Rita Rudner's newest book has put me in the mind of all the books (or as they sometimes formerly were called, non-books) by comedians over the last fifty years or more...where you'd see the results of a stand-up comedian, well-trained in that focus, grappling with writing prose fiction or essays and even their memoirs, and not quite getting the hang of it, though credited well enough because they were often still funny, certainly usually to the audiences who were following them over to the books. For example, Woody Allen's vignettes and short stories (and what Steve Martin fiction I've read) are very much in this tradition, usually extended jokes that are relatively flat as fiction but are often at least as funny as his routines used to be; perhaps the most obvious example of memoirs that fall into this category in my early reading is Fred Allen's Treadmill to Oblivion, his relatively tired and bitter recounting of his radio and subsequent career (his other memoir, Much Ado About Me, was somewhat less bitter as it dealt mostly with his earlier career; Fred Allen's Letters is also very much worth seeking out), where much of the writing is still building to a punchline entirely too often.
So, too, I Still Have It..., though Rudner, one of the best comedians active, is both honest and witty enough to keep one reading this volume easily, even if it it simply a fleshed-out version of a number of her jokes (with single-page interlineations of some of the standalone jokes without elaboration). I'll suggest you take the "look inside" spin of the first link above rather than my pulling any particular bits out, but the book is very pleasant reading, actually touching in Rudner's memoir of her mother, and absolutely a very good (if not completely satisfying) reading experience.
One of the first books I read in this mode was Dick Gregory's From the Back of the Bus, which is basically also his routines with good, appropriate accompanying photos, mostly of Gregory in performance but some, like the cover shot, of him in comedically (and otherwise) charged poses. Another good book, if not quite the experience of reading his autobiography, Nigger, with its famous dedication to his late mother, suggesting that anytime anyone uttered the word in the future it would be an advertisement for his book...like Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, the Gregory autobio is full of interesting and a few wrenching details (comedians often do not have the happiest of marriages), and unlike even the Bruce (despite Bruce having the help, reportedly, of Harlan Ellison and other editors at Rogue magazine for the articles that his autobio is based on), Nigger is not a primarily jokey patter in print...but From the Back of the Bus is, and is still worth the look (even if much of the patter will be familiar to any fans of Gregory's early career). The Avon edition is very reasonably-priced on the seocndhand market still (I've had a copy of that edition since the very late '70s or earliest '80s).
I missed the Heroic Years of punk rock in Washington, DC, or harDCore...I moved to the DC suburbs in 1984, after failing to make ends meet and go to U. Hawaii at the same time. I rejoined my family, who had left Hawaii the year before (though one of the last things I did on Oahu was to help finance Kevin Donegan's Second Pacific Nu Musik Festival (sic) (I think my straightedge cred will be furthered by the probability that my contribution all went to buy the beerkegs) where such folks as the Sharx's Gardner "Fusuhara" and the late Lance Hahn got some early hanging-out in before moving to the continent and forming Cringer). A protopunk fan in the mid-'70s (my first record purchase for myself: a Brownsville Station 45; my second purchase: a Pickwick Beach Boys anthology disc, Surfer Girl; third, an AudioFidelity no-name orchestra recording of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgski's Pictures at an Exhibition; fourth, the Count Basie Orchestra's Chairman of the Board, my fifth, David Steinberg's Disguised as a Normal Person--and I was off and consuming), I was ready for punk when it arrived, even if I wasn't going to play dress-up. By the time I started befriending people at my Honolulu high school, most of them were at least punk-congnizant, so I got to hear Flipper and the Slits and the Young Marble Giants along with the poppier groups making their way on the charts. A very glum day early in my new Northern Virginia life was brightened by first hearing Husker Du's version of "Eight Miles High."
