Notwithstanding all the tweed and brown shoes I go in for, I also like to beat up my ’95 Camry’s flypaper speakers with nasty bass like this. The verse that starts around 2:00 is an especially hot ride on a hot, hot beat. Blow like early-mornin’ flights, indeed. Watch out for the weed references and gently onanistic misogyny. Happy autumn, all!
Author Archives: Ryan
Good Reviews: More like “Back to DERP”
Esquire is gross. We’ve covered that. Not many texts are more ephemeral than book reviews in Esquire, except maybe reviews in Esquire of recent books by Tom Wolfe; the neo-Social Realist ones. And yet although nothing Tom Wolfe, Esquire, or the General Reader does matters, Benjamin Alsup’s compact but weirdly patient, vicious disposal of Wolfe’s Back to Blood (yeesh, the title) is worth your bytes and clicks. A fundamental thrust:
[. . .] There are no characters in Back to Blood, only caricatures, cartoonish stereotypes that are little more than reflections of their sociocultural contexts. The Cuban cop who loves his pastelitos. The preppy reporter with all the right credentials. The Hialeah honey with a heart of gold and a pussy like a papaya. In Back to Blood, Wolfe comes across as a white guy explaining brown people to a room full of white guys. Sure, he burns pages giving his readers access to these characters’ interiors, but once he’s given you the sociological stats (age, gender, race, occupation) there’s really no need for it. Anything Wolfe tells you about what his characters are thinking are things you could’ve guessed from the jump.
We want your weekend to prosper. We don’t want you wasting time with shitty art. So believe us when we say this, y’all: If it ever comes down to white urban writers, you are better off (you are fantastically well-off) with David Simon or Richard Price (or Tom Wolfe from before 1980).
Weekend Beats: “Miss You”
By the late 1970s the musical residue of the late 1960s had become troublesome ground, given the passage of time’s ability to turn the cool into the passé as well as the rise of genres that challenged first-wave rock’s popular ascendance, some of them enduring (punk) and others (disco) not so much. To be honest, postwar rock had taken some gross turns, like prog. And the musically abetted idealism of “The Sixties” hadn’t done much in terms of, you know, preventing Nixon or a terrible recession. And a lot of great postwar bands were gone (the Beatles), close to disintegrating (Zeppelin), or on the early slopes of a long decline (the Kinks). And really, the Sixties in general *did* suck (ewww, Baby Boomers as young people are even worse than Boomers as anything else).
The Rolling Stones endured these winds with their standard vulgar genius, so different from the Beatles’ awkwardly self-conscious, cerebral magic. In 1978, as the Clash exploded toward London Calling (1979), the Stones dropped Some Girls. You’ve heard the lead song from this honky-tonk scumbag-disco masterpiece a thousand times, but I’ll bet “Miss You” still feels as urgently dirty as it did the first time you heard it bump. What’s a matter, man? We’re gonna come round at 12 with some Puerto Rican girls that’s just dyyyyyyin to meet you.
Picking the best RS albums is like picking the best Shakespeare, as in about fifty percent of the work they did in their prime could legitimately be called their “best.” On the other hand, this album clears most of the decks: Some Girls is their second-best album, after Sticky Fingers, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise, which is probably, like, eighty percent of Stones fans, given the above-noted reality of all those classics.
Koko the Clown drops “St. James Infirmary Blues”
Labor facts: For Thomas Jefferson, a republic could thrive only with a landed middle class; but for mature capitalism, there was no way or need to secure that fantasy for most; and so for some American artists, that meant streaming fever dreams of failure, loss, and nomadic anger. As Leslie Fiedler points out, we have a native genius when it comes to horror. Exhibit A: Eighty years ago, the Betty Boop softcore empire made a good mini-doc (featuring the voice of Cab Calloway) about working conditions that persist today. Sure, the cartoon might just be about heartbreak, but I enjoy going out on interpretive limbs. I’ve got this all theorized and worked out, trust me. Long live the precariat! Happy Thursday, y’all.
Topical Verse: Neruda’s Job Letter
The boutique styling lab (a Supercuts down the road) where I get my hair cut is across the way from a thrift shop with an above-average paperback selection. The shop, or “shoppe,” as the sign has it, is close to UCSB in a neighborhood where a lot of graduate students live, so it gets quality runoff. Today I went in before driving home and found the City Lights-published, Stanford-curated selection of Pablo Neruda’s poems. It only seems fair to share the good luck, so here is “Poet’s Obligation” (1962), one of his late lyrics:
To whomever is not listening to the sea
this Friday morning, to whomever is cooped up
in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell:
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion
the rumble of the planet and the foam,
the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.
