Drinking up the eau de cologne

Rob Sheffield on Elvis Costello's Trust: "He was still singing about girl trouble, but for the first time, the girls in his songs weren’t faceless villains or metaphors for fascism."


Bonus: video of E.C. on Tom Snyder's show, 1981, singing "Watch Your Step."

From The Memoirs of Parkus Grammaticus: Last year I wrote two stories with titles nicked from/mood inspired by songs: "Bring on the Dancing Horses," which I wrote for the "Impossible Geometries" event at 177 Livingston (and now in the latest issue of Open City); and "Watch Your Step," which I wrote for a Housing Works/Bookforum reading, and as yet unpublished, but possibly the cornerstone of a novel, though not the one I'm working on now.

On a related note: the February/March Bookforum is out; I haven't seen it yet, but it has my review of Jonathan Coe's latest novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. (The piece is not available online.) Thanks again to Michael Miller for the inspired assignment!

What is it?

It's hard to know which part to excerpt here: Rob Sheffield on music criticism (It's a lot more joyous than that sounds), at 17 dots.

I was a librarian. Part of why I loved being in and working at a library is that it meant reading and listening to my Walkman, which were my two favorite things. After I got off my shift, I would go to another room in the library with the microfilm. You could often find Village Voices and Boston Phoenixes archived, back to the ’70s.

You could read Greil Marcus’s [Voice] review of [Van Morrison’s] Veedon Fleece six months after it came out, when he said, “This album came out, I wrote a good review, forgot about it. Then I heard it at a friend’s house the other day for dinner and was like, ‘This is great. What is it?’ ‘Well, it’s Van Morrison. I bought it because you said it was good.’” And he does a whole new review. Writing about records six months after they came out is usually more interesting.

It's like Brooklyn when they hold panels outdoors

Chuck Klosterman makes a controversial statement about the Eagles, as Rob Sheffield and the guy from The Dizzies prepare their responses—Brooklyn Book Festival, 2007.

Not pictured: Mysterious head-patting woman.

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Speaking of Brooklyn—I'll be making another visit to that fair borough for an exciting event in February—more details soon!

The year 1988 was kind of a blur for me

Hot of the presses—in the Times, Dizzies Team Member Hua (has the blog stopped?!) listens to Top Shelf 8/8/88, a hip-hop CD of dubious provenance.

Afrika Baby Bam of the Jungle Brothers, who contributed the track “Back in the Jungle,” which he said was recorded in 2003, dismissed concerns about the authenticity of the project. “We still remember the culture and tradition,” he said. “How much more do you need, outside of the actual date, to make a record as authentic as you would have made on Aug. 8, 1988?”

Other Dizzies Newsfeeds™: Vocabulary via Edmund Gosse via Levi: jobation is "a lengthy and tedious rebuke"...quinduncs are "gossips or busybodies"...Levi's also got some delightful posts on Ring Lardner and Proust via Powell...Am excited for these 145 short-shorts from McSweeney's, three books by Dave Eggers, Deb Olin Unferth, and (Psychic E. singer!) Sarah Manguso....I don't play a lot of video/computer games, but this Fancy Pants adventure is simple and cheering...A new New-York Ghost is out, the nearly one-year-anniversary edition...How long will it last?!...Press release/reminder, I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow—here is the official listing...it's at "Mainstage (Borough Hall Plaza)":

5:00 p.m. EVERYONE'S A (FORMER) CRITIC.
Three music and arts critics known for their humor discuss what it means to be a critic and the art of writing beyond the review. Featuring popular essayist, memoirist, critic and soon-to-be novelist Chuck Klosterman, Rolling Stone music critic and new memoirist Rob Sheffield, and Believer editor and former Village Voice editor/critic Ed Park whose comic novel Personal Days will be released in 2008.

Dizzies Press Release — Brooklyn Book Festival

Though I don't live in Brooklyn, I'll be on a panel at next Sunday's Brooklyn Book Festival, with Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield! It's at 5 p.m., on the main stage at Borough Hall Plaza. (OK, I have no idea where that is...) Lots of good stuff going on—more info here....

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In other news...Restricted View on For Better or For Worse..............Does one italicize comic strip names?................Speaking of copy-editing mysteries: Molls on Pilates—or is that pilates?.............................New Psychic Envelopes single is out..........(more info here).................................Slate says no to exclamation points (via Dizzyhead Jen)...but Jenny D is on a quest to reclaim them! So am I!.............Jonathan Franzen: "It sat in a drawer for twenty years".............Jonathan Lethem: "the hapless and poignant Julian Lennon"..........Thought: My favorite humor site might actually be Cracked, when they do their musical lists........Thought: This lyric (from Cream) has always bugged me:

I told you not to wander 'round in the dark
I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park
Then I told you 'bout our kid, now he's married to Mabel

...........................Mabel?...This also doesn't sound so great, alas (via Dizzyhead Brent):

Across the Universe takes place in a ‘60s England and America in which there are no Beatles, only Beatles songs. Jude, a Liverpool dockworker, jumps off a steamer in America to find his father; at Princeton, he meets up with happy-go-lucky soon-to-be-dropout Max and his ethereally beautiful sister Lucy.

Last Vulgar thoughts

It seems likely* that Lethem's upcoming novel is a tip of the hat to that song on the Vulgar Boatmen's second album. And I always assumed that the group's first album, 1990's You and Your Sister, got its title from the song by ex–Big Star member Chris Bell. (The VB album also has a very good song by the same name, though not a cover of the Bell song.)

Bell was recording a solo album when he died in a car crash in 1978; it was released as I Am the Cosmos by Rykodisc in 1992, around the time I started listening to the Vulgar Boatmen. Whether this reflects Bell's final vision for his first album (six years in the making) can't be known—my feeling is that it's a shadow of his ideal version. The title track and "You and Your Sister" are seared in my memory—gorgeous, stately, the voice making hairpin turns in the ether—but the rest of the album has faded. (There are 15 tracks, but the last three are alternate takes of the two aforementioned tunes, which Amazon tells me shared either side of a single, the one solo release in Bell's lifetime.)

(Much more detail at this site called "Wikipedia.")


I like the idea of the Vulgar Boatmen titling their first album after a song by an artist who was barely there. (The VB album precedes the release of the Bell album by two years, so they must have been fans of the single—released, Amazon tells me, by dB'er Chris Stamey's Car label, the name grimly ironic given Bell's death.) Hopefully the Lethem book will create an uptick in interest in the Vulgar Boatmen...I'd like to end today's sermon with this quote from Charles Portis's Gringos:

Frank didn’t write anything, or at least he didn’t publish anything… The Olmecs didn’t like to show their art around either. They buried it twenty-five feet deep in the earth and came back with spades to check up on it every ten years or so, to make sure it was still there, unviolated. Then they covered it up again.





*But—maybe I'm completely off base! Check out what the Driftwood Singers have posted—a Roky Erikson tune also entitled "You Don't Love Me Yet," from 1985, which might actually be closer to the time period of the new Lethem book. (Curious iPod-as-memory fact/coincidence: In the early ’90s, I liked the band Poi Dog Pondering; the only PDP songs that have survived in iPodded form are the covers of "Love Vigilantes" and...Roky Erikson's "I Had to Tell You," which came up on the shuffle yesterday. And the only currently iPodded VB song I have is "You Don't Love Me Yet." This all connects somehow, yes?)

UPDATE: Breaking news — Dizzyhead Benno reports that the book's epigraphs are quotes from both the VB song and the RE song. Brilliant!

UPDATE (2/23): From Rob Sheffield's memoir Love Is a Mix Tape—check out the first song on the first mix (via Very Short List):