But by arriving when I did, and not really immersing myself in the burgeoning DC punk scene, I missed the diverse likes of Bad Brains, White Boy, Marginal Man, Psychodrama and Minor Threat...not until I began accompanying my new womanfriend to shows in 1987 did I catch the last appearances of Government Issue and Scream (in their first go-round) and start to pick up on the bands that were continuing and forming in the established and rather adventurous local scene (by the latter '80s, while DC audiences were famously "cool," DC bands were seen as among the most open to experimentation with what "hardcore" punk could mean...Bad Brains, after all, had been credited with inventing the "harder, faster" form, and they were a mutant ex-jazz/rock fusion band (they gave up on Return to Forever-like music because, as Rastafarians, they hoped to reach a wider and younger audience...much as some of the core Return to Forever members had in the early '70s stopped playing free jazz, in bands such as Circle, and moved on to fusion so as to reach larger audiences and perhaps spread a little love for the Church of Scientology).
A lot of the bands were recording on Dischord Records, co-founded by members of Minor Threat, which soon established itself as the most influential, durable and popular punk-oriented label in the area (and one of the most so in the world), though hardly the only one...a lot of bands would self-release their work and use the floating "corporate pseudonym" De Soto Records (now an actual label run by ex-Jawboxers), and such labels as Simple Machines sprung up in Dischord's wake. While Dischord co-owner Ian MacKaye's new band Fugazi was growing enormously popular from jump (I was one of the band's few unenchanted auditors, finding its early investment in songs that built tension to no release counter-productive, if relatively novel; I prefered the songs where they cut loose), there was another local band which first came to my attention due to Maximum RocknRoll's 1989 new-artist compilation They Don't Get Paid, They Don't Get Laid, But Boy Do They Work Hard...Jawbox, with a song named for a John Cheever novel, "Bullet Park."
Smart, allusive lyrics, a propulsive beat; it stood out even in good company. The four-song EP on De Soto/Dischord came soon after, in 1990, and it was brilliant, particularly the final song, "Twister". They weren't holding anything back, and while the lyrics weren't always pellucid, they were always literate and humane...I had a favorite local band, particularly after some transcendent concerts by the trio. The Dischord full-length album Grippe featured the EP and a track, "Footbinder," that had appeared on a compilation album--Jawbox, like many a punk/postpunk band in the early '90s, were on a remarkable number of anthology albums, many of them thematic tributes to other bands, and released any number of split singles with peers such as Jawbreaker. Bassist Kim Coletta can be seen protruding her tongue on this album cover, whose not-quite-title track "Grip" is an example of the slower-tempo songs the first album favored:
...and "Consolation Prize" is an even better example of this more balladic approach. I championed the band in the pages of the free monthly tabloid Whack! (originally Crack DC, which proved too incorrect a title) and they were kind enough to invite Donna and me over to their house to chat...their next Dischord album, Novelty, featured some excellent songs, and debuted the new fourth member, guitarist and vocalist Bill Barbot to augment guitarist/singer J. Robbins, Coletta, and the soon-departing drummer Adam Wade (who found even my praise of the band kind of off-puttingly intellectualized); Zach Barocas replaced him.
In the wake of the grunge/punk explosion, Atlantic began looking hard at punk bands with pop sensibilities, and even though they made west-coasters Sweet Baby Jesus circumsize its name to Sweet Baby, they signed them...and Jawbox, the first Dischord band to move to a major label, to much fuss and hassle back home. For Your Own Special Sweetheart was a brilliant album, featuring a re-energized band now moving into a more "heavy" direction, much as their occasional tourmates Helmet were, as with the J.G. Ballard-inspired "Motorist" or the breathless "Breathe":
But Atlantic didn't really feel like supporting the bands that weren't turning out to be the new Green Day or even Chumbawamba in terms of sales, so their second album with the corporation, Jawbox (1996), was their last, and essentially their last album as well, with finely-crafted songs such as "Iodine" left for diehard fans to discover. The band broke up soon after.
So, this brings us to the album pictured above, My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents, collecting a BBC Radio John Peel Session, a number of anthology and tribute tracks (including the original "Bullet Park," which I prefer to the rerecording for Grippe), and such otherwise unavailable tracks as the slinky, funky "Apollo Amateur". As a survey of their career, I say it's excellent, even if it can't be fully represntative of their work as a whole. (There's a download being offered by someone of a second set of rare tracks, which might well be a bootleg...pity, because a legit release of their original demo, with "Consolation Prize" construed as "Consolation," would be welcome as well.)
