by Alexandra Bowie

The Irish filmmaker Simon Fitzmaurice (“My Name is Emily”) has ALS – Lou Gehrig’s disease, it’s called in the US, though in Ireland it’s know as Motor Neurone Disease. He was diagnosed in 2008 at age 34. Writers often use metaphors for illness and Fitzmaurice is no exception. As a man in a wheelchair breathing through a tube, Fitzmaurice writes of himself as a stranger. Different. No longer invisible, he stands out from the mass of the well. He writes, “I frighten you. I am a totem of fear. Sickness, madness, death. I am a touchstone to be avoided.”

It wasn’t always like this for him: confined to a wheelchair, unable to move, eat, or even breathe. He was young, he was bullied, he climbed mountains. He washed dishes and got a university degree, taught English in Ukraine and got another degree. He married and had a child, then another, t hen a third. The diagnosis is devastating, tragic, and Fitzmaurice chronicles his decline from walking with a limp to manual wheelchair to electric wheelchair.

Fitzmaurice’s brain and sense of humor are intact, and parts of the memoir are hilarious. After a bout of pneumonia leaves him dependent on a ventilator (more on that below) Fitzmaurice writes of sitting in a cafe with his wife, Ruth, among other people living their lives. He, too, is enjoying being alive, not least because he’s there with his wife, who is pregnant with twins, their fourth and fifth children. He writes:

My willy works. It’s that simple.
The day I found out that ALS didn’t affect my penis was a red-letter day. Unlike a spinal injury or condition, ALS does not take away any feeling from my body. It removes my ability to send message to my muscles to move. But as the penis is not a muscle, it is unaffected.

Other parts work, too: his eyes, some facial muscles, a tiny muscle in one hand – that Ruth and the children can feel. They call it ‘imping.’

Parts are devastating. Describing running after one of his boys, he writes:

When you are told you will die within a certain period, time slows down. Life becomes dominated by the last time. . . Is this the last time I’ll be running? So I speed up. I’m running with a limp . . . And I’m remembering it. Fear of the last time is recording every second. . . [W]hen you lose something central in your life it’s important to have a memory of it.

One of the many striking things about Fitzmaurice’s story is the difference in health care provided in Ireland and the United States. Fitzmaurice contracts pneumonia, and his description of his fear as he struggled to breath is absolutely terrifying. In intensive care, just before he loses consciousness, drowning, he begs his wife, who is pumping his chest, to keep him alive. Once he’s conscious again, discussions about removing the ventilator begin. The specialists recommend against home ventilation, asking why someone would want to live dependent on a ventilator, but Fitzmaurice and his family advocate for it. They learn that home ventilation is covered by the Health Service Exchange and medical card, and Fitzmaurice has kind words for the HSE, the nurses who care for him, and the Irish Motor Neurone Disease Association. Everyone’s truth is different, Fitzmaurice points out, writing, “It’s only important that you remember that behind every disease is a person. Remember that and you have everything you need to travel through my country.

Ironies abound, starting with the cover blurb from the late Alan Rickman, calling the book (correctly) “Utterly life-affirming.” Make no mistake: “It’s Not Yet Dark” is not a feel-good book. Instead, it’s a fierce, tender, and compelling examination of what it means to live.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com.  Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

by Alexandra Bowie

They pop up in old stories, every once in a while, a child with blue eyes living among Native Americans, a survivor taken along after a raid, and there are historical records European children raised among Native Americans. A few of those children returned to their families. In her elegiac and poignant novel “News of the World” Paulette Jiles imagines the return home of one such child, blending her depiction of the psychological pressures with a portrait of a man whose moves through his life illustrate the connections that can be made among people of vastly different ages and cultures.

in 1870 Captain Jefferson Kidd makes his living reading from the newspapers to the inhabitants of the towns through which he passes. Kidd rides a regular route through Texas, up to Wichita Falls in the north and back down south to San Antonio. He’s past 70; his wife has died; his children live in Georgia, though he hopes to coax them home soon. Texas, recently part of the Confederacy, is still under martial law. Captain Kidd fought in the Georgia militia during the War of 1812, ultimately serving as a messenger. After the war he bought a printing press and settled in San Antonio as a printer. He returned to the Army during the Mexican-American War, this time to organize the couriers.

Kidd is a smart and cautious messenger, tailoring the stories he picks to each town’s politics and atmosphere. In Durand, for instance, where political passions still run high, he reads about railroads and tulip bulbs, but tries to avoid local politics. Kidd thinks hard about his customers and, Jiles says, “he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information . . .Then the listeners would for a small space of time drift away into a healing place like curative waters.”

On one of his runs, Captain Kidd brings along a passenger: Johanna, a 10-year-old girl. She’s been living with the Kiowa since she was captured four years earlier, but now the Kiowa have been persuaded to return her, and Kidd agrees to bring her back to her family outside San Antonio. Johanna’s parents were killed in the raid, and now she’s been taken from the Indian woman who raised her. So it’s no wonder that she trusts Captain Kidd not at all. Johanna speaks Kiowa, and, the captain eventually figures out that she remembers a little German, but knows no English.

The trip south covers several hundred miles and they are not easy miles. Together, Johanna and the Captain must cross a river in flood, survive an ambush, make enough money to eat, and reacquaint Johanna with the requirements of European dress and modesty, and the Captain must persuade Johanna there’s no point in running away. Eventually, Johanna and the Captain come to an understanding.

Jiles’s writing is supple and fluid. “News of the World” is an adventure story – the pacing makes it hard to put down – but it’s also the tale of a man’s passage through the world. Don’t miss this beautifully written novel.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

by Alexandra Bowie

It’s a truism that the United States, like the rest of the developed world, is dependent on electricity to power our homes, our transportation systems, and our communications. In “The Grid” Gretchen Bakke, a cultural anthropologist, examines our electric grid, exploring how it developed and the cultural factors that maintain it (or, as she points out, fail to maintain it adequately). News reports focus on energy sources – coal, oil, gas – but rarely on what Bakke calls the “complex and expansive electrical delivery system”: the wires, substations, poles and transformers that bring power from distant sources to our wall outlets. This system, Bakke says, “is the world’s largest machine and the twentieth century’s greatest engineering achievement.” We mostly ignore it, until it breaks down, as it is doing with increasing frequency (measured both by number and the length of power outages). A green and sustainable energy future is achievable, Bakke reminds us, but not without the grid.

Many of the steps we need to take to reach that future are reasonably obvious: reduce demand, increase renewable energy, develop a way to store energy. But Bakke identifies some unexpected ones as well: widen the use of smart meters, don’t build energy sources to meet peak demand but try instead to level demand, improve the grid, and integrate electric vehicles into the mix. But none of these alone will be sufficient, and as each one is integrated, all the others need to be taken into account. Bakke spends most of her interesting, if occasionally feverishly written, exploration of the electric grid sketching the complex financial and infrastructure decisions that have brought us to a point where many competing demands place irreconcilable stresses on the grid.

Here’s one example. Home solar panels feed power into the grid, enough (if the sun is out) to offset that home’s electricity use. But instead of paying the power company (a regulated monopoly) the homeowner pays the installer. From the homeowner’s perspective, solar panels are a good deal: their price will not go up, the way electricity bills do. From a public policy perspective, it’s also a good deal: increased use of solar power means less use of expensive and polluting fossil fuels. But from another policy perspective, it’s missing something: the power company must maintain the poles and wires and transformers – the grid. But the utility receives no money from the solar companies to maintain the grid, even though electricity from those panels feeds into the grid. Less money for maintenance means more infrastructure problems down the road, and higher costs for the utility’s remaining customers.

That’s just one example; every one of the solutions is similarly multi-faceted. Can we solve the problems, or at least come up with new ways of generating and transmitting electricity? Bakke believes yes, with a concerted effort that will require acceptance of new ways of thinking even while we continue to pay to maintain old infrastructure. Electric cars can play a bigger role, for example, as they can be seen, in Bakke’s words, as “great big batteries on wheels.” With enough of them, she writes, car batteries, if engineered to return power to the grid (yes, it’s possible), can act as storage units. Charged, they can be driven; plugged in while parked, the excess can be returned to the grid as power. The car can be recharged overnight. It’s not enough, alone, especially now, but it’s plausible – cars spend most of their time parked.

“The Grid” provides an engaging look at a system we take for granted. Readers interested in the environment, in global warming, or just worried about when the next blackout is coming should add it to their lists.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917

by Alexandra Bowie

We think of the Depression as a time of food scarcity, our vision shaped by John Steinbeck’s great novel “The Grapes of Wrath” and Walker Evans’ images. Breadlines. Bankers selling apples. Those impressions don’t tell the whole story, as Jane Ziegelman’s and Andrew Coe’s fascinating history “A Square Meal” makes clear. Thrift and making do were definitely part of what was happening in America’s Depression kitchens, but big changes were underway as well. Electrification, mechanization, nutritional research and government food policies all developed during the 1930s. Eighty years later, we are still feeling the effects.

The United States had (and continues to have) enormous food resources, and Ziegelman and Coe use an illuminating example to open their history: during World War I Americans cut back consumption, allowing huge quantities of grains and meats to be shipped overseas, where they fed soldiers a diet that could reach 5000 calories a day. After the war, mechanization of farms and electrification meant fewer hands were needed to produce this harvest, consumption returned to normal levels, and returning soldiers, and their sisters, left the farms they’d grown up in and flooded into cities where manufacturing jobs awaited them.

In the cities, apartments were much smaller than rural farmhouses, and kitchens (which often became “kitchenettes”) were tiny. Delis, cafeterias, and sandwich shops provided fast meals at a low price; obtaining food was efficient (Ziegelman and Coe write, they “followed the same ideals of industrial efficiency and mass production as Henry Ford’s factory,” even as they offered a substantially greater number of products). There was a cost, in lost knowledge – once bread became widely available fewer people learned how to bake.

