Much (though by no means all) of the stuff I talk about in this column comes to me free for review, often well in advance of the street release date. That means there are a lot of unfamiliar CDs and books and DVDs scattered around my workplace; it also means we get a lot of mail.
My kids thought that part was pretty exciting, when I first took the gig — until they got a load of the actual contents of most of those packages. “Hey, guys, who wants to watch this Rob Thomas DVD with Dad?” is kind of a non-starter, when weighing the options for a rainy Thursday afternoon.
Every now and then, though, a hit finds its way into our house. I got my advance copy of the lavish annual photo-book put out by the Ripley’s people (this year’s edition is subtitled Seeing Is Believing) literally months ago, and I’m only writing about it now — because it’s been the exclusive property of my seven-year old since its arrival. (more…)
On last month’s Popdose Podcast, I endorsed The Light in Darkness, an oral history about Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town album and its subsequent tour as told by Springsteen fans. In full disclosure, its editor, Lawrence Kirsch, is a friend and I contributed an essay to the book (as did Popdose’s Farkate Film Flashback columnist, “Outlaw” Pete Chianca). But even though I’ve had my copy for about a month, it took a while for me to finally get through it. The reason isn’t (entirely) due to my laziness, but rather that I wanted to savor every word.
You see, compiling fan stories about a favorite artist, as Lawrence did in 2007 with For You, can be difficult. There’s the potential for repetition, and that possibility increases when you decide to narrow the scope of the book to one year in the artist’s life. So when you read it, you don’t want the stories bleeding into each other. You just take it in about ten pages at a time. (more…)
Daniel Nester is the type of author anyone who frequents Popdose should be reading. His essays and prose contain much of the same humorous, sometimes smartass attitude that you readers have come to love. At the same time, he is an accomplished journalist whose ability to immerse himself in his articles makes reading his informative pieces that much more enjoyable. His new book of essays and articles is entitled How to Be Inappropriate; it is available in paperback from Soft Skull Press.
Throughout the book, Nester has a self-deprecating charm that makes his writing seem like he’s just hanging out with you, telling you a good story. Whether it’s recounting the time he moved in next door to an ex-girlfriend while living in New York (“The Puerto Rican Lockhorns Reunion”) or detailing his adventures in self-tanning (“Yes I Tan”) Nester is funny, but never mean. Indeed, even when he could go for the jugular in two of the finest pieces in the book, he instead remains an observer, allowing the laughs to emerge from his subject’s behavior rather than any snarky remark he could have come up with. (more…)
I became a Queen fan the winter before my 14th birthday; a friend let me borrow his well-worn Greatest Hits cassette, and by the time I got to song #2 — “Bohemian Rhapsody” — my life had been changed. Obsessive music freak that I was, even at age 13, I promptly set about obtaining all the Queen material I could find — a task made slightly easier by the recent “20 Years of Queen” reissues by their new American record label, Hollywood Records. The pity, though, was that it was February of 1991, and within 9 months, Freddie Mercury would be dead. The band I suddenly wanted to follow forever was silenced.
Since Mercury’s death, “new” Queen releases have been a mixed bag: on the positive side, Queen fans have been presented with the band’s “final” album (Made in Heaven), two relatively strong livealbums from the ’80s, a couple of accompanying live DVDs, and the Freddie Mercury Solo Collection. On the negative side, fans (American ones in particular) have been bombarded with seven — seven! — greatest hits compilations (the eighth will be released later this month) and have had to endure the relatively depressing “Queen + Paul Rodgers” incarnation, including mediocre studio and live albums that nobody asked for. Queen fans still wait patiently for archival releases, including a long-anticipated, endlessly-postponed box set of rarities.
Lovingly written and compiled by journalist Phil Sutcliffe, Queen: The Ultimate… is 287 pages’ worth of illustrated beauty, featuring multitudes of photos of the band throughout their career — many of them previously unpublished — and scores of memorabilia: concert programs, posters, domestic and foreign 45 singles, LPs, backstage passes, ticket stubs…you name it, it’s here, and there are over 500 photos in all. (more…)
One thing you learn pretty early on in Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ memoir Big Man(Grand Central Publishing, 400 pages, $26.99, Oct. 21) is that you’re not going to be reading any of the real juicy stuff.
