This may sound weird, given their Spin cover-gracing ubiquity amongst New Yorkophiliac hipsters, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have always held an underdog's charm for me. At their best, the band's songs - at least from their first EP through 2003's Fever To Tell - have sounded like happy accidents, the result of guitarist Nick Zinner looping and accenting a riff ad infinitum and letting singer Karen O yelp over it until it took form. At their worst, of course, they've sounded like throwaway Chainsaw Records 7" tracks from the late nineties, but that's part of the draw: During their five-ish year existence, the trio has always had a unique (and hapless) ability to teeter between substance and sheen, somehow anchoring their Williamsburg buzz-and-dazzle with universal sentiment. They've been a theoretically crappy band that's overcome their own mediocre premise (i.e. "fashionista girl croons while a well-coiffed guitarist and anonymous drummer pound out post-punky garage stuff") and, for the most part, hit their own singular rock n' roll sweet spots (see: "Maps," "Y-Control" from 2003's Fever to Tell).
The problem with this kind of band, though, is that it runs on essentially two fuels: Youth and, to a degree, Amateurishness. And that's why Show Your Bones, the band's newest record, is a big sophomore buzzkill on par with, say, Ben Lee's adult-contempo fall from grace Breathing Tornadoes - i.e. a half-assed attempt at pseudo-maturity from an artist that doesn't understand its own appeal. The band has, for some reason, completely abandoned the melodic, song-oriented noise of their earlier work for "subtle" fare like stolen Love & Rockets riffs ("Gold Lion"), cheap sentimental reference points (the lifted nursery rhymery of "Dudley") and, of course, squeaky clean production (courtesy, I shit you not, of some guy named Squeak E. Clean). The resulting 2006-style mess - vocals ProTooled into gaudy oblivion, airless instrumentation, etc. - plays like a listless veer into post-"Maps" Modern Rock blandness that can't think of anywhere else to go. On some level, Show Your Bones recalls the Ramones' turn-of-the-decade jump from tightly packed pop songs like "Rock N' Roll Radio" to winsome (if political) cheese like "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg" in the late 70s/early 80s: The ever-noble Need To Change is all over this record, but, ultimately, the band's need to move forward crushes what little personality it ever had. The record reads like a rough sketch of an already ill-advised sonic map - an identity crisis from a band that lived and died on Karen O's identity. And, yeah, it's baffling.
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In other news, I've been reading Mary Karr's first autobio, The Liars' Club, and, though it's making me reconsider my memoir moratorium - I'd pretty much abandoned the genre after reading Dave Eggers's infuriatingly lopsided A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius - plowing through the book's has still been exhausting. Much like Eggers's book (and, given the shitty circumstances and tragedy-starved marketplace that often begat them, a lot of milennial memoirs), Karr views her truckload of Awful Life Occurances through a lens of pitch-black humor and weird geniality, but there's a per-chapter rate of horror here that trumps Genius's numbing, self-reflexive exhaustion about ten times over. What Karr's offering is, for the most part, harrowing, and though she tends to tell her tale of mental illnesses/divorce/rape/familial negligence/etc. with the good-natured aplomb of someone caught midway through a really great anecdote, there's a certain sting to the book that keeps me from going with the whole "Boy, I've got a story" shtick it's selling. In fact, reading The Liars' Club really just feels like the literary equivalent of being a bystander at a friend's friend's intervention: Sure, there's a catharsis being achieved, but that doesn't make it any less awkward to witness. What saves the book from being another painful (and solipsistic) run through the memoir mill is Karr's hyperregional voice, a confident blend of roughshod East Texas jargon and dead-on lyrical description that keeps heavy moments from being too horrifying and the light from starry-eyed wonder. Most of Karr's work previous to Club consisted of poetry and, happily, the book moves with the sharp sense of rhythm and glossable detail of a poet trying - and pulling off - prose. Given that the book's going for $.01 on Amazon.com (note: I claim allegiance with Powells.com, for the most part, but I'm just sayin'), I'd slap down the shipping costs and pick it up, particularly if you're a memoir buff. Of course, if you are, you've likely already read it.
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Updates should be coming fast and furious soon-ish... I recently received (and accepted) an offer to study fiction writing as a grad student at Johns Hopkins University, so I'll have more free time to write (if less time to do anything else) within the next couple months. Until then, check back once in a while. I might be around...
]]>So: When I was seventeen and in the midst of graduating and preparing for college and etc., one of my older friends/coworkers at the Morton Public Library gave me her personal, clearly well-loved copies of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Thomas Pynchon's V (complete with a torn/barely extant cover), Chuck Bukowski's The Roominghouse Madrigals and Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Deluxe Transitive Vampire as a graduation gift. This particular librarian was a serious, dictionary-devouring logophile - we'd kind of bonded over it, even - so she handed them to me and proceeded to outline their contents with some impenitrable English major gusto while I pretended to follow. At the end of her spiel, she somehow managed to flatten her theorrific message into something less demanding ("I hope you'll come to cherish these books as much as I do") and I, happy to find a moment of clarity in all the word-fog, smiled and said I would go home and read them as soon as I had the chance. But, unsurprisingly, reading was barely on my post-high school docket; after thumbing through a few of Bukowski's poems, I filed the books away in a box somewhere and went to college.