Trusty were one of several bands which relocated to DC after establishing themselves elsewhere, in their case, Little Rock, Arkansas; like many of those, they also decided to return home eventually, but not before recording the impressive "Goodbye, Dr. Fate" (1995), a remarkably poppish, lovingly humane album that took off from the band's obsessions with geek culture such as comics and films such as Badlands (this album's "Honey Mustard," describing the color of the van the fleeing young criminals are using, remains the best song about serial killers I'm aware of)...about half the songs are love songs of a curiously domestic sort, some about young lovers coping with tough realities ("Joseph and Jennifer") or simply celebrating the joys of partnership ("A Modest Proposal"; "Wife"); "Kal-El" is a funny and touching lament by a "Clark Kent" who has seen his superpowers fade, while the title track is the most sympathetically chiding corrective to those who think they have complete control over their lives, or anyone else's, this side of Kurt Vonnegut...just as funny, and less bitter. They recorded a second album with Dischord before disbanding; there is no reason either album shouldn't've been all over college radio, at least.
Smart Went Crazy, conversely, were pure spite lyrically, as an album entitled Now We're Even might suggest; in terms of music, they were the closest of any of the Dischord bands to "classical" art-song; I can think of no other postpunk band to utilize cello quite as centrally, though my high-schoolmate Deb Fox's Virgin-Whore Complex and subsequent projects might prove to be comparable (Laurie Anderson is not quite in this race). Particularly witty, if viturperative, are the turns in such songs as "Domestic Tension," "Spy vs. Spy," "Sugar in Your Gas Tank" and "That Which is in the Way"...and set to such lovely, sinuous melodies, some sinister, some deceptively sweet. And about half the pieces are lyric-less, for those who'd just like to take in the beauty without what Avram Davidson called "laughter with a little bubble of blood in it"...you might be reminded, just a bit, of Kurt Weill...
Three albums that really should be heard. Actually, more than three, but certainly these three at bare minimum.
For more of this month's initial set of "Forgotten" Music, see Scott Parker's blog.
Jazz scores, or at least jazz-flavored scores, for crime drama were almost inevitable by the latter '50s, and some items, most obviously Mancini's "Peter Gunn Theme" but also (a little later) Duke Ellington's score for Anatomy of a Murder, were major hits. So, after John Lewis had taken charge of what had been the Milt Jackson Quartet, and remade into the Modern Jazz Quartet, losing Kenny Clarke as drummer but gaining the more sympatico Connie Kay by then, and while the MJQ was setting about to beat the world as the proudest carriers of the banner of Third Stream Music (the European classical tradition and jazz being streams one and two, which mingled in the third, suggested Gunther Schuller in a notable essay), Lewis continued to look for challenges...a large group including MJQ members under the direction of Lewis scored a UN-sponsored short film, Exposure; the MJQ scored a European film, No Sun in Venice, and Lewis was called upon to score a 1959 American dramatic film, based on a novel by Ziff-Davis veteran William P. McGivern and starring and produced by Harry Belafonte and directed by Robert Wise, Odds Against Tomorrow. A hell of a film, with the most over the top ending of any crime drama I've seen yet (even in the age of excess in such matters as we live in now), and featuring some compositions that would become chestnuts in the MJQ repertoire...in fact, the MJQ recorded their own interpretation album, issued at various times as Patterns and as Music from Odds Against Tomorrow and currently offered at an exorbitant price by Amazon for a CD-R they will burn for you, when not erasing books from your Kindle or refusing to sell you books by publishers whom they don't like. And, speaking of exorbitant, the prices being hung on copies of of the 1991 cd of the original soundtrack would pay for an excellent stereo component...sorry I missed that item, for at least two reasons. But, here is the contents of the cd:
1. Prelude To Odds Against Tomorrow (01:44)
2. A Cold Wind Is Blowing (01:20)
3. Five Figure People Crossing Paths (01:40)
4. How To Frame Pigeons (01:04)
5. Morning Trip To Melton (03:09)
6. Looking At The Caper (02:01)
7. Johnny Ingram´s Possessions (01:08)
8. The Carousel Incident (01:44)
9. Skating In Central Park (03:29)
10. No Happiness For Slater (03:56)