No system was prepared when the economic crash came. The federal government and most of the state governments argued that charity was a private concern, and the first response to the need for food was bread lines. Ziegelman and Coe report that bread lines had been in use during the 1920s as a seasonal – and private – response to the food needs of men drawn to cities to work on construction projects, then a warm weather activity. (Ziegelman and Coe make the bread line atmosphere sound too rough for most women, though there were some. It’s an interesting footnote in this time of new awareness of the many kinds of sexual harassment.)

When it became clear those efforts would not be sufficient, New York City, under Mayor Jimmy Walker, tried a new approach in 1930: using city government structures to supply families with fuel, clothing and food. Ziegelman and Coe write:

To pay for all that emergency help, the mayor would tap the city’s 125,000 municipal workers, asking that they each donate 1 percent of their monthly salaries . . . This was not a charity, [Mayor Walker] told them, but a wholesome example of neighbor helping neighbor, exactly the kind of relief advocated by President Hoover.

The police compiled a list of families in need and distributed the food, along with instructions about how to “wring the most nutrients” from the potatoes, cabbage, turnips, dried peas and cereals provided. But once the school year started, teachers noticed that children were missing school – and when truant officers investigated, they found children lacking food and clothing. The City’s response was to transform schools into emergency assistance centers, using teachers to identify students who might be in need. This echo of the contemporary Community Schools effort differed from the present in that it was funded by monthly contributions from Board of Education employees (and gave out aid on the spot). Sometimes school lunch was a child’s only meal of the day.

New York State began providing food relief soon after (Franklin Roosevelt was still the state’s governor, and Harry Hopkins ran the program). New York planned carefully, included nutritional guidance and menu planning assistance for limited budgets, and still made mistakes: social workers followed women to grocery stores to ensure that they were spending as little money as possible, and meals could be dreary, repetitive and not necessarily nutritious. Despite fears of increasing dependency, grocery orders were replaced with cash assistance. Ziegelman and Coe write, “If work was the best kind of help a person could receive, money was second, a lesson [Hopkins] carried to his next job as the director of federal relief under President Roosevelt.) Then as now, the state and localities split the cost of the relief.

At the federal level, Ziegelman and Coe describe Herbert Hoover as remote, entertaining lavishly at the White House and leaving food relief to the states. It was an approach that worked until Americans started to die of starvation. In 1932 FDR was elected president; and Ziegelman and Coe devote the last portion of “A Square Meal” to the various federal government food relief efforts. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which distributed food, came first, and was followed quickly by the Civilian Conservation Corps, Works Progress Administration, and the Federal Transient Program – all programs that required people to work for food because, in yet another repeat of a debate still underway, there was concern (and some evidence) that relief without work created dependency.

There’s much more in the book: Food and farm policies that resulted in low prices produced farmers who dumped food in protest, creating what Walter Lippmann called “the paradox of want amid plenty.” The relief programs ended just as the Dust Bowl got underway (though, Ziegelman and Coe write, most of the displacement we credit to the Dust Bowl was the result of changes in farming practices, not the weather). The development of home economics and the combination of that science with new learning about nutrition. Ziegelman and Coe intersperse meals plans and recipes throughout their text. Cracked whole wheat, for example, became the basis for a slew of nutritious if frugal menus. (It’s yet another theme that echoes today – savory oatmeal is touted as a healthy alternative.) The continuing development of the science of nutrition, which gave menu planning at all parts of the income scale a solid scientific basis — but when taken up by increasingly centralized food manufacturing and distribution networks, it also meant the beginning of practices that torment us today, such as milling all the nutrition out of wheat (so we can have soft white bread) and then supplementing the resulting loaf with artificial nutrients.

For anyone interested in food policy, cooking, eating, and nutrition, “A Square Meal” provides a fascinating and well-written introduction to policies that still affect us today. It’s a worthy companion to the other books in your food library, and a useful reminder of the limits of our knowledge.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

by Alexandra Bowie

Some people stay home and find the world; others must travel the world to find their way home. Roisin and Francois, two of the central characters in Helen Sedgwick’s eerie and satisfying novel “The Comet Seekers” meet far from home at a research camp in the Antarctic; she’s an astronomer and he’s a chef.

Roisin, who’s Irish, has spent her life studying the sky; as a child and adolescent she taught her cousin Liam to watch and map the sky whenever a comet appeared, so they could see its movement. Liam, whose mother died long ago, is tied to his isolated Irish farm by his promise to his father to help keep it going. Roisin pursues her studies in Hawaii, New York, and various places in Europe. But Liam draws Roisin back periodically, and at one point she gives up a fellowship in Bayeux, returns to Ireland and stays for a year. We know before she does that Roisin is one of the travellers. We watch her come to understand that truth about herself in a sensitive and beautifully written, very brief, scene: Roisin’s mother asks a question whose answer shows Roisin which love she’s willing to sacrifice.

Francois is from Bayeux; as Sedgwick puts it, from two channels away from Roisin’s village in southern Ireland. He’s a few years younger than Roisin, and was brought up by his mother, Severine. Even as a child Francois encouraged his mother to travel – one year they went to Edinburgh, where they ventured out to see a comet and met up with a group of astronomers bent on the same errand. But that’s the only trip they ever take, because Severine is held to Bayeux by her family – an extended family of ghosts who keep her company – who cannot find her if she travels far from home.

It’s a measure of the power of Sedgwick’s concept and writing that the reader believes entirely in the existence of these ghosts. Each family member may choose whether to introduce the ghosts to the next generation or not, and, for Severine, it’s an agonizing choice. The ghosts range from Severine’s mother and grandmother, to more ancient family members. There are Brigitte, a near-contemporary of Joan of Arc, whose skin and dress flicker like flames, and Aelfgyva, who appears in the Bayeux tapestry (as does, yes, Halley’s comet). Severine both wants Francois to believe her and to see the world. Francois worries that she’s succumbing to early-onset dementia. The ghosts appear for reasons of their own.

“The Comet Seekers” is broad geographically and temporally, with each era marked by the appearance of a comet and its earth-bound viewers. Sedgwick handles her themes of travel, home, enduring love, and family with a delicate sensibility that keeps the reader on edge and provides an ending that is both satisfying and, for Roisin and Francois, delicately ambiguous.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter at @abowie917.

You can watch a video from the 2012 show here.

The Annex is open 8 AM – 8 PM Monday-Friday, and 10 AM – 6 PM Saturday and Sunday; closed major holidays and for special events.

by Alexandra Bowie

The urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg has written about the Third Place – gathering spots like bars, coffee shops, and general stores, and how important they are to making communities vibrant. Without them, people are either at work or tucked up in private at home – and have no place to meet, talk, relax, drink, write, reflect and allow grassroots politics to develop. In his book “Meet the Regulars” Joshua D. Fischer, a writer for the blog Bedford + Bowery, has culled and collected his posts. Fischer profiles a range of people – some famous, some not – in their favorite places, mostly bars, but also yoga studios, Melody Lanes, Brooklyn Strategist and Brooklyn Bridge Park. The selection of places is heavily weighted towards Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and the age of the regulars tends toward people in their twenties, with the occasional appearance of a somewhat older person.

All the same, there’s a lot of diversity here: Ellen Stagg, a straight photographer who hangs out at the strip club Pumps because “the girls in the neighborhood probably feel cool and safe to dance here;” Joey Green, a gay African-American whose stepfather was white, who likes Metropolitan because it’s completely non-judgmental; Ariel Pellman, who likes the Steampunk bar Way Station, who’s photographed in a corset. Fischer quotes her:

I do waist training, which means I wear [a corset] on a regular basis and can cinch my waist to a very small size. I am wearing a bustle. So the whole thing is very reminiscent of steampunk themes. This being a steampunk bar, I wanted to wear something fun.

If Fischer asked her why she thinks it’s fun to wear articles of clothing that exaggerate old-fashioned (not to say ancient) ideas of the ideal female form, he doesn’t report it. But the theme of exploration of different selves and different lives emerges in this and other interviews. Life as a young adult – whether in a new place or not – is hard, and the stories people tell in their interviews often circle around their discoveries of themselves as they figure out who they are. It’s not just navel-gazing: these New Yorkers will shape the city’s future.

The second theme that emerges, as might be expected in such a book based in Brooklyn, is gentrification: the artistic (and yes, even the artisanal) ferment that started here and has drawn many people has been wonderful, but it’s carried a cost. To his credit, Fischer both allows the theme to emerge from the interviews he’s elected to include, and addresses it head on, in one of the topical essays (“Are these the best places in Brooklyn?”, “I hate the future”) that break up the stream of interviews.

Rents in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have shot up in the last 15 years, and Williamsburg is now home to an Apple store and a Whole Foods, not to mention a series of tall waterside apartment buildings. There’s little space to operate in what Fischer calls “the spirit of what made Williamsburg ‘cool’”; those joints are now opening further east, in Bushwick and Brownsville. That means that residents in those neighborhoods have also been displaced – yet at the same time, as Fischer points out, you can’t blame store and homeowners who are offered millions for their properties.

It’s a complicated cycle, and Fischer’s subjects are as caught up in it as the people who preceded and will follow them. Fischer quotes Eddie Cedeno, half-Cuban, half-Ecuadorean, who owns a coffee shop in Bushwick. Cedeno acknowledges that his neighbors are skeptical, but he wants new businesses to open up even though his neighbors – the ones he’s squeezing out – remind him of his parents. Fischer asks whether gentrification is OK when it’s an independent business, not a chain; when it’s necessity, not luxury – though of course one person’s daily cup of coffee is another’s luxury. He hopes that development will be followed by services. The reader hopes that as they settle into adult life, his subjects will use the networks they’ve developed in their third places to organize, vote, and even run for office, to be sure the people are heard.

If you want to read an earlier view of gentrification in Brooklyn, read “A Meaningful Life” by L.J. Davis (reviewed here). Let us know your thoughts about how things have changed, or even your favorite Brooklyn hangout, in the comments.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

Tickets, ($10/free for museum members) are available here.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.

The screening will take place Tuesday, March 15 at 6:30 pm. Tickets ($10, free for museum members) available here.

The Transit Museum is located at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. For information on wheelchair access, American Sign Language interpreters, Assisted Listening Devices, or other accessibility matters, please contact Meredith Gregory at 718-694-1823 or meredith.gregory@nyct.com.

