Book No. 14: David Maine - The Book of Samson

David Maine is one of my favorite contemporary authors. I loved The Preservationist, liked Fallen, and really like this one. Samson tells his story in the first person. He doesn't realize (could not realize, even) that to modern ears he comes across as a psychopath and an arrogant lout. To his mind, he is a simple champion for the LORD. Maine's book never directly asks what sort of evil god would have given Samson so much power, but he strongly hints at the question, especially when Meneth, the priest of the Philistine god Dagon, tells him towards the end of his life that no, the Philistines do not plan to celebrate his death by destroying the Israelites. They will simply go back to their farms, glad to be rid of him, a mass murderer free of conscience. But, as you probably remember, the LORD allows Samson to commit mass-murder one last time, despite his foolishness and stated weakness for wine and women. That's an Old Testament champion for you: killer of men, women, children, babies, and animals, filled with the bloodlust of an Old Testament god.

The Book of Samson is not as funny as either The Preservationist or Fallen. It's funny, yes, but it's also angrier. And that's ok. It works with the material.

Maine has another book just out called Monster, 1959 that appears to leave the Bible behind in favor of B-movies. I intend to get around to it as soon as I clear my reading backlog.

Book No. 13: Amanda Petrusich - Nick Drake's Pink Moon

Some of the commenters on Amazon's page have been unkind to this book because Petrusich spends a good chunk of space talking about the VW commercial that spurred Nick Drake's current popularity. I think that's a stupid attitude.

I hadn't been a Nick Drake fan for long when I heard that commercial. Maybe a year, but less, I think. I was in a different room while my wife was watching TV. I heard the opening strains of the song "Pink Moon," and yelled to my wife, "You're playing Nick Drake?" She sounded surprised herself, and said no, it was on a commercial.

I felt a little put-out at first. Drake seemed like such a private pleasure that I felt conflicted about sharing his music with the world via a commercial. But I liked the commercial. I made peace with it.

Drake's story is pretty cut-and-dried at this point. Too young and sensitive for this world. Petrusich found a way to tell it again by gathering stories from Drake's sister and Joe Boyd, who knew him best. She asked a number of fans to submit a few paragraphs about their relationship to Drake's music. And she talked about the commercial, how it opened him up to a brand new audience. Good stuff.

On a personal note, I want to mention that the musicians on Drake's first record are many of the same ones from the album I wrote about, Shoot Out The Lights. Richard Thompson on guitar, Dave Pegg on bass, and David Mattacks on drums. Not always, but sometimes. I also wrote a short section that dealt with September 11, 2001, which Petrusich talks about as a time that she turned to Pink Moon for comfort. And yet our books are quite different. Cool, huh?

Book No. 12: Gilbert Hernandez - Chance In Hell

Reviewing comic books now, apparently. I loved Gilbert Hernandez's dreamy Sloth, another non-Love & Rockets book from last year, and so looked forward to this one quite a bit. But I didn't much care for it. It was about an abandoned child in an uncaring country who grows up to a more stable life, even as she fears being pulled under by her own demons. Sounds promising, yes, especially in the hands of the master who gave us the rich Palomar stories and Love & Rockets X. And yet I never found much to connect to in the story. The main character is so alienating and her circumstances so horrifying that I never wanted to bridge my distance from her. Maybe she had only one chance in hell, as suggested by the title, or maybe, on the other hand, she has no chance at all in life. I'm not sure. And I don't really want to figure it out. Great art, great eye. But cold, cold, cold.

Book No. 11: Mike McGonigal - My Bloody Valentine's Loveless

McGonigal's take on the 33 1/3 form is semi-journalistic, although McGonigal inserts himself in the role of enthusiastic guide. I love this album, but it's by design a mystery of sorts. It's a loud, distorted rock album that is almost ethereal. There's few lyrics on it that seem to make sense, but the songs seem perfect as they are. But I'm afraid I'm running out of new ways to say things about 33 1/3 books. The facts in the book are fascinating, the interviews enlightening, and McGonigal's personal touches are loads of fun. If you're a MBV fan, you should read it. If you're not, you probably won't dig it. If you've never heard MBV, go get the album and the book at the same time and read it while you listen.

Music Library: American Music Club, Amerie, Amon Düül II, Amy Rigby

American Music Club - California. Aw, I love Mark Eitzel's thing. The standout tracks are still, clearly, "Firefly" and "Western Sky," but the whole album is a beautiful slice of sadness pie.

American Music Club - "Western Sky (Live)" from Live At Slim's. This is the only track I have from said album, which was a promo, I think. But yes, I still love that song.