So, drawn on by my destiny,
I endlessly must listen to and keep
the sea’s lamenting in my awareness,
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
so that, wherever those in prison may be,
wherever they suffer the autumn’s castigation,
I may be there with an errant wave,
I may move, passing through windows,
and hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying: how can I reach the sea?
And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,
the starry echoes of the wave,
a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,
a rustling of salt withdrawing,
the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.
So, through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
(Trans. Alastair Reid)
Today in Foil Shrines and Monkeyshines
Call me John Ruskin, but when it comes to home decoration, whether aesthetic or functional, it’s hard to beat the work of an obsessive craftsman. Sometimes having a limited set of tools makes for human creations that are even more astonishing. Just look at this! (h/t Dan Pecchenino, co-editor of TGR, and to Slate.com’s The Vault, where you should click some links) The fact that it was made for Henry Ford has kept me chuckling for the past 36 hours.
It reminds me of James Hampton’s The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. Googling this miracle will make you proud to be human and American. Plus it’s the title of a good (well, often) poetry collection by a fantastic American novelist. A win-win for you.
Sporting Chances
In light of Dan’s perspicacious post about the societal burdens of big-time sports, here is some reading to help you intellectualize your version of the general human love of watching young men chase rounded objects and/or injure one another. This afternoon mine entailed watching the Miami Dolphins on the ole flatscreen, as my beloved rotating cast of gladiators, employed by a billionaire from Detroit (postindustrial-dystopia Detroit), did televised battle with the Cleveland (postindustrial-dystopia Cleveland) Browns, who are also owned by a billionaire (one facing federal charges because his company stole money from its customers). Like Dan said: FOOTBALL!
- “The Legend of Jadeveon Clowney,” from the New York Times. Jadeveon Clowney is going to make a Scrooge-McDuck pile of money playing pro football because he is almost unfathomably talented at aspects of that sport. That’s awesome for him and his family; it’s the opposite of what happens when Meghan McCain or Chelsea Clinton or some other potentate’s child graduates from Stanford then takes a job at the UN. I’m happy that his grandchildren are set for life, provided he obtains sound financial advice. His game is beautiful, an otherworldly blend of spatial intuition, bison strength, ballet-dancer grace, and vicious concentration. Kid is a football genius who makes football aesthetes’ eyes pop out of their heads. But still you wonder what would have happened to Clowney if he weren’t an athletic marvel, if he had a gift for math or writing or painting; or if he were “merely” a reasonably intelligent, average human being; or if he wasn’t all that talented or ambitious and just wanted to manage a hardware store or something. He grew up poor and black in North Carolina. What happens if he isn’t a brilliant entertainment provider? What happens to that kid? The US (especially the South) has developed a superb system for producing football and basketball players. Imagine if they (we) put that much effort into the academic side of the schools that students like Clowney have to attend whether or not they’re rare athletes.
- “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” also from the NY Times. Somewhere in his published Letters, Kingsley Amis remarks that anyone who denies that Shakespeare is the greatest of all English poets can be ignored because they have a second-rate mind. I feel the same way about anybody who claims that David Foster Wallace, who wrote this essay, wasn’t all that good, especially if they dredge up the stupid gripe about how it’s a corny stereotype for young people, especially young (or not-so-young) males, to love his work. DFW isn’t Shakespeare, but nonetheless, fuck you if you aren’t amazed by his nonfiction. You probably don’t like Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Didion, Sontag, Edmund Wilson, Lester Bangs, or James Baldwin either. Yeah, I said it: amazed.
- Baseball Card Vandals is a website you shouldn’t look at if you dislike laughing for extended periods of time.
- I rode hard for Wright Thompson’s “When the Beautiful Game Turns Ugly” earlier this summer. I ride for it again here. Fantastic pop-ethnography for sports dorks who appreciate history, politics, and the utility of long clauses.
So stop watching sports!
Just kidding. Don’t ever do that.
Weekend Beats: All Grown Up
Hope y’all are having a good weekend. Whether you empathize in a literal or figurative sense with the concept of “blow[ing] big blunts on the way to brunch,” I hope that, on a poetic level, you can dig a man, one Danny Brown, who enjoys the possibilities of alliteration and assonance.
The General Reader 