Anwar Al-Awlaki was the son of a Yemeni studying in the US. His father, Nasser, later went on to high government positions in Yemen, and hoped for a similar career for his sons. But only Anwar’s brother, Ammar, has followed their father’s path. Anwar went another route, becoming more religious, and studying the Koran and Muslim scriptures. He was somewhat entrepreneurial, recording English-language sermons and translations of Islamic stories. He married and became an iman, first at a mosque in San Diego and later in Washington, DC. That’s where he was on 9/11, and Anwar Al-Awlaki was a media presence in the days immediately after, serving as what he called a bridge between Muslims and Americans, one who could show that not all Muslims advocated violence.

But not all was it seemed. Al-Awlaki had a habit of visiting prostitutes, and the FBI had proof. Further, several of the 9/11 hijackers had been in one of his mosques or the other. Shane is careful to show that it’s not clear whether they attended services among throngs or had closer contact with Al-Awlaki. What Shane makes crystal clear is that Al-Awlaki continued to move toward violence. He left the US for Yemen, most likely because of the threat of exposure or even prosecution, and spent time in London before returning to Yemen for good. His sermons, which continued in English, moved from cassette to video to YouTube to his own website, and were re-posted on social media throughout the world. They appealed to a wide range of disaffected young men and a few young women.

At the same time, the Obama administration was undertaking its own somewhat more cautious journey, attempting to repair relations with the Muslim world and preparing to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. The increasing use of drones was only one part of that policy, and was immensely complicated. Drones may be better able to pinpoint a particular small target like a car than bombs launched from airplanes, but the operator has to be pretty sure of the target. Drones need less time to reach the target, but need to be launched from somewhere fairly nearby. Then there are the legal questions: can the US use deadly weapons on another country’s soil with its government’s permission? Without? What if the target is a US citizen, as Al-Awlaki was? There are moral questions, too, and political ones. Shane raises and addresses these issues in careful prose, with details that support but don’t overwhelm. Here is Shane’s description of the impact of drone strikes on operators which was,

paradoxically, far greater than on those who flew traditional fighters and bombers . . . Modern warfare had largely gotten away from the hand-to-hand combat of earlier epochs, and killing at a distance was the norm . . . the team of drone operators not only saw the target, they lingered over it. [Shane quotes an essay from a former operator, who says] ‘when you recommend that target folder for approval, you do so with the explicit knowledge that you are recommending the death of not just an enemy of our nation, but a person.’

(An interesting fictional exploration of that topic is “I Saw a Man” by Owen Sheers, which follows three families devastated by the intended and collateral damage of a drone strike. If you’ve read it, let us know in the comments what you think.)

Ultimately, Al-Awlaki climbed to the top of the administration’s kill list and, after a near-miss, was killed by a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, his son, a 16-year-old who had gone in search of the father he hadn’t seen in several years, was killed in a subsequent strike targeting members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The best explanation Shane has unearthed was that the killing was accidental, that the US ‘didn’t know he was there.’

It was a damning excuse. In two weeks, the United States had killed three Americans in Yemen. By its own account, only one of the killings had been intentional. It undercut claims that the [drones] . . . allowed drone operators to examine and identify the faces of those on the ground. They were killing people whose identity they didn’t know, often on the basis of sketchy intelligence, hunches, and guesswork.

Shane concludes that such killings generated hostility in Yemen and sympathy for Al Qaeda, and hastened and supported ISIS recruiting. He argues quite persuasively that by keeping the development of the drone program secret, instead of ensuring a public debate about US policies of how and when we kill citizens who are foreign combatants, we are both endangered and lessened. The drone program has kept the US use of killing almost an abstraction, which Shane points out is in contrast to Osama bin Laden death – a difficult, dangerous operation that provided proof of death. Our government kills in our name, as part of its response to terror. We need to be aware of this policy, to discuss it, and to accept its implications. Scott Shane’s book is an important contribution to the debate.

by Alexandra Bowie

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

by Alexandra Bowie

Iain Pears’ fascinating and compelling new novel “Arcadia” opens in a landscape, “bathed in sunshine, sweet-smelling from the gentle shower that fell overnight then stopped as dawn broke.” It’s a lovely picture of a classical pastoral setting with perfect weather. From here, Pears takes us into three different places. There’s Anterwold, the idyl of the opening scene where farmers work in pleasant fields and the highest office one can hope for is Storyteller. Second is Oxford in 1960, and third is a sealed environment on the island of Mull, sometime in a distant dystopian future, where characters look out on pictures, fields with cows, which eventually changes to one of snow-topped mountains, “also imaginary as no snow had fallen anywhere in the world for at least a decade.” Typical of Pears, he doesn’t reveal the temporal relationship of these three worlds.

Oxford is home to Henry Lytten, an Oxford don who specializes in Sydney and Shakespeare, and wants to create as lively a fictional world as Tolkien or Lewis had done, only without dragons. But he hasn’t written it yet, just set out ideas in notebooks, with character sketches, landscapes, and the society’s precepts. Lytten meets with his friends in the pub in what is essentially a writing group, one of whose members, Persimmon, is writing a story about a dystopian future. Lytten may be a don but is not donnish, and his wartime work for a shadowy government intelligence agency has continued into the 1950s and requires some European travel. It’s through his travels to France that he’s met Angela Meerson.

As far as Lytten knows, his friend Angela is an eccentric artist who happens to speak a range of obscure and difficult languages. But Angela describes herself as a “psychomathematician whose speciality was time; events were mere epiphenomena which interested [her] not at all.” Lytten’s trips are also the reason he’s befriended Rosie Wilson, a 15-year-old who loves the mysteries of Agatha Christie, whose lively, curious mind annoys her parents and endears her to Lytten. Rosie looks after Lytten’s unpleasant cat while he’s away, and that leads her to Angela and a machine that she’s left in Lytten’s basement.

The machine gives Rosie, Lytten, and Angela access to Anterwold. Does Anterwold exist? When and where is it? Is Anterwold a parallel universe or another world, and what can possibly link it to dystopian Mull? If, as one character argues, in some circumstances the past must rearrange itself, though “it appeared exceptionally difficult to alter the past except through massive intervention” how does that happen? These are some of the  central mysteries at the heart of this extraordinary novel. Like any good mystery, “Arcadia” also includes MacGuffins and red herrings. And Henry Lytten, Angela Meerson and Rosie Wilson aren’t the only main characters in this complex novel: there’s Henary, a Storyteller in Anterwold, and Jay, who goes on a quest, Hanslip, who runs the Mull institution, and Jack More, a policeman who goes in search of Angela when she disappears.

Three parallel worlds, mysteries, a quest and considerably more make up “Arcadia,” whose complexities also include consideration of stories and origin myths, creation and destruction. There’s some nice character doubling – the Henry/Henary pair is just one example – and it’s a measure of Pears’ success in this novel that it’s quite easy to believe that Rosie can exist in two places at once. It’s so intricately knitted together that Pears has developed an app to accompany the book. (Here’s an article in which Pears explains his reasoning.) The app is well worth buying ($3.99 via Apple) as it includes a map (that’s a screenshot)

and skeins showing where each of the ten (!) main characters is. It’s also an act of trust in the reader, as each node in the map takes the reader to the relevant text, and readers can read in the app in any order they choose. This is both distracting and enriching, as re-reading certain sections after learning what brought a second or third character to that particular point makes the resonances considerably deeper.

“Arcadia” is a substantial achievement by a novelist very much in control of his considerable powers. It’s well thought-through, vivid, and one of the best novels to come this way in a very long time. Don’t be put off by the complexity and do take advantage the app, because this engrossing and deeply satisfying novel will repay the reader many times over.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

Guggenheim was born in 1898, one of three daughters of Benjamin Guggenheim and his wife Florette. Benjamin Guggenheim died on the Titanic, too early to amass a sizable fortune like his siblings. Peggy and her sisters were poorly educated, largely at home, and the lives of all three were chaotic. One sister died in childbirth. The other may have killed one or both of her children. Peggy herself was married twice, first to the writer and painter Laurence Vail, with whom she had two children, and later to Max Ernst. She had many lovers, Samuel Beckett among them. Her children were not always the first thing on her mind. She was a thinly veiled character in various works of fiction, and makes appearances in the biographies and autobiographies of many 20th century artists and writers. It makes for a fascinating life story, and Francine Prose has a good time telling it in this volume, part of Yale University Press’ Jewish Lives series.

Prose organizes the story less chronologically than thematically, though the themes — men, husbands, sex, art — overlap and commingle. Here’s one example: In the fall of 1939 Peggy (as Prose refers to her subject throughout) left London for France and delivered Peggy’s son Sindbad to his father and stepmother, the latter of whose “hatred for Peggy appeared to be outliving her passions for Peggy’s former husband.” Despite the looming war and Hitler’s animosity to Jews Laurence Vail persuaded Peggy to stay in France, rather than returning with their children to London. She went to Paris, and spent her time buying art, leaving just three days before the Germans arrived. Instead of going south, she drove east, to her former husband and their children on the Swiss border. She had an affair with a hairdresser — “her efforts to keep her romance a secret necessitated spending a great deal of time in the salon, where she had her hair dyed a different color every few weeks. . .” By the end of the summer of 1940 Peggy moved on to Grenoble, where she became involved with – and funded – the efforts of the journalist Varian Fry to help Jewish artists, including Andre Breton, escape from Europe. It was during this period that she became involved with Max Ernst.

Throughout, the writing is engaging, and Prose keeps her many strands clear yet woven together (my only quibble is with the enormous number of typos the text contains). Peggy’s escape from Europe was not easy, involving as it did threatening visits from the police, crossing borders (France to Spain, Spain to Portugal) and seven people (Laurence Vail, and his wife, Peggy and Max Ernst, Vail’s and Peggy’s two teenaged children, and Ernst’s former lover). The group, Prose writes, reunited in Lisbon, where Kay Boyle (Laurence’s wife)

checked into a hospital, claiming a sinus infection in order to be spared the theatrics generated by her soon-to-be ex-husband, his ex-wife, the ex-wife’s lover, and Leonora, the lover of the ex-wife’s lover, who had inconveniently–and dramatically–re-entered their lives.