“Maybe I’ll write a book that has all the sex-and-drugs stories from the early years and publish it after all of us are dead,” Clemons writes. “Nah, I can’t do that either, ’cause now all of us have kids and grandkids.”
But beyond the fact that you know a lot got left out of Big Man — a nickname Clemons says came not from Springsteen but from a little old lady in Bloomingdale’s — there’s another complicating factor: A lot of the stuff in it never even happened. Clemons and his writing partner Don Reo label a good number of the chapters “Legends,” and promise that those sections include “some fact and a lot of fiction.” It’s unorthodox, but just think of the trouble James Frey could have saved himself if he’d included the same warning.
Still, you’ve got to read between a lot of lines to get the complete picture of Clarence Clemons from Big Man, since the way it’s written relies less on historical fact and more on the personality of its subject. Fortunately, Clemons has plenty of that to spare. (more…)
We live in an age when you don’t have to be a dignitary, famous celebrity or someone who survived tragedy to write your life’s story. In the past decade, blogs, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few) have given any person with a computer or cellphone the ability to create his own memoirs. Case in point: you wouldn’t be reading this review right now if I hadn’t started my own blog back in 2003, which led to Jeff Giles reading some of my ramblings and asking me to be a part of Popdose. In this era of immediate thoughts and short, succinct sentences, it was only matter of time before a writer took the approach of a blog entry or Twitter update to write their memoirs. Well, almost.
Jeff Martin, author of The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, has written his fabricated memoirs, My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize (Soft Skull Press).
As Martin lays out in the author’s note, “Some of the events described almost happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Others were stretched from the smallest inkling of truth. Others were stolen from other memoirs.” Right off the bat you know this is going to be a silly ride. This whimsical, quick read — it’s only 128 pages, none of which is a full page and including plenty of illustrations — brought me a smile and chuckle as it follows Martin’s “extraordinary” life from his birth in 1980 to the year 2061. Martin’s approach to his so-called life reminded me of Woody Allen’s Zelig and, more obviously, Forrest Gump: Martin is continuously present at some remarkable moments in pop culture history. Some examples: (more…)
On one level, there seems little point in reviewing a Dan Brown book. He’s big enough now that he’s critic-proof, and my little barbs will penetrate his mighty armor of public adoration not one jot. But you know, sometimes criticism isn’t about influence; sometimes, it’s a matter of conscience. And on the matter of The Lost Symbol being a terrible book — abysmally written, ludicrously plotted, resting on a foundation of knuckleheaded historical speculation and flat-out pseudo-scientific wrongness — I will not be silent.
You don’t have to be a great writer, Lord knows, to achieve popular literary success. But has there ever been a worse writer than Dan Brown to ever become so successful? It’s a trick question, of course, because there’s never been a writer quite as successful as Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than all four Twilight books put together — more copies than the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fa chrissakes. J.K. Rowling has sold more books overall, but no single volume of the Harry Potter series has racked up Da Vinci Code numbers.
Besides, Rowling is — despite her huge and glaring flaws as a prose stylist and a systematic thinker — pretty good with character and mood. She’s still a terrible writer, but she’s a slightly more lustrous shade of terrible than Dan Brown. True fact, The Da Vinci Code is not a good book, and Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, carries on in the tradition. And if you haven’t read it and intend to, be warned: from this point on, I will be SPOILING like mayonnaise in a hot car.
I have a theory. It’s not a literary theory, but a theory of personality — Dan Brown’s personality, to be precise. See, I figure Dan Brown probably enjoys all the perks of being a writer (who wouldn’t?), but is not much interested in the craft of writing. The Lost Symbol is all plot and ciphers (one using the “pigpen” code from that one issue of Boy’s Life, another apparently created in MS Word with Zapf Dingbats), told with about as much verve or emotional heft as a Will Shortz back-page puzzle from the Times. Or maybe — and this is perhaps a better comparison — as Myst; the structure and lack of emotional affect make the whole enterprise feel like a video game. Stuff happens. Puzzles are solved. Move to a new location — a new level — and start the process again. (more…)
Nick Hornby is Exhibit A in defense of the crusty old adage “write what you know.” He built his reputation on a pair of books that traded on his twin obsessions – football (the autobiographical Fever Pitch) and pop music (his debut novel High Fidelity) – while exploring the impacts of such fixations on interpersonal relationships. His next novel, the brilliant About a Boy (1998), didn’t explore fandom directly, though one of its main characters was a former pop singer who used the residual income from his one big hit to keep the world at bay.
