hmmm, should convert everything into someone's wayward eighteenth-century or science-fictional decimal time system and shake up those expectations...)

V. Also, there's a new New-York Ghost.

The Dizz

Over at Hey Dullblog, which wants to be your Beatles site, Dizzies Team Member and HD guiding spirit Devin has a truly hair-raising outtake from his book, Magic Circles.

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Dizzyhead Brian sends us to Nina Katchadourian's Continuum of Cute. Be prepared to lose a half hour instantly.

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Listening to the new Mountain Goats—"Lovecraft in Brooklyn"!

I was trying to think what this reminded me of—then realized that in one of the unpublished Parkian novels, I invented a failed sitcom called Howard and Sonia. (I find this interlude in HPL's life terribly poignant—marriage to a fellow amateur writer, transplant to Brooklyn, searching for work, finding none, retreat.)

Weekend Table-Talk

I. It's not every day you pass by a palindrome, let alone two: Yesterday I walked by a new condo, Avonova...and then, later, an Argentinian restaurant, La Rural.

II. Weekend Ouroboros, from Dizzies Team Member Hua:



III. Beatles trivia was never this difficult! (Black Sabbath experts, please apply inside.)

IV. Levi uncovers more about the Family Waugh than is seemly.

V. Weekend vintage video: "Shout to the Top"!



VI. Sebald genealogy? (Via Bibliodyssey.)

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 7

I.

I'm reading tonight! From Personal Days! In Brooklyn!

II.

Maharishi dies—Hey Dullblog takes note—and James Wolcott takes note of our note!

III.

Habitus unearths a never-before-published Borges interview! Lots of goodies, including this bit:

Without a doubt Alonso Quijano is more complex now than when Cervantes imagined him, because Alonso Quijano has been enriched, we say, by [Miguel de] Unamuno. Without a doubt Hamlet is more complex now than when Shakespeare originated him; [Hamlet] has been enriched by Coleridge, by Bradley, by Goethe, by so many people. That is, the books live on posthumously. Each time that anyone reads them, the text changes, even if slightly, and the fact of being read with respect makes us see the riches in them ignored by the author.

Via Three Percent

IV.

Mike Hale's NYT review of Nickelodeon's Ni Hao, Kai-lan, is quietly hilarious:

Given the multifarious nature of the Chinese language, choices have to be made, and some Chinese-Americans might be disappointed to know that millions of children are about to be told to call red packets — the envelopes used for gifts of money at new year — ya sui qian rather than hong bao or ang pao.

V.

Great name: Floyd M. Boring, RIP.

VI.

Song of the day, from Moistworks: The Lucksmiths, "To Absent Votes"