Peggy shouldn’t be likable, but she is; outside of her personal life she was a generous and interested patron, spontaneous and genuine. Her larger-than-life life story was shaped by denial and by money. The latter allowed her to do what she liked; the former allowed her to forget the consequences and repeat mistakes. She left one of the best collections of mid-century art, and she left it as a gift to the city of Venice where, Prose tells us, her memory is celebrated. Prose’s life of Peggy Guggenheim is entertaining while not overlooking the tragedy and the pain, and should be required reading for anyone interested in feminism or the art of the 20th century.

Have a favorite moment? Share it in the comments. Email me at asbowie@gmail.com if you have a book you want me to know about. Follow me on Twitter @abowie917.

Admission is $10 for the general public/free for Transit Museum Members. Tickets available here.

The Transit Museum is located at the corner of Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights. Doors open at 5:30 PM.

On Wednesday, October 7 John Lahr, drama critic for “The New Yorker” and author of “Joy Ride: Show People and Their Shows” will talk about his new book with one of its subjects, Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House, In the Next Room). A Q&A with the audience and book signing will follow the talk. Books, food and drink will be available for purchase in the lobby.

The talk starts at 7:00 pm at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place, Brooklyn, NY. Tickets are $10, general admission. More information and tickets are available here.

The Transit Museum is located at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.

The screening starts at 6:30 pm; doors open at 6 pm. Tickets available here.

It’s the early 1930s. Nell Stone, an American anthropologist who has recently published a well-received study of the sexual lives of teeangers in an isolated tribe, and her husband, an Australian anthropologist named Schuyler Fenwick, called Fen, have sought but not found a new tribe to study together. A brief stay in the west over Christmas brings them into contact with an English anthropologist, Andrew Bankson, who introduces them to the peaceful Tam, who live near a hidden lake that is itself located off a bend in the Sepik river in New Guinea. (The story was sparked by but not based on a short period in the lives of Margaret Mead, her second husband Gregory Bateson, and her first, the New Zealand anthropologist Reo Fortune.) Nell and Fen settle in happily, plumbing the mysteries of the very traditional society. But all is not well – Fen is jealous of the reception Nell’s book receives and hopes to make his own mark, and a fortune, by a very different means: acquiring an artifact that western museums will value. Andrew comes for a visit and then must stay for an extended time as he recovers from a fever.

It’s during the period of his fever that Fen explains to Bankson that he’s seen, in their previous village, an object, covered with logograms, that would be the only example of writing developed in this part of the world. In his feverish state Bankson makes little of this “thrilling and impossible” description, even though Fen insists that he can find his way back to it. Bankson’s fever episode also provides King with the opportunity to relate a telling difference between Nell and Fen. Both nurse him, sometimes providing a damp cloth, reading to him, fanning him. But, says Bankson, “I shut my eyes and Nell disappeared, replaced by Fen who sat so much closer, the fan nearly swatting me, the wet cloths runny, water dripping in my ears.”

Whether and to what extent a person from another continent and another culture can understand a “primitive” one, and whether such societies are primitive at all or are just different, are questions still debated. The issues form a subtext for the novel, as the three main characters figure out their fieldwork methodology and debate their conclusions, even as they immerse themselves in Tam practices. Of course, they’ve brought their own society’s taboos and standards along with them, and King does a terrific job illustrating the sympathies and experiences of the Westerners, and suggesting how those experiences influence their interpretations of what they observe each day. Each of them is from a different continent as well, and their hesitations and conflicts drive their story forward.

Fen’s competitive approach to the work brings about the final resolution of the story. “Euphoria” is a memorable, lucid and deeply satisfying exploration in a fully realized if completely foreign setting. Read it.

Have a book you want me to know about? Email me at asbowie@gmail.com. I also blog about metrics at asbowie.blogspot.com.

(Or, Bitte, Kann ich haben eine Fribble?)

As discussed in Part 1, the first generation of New York City Hardcore Punk bands (1980 – ’82) were essentially musicians trying to reclaim punk and post-punk for a younger audience. Most of the contributors to the budding hardcore scene had been 12 – 16 years old when the Pistols and Ramones emerged, and had therefore been too young to actively participate in that “first wave.” But circa 1980, these same people (now in their late teens and early 20s) were very eager to create their “own” punk rock and post-punk, informed by the earlier music yet inclusive of a musical and iconographic style that reflected a changing social and creative environment.

Few of those ’80 – ’82 NYHC bands played music that would now be recognized as pure hardcore, and nor did they want to. I believe they considered themselves punk acts, post-punk acts, art-rock acts, activist rock acts, funny-rock acts, etcetera, but as they were swept away by the momentum of an exciting national movement, virtually all of them adopted some aspect of the iconography, lyrical harangue, and hyper-kinetic rhythm that was characteristically hardcore. In some ways, it is unfortunate that virtually every American “third wave” punk band (the first wave being the initial ’75 – ’77 explosion, and the second wave being the ’78 – ’80 group, typified by Stiff Little Fingers, Undertones, Ruts, et al.) were engulfed, to some greater or lesser degree, by the hardcore thing; ideally, a “pure” punk third wave should have been allowed to flourish in America, as it did (to a certain degree) in the U.K. (and although much of the U.K. “third wave” was lumped under the Oi Movement, in general there was more of stylistic and philosophical continuum between first/second wave punk and Oi then there was in the U.S. between first/second wave punk and hardcore. Now, that sentence sounded a bit academic, but if you stuck with me, I’ll buy you a Fribble one day).

False Prophets, Even Worse, the Undead, and Stimulators (to name four) were pretty much straight punk rock acts, each with differing stylistic and ideological accents; Reagan Youth, AOD, and Kraut were more-or-less straight-up punk bands, too, but they occasionally integrated double and quadruple-timed hardcore rhythms; and the wonderful Nihilistics seemed on one hand to borrow from Crass and on the other anticipate the Swans. In fact, in this “first” generation of New York Hardcore, the only acts I would label as being (more or less) “pure” hardcore would be Heart Attack, the Mob, and the Beastie Boys (let me note here that Heart Attack were a blunt, often stunning group, shattering and direct, and they’ve never quite gotten their due; after Misfits and Bad Brains, they were probably the best band on the scene).

(It’s important to note that the groups who are most frequently identified as being “early” NYHC bands – say, Murphy’s Law, Cro-Mags, Agnostic Front – evolved after this first wave. Those bands were a distinct and very powerful second generation of NYHC…but right now, we are discussing the diverse and occasionally shambholic first generation.)

Out of this small list, the clear leader was the Bad Brains; none of these groups could ever hope to hold a candle to the explosive, radical, original genius and nearly miraculous level of craftsmanship and showmanship the Bad Brains brought to every gig during this time.

The Bad Brains constant gigging provided the centerpiece for the first era’s socializing (and band forming), and the Bad Brains were also extremely supportive of the scene growing up around them. Although New York also laid a somewhat tenuous claim to New Jersey’s Misfits (who were also very damn fierce in terms of performance, songwriting, and iconography), the Misfits more or less abdicated as potential scene-leaders, choosing instead to focus on a more global and long-term game plan.

It is also very important to note that the Bad Brains changed radically towards the end of this first era; by the end of 1982, their gigs were largely oriented towards their reggae compositions, and by mid-1983 they had made a more-or-less full transition to reggae. I could theorize that the Bad Brains absolutely unchallenged musical superiority intimidated this first generation of bands from playing pure hardcore (and it’s true that the explosion of area bands playing music clearly identifiable as hardcore happened only after the Bad Brains stopped playing so damn fast); but I don’t think that’s true.

I think it’s far more likely that the ’80 – ’82 NYC scene bands played a more “traditional” form of punk simply because a) they wanted to, b) their prime desire was to interpret ’75 – ’79 punk in their own Lower East Side way, and c) their main interest was in the teen empowerment and generationally distinctive inconography implied by hardcore, not in the caricature hardcore sound itself.

By mid and late 1982, the next generation of New York hardcore was becoming established. This would be the generation that would perform music immediately identifiable as hardcore, and would later be more firmly identified with the story of NYHC. Personally, I lost interest; by late 1982, the on-stage efforts of any band you saw — even if it was a well known national or international act — were overshadowed by the antics of the audience, and personally, I couldn’t quite make sense of a musical scene where the moshpit and the stage-divers seemed more important than the music itself. I am not looking down my nose at that behavior, I’m really not; it’s just that not my, uh, thing. Circa ’82 I had also noted that some of the first-generation hardcore bands were trying to take steps away from their original sound, and were being (at best) ignored, and more frequently ridiculed; a perfect example of this was TSOL, whose outstanding, pre-goth, keyboard-driven second album, Beneath the Shadows, was largely ignored; similarly, Bad Religion’s second album, the synth-heavy, slower-rhythm’d Into the Unknown was subject to so much ridicule that the band later virtually denied that it had ever existed. A scene in which an act was prohibited from growing creatively was of little or no interest to me.

Now, none of this is to denigrate the next (post ’82) generation of New York-based ”pure” hardcore bands; not only did these groups contains some mighty players and some extraordinary characters (John Joseph of the Cro-Mags is one of the great frontmen in New York rock history), but the ultimate success and staying power of speed metal and death metal has validated these groups hunches and innovations.

Looking back, I recognize that the first generation of NYHC was, to a great degree, hardcore only in name. We had a tremendous desire to link the new “third wave” punk coming out of the East Village with the maelstrom of new punk (labeled as hardcore) coming out of the rest of the country. Ultimately, I believe that it may have been unfortunate that we had to “tag along” on a national movement (as ferocious as that movement was); it’s very interesting to consider what would have happened if we had allowed this “new” third-wave New York punk to assert itself without the stylistic and ideological limitations of hardcore and without having to be tagged with the label of a movement that ultimately became creatively restrictive.

Finally, Sting is a tool, and we warm ourselves with the salty tears he sheds over the failure of Come Sail Away or Ship’s Ahoy or Capeman, or whatever that musical he wrote was called.