Since then, Hornby has broadened his thematic horizons to encompass religious fervor (How To Be Good), suicide and therapy (A Long Way Down), and teen pregnancy (the “young adult” novel Slam) – all, unfortunately, with returns considerably diminished from his earlier work. In fact, his most essential work of the last decade was a nonfiction immersion into his music fandom: the essay collection Songbook (titled 31 Songs outside the U.S.), which explores his emotional attachments to tunes by artists ranging from O.V. Wright to Royksopp. Any Popdose loyalist who has not already picked up a copy of Songbook should do so immediately.
With all that in mind, it was welcome news indeed when Penguin’s Riverhead Books subsidiary announced that Hornby’s new novel would return him to the world of those who create and devour popular music. Indeed, the setup of Juliet, Naked is almost impossibly juicy … at least from the perspective of a 21st-century music writer like me (and many of you). If you read the excerpt we posted here last week, you already know that Duncan is an obsessive fan of singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, who walked away from his middling career under mysterious circumstances 20 years ago and has since become the subject of endless conjecture about his past and present lives. As leader of the “Crowologists,” and administrator of a website devoted to picking apart every detail of the singer’s career, Duncan receives a preview copy of a new CD featuring “naked” demos from Crowe’s most acclaimed (and final) album, Juliet. (more…)
The debut novel (or novella, as somewhat grumpily conceded in the Author’s Note) from AlertNerd’s Matt Springer, Unconventional is, according to the front cover’s helpful summary, “a tale of sex, booze, and geeks”…pretty much in that order. And as unappealing as a book filled with drunk, naked nerds might seem, Springer makes it work, thanks to his effortlessly conversational writing and a plot that actually has less to do with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings than it lets on.
The story follows a sci-fi-loving trio of longtime friends (Marty, Ron, and Ham — a nickname, short for Hammerhead, as in the minor Star Wars character) on their adventures through one weekend at the UnConvention, “Chicagoland’s number one sci-fi con,” working in plenty of basement-dwelling misfits in Jedi costumes while building toward a few life-changing decisions for the main characters. It’s a framework you’re probably overly familiar with — as you’ll be with Unconventional’s habit of flashing back and forth between past and present in order to give the reader additional context — and pop metaculture has been drowning in geek heroes for years. At a fundamental level, the book is utterly ordinary, and it shouldn’t work as well as it does — but unlike most writers who dabble in geekdom, Springer actually has something to say, and instead of just presenting his characters as empty vessels for Klingon jokes, he uses them to deliver some trenchant, poignant messages about making the awkward transition into adulthood, and the nature of fandom in general. (more…)
My head jerks so hard that the pencil falls out from behind my ear. “Jesus Fuck,” I splutter. “You’re fucking dying? Fuck, Yancey — ”
“Naaah,” she says. “I just haven’t got time. You know, for the book. Good thing it’s a quick read.”
She smirks. Last thing I need is Yancey giving me a hard time. But she’s a fictional character I created to act as an interlocutor for my review of Joe Pernice’s debut novel It Feels So Good When I Stop, so there’s not much I can do about it.
One thing you learn pretty early on in Springsteen saxophonist Clarence Clemons’ memoir 
We live in an age when you don’t have to be a dignitary, famous celebrity or someone who survived tragedy to write your life’s story. In the past decade, blogs, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few) have given any person with a computer or cellphone the ability to create his own memoirs. Case in point: you wouldn’t be reading this review right now if I hadn’t started my own blog back in 2003, which led to Jeff Giles reading some of my ramblings and asking me to be a part of Popdose. In this era of immediate thoughts and short, succinct sentences, it was only matter of time before a writer took the approach of a blog entry or Twitter update to write their memoirs. Well, almost.
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