American Music Club - Mercury. Lots more beautiful weird sadness. Not many dynamics.

Amerie - "1 Thing" - From Said The Gramophone. Downloaded from the music blog. I'm not as blown away a they were, but I like it enough to hold on to it.

Amon Düül II - Phallus Dei. Heavy psychedelic krautrock.

Amon Düül II - Yeti. Heavier and more psychedelic krautrock. I have a burning desire to cover "Eye-Shaking King" at some point in my life.

Amy Rigby - Diary of a Mod Housewife. I never listen to this album these days, but if a song pops up on shuffle, it's always a delight. Rigby is a clever songwriter spinning a feminist slant on folky pop music. There's a little too much reliance on Nashville-style bar-bluesy guitar for my tastes, but her wit and exuberance always shine through.

I have two more Amy Rigby albums, so that's where I'll pick up next time.

Book No. 10: Allyson Beatrice - Will The Vampire People Please Leave The Lobby?

This is the second catch-up book post. Beatrice is someone I virtually know via one of the online communities she mentions here.

This is a breezy book about fandom in the early 21st century. Beatrice recounts how she left her unsatisfying corporate job and moved across the country to look for happiness in LA. She met a few people through the Buffy The Vampire Slayer fansite The Bronze. Then she becomes involved with fan activism and eventually forms lasting friendships with other posters and some of the show's (and other shows that emerged from it) writers.

Beatrice is an entertaining writer, not just funny and insightful but willing to lay her heart bare in pursuit of the truth. Her kindness shines through the pages, and she has enough ironic distance from herself to understand when she's being - as she puts it - a jerk, although I don't know that anyone who knows her online persona would describe her that way. Anyway, as a diehard nerd who loved the mix of whimsy and brutality that made shows like Buffy and Angel and Firefly and Wonderfalls and (now) Pushing Daisies - excuse me, that mix that made these shows so special, I certainly enjoyed her adventures and recommend them to others like me.

Book No. 9: Brad Vice - The Bear Bryant Funeral Train

I read this a while back, actually. I meant to blog about it, and then I was concerned that I wasn't doing it justice, and then I forgot to finish blogging about it. I have another book that I read around the same time where the same thing happened. Both were written by people I know.

This one is the more notorious of the two. Back in late 2005, a few voices threw accusation of plagiarism at the original edition of this book. I posted about it at the time, first about UGA's decision to pulp the book and then about the absolutely ridiculous NY Press hatchet-job written by the guy who'd elsewhere called for another Sherman to metaphorically burn down the literary South. Shame on him. I hope anyone out there who called for Brad's head on a spike without reading the book in question has come to his or her senses. If not, shame on you, too.

This version of the book is a little different from the UGA publication that was unceremoniously pulped. The stories are in a different order and the epigraphs from his original text have been restored. So, the burning question: is it any good?

That it is. Vice's stories are uniformly smart, well-observed, and deeply touching. In fact, I liked the most controversial story, "Tuscaloosa Knights," least of all, although I can say that I liked it a great deal. Some of the stories in part one ("Stalin" and Other Children's Stories) were working through Vice's relationship with his father, and the protagonists of those stories share a father who is both a farmer and a teacher, somewhere between hard-bitten realist and dreamy intellectual. In "Artifacts," a woman and her increasingly-absent husband quietly grieve over the loss of their young son until things come to a surprising head. I found the culmination of this story very silly on the face of it, but it managed to break my heart completely at the same time. "Chickensnake" is likewise haunted by a lost child - the older brother of the protagonist this time - as it quietly reveals how the violence of farm life is a reflection of life's constant close proximity to pain and death.

Part two of the book (The Bear Bryant Funeral Train) opens with "Tuscaloosa Knights," the story that lead Vice's literary witch-trial. In this one, a neglected young wife in 1920s Tuscaloosa watches a Klan rally with her only friend in town. Some of her observations are verbatim from Carl Carmer's nonfiction account of life in 1920s Tuscaloosa, Stars Fell On Alabama, in the section titled "Tuscaloosa Nights." It's a good story, but I like the others in this section better. "Report From Junction" explores the farm/city dichotomy with the backdrop of Bryant's tenure as head coach of Texas A&M. "Demopolis" yanks happiness out from under the feet of its protagonist suddenly and violently, and its description of Tuscaloosa in the 1990s is perfect. "Mule" is so utterly beautiful that I don't want to spoil a word of it here. The final story, "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train" is a little postmodern exercise in fakery as the protagonist creates a fake document of a real event, heightening it into the realms of myth. It's the perfect explanation for Vice's use of reality and unreality to create greater truth. That's what fiction writers do.