In Part 3: New York Hardcore and My Part in it’s Upfall

Last year Coney Island Brewing released “Seas the Day India Pale Lager,” which I tasted and reviewed. Having gotten Overpass, their first India Pale Ale, I couldn’t resist sampling them side by side (see photo above). The first thing that struck me is that, contrary to my expectation, the lager (on the left) is a deeper amber color than the IPA. Please don’t conclude from the photo that the lager produces a much more ample head. Before I poured the brews, I accidentally knocked over the lager bottle, which made it very fizzy. The IPA produced a full, foamy head which had largely collapsed by the time that on the lager had declined to the point where I could finish pouring it. As I did when I reviewed Seas the Day, I paired both brews with a spicy Vietnamese bánh mì sandwich from Hanco’s.

Before this tasting, I tried the Overpass IPA by itself. My notes were: aroma–hops predominate, with floral undertones; flavor: hop bitterness dominant throughout. When I gave my wife a sip, though, her reaction was “Malty!” As the ale warmed in the glass, I got more malt flavor.

For this tasting I let both brews sit on the table for a while so that, when I poured, they were not too far below room temperature. This time I noticed malt flavor at the start in both brews, although the hop bitterness seemed more pronounced at the finish in the lager than in the ale. As it got warmer, the IPA seemed almost toasty. But as I ate the spicy sandwich, I noticed the hop flavor in the ale becoming more pronounced again. The principal difference between the IPA and the IPL was that the latter had more pronounced fruit overtones. This seems odd given that the hop mixture in the IPA includes two varieties–Centennial and Nelson-Sauvin, that are not used in the lager and are said to impart fruit flavors.

I find the Overpass IPA a fine, well crafted example of the style; one that, if not served too chilled, has excellent hop-malt balance. Of the two, I think the Seas the Day IPL is more interesting; but why wouldn’t an unusual brew like an India Pale Lager be so?

Coney Island Brewing has also recently released a 1609 Amber Ale, 1609 being the year Europeans first set foot on what is now Coney Island. I have a bottle, and will be reviewing it soon.

Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/SeuV5X2fK3Y/coney-island-brewings-new-overpass-ipa.html

For some reason, there seems to be a rash of books and magazine articles about the history and legacy of Hardcore Punk in New York City. That’s all well and good, but I realized while perusing some of these pieces that my take on that scene was quite different. I was deeply involved with the early-ish days of (what came to be known as) the NYHC scene; in fact, this very column takes its name from the radio show I had in 1981/82 that heavily promoted local punk rock and hardcore bands. Hooray for differing perspectives! Now, here is mine, which I will spell out in three parts.

I was 17 in 1979, and age figures prominently in this story.

Circa 1979, many of us were frustrated by the lack of a true teenage-based punk rock in New York City.

That may sound odd, so let me explain: Around that time, there was a sense that the music scene in NYC was not replenishing itself, the way London, Manchester, and even Los Angeles had. Not only did these cities have a very healthy second-wave punk and post-punk scene, but the musicians forming the second-wave bands were significantly closer to our age (Bono was barely two years older than me, Ian Curtis only 23, Terry Hall just 20). On the other hand, in 1979 David Byrne would have been 27, Joey Ramone, 28, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine both 30, Alan Vega, 32, Debbie Harry, 34, and so on. When you’re in your late teens, that age differential is huge.

As a teenager in 1979, it was great fun to be a music fan in NYC (especially since every band imaginable came through town), but we most definitely felt we were being left out on the participation side. Out of this frustration – the desire of people 21 and under to become active participants in the performing story of New York rock – the first wave of New York City Hardcore was born.

The first stirring lay in a pile of bands between ’78 and ’80 who defied the odds and were teenagers playing for teenagers: The Speedies, the Blessed, the Stimulators, the Student Teachers, and the Colors. The fact that only two of those were “properly” punk bands (and only one of them, The Stimulators, segued into the NYHC scene) is honestly irrelevant; what was important is that these bands (especially the Speedies and the Stimulators) bought a lot of teenagers into mainstream NYC rock clubs like Max’s, CBGBs, and Hurrah, and that these bands empowered their audience (please recall that in those days not only was the drinking age 18, but clubs also checked proof of age far less than they later would; it was very common to see 13 and 14 year olds at these shows). One cannot stress enough how important the Speedies and the Stimulators were in the gestation of NYHC, and it is no accident that Eric Hoffert and Greg Crewdson of the Speedies produced the first Beastie Boys recordings.

Around 1979/80, I became aware that a fresh crop of American punk rock was arising, playing music that was more rhythmically aggressive and conceptually confrontational than the American and British punk that had preceded it.

Around ’80, especially if you lived in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, or D.C., it became clear that a form of punk was emerging that was very distinct from the earlier British and American models, epitomized by bands like D.O.A., Flipper, the Subhumans, the Pointed Sticks, the Dils, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Black Flag, Germs, and most notably (if you were a New Yorker) the Bad Brains and the Misfits.

I also began to notice that when you went to certain shows – especially shows by the Stimulators or Bad Brains – people would talk a lot about these aforementioned bands. Young people who had essentially been shut out (on a participatory level) from the “traditional” New York scene were congregating at these neo-punk gigs and sensing that they were a part of a larger movement, a “third wave” of punk that would come to be known as Hardcore (the “second wave” being typified by bands like the Ruts, the Undertones, and Stiff Little Fingers).

If I had to point to a single event where New York City became alerted to the idea that hardcore punk was a major, nation-wide mode of youth expression, I would have to say that it was a Dead Kennedys show at Irving Plaza in April of 1981. Until that evening, I had thought of the Dead Kennedys as a strong, hyper-political second-generation San Francisco punk band who had firm stylistic roots in the ’77 model, but were avidly and fairly successfully experimenting with rapid rhythms and absurdist ideas. The Irving Plaza show confirmed that the DK’s, rather than being a “second generation” band in the mode of, say, SLF or Red Rockers, were the leading edge of a new vanguard of “third wave” bands with a very new attitude. The primary reason this became abundantly clear at the Irving Plaza show was because a significant contingent of D.C. punks came up for the event; and for the very first time, due to the instigation and instruction of the visiting D.C. crew, serious moshing and stage-diving was seen in a major New York venue. It was a miraculous vision, and boldly announced that this was a new entity, indeed.

In the immediate wake of the April ’81 Dead Kennedys show, a number of different and powerful forces came together: the awareness of a national youth movement that was claiming punk rock as it’s own, and was playing it (and reacting to it) in a radical and fresh way, deliberately meant to distinguish this “new” third-wave of punk from the earlier modes; the confirmation that these heretofore un-attached tribes of avid teen club goers, indoctrinated by the Speedies, Stimulators, et al., would now attach themselves to the new punk; and finally, that the New York branch of this movement would borrow a rather significant form of its’ iconography, ideology, and audience behavior/sensibility from D.C.

From that point forward, the hardcore scene developed very rapidly, with the Bad Brains at its’ locus. But the heart of the “scene” still lay somewhere between the old and the new: between 1980 and 1982, a group of enthusiastic young people were attempting to splash some fresh blood on a somewhat dormant New York City punk scene; what I am referring to as the first generation of NYHC was essentially just an overlay of contemporary and fast-evolving hardcore memes (musical, ideological, and iconographic) on those efforts. I re-wrote that sentence eight times, does it make any sense now? Even if doesn’t, I hope you enjoyed this story. Then again, perhaps you’d prefer a Strawberry Fribble and a copy of 2112 by Rush.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

(Thanks to the amazing Jack Rabid for some assistance clarifying names and dates in this piece.)

In troubled times, both globally and personally, we rely on one factor to provide hope and establish stability: our belief in the essential humanity of man. Often, there’s another factor that provides comfort: music, and our belief in the essential humanity of the people who make and love music.

Listening to music, loving music, gives us common ground with our fellow man; it means that not only are we engaged in the special energy and beautiful empathy implied in songs new and old, but it is also implies that we understand, implicitly or explicitly, that

the sound of American music is the sound of America’s disenfranchised, empowered by song.

But first, let’s talk about War.

We have always believed in the humanity of the common man, even if we have disparaged the humanity of their leaders. We believed that when we looked the enemy in the eye, we would see men and women like ourselves; we would see our brothers, our friends, our fathers, the sons of mothers. We hated the leaders, not the led.

We believed that the “enemy” was a government, misguided or cruel, but the armies were made of men and women much like ourselves. This is the essential faith we have in humankind, the one that compels us to not just fight, but to also rebuild: we separate Hitler from the Germans, the Kaiser from his soft-faced armies; behind the uniforms, we see men who dream of football, Christmas, and girls back home. We separate the cold, didactic hysteria of Mao or Stalin from the millions who suffered underneath them; we believe these ordinary citizens dream of freedom, dream even of the tabula rasa once implied by the American dream, just like we do. We separate leaders from the conscripted, and we hold on to the truth that we are all born the same, even if the flags that fly over our cradles are different.

This kind of thinking sustains us, leads to beautiful moments of history like the 1914 Christmas Truce and the 1948 Berlin airlift. More importantly, it makes us believe that war is an atrocity, an aberration, not the standard modus operandi of man. It even makes us believe that Lynyrd Skynyrd would probably defend the rights of Rosa Parks, but more on that shortly.

However (and this is a big goddamn ‘However’): The next war will be different. The men of ISIS have a core of belief absolutely alien to us; I am not here to either delineate or condemn their thinking – I will do neither, they are men, they are born of mothers, they are victims of indoctrination, deprivation, and oppression, just like us – but I will make some assumptions about the way they think: they are serving a fundamentalist belief that lies deep in their hearts, and does not come exclusively from the well-guarded sanctum of some governmental palace or limestone’d capitol. Their belief comes from the same part of their soul that compels breath, hunger, survival. They are not conscripts; we will be fighting an army where every soldier holds in their bosom the heart of a leader. We will be fighting the Borg. This idea is completely alien to us; we associate armies with pawns; but

when we fight ISIS, we will not be fighting pawns. We will be playing on a chessboard where every man is king.

