1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die ~ Tom Moon ~ The Almanac Singers

The Almanac Singers, Folk Activism

I had access to an album circa 1941, reissued in 2011 titled “State of Arkansas”. The leftist folk group included at one time or another the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terri and Brownie McGee. Included were these two tracks specifically identified by Moon

First “Hard, Ain’t It Hard” sounds like Seeger picking and Woody singing. A nice lament for love not reciprocated. Then there’s “The Dodger Song”. Not about the baseball team. I’d nominate it for the campaign theme song for Der Mitt.

Lotsa union songs. But you had to temper the leftist activism with songs like “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave.”

Then there’s this little tidbit: Seeger actually coined the phrase “Hootenany” which was picked up as the name of the of the folk music show on ABC in the early sixties. Ironically, Seeger was banned from appearing on the show that he essentially named. Ouch!

Waiting for Sunrise ~ William Boyd

Review on Booker page

Tale of Genji: Week 20, Chapter 20 (The Bluebell)

Latest Chapter

New Stuff

Getting ready for a few things, I’ve done some archiving and added two new pages:

• BOOKER 2012 – Key dates, announcements and reviews for this year’s Booker Road Race. I’ll be reading any eligible books of interest, until the long-list list is announced and previewed. After that, I’ll limit my reading to the long-list nominees. The same applies to the short list announcement.
• TIFF 2012 – This page is the place that I’ll be posting news, movie selections and reviews for this year’s Toronto International Film Festival

Tale of Genji: Week 19, Chapter 19 (Wisps of Clouds

Next Installment here

1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die ~ Tom Moon ~ Mose Allison

MOSE ALLISON: Allison Wonderland, The Musings of a Hipster Cynic

I really do take exception to the characterization of Mose as a “cynic”. That really misses the point. When he sang “I don’t Worry About a Thing (cause nothings gonna be alright) in 1962, this was merely Mose offering some  sage advice for getting on with your life. Don’t sweat te details. When he argued that some people minds were on vacation, who could argue? I picked up a vinyl copy of that 1962 album in the summer of 1963 between my HS graduation and my freshman year in college (1963). I never looked back and I was constantly quoting The Word (the word from Mose) in those days.There are two great American music philosophers: Mose Allison and Bob Dylan. Period.

Mose, born  in Mississippi in 1927 is an ageless hipster who found a unique and perfect blend of jazz and blues, and never wavered from it. Yet it’s as fresh, rocking, and ebullient as ever.  His clever and witty lyrics are a treasure. I often thought that if I could play the piano that effortlessly, then I’d certainly be a happy man.

That’s what comes from being able to play by ear. What a gift! Allison was the first musician I can remember that made me think of the voice as an accompanying instrument, when, as on many of his songs, he grunted right along with his piano playing. Pair up Young Man’s Blues with Old Man’s Blues - and you’ll see how long he’s been talking the talk.

1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die ~ Tom Moon

Pure Junkie Menace: Alice in Chains ~ Dirt, Released 1992

I own this disc, but I’ve never listened to it until now. After all, I have part or all of 14,822 albums. Gimme a break! You think it’s hard to listen to 1,000 albums before I die? Howzabout nearly 15,000?

So I gave it a shot. Conclusion? This is just not my thing? Most of the cuts did nothing for me. About all I can say is that several cuts had multiple tempos and time changes – the only thing that kept the music from exhibiting an extraordinary sameness. Back in the day there were certain albums that you just had to listen to stoned. You know who you are. Is it possible that this album just has to be experienced with a spike in your vein?

Between “not too bad” and “tolerable”: “Down in a Hole”.

Tale of Genji: Week 18, Chapter 18 (Wind in the Pines)

Chapter 18 takes place during the same time frame as the previous chapter so Genji is 31 years of age, still trying to juggle “wives” and children. With so many “ladies” to provide for, there seems to be a housing shortage. He’s furiously at work building, expanding and providing. [more]

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them ~ Elif Batuman

Funny is when I frequently laugh out loud. Smile and laugh, chuckle even. Amusing is when I may smile a bit, nod my head even. I believed that this book was going to be very funny. I was merely amused a few times. I failed to see the great humor.

Then I thought it was going to parlay the humor into a comprehensive look at Russian literature. There really is only one in-depth overview of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. There is some interesting background on Tolstoy and Babel, and a little on Gogol, Pushkin and Chekhov. There is a lot more on some obscure writers of the former Soviet Union, especially Uzbekistan. The author spends a summer in Samarkind, and this time comprises the unifying sections of Elif Batuman’s book. I say “unifying”. But that’s another problem I had with the book. It just didn’t fit together well. The transition for one paragraph to another (not in all cases) is sometimes painfully inept.

Much of the book was very definitely “academic”. I hadn’t expected that.  And the academic discussions seemed to me to  be directed to an inadvertently (I’m sure) very limited audience.

So what did I like?

I liked this, certainly on “the second time” she read Babel:

There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover. Often, it’s the material circumstances themselves that make you remember a book that way – but sometimes it’s the other way around. I’m sure that memory of that afternoon – the smell of rain and baking chocolate, the depressing apartment with its inflatable sofa, the sliding glass door that overlooked rainy palm trees and a Safeway parking lot – is due to the precious, almost-lost quality of Babel’s 1920 diary.

In fact it’s those sections of the book that are personal for the author, those that show Elif Batuman’s personality which are the most engaging in the book. More of that, less of the uninteresting (except for the chosen few) academic navel lint pickers. This would have gone a long way.

I’d almost like to take a chance on a possible novel by her, but with her constant trashing of Orhan Pamuk, this would be iffy. Maybe just a few beers.

Gods Without Men ~ Hari Kunzru

I finished this novel almost two weeks ago now, and I just didn’t know what to say about it. It’s a bit of a mess. It’s surely a huge disappointment. I had found previous Kunzru books just interesting enough to come back for more. Both My Revolutions and The Impressionist put Hari Kunzru on my mental list of authors who deserved another reading as new books appeared. Kunzru is now off that list.

I’m not exactly sure what Kunzru meant to do here. Maybe even he doesn’t know. But