Music Library: Allman Brothers, Alvin "Shine" Robinson, Alvin Cash, Amadou & Mariam, Amalgamated Sons of Rest, John Cage,American Cosmic

Say, it's been a month since I wrote about my music library. We left off with The Allman Brothers Band's Eat A Peach. But, realizing that I had a hole in my collection the same size as the ABB's first two albums, I bought them, so I'll retroactively add them back in.

The Allman Brothers Band - The Allman Brothers Band. The first outing of the brothers Allman with the classic ABB (they'd previously made a Brit Invasion-style album as The Hourglass, which I know because my dad had a copy from his college days). It's a pretty great jammy Southern-rock blues guitar & organ. You can hear from the outset that Duane Allman and Dickey Betts are insanely creative interpreters attuned to each other to a rare degree. I'm not much of a fan of the blues, especially when rock bands appropriate it, because it usually sounds like unearned thievery of someone else's suffering from a place of privilege mainly designed to showcase yourself (see "Clapton, Eric"). The ABB somehow convey how important these songs are to them by crawling inside and living them like rock songs. The only song on the 7-song album that isn't blues-rock is "Dreams," which isn't much of a departure from the rest of the album, but incorporates more psychedelic flourishes and, just incidentally, kicks the Grateful Dead (and just about all the other jammy psych bands of the 60s) right in the keister.

The Allman Brothers Band - Idlewild South. Pretty much everything I said about the last one goes for this one. It's a little more garage-y and the psych-hippie standout track is the beautiful instrumental "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," but yeah, it all still holds.

The Allman Brothers Band - The Fillmore Concerts. This is the expanded version of the classic album Live At Fillmore East. Excuse my nerdy analogy, but this is the rare exception where the extended version is better than more heavily edited version, also known as the Lord Of The Rings Conundrum (coming soon from Robert Ludlum!). Usually artists benefit from editing and tighter scope, but rarely - and this is one of those cases - an artist comes across even better with a larger palatte. The length gives them more room to showcase their virtues, and even seem, counterintuitive though this may sound, more intimate. At the end of all this music, crazy-long solos and polyrhythmic drums and all, I feel like I know these guys' music better than I ever thought I would.

Alvin "Shine" Robinson - Shine On. Enjoyable New Orleans-style R&B. Not essential, by any means, unless you're a New Orleans-style R&B completist. Reminds me a lot of Bobby "Blue" Bland, but he's not quite as expressive.

Alvin Cash & The Crawlers - "Twine Time" - Rock Instrumental Classics. This is a single track from a massive Rhino collection of singles. It's a groovy instrumental dance track from the 50s or early 60s that sounds like a John Waters movie in the making.

Amadou & Mariam - Dimanche a Bamako. I don't love what we Westerners condescendingly call "world music," but I like the music of this duo, a blind couple from Mali, quite a bit. Francophone afro-pop! What's not to like?

Amadou & Mariam - Je Pense a Toi: The Best of Amadou et Mariam. A best-of collection that precedes the above album. There is a discernable production contrast between the two, as if this is the more rootsy music and Dimanche a Bamako was an attempt to reach a more Western audience.

Amalgamated Sons of Rest - s/t. An indie-folk supergroup of sorts, ASoR consists of Jason Molina of Songs: Ohia, Bonnie "Prince" Billy/Will Oldham, and the even-more-obscure Alasdair Roberts. The album is a six-song EP with each songwriter taking lead twice. It's pretty good, but certainly inessential.

American Composers Orchestra - Cage: The Seasons. This is a performance of some of John Cage's minimalist compositional works, a somewhat discordant ballet, and a piece of music for toy piano, performed solo and with orchestra. I dig it, but I can't say I understand it. I'll bet Steve Hicken and/or Alex Ross could explain it to me, but I'm not sure I could retain their ideas.

American Cosmic - Band In Decline. I'm one of maybe six people who own this album, but that's about right: I'm one of four people who played on it. It's all nostalgic for me, because we were so young and hopeful when we made it. Every note I sing is a little out of tune. I remember Robert Huffman, who recorded it, compared my voice to Chuck Prophet in Green On Red. I think that's a little kind in retrospect, because I wasn't anywhere close to even his standard. A few of these songs have turned up on Dexateens albums, which is fitting, because about half were written by Dexateens guitarist John Smith. Mike and Jeff were a killer rhythm section, and even now, I feel like this band should have been a bigger deal than it was. The story of my life as a creative person: nobody gave much of a shit. Ah, well. That's life.

Edit - deleted dead link 12/13