Five years and a whole B.A. in English later, I've figured out what she was angling for: Being the scholarly, twenty-something theory geek that she was, she wanted these books to be my entryway into college/"adult" literature, a sort of rough course in metafiction and postmodernism for a Vonnegut- and Salinger-weaned, teenaged boy on the brink. The ploy failed on an almost embarrassing level, however. I mean, sure, I discovered Pynchon on my own as a freshman (thanks to - no kidding - a Yo La Tengo song called "The Crying of Lot G"), but it took years before I really dug into any lit theory and philosophy, let alone felt like checking out something as willfully "foreign" as a Milan Kundera book. And so, despite my semi-belated love of both The Crying of Lot 49 and Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - both eagerly devoured at the beginning of these interests or long before - I still somehow left my English program having never read either Unbearable Lightness or V. Intentions aside, my librarian friend made two complete miscalculations: The assumption that I was into "difficult" or "mature" fiction as a high schooler (which I wasn't, though I liked to think I was) and, less damning, the assumption that I gave suggested books any sort of chonological priority. Neither of these actually applied to me until I became a collegiate upperclassman and, by that point, I had more than enough books in my queue, placing Unbearable Lightness and V on some perennial backburner.
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So: One of the few good things - maybe the only good thing, even - about living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, is the well-off, bookish locals' need to spread their discarded books around. Residents here regularly fill boxes with books and leave them on stoops, near street corners and in fenced garbage areas, basically begging other, less-well-off-but-still-bookish locals to pick them up and "recycle" them. And, thus encouraged, my girlfriend and I, being young and poor-ish, pick up armfuls of books (and, in one case, about three years of Harper's) whenever we get the chance. It was in this manner that I obtained yet another copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being - apparently, I'm destined to always get this book secondhand - but, this time around, I actually (and guiltily) read it. Score one for my librarian friend, wherever she is.
Was it good? Well, yeah. I once described Kundera's style to a friend of mine as being "warm and wise," ala Italo Calvino, and I stand by that. And, appropriately, there wasn't any particular moment in Unbearable Lightness where I felt like the prose was getting too dense, in either sense of the word - a minor miracle, given the narrative's tendency to switch characters, histories and time periods in a way that, in the hands of a less controlled author, might feel a little ADD. Instead, Kundera kept up his usual hypnotic sense of pacing, maintaining a metronomic, D.H. Lawrence-inspired Calvino vibe for the bulk of the novel. Being longer and slightly more involved than his pitch-perfect The Book of Laughter or Forgetting, Unbearable Lightness exhausted the hell out of me by its end - after three hundred pages of "nature of love" turmoil couched in a parable about extremes (i.e. public/private, lightness/weight, brightness/darkness, etc.) and their inherent "gray areas," I was ready to move on - but, like most of the writer's work, it maintained a satisfying balance of formal tricks and a brisk plot. The unconverted might want to check out The Book of Laughter and Forgetting before giving this one the time of day, but, as far as I'm concerned, it was almost worth the five years of nagging guilt/indifference. Or not.
Oh, and I just picked up V from the library, so a quick review of that one should be up within the month. Then I plan to get on with my life.
For the uninitiated: Hi, I'm Joe Martin, longtime curator of Paperdrums.com and about thirty other, more extinct websites. Welcome to Cities and Signs, a blog devoted to Whatever The Hell I Feel Like Talking About. And, being that I moonlight as a "pop culture" writer (CMJ, Skyscraper, Punk Planet, Mass Appeal, Magnet), said category essentially includes untimely rants about books (I tend to wait 'til things come out in paperback and, beyond that, I'm constantly catching up on the lesser-known fiction of the twentieth century), movies (same deal, except with "DVD" in place of "paperback" and "films" instead of "fiction") and music. That said, however, I plan on diverting wildly from all three whenever the mood strikes, mostly because I have no interest in having any sort of bullshit central focus (beyond off-the-cuff analysis) or forced topical straightjacketing here. Cities and Signs won't be purposeless - it's not a diaryblog or anything - but, for the most part, it won't be all that purposeful, either. Instead, it'll just be a nice little forum for my musings on, say, an Angela Carter book I just picked up or some freshly discovered band like the Art Bears... a way to wax compulsive about subjects that I'd like to write about but, for some reason, can't imagine throwing into any sort of magazine/periodical. So that's that.
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On the topic of the Art Bears: Picture Faust's woozily operactic female vocals fronting a jazz-influenced prog rock group with lots of rhythmic change-ups and a future John Zorn sideman (Fred Frith) on guitar and you'll have the gist, though the actual band is a little less fascinating than all of that. If none of the aforementioned reference points make any sense to you, there's a good chance you probably wouldn't like 'em, though I'm willing to register a guarded "thumbs up" for most Frith projects (Henry Cow, Zorn's Naked City, the Residents' Commercial Album) on the basis of the guy's singular, fusion-filled style.
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On the topic of Angela Carter: She's amazing. I just picked up a used copy of Burning Your Boats - a collection of all her published stories (and then some) - and I'm already as enthralled as I've ever been while reading shorter stuff. She has (or had, as she died of cancer in 1992) a smooth, almost hypnotic way of knitting her sentences together and tends to read like a more sinister Nabokov plumbing the history of literature in search of plots to respin and/or recycle. As a result, her stories tend to read like a less expressionist/more British Donald Barthelme channeling his sarcastic cultural appropriation through 19th century horror tropes. The style makes for some unique joys, to say the least, and curiosity-seekers are encouraged to check out "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" (also available in 1985's Saints and Strangers). It's about as indelibly creepy as fiction gets and, as a result, happens to be one of her best (and most widely anthologized) stories.
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That's all for now. Check in later this week for more rambling.
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