So be fucking careful out there, okay?

Next: War, the cultural kind.

We have always believed in the good intentions of our pop stars, even if we have disparaged their corporate overlords or the excesses of their stardom. We have believed that we were all on the same “side,” regardless of musical taste; I mean, whether you were into (or in) Buffalo Springfield or Grand Funk Railroad, no one wanted to get drafted; whether you were Jeff Buckley or the Carpenters or Ice T (or one of their fans), no one wanted their head bashed in by a cop. The “establishment,” whether it was personified by Reagan, Nixon, Bush, or Thatcher, was a country without empathy; we, the children of rock, stood on opposite shores, observing and jeering at the “establishment.“

When we saw other members of the Fraternity of Music, long hairs, short hairs, pink hairs, and suede heads, we intrinsically believed we were seeing others who believed in the capacity of art and music to make peace, achieve equality, empower the disenfranchised. We assumed other members of this Fraternity stood for compassion, tolerance, and equality. The occasional affirmation of a right-leaning stance from a member of Generation Rock was considered an aberration.

So, here we are, dear reader, 778 words into this piece, and hopefully comfortable in the bosom of an idea or two, which I now recap: first, our general belief in the essential humanity of the Family of Man, the framework that has guided is through the centuries of war and reconstruction; and secondly, our general belief in the essential humanity of the Family of Pop, which made us see a lover of freedom in the face of every silky-haired singer and spiked-hair guitar-slinger.

Both ideas are no longer valid. Both can no longer sustain us.

Instead, we see the face of Kid Rock, and we see the face of ISIS.

Rock has been Kid Rocked. And this has happened at the worst possible time, just when we need to temper the extremist intolerance of the coming war with compassion and empathy.

Each group – ISIS and Kid Rock — fails to recognize that mercy and compassion is a great form of justice in and of itself.

And the highest, most ideal aim of government is compassion, and the highest aim of musicians and artists is to insure that compassion is enforced.

As I have stated before, everything about our culture of American pop – and I mean everything — originated with the disenfranchised people of our country; and every moment you listen to music (and every moment you create music), this genesis must be recalled, because this reinforces compassion and empathy. From Stephen Foster’s faux-slave songs to the modified Appalachian howls of Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams to the sex-calls of Elvis to the rhymes of Run DMC and all the manifold descendants of all these pioneers,

American music was the creation of those forgotten by the American dream: truck driving sons of Parchman convicts, the urban and rural poor, the immigrant Jews and Italians and Irish, all the people who had nothing and built America…they built American song, too, American pop, American rock’n’roll.

Every song you hear, whether it is the retching machinery of death metal or the most superficial EDM, contains the musical DNA of America’s bruised, insulted, exploited, poor, and oppressed.

The Buddha said that you should see the face of your mother in the faces of those who abuse you; at some point in the tumble of eternity, reaching eons into the past and unknown millennia into the future, everyone has been your mother. Likewise, every time you listen to a song, any song, you should see the faces of Ledbelly, or Big Mama Thornton, or Irving Berlin, or Lee Hayes, or Maybelle Carter, or any of the other citizens who turned their suffering into song, and translated oppression into joy.

There is zero room in the pop landscape for the racism and proto-fascist teabaggery of Kid Rock (who I will target specifically, as Ted Nugent is just a useless old windbag, grasping at the straws of the Fox News culture to sustain an income). I am tired of this shit. The stakes are too high.

We will fight the lack of humanity with humanity; we will fight hatred with the ubiquity of love; we will fight the ignorance of fundamentalist prejudice with the awareness of the common empathy of all humans of all sexes.

Jesus Christ I sound like a hippie.

And why not? We need them more than ever. Hippies, that is. Especially if they listen to Rudimentary Peni and the Mekons and not crappy jam bands.

Truth is, I got nervous when I read this New York Times story. Anything that indicates the Mets are doing something other than concentrating on playing baseball, especially if it smacks of premature triumphalism, puts me on edge. Sort of like Darryl Strawberry’s rap “Chocolate Strawberry.” recorded and released in 1987, just as the Mets were beginning their as yet interminable decline from their 1986 championship.

And the Babe? Thinking about players’ publicity appearances brought to mind a story I read some years ago. It was 1942, and everything had to be about the War Effort. The Babe was to be interviewed on Grantland Rice’s radio show, so one of the questions was how sports could contribute to that effort. Rice had scripted an answer; “Well, Granny, as the Duke of Wellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.” This was rehearsed several times until it seemed Ruth had it down pat, but when the show went live, he said, “Well, Granny, as Duke Ellington said, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Elkton.” Asked afterward why the deviation from script, Ruth said he didn’t know Wellington but did know Ellington, and while he’d never been to Eton, he married his first wife in Elkton, and would never forget that place.

Update: already the intra-squad sniping has begun.

Babe Ruth photo: Culver Images via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/8F-9m9SgiiM/why-im-worrying-about-mets-already.html

For the most part, these lists are self-effacing yet bursting with arrogance, a way for our friends to remind us of all the cool bands they like, such as Wire and the Feelies and John Zorn (by the way, no one actually really likes John Zorn; it is, however, very possible to like him theoretically. In this sense, he is to music what Joyce’s Ulysses is to literature). These alphabetical musical biographies are not easy to compose, so they are all literally trembling with intent. In my opinion, this letter/band exercise is an ultra-indulgent waste of time; but then again, I am of the opinion that humans should spend a lot more time discussing the TV show I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster.

So, I’m going to join the fun!

John Astin and Marty Ingels of I’m Dickens He’s Fenster.

T is for The Kinks. Because when I was young, I studied the Kinks the way others studied the Beatles (as I detailed here). Sensitive, poetic, acutely observing, self-destructive, monstrously clumsy yet delicate, espousing doe-eyed love and dumb-angel lust,the Kinks epitomized the maddening hot-and-cold experience of being a touchy and skeptical teenager, and they did this better than any other band. The Kinks’ mixture of fey flippancy, monkish self-reflection, and garage-rock bumbling made the Beatles frippery and the Stones’ mannishness seem positively mainstream; they were exactly what a delicate, uncertain outsider like myself needed to guide him through the garden-maze of the horrors of high school. Thank you, Kinks.

I: Impaled Nazarene. Because the future belongs to death metal. Even if you hate the genre – shit, better if you hate it – the flag of the armies of the disenfranchised, the barely employed, the lovers of the loud, the haters of the ‘normal,’ all of these things we thought ‘punk rock’ stood for, is flown far, far better by death metal. It’s extreme shit, and death metal underlines the fact that all us fools who thought Television or the Dictators were extreme were just totally full of shit. And it’s ten times more popular than punk rock ever was. And even if much of it sounds like Rush played by bikers on speed, a lot of it is really, really fucking good.

M: The Move. Because they are one of the three most underrated bands of all time (the others being the Damned and the Small Faces, as explained here), and because they were virtually a precise cross between the Beatles and the Who, and at the same time they presaged Sabbath. That’s hot.

By the way, the theme song for I’m Dickens He’s Fenster was called “The I’m Dickens He’s Fenster March,” which may be one of the greatest song titles of all time. But anyway…

O is for Opeth. Because while you were busy trying to convince me that I should listen to Neutral Milk Hotel and insisting that the freaking world revolved around Wilco, a pile of bands who evaded the hipster radar were making strange, extreme, and thoughtful music of massively high quality. Usually, I consider Porcupine Tree the prime example of this – a band who consistently do what people think Radiohead do – but since there is no ‘P’ in my name, I’ll go for Opeth, who make shimmering, intense music laden with art and intention, starshine and aggression, and who sound like Pink Floyd if they morphed with Slayer.

T: Trouble. Because when metal really sucked, when it was a lot of hair bands mixing drums WAAAY too loud and re-cycling the most obvious aspects of Slade and Hanoi Rocks very, very badly (and WORST OF ALL creating the idea of the “Power Ballad,” which is to music what Dr. Mengele was to Twins), Trouble summoned the ghosts of Budgie, Blue Cheer, and Sabbath and released chunky, sinewy, slithering, riff-filled oily slabs of rock that anticipated the best aspects of stoner and doom metal while somehow making us realize that Black Flag’s overly-sincere attempts to ROCK were pale imitations of the real thing…the real thing being Trouble. Jesus Christ I just re-read that and realized that was ONE long sentence.

H is for Hey, I didn’t mean to disparage Wire, because they are one of the best bands ever. Like Werner Von Braun, most musicians aim for the stars, and imagine themselves purveyors of great, immortal art and perfection; like Werner Von Braun, most musicians just desire to make a big hit in London, where they will sadly be confused by the tipping protocol and pretend that Blur are a lot more important than they actually are (I am a little confused about that metaphor, too, probably because I am still busy thinking about I’m Dickens He’s Fenster). Between 1977 and 1979, Wire achieved what virtually no other band has ever accomplished: they attained perfection, releasing three consecutive flawless albums. Seriously, Layne, how many bands have released three straight albums that are literally immaculate in execution and conception, and which reveal a mixture of startling energy, challenging artistry, and remarkable melody? If 1977s Pink Flag is the most joyful, immediate, and shocking of this trio, perhaps the most rewarding is ‘78s Chairs Missing, which adds a profound intensity and intimacy to the punk vocabulary, and integrates almost pastoral melodies into the gentle tsunami of Wire’s art-punk, post-Eno sound. Yeah.

Y: Young Marble Giants. Along with Durutti Column, YMG invented the possibility of quiet punk, blowing a great wisp of gentle into the post-punk world without losing any of the power.

Now, I’m not going to bother doing the last name, I mean my last name, other than to note this: Many years ago, when I was a resident of the Weinstein Center for Student Living at NYU, I lived next door to a rather extreme and kind wit named Larry Kase. One day in the cafeteria, Larry politely inquired about a song I was playing over and over during the autumn of ‘79, and which he could hear through the wall; see, he was rather surprised that someone had recorded a number called “Here Comes Tim Sommer.” He was, of course, misinterpreting the Undertones song “Here Comes The Summer.” And if you listen to it through the wall, yes, indeed, it does sound like “Here Comes Tim Sommer.” So, the remaining letters in my name — S, O, M, M, E and R — is for “The Undertones.”