11. Main Theme Odds Against Tomorrow (03:24)
12. Games (02:17)
13. A Social Call (03:53)
14. The Impractical Man (03:00)
15. Advance On Melton (01:58)
16. Waiting Around The River (03:51)
17. Distractions (01:25)
18. The Caper Failure (01:23)
19. Postlude (00:45)
Total Duration: 00:43:11
Track listing contributed by Dick van Oosten
--and it's notable that the performances by Harry Belafonte are missing, as he interrupts Mae Barnes as she performs "All Men Are Evil" (and she walks off the bandstand accusing Belafonte's character of definitely being evil):
...though the cues that include the MJQ augmented by the likes of guitarist Jim Hall and pianist Bill Evans are definitely collected here. Here's the scene with "A Social Call":
The Patterns album:
A1 Skating In Central Park 6:08
A2 No Happiness For Slater 5:20
A3 A Social Call 4:46
B1 Cue #9 5:05
B2 A Cold Wind Is Blowing 7:31
B3 Odds Against Tomorrow 3:32
--also features a track called "Cue #9," missing from the sountrack album, but audible in this scene (Odds the film is an early credit for Wayne Rogers and Zohra Lampert):
But perhaps the only recording I can find to snag from the MJQ album is this (and the sound quality isn't optimal, but it's worth hearing):
Well, if there was any band specializing in Third Steam music that was doing better financially than the MJQ, it was the Dave Brubeck Quartet, who in 1959 achieved the first "gold" album in jazz history, and whose pianist/leader was engaged to write the musical cues and themes for a 1964 return of Peter Gunn's Craig Stevens to network television, Mr. Broadway. The Brubeck Quartet also recorded an album of their interpretations of the cues, Jazz Impressions of New York (with one track from those sessions, "Toki's Theme," reslotted for the Jazz Impressions of Japan album instead). Here, among a charming array of mostly jazzy themes (including the McBain series 87th Precinct and the Roy Huggins/Anthony Boucher [Kraft] Suspense Theater), is "Mr. Broadway" with an organ dubbed in over Brubeck's piano part, but otherwise featuring the DBQ:
(and here's a quieter version, with a Lengthy coffin nails ad attached.) Here's the DBQ album version, a track that has had much more success than the one-season series. The New York album has one real dud of a recording, "Broadway Romance," but more of that quartet (Paul Desmond on alto sax, Gene Wright on bass, Joe Morello on drums) doing excellent work at the height of their popularity, such as this:
Coming, like Gunther Schuller, from the classical side of the Third Stream ferment, but with strong Beat movement connections (such as his friendship with Jack Kerouac that led to his participation in this film), David Amram would go on to have his greatest commercial success as a film-score composer with 1963's The Manchurian Candidate--but in 1959, was putting together the music for Pull My Daisy:
The second (and perhaps final) of a series of Interim "Forgotten" Soundtracks posts while Rick Robinson reorganizes his collection, causing temporary suspension of his regular Saturday Soundtracks feature.
With apologies to Bill Crider, the Commonwealth of Penn and Trees has been giving even Florida a run for the crazy-stakes of late, not least in official treatment of the Future, in the form of the younger generation. While the truism is that Penna is Kentucky bookended by Philly and Pittsburgh, the Philadephia 'burbs have been the latest to represent, with a lawsuit involving school administrators activating the webcams in the laptops assigned to students...for the purpose of spying on the kids in their homes (and, apparently, hoping to catch at least someone in the household in some degree of undress). This follows the recent kamikaze attack by Harrisburg, PA's own unfavored son on the Texas IRS offices, and various PA prosecutors leading the nation in the Mighty Battle to put away teens who are "sexting" (sending provocative phone-photos of themselves, usually) each other as child pornographers...yes...I'm wating for the first of these idiots to attempt to prosecute one of the kids as an adult for the crime of sending a swain a picture of her- or himself, which is a crime of course because she or he is a juvenile. And all this following last year's revelations of children being sentenced to private juvenile prisons, for posting critical comments on discussion boards and similar crimes against humanity, thanks to the fine jurists who were picking up a little cash on the side from those private prisons (a practice so ludicrously evil that when used as a story element in the fine CBS tv series The Good Wife, it was set up very gingerly so as to be believable).