P.S. Paul Simon is a tool.

Listen to Episode 10

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In this episode: Kate and Sally catch you up on their lives, from how charming and wonderful Norm Lewis is to friend breakups that suck. They discuss emails from a couple of listeners, including one who has figured out the perfect way to trick aggressive bros out of leaving you alone in a bar. (Hint: It involves using heteronormativity as a weapon…in a subversive way.) They then answer a listener’s question about healthy relationships and how to, like, have one? (Spoiler: We can only guess.)

Have a question? Tweet at Kate and Sally or The Podcast! Plus, find a “Struggle Buddy” on Twitter at #StrugglePodBuds or the NEW #StrugglePodBuds420 (we can explain).

Theme song by Marty Scanlon!

Source: The Struggle Bus
https://strugglebuspodcast.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/episode-10-on-weaponizing-heteronormativity-and-how-no-one-knows-how-to-do-relationships/

Download From iTunes Here

In this Episode:

The Bartender is joined by Norm Lewis and The Bitchy Waiter for another wonderful live show. PLUS a listener shout out, and we play Craigslist Ad or Casting Notice with Jordan McDonough! Recorded at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY. Like the show? Tip The Bartender! Or give it 5 stars!

Pics by the amazing Tom Scola:

Music Credits:

“Setting Sun” by Chris Powers

“Bottled in Cork” by Ted Leo & The Pharmacists

Source: Tell The Bartender
http://tellthebartender.com/2015/02/23/episode-54-live-with-norm-lewis-and-the-bitchy-waiter/

When I watched the occasionally thrilling circus of self-congratulation that was SNL 40, more than anything, I saw myself. I’m sure a lot of us did. When we revisit old episodes of Saturday Night Live, we flash back to where we were and who we were when we first saw these actors, these sketches. I found myself entirely conscious of how I reacted to the show when it was a bright, sassy miracle that suddenly appeared on my TV during the dreadful years when Junior High was preparing to end its’ reign of humiliation and cruelty.

A rather gruesome example of the American model

Historical Context: Circa 1975, there were essentially two models for non-sitcom television comedy: The American and the British. The American model involved light satire, broad sketches, musical burlesques, and guest stars, and was typified by (the wonderful) Carol Burnett, Sonny & Cher, Tony Orlando & Dawn, and a rather large stack of forgettable summer replacement shows. It had fairly direct roots in the Vaudeville format omnipresent in the earliest days of television variety.

Beyond the Fringe, the Rosetta Stone of all modern sketch comedy

The British model involved high-concept and frequently absurd sketch comedy, acute topical satire, an ensemble cast, and minimal guest stars; it was typified by Monty Python, The Frost Report, That Was The Week That Was, lesser lights like the Two Ronnies and the Goodies, and many brilliant (but unknown in America) shows like Not Only But Also, At Last the 1948 Show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, etcetera. It had direct roots in the cool, crisp satire of Beyond the Fringe and the Dada hysteria of The Goon Show.

These two branches did not meet, at least not in any real or lasting way,until NBC’s Saturday Night came along. NBC’s Saturday Night (I am deliberately using the show’s original name, which was not altered until 1977) was the child of three very distinct but compatible bloodlines: The National Lampoon (from which it drew the heart of its’ writing staff and its’ acidic attitude – also, a chunk of SN’s original cast came from the Lampoon stage shows), Toronto’s Second City Troupe (which gave Saturday Night some cast members and, more importantly, the general skill-set and acting style of its’ performers), and Monty Python (whose ensemble style, penchant for absurdity, and non-punchline based sketches was possibly the most visible influence on SN). Put the three together and throw in a soupcon of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and you had the DNA for NBC’s Saturday Night.

If you were sitting in front of a television in late 1975 and early 1976, this bizarre, beautiful, feisty, fluid object startled you. It was, quite literally, like nothing on American television; the unsubtle and unpredictable sketch format felt vaguely familiar to those of us who were already Pythonophiles, and the language and the attitude of the new show had a resonance if you were acquainted with the Lampoon; but aside from that, it was an Atom Bomb. If you watched a lot of television and listened to a lot of comedy albums (and being a lonely, trivia-obsessed and highly curious 13 year old, that would be me­), Saturday Night seemed to achieve the impossible: it was obnoxious, unpredictable, cocky British-format humor,Americanized.

I instantly became obsessed, and starting with the third episode, I found myself glued to the TV every Saturday at 11:30. I would even carefully balance my cassette recorder and tape every new episode, to aid the process of memorizing, analyzing, and understanding this exciting new object.

I turned 14 in March of 1976; I grew a few inches, lost the baby-fat bursting face and peanut-shaped body so permanently memorialized in my Bar Mitzvah photos, and I suddenly found myself somewhat confident in my abilities to actually achieve the goals that my obsessively nerdy mind had latched on to. In the long term, this set me on a course to insert myself into the world of British and American punk rock; but more pertinently, I recognized that Rockefeller Center was only a short ride away on the LIRR. By the autumn of 1976 and the onset of Saturday Night’s second season, nothing was going to stop me from trying to investigate my obsession first hand.

A Long Island Rail Road Train, circa 1977. This was the magic carpet to my dreams.

So I did.

Now, this story isn’t going to involve sex or drugs or even encounters that are particularly anecdotal or remarkable. This story just is, well, what it is.

Throughout the second and third season of Saturday Night, I began regularly going to 30 Rock on show days. Sometimes I waited on the stand-by line, a few times I actually had tickets, but the most interesting times were when I just snuck in. I found that if I put on my older brothers’ tan corduroy jacket and wore his well-tempered Frye Boots (which supplied me with a somewhat jaunty, adult step), I could basically look like someone who might belong in Studio 8H. I can’t recall the precise method I used to slip past security, but I remember that it wasn’t too hard. I think the trick was to keep your head up (if you keep your head down, it’s fairly obvious you’re trying not to be noticed; keep your head up, and you look like someone who isn’t trying not to be noticed, therefore you belong there); to move smoothly but not rapidly; and to have that slight angle to your shoulders that says “Hey, hold that elevator!” I am quite damn sure it wouldn’t be that easy now (though I will note that I did do this trick again in 1996, when I was visiting a friend who was working on that week’s show). When push comes to shove, I really think it was the corduroy jacket that made it so easy; the other fans hovering about wore down or denim, and it seemed like an inordinate amount of the staff wore corduroy.

When I would get up to 8H, I would find a spot in the hallway adjacent to the big studio and just lean against a wall and try to stay compatibly invisible. I wasn’t pretending to be a writer or musician or whatnot; rather, I just wanted to pass for someone who had some small but not intrusive reason to be there (maybe people would think I was the younger brother of a cast member, or the guy who had just dropped off an important prop). Sometimes, if I felt exposed, I would look at my watch and glance around with a small frown on my face, as if I was waiting for someone to hand me something that hadn’t come yet.

I didn’t talk to anyone. I wasn’t there to engage, I was there to observe. There was only one person I revealed myself to; that was one of the writers, Alan Zweibel. I was very curious about his craft, and for some reason he seemed approachable. He could not have been nicer. Seriously, I will always recall that this busy, brilliant man took the time, on a show night, no less, to be kind to a wide-eyed 14-year old passing as a devil-may-care 18-year old. I also talked a little bit (on different visits to 8H) with Dan Aykroyd and Laraine Newman, and they were both nice, especially Newman. Again, I am grateful for her unnecessary kindness.

Not very exciting, right?

Alan Zweibel, an SNL writer who was extremely kind to an annoying 14 year-old.

But it was hugely exciting to be 14, to be captivated with the process of television, to be utterly obsessed with this exciting new show, and to just be able to lean against a wall and watch the incredible, beehive-like buzz of frantic activity and visible tension as the live show unfolded in the hours and minutes before it aired. Who needs anecdotes when you had a front seat?

Somewhere along the way, in the nearly 4/10ths of a century since then, I lost the Frye Boots, the corduroy Jacket, and the cockiness that would allow me to just stroll past security at a live network TV show. But I had it once; it served me well on those nights, and many other times, too. Nothing bad happened to me because I did such ridiculous things – some kind of inner compass of common sense counter-balanced my nerve — and I just followed my dreams onto a train from Great Neck to Penn Station.

 So, here’s the remix. I want to re-state the stuff from that column that was actually important, without the distraction of the fumbling Kanye stuff. Thank you for listening – I mean that.

America, I am a member of your luckiest generation: Those of us born between (roughly) 1956 and 1975 were born into an era pregnant with prosperity and endless invitations to escapism, and we came of age in a time when this nations’ penchant for invention and daydreaming soared without the clouds of impending disaster and involuntary conscription. We are the luckiest generation: we have lived the rough bulk of our life in the downy-soft years after the threat of Vietnam yet before the apocalyptic Goliath of the caliphate wars and environmental catastrophe. Personally: I was 9 when the shadow of the draft ended, and it is likely I will live most – and perhaps all – of my active life before things become really dark, both figuratively and literally. Our children, our grandchildren, and you (if you are under a certain age) are going to grow up and grow old in a very, very different world than the dynamically inventive and often wonderfully trivial era that has is ending.

Every freedom we have taken for granted, whether it is the freedom to practice our religion, the freedom not to practice any religion, or the freedom to drink fresh water, will be assaulted.

Will your music, your art, and your culture rise to the task?

From Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Ragga, Syria, from the West Bank to Paris, from Manhattan to your hometown, the corpses of those killed in the name of religion are going to pile high in the streets; the bodies of 88,000 and more children, slaughtered hysterically because of the country or creed of their birth, will be laid at the feet of 88,000 mothers; hysterical statesmen, waving testaments old and new, will demand allegiance to a holy land; weapons created by cold-blooded scientists in the last century to defend freedom will be used by hot-blooded hysterics in this century to end freedom; the flashing, shattering scythes of the middle ages and the darkness of the Toba Extinction will return to our world, grim twin revelators riding the pale horses of virulence and deprivation.

Will you be watching the Kardashians?