It's quite a state we're in...and we really should be doing something about it.
The Book of Sand, as translated by Borges himself and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, was published in English by Dutton in 1977 and proved to be the last collection of fiction Borges was to assemble during his life...it was also the first collection of his I was to read, and I was hooked for life. Contents: The Other (El Otro) Ulrikke (Ulrica) The Congress (El Congreso) "There Are More Things" ("There Are More Things") The Sect of the Thirty (La Secta de los Treinta) The Night of the Gifts (La noche de los dones) The Mirror and the Mask (El espejo y la máscara) Undr (Undr) Utopia of a Tired Man (Utopía de un hombre que está cansado) The Bribe (El soborno) Avelino Arredondo (Avelino Arredondo) The Disk (El disco) The Book of Sand (El libro de arena) Almost all of these stories were written after Borges's blindness had progressed to the point that he could no longer read for himself, and that perhaps contributed to the emphasis on memory in most of these, and perhaps some of the vivid imagery (not that that these elements were absent from the work of the younger Borges). "'There Are More Things'" was his slightly sardonic tribute to Lovecraft, thus nudging Borges into the elite class of Lovecraftians, however briefly (though their concerns with existential horror were not dissimilar, their approaches to the subject could hardly be more unalike: Borges is cool and offhanded where Lovecraft tends toward the perfervid). "The Book of Sand" itself is a masterful reapproach to the same concerns as drove "The Library of Babel," but more compactly...rather than an infinite library, the newer fiction offers an infinite book, or at least a book with an apparently infinite number of pages, and likewise containing all the possible combinations of characters. "The Night of the Gifts" was one of Borges's too-infrequent gaucho stories, Argentine westerns; "The Disk" another charming, if slight, peak at the same sort of fantastic visual device that was the McGuffin of "The Aleph"; "The Other" one of several encounters (like "Borges and Me" and "The Other Death") by twinned personas of Borges himself. "Utopia of a Tired Man" is a fine science-fictional encounter; "The Congress" a fine paranoid conspiracy tale...these are all pretty much examples of past mastery at play and work. It's a continuing shame that this edition is pointedly out of print because of the hassle between di Giovanni and the Borges estate. I have less to say about the charming The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the 1977 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition translated by William Weaver, other than it was the first Calvino book I took on, and it might be the most Borgesian of his I've read so far (it was the also the only one I've attempted, with very modest progress, in the original Italian). A series of interlinked vignettes driven by tarot cards Calvino was fascinated by (a fascination shared, of course, by many other fantasy writers, including such students of tarot as Rachel Pollack and K. A. Laity), Calvino has always struck me as someone who was trying to bring the experience of the spoken tale to the page in a more immediate way than most writers, certainly than those who use frames such as having a tale told within their stories (contrast Borges, who was more interested in playing with the forms of literary genre itself, or Fritz Leiber, whose work I was reading as quickly as I could find it at the time I first read these books, who constantly threatens to, when he doesn't actually do so, break into actual playwriting in his prose fiction). At least this one's in print! For more Friday books, please see Patti Abbott's blog
The Lawrence Sweeney Mix is a fine project of Josie Lawrence (most visible in the States as a stalwart of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway?) and Jim Sweeney, and aside from being quite funny (by me), and unusually for Radio 4 on a "stripped" (Monday-Thursday) schedule rather than offered weekly...so one can (at this hour) hear three of the four episodes they are going to do in this second "series" (or "season" for us in the States)...what's most unusual about it for those used to the "Chicago school" of improvised comedy and drama is that they flagrantly break the Yes And rule...Lawrence and Sweeney frequently say No, or completely undermine the reality the other is suggesting, but are deft enough to keep the game going.
Good audience participation as well. (And do check this out sooner rather than later, as Radio 4, at least, usually keeps items such as this up for only a week...though Radio 7 and the World Service might have it up for longer...).