It is entirely feasible that we will soon find ourselves returning to the constant state of religious war that existed throughout most of history (remember, as recently as 1683 Ottoman troops were at the gates of Vienna); simultaneously, assaults to the environment will force our children and grandchildren to radically alter the way they live and ration things their ancestors took for granted; and continuous breaches of internet security will compel us to redefine the word privacy, and even more likely, force a sizable portion of the wise men and women of this planet off the grid, into an existence that both denies and combats progress.

This is our future.

Will music meet the challenges of this new world? Will music motivate the people of raped Gaia to fight for positive change? Will music mobilize armies to stand up for the disenfranchised, the hungry, the frightened, the abused? Will music provide amiable distraction that somehow creates joy but avoids numbing? Will music incite courageous and productive dissent? Will music underline atrocity and suggest solutions? Will music rouse brotherhood, and combat ignorance?

The model for a utile, user-friendly, informative and provocative pop has existed in the past, and must be recalled and implemented again. Let us consider Phil Ochs and the MC5, performing in Lincoln Park in Chicago during the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention; let us recall the theories, screeds, pranks, and radical distribution models of Penny Rimbaud, Crass, Woody Guthrie, Will Geer, Billy Childish, Alan Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, the Mekons, and everyone else who thought that art could inform, balm, spotlight the truth, highlight hypocrisy and witlessness, provide facts, and inspire accord.

In the future, entertainment can continue to feed escapism and act as the clown distracting children on the way to the death camps; or it can be a utility, a bridge to unity, information, and power. From the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement to the cotton fields of the old South, from Welsh mines to lunch counters in Mississippi, from Lincoln Park in Chicago to the Compton, the story of music and the story of activism is inseparable. And the story of every single aspect of our pop, whether you listen to country, death metal, or rap, is synonymous with the story of America’s disenfranchised. Seriously, friends: the DNA of every goddamn thing you listen to can be found on slave ships and in the hollers of Appalachia. American music is the sound of those who had less, the sound of those who had to fight to be heard, fight to eat, fight to vote, fight to survive. Whether you’re Jack White or Lightning Bolt or Bon Jovi or loathsome Paul Simon, when you make music, you are echoing the noise of America’s disenfranchised screaming to be heard, or seeking joy in their toil, or setting a melody to the fight for equality.

Our music is a talking drum, passed down from the disenfranchised of the past for the use of the desperate of the future.

And that future is near. Our children, our grandchildren, ourselves, will need the Utility of Music more than ever. Music must mean something, say something, fight for something, take risks, announce agendas, denounce lies, and tell the truth.Music is beauty and power. Do not fucking forget it. Honor it. Playtime is over. Rock’n’roll is just beginning.

Be Woody Guthrie. Be Crass. Be Phil Ochs. Be Jon Langford. Be Victor Jara.

You owe it to the future.

Lesley Gore, who died today at 68, is most remembered for her first hit, “It’s My Party (and I’ll Cry If I Want To),” which began a successful collaboration with Quincy Jones as her producer.

She was a Brooklyn native, but her family moved to New Jersey, where she attended the private Dwight School for Girls in Englewood. She was a sixteen year old junior at Dwight when Jones signed her to Mercury Records and she recorded “It’s My Party,” which went to the top of the Billboard pop chart in 1963. Her recording and performing career continued through high school and Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied drama and literature. She later did some acting; the photo above shows her as Catwoman’s sidekick Pussycat in the TV series Batman.

My favorite of her early hits (she continued to record, perform, and write music through much of her later life; her last album, Ever Since, reviewed favorably in The New York Times, was released in 2005) is “You Don’t Own Me,” described as an “empowering, ahead-of-its-time feminist anthem” by Daniel Kreps in Rolling Stone. The video clip above shows her performing it as part of the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, when she was eighteen.

While “You Don’t Own Me” could be seen as an “answer song” to Joanie Sommers’ 1962 hit “Johnny Get Angry” (“I want a brave man; I want a caveman”), Gore didn’t see it that way, at least not when she recorded it. She thought of it as something a man could have as easily sung to a woman. Like all of Gore’s early songs, it wasn’t written by her. It was written by two men, John Madera and Dave White.

Gore was in college when she first realized that she was a lesbian. She didn’t announce this to the public until 2005, when she was hosting In The Life, a PBS show about LGBT issues. Her death was announced by Lois Sasson, her partner of 33 years.

Addendum: Friend Eliot Wagner has this observation:

While “You Don’t Own Me” was not an answer to any particular song, it responded to an entire era. The late 50s and early 60s were full of songs which instructed women on their role viz a viz men in society: not only “Johnny Get Angry”, which you mentioned, but also “Love and Marriage”, “Wives and Lovers”, and probably the most egregious of the lot, “Bobby’s Girl”. The fact that “You Don’t Own Me” was on the air was a grand signal that even if that era was not over, it would, in fact, soon be history.

It also occurred to me that 1963, the year “You Don’t Own Me” was released, was also the year that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published.

Source: Self-Absorbed Boomer
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tzVM/~3/C7cedCNuIVI/lesley-gore-1946-2015.html

If you are too young to have truly experienced the 1970s, you probably don’t know how dreadful it really was.  History tends to be quite goddamn kind and only remember the “cool” things about the decade, and all the groovy music; I mean, when the ‘70s are discussed, it’s all about Bowie and Big Star and the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, etcetera…maybe with a gentle, ironic half-grin we add the Bee Gees and the Carpenters to the list.

In the 1970s, there was a TV show based on the movie Animal House. For the Love of God, there was a TV show based on Animal House.

And people LOOKED LIKE ASS.  Important Freaking Note:  When “modern” TV shows and movies show people “dressed” like the 1970s, for some reason they almost ALWAYS have ‘em looking like how people looked like in the early/mid-1980s.  WTF, as Jefferson Davis said while Union forces captured him on a misty but warm spring morning in Irwinville, Georgia in 1865.  This stylistic wishful thinking is a constant and disturbing confusion.  That Square Pegs/Charlie Rocket/Pamela Stephenson/Downtown Julie Brown thing is a distinctly (and tragically) 1980s look, YET WHEN PEOPLE ON TV DRESS ‘1970s,’ THAT’S HOW THEY DRESS.  For fuck’s sake, it is a ludicrous distortion of the actual aesthetic misery of the time.  What people REALLY looked like in the 1970s is too unfathomable and unpleasant for most contemporary humans to even confront – in fact, it even defies description, except if you can somehow conflate Ron Jeremy with the ugliest house sound-guy you ever met.   You have GOT to remember that GROOVY LOOKING PEOPLE like Joe Strummer or Chrissie Hynde or Walter Lure or Mick Ronson or even Randy Mantooth WERE IN THE VAST MINORITY.  I mean, you were LUCKY if someone looked like Bill Macy from Maude.

Literally NO ONE in the 1970s looked like this.

Now, I personally have AMAZING memories of the 1970s – Manhattan’s Soho when it was still shattered, shuttered, lit strangely golden and full of mystery; the East Village when it was still a Beat Secret; flats on Spring Street that cost $175 a month and had a bathtub in the kitchen and a bathroom in the hallway and a rock star’s name on the buzzer panel; and god knows when the music was good, it was really, really goddamn good.

This is superstar Linda Blair and bassist Paul Goddard of the Atlanta Rhythm Section. This is a little more accurate, though to tell you the truth, this isn’t even THAT bad.

Now, this kind of era-distortion is certainly not rare:  the common myth that the ‘50s were all boring and virginal is total bullshit (damn, just three minutes watching Louis Prima dry-hump a stage on the Ed Sullivan Show will toss that lie out the window), and lord knows even Hogan Heroes is more historically accurate than Happy Days.  And as much as we look at the 1960s through a haze of flowers and smiley faces, during much of that decade it sucked to be African American, it pretty much sucked to be a woman, in a lot of the country being caught with one slim joint could result in you getting legally fucked for life, and half the teenagers in America lived in imminent, pants-pooping fear of being shipped off to Vietnam.  Flower Power my ASS.

Having said that, there is ONE song that REDEEMS every single excess of the 1970s; there is one single song that proudly and boldly announces “Hoorah! You have made it through that gruesome, distasteful, patchouli-and-weed-scented hirsute and sloppy, sludge-like leviathan of a decade, and here is your reward!”

And that song is “Everybody wants Some” by Van Halen.

Recorded in the waning weeks of that distraught decade, it somehow both typifies and improves upon every wrong thing about the 1970s,while being stunningly, screamingly powerful and beautiful.  Hairy, hoary, horny, creepy, corny, it integrates the crunching simplicity of punk with the utter bombast of the decades most obscenely indulgent rock memes; in fact, I might be hard pressed to think of a song that appears to have learned more from punk while simultaneously repudiating the very idea of the upstart movement.

I mean, the track is the very definition of musically and conceptually indulgent, exploitive, wasteful, and distasteful, yet it sounds more punk rock than most of the era’s more deliberately simplistic and primitive recordings (in fact, I find it slots in very, very well alongside the chunky, leaping, slurp-chord thump-punk of the U.K. Subs and Sham 69).

“Hurry Up Harry” by Sham 69 which, for some reason, reminds me of “Everybody Wants Some,” in a good way, that is.

Like a lot of Roth-era Van Halen, the band achieves a near-perfect blend of musical showboating and chordal simplicity (reminiscent of the Kinks or the Raiders) applied where it counts, i.e. underneath the melody; couple this with an extraordinary production sheen that polishes yet is so powerful it is almost disabling, and you have a song that makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about musical indulgence and high-end pop metal.

This is a song that doesn’t lie, I mean it is what it fucking is, a punk rock song about trolling for hookers played by buzzed-up nerdy alchemists, and it achieves the massively impressive trick of being the musical equivalent of driving on the 15 from Los Angeles to Las Vegas while looking at yourself in the mirror while doing 144 mph.  This is a fine fucking line, my friends; one wrong move and you are going headfirst into the World’s Tallest Thermometer in Barstow.

The World’s Tallest Thermometer, outside of Barstow. I dedicate this picture and its’ caption to my great friend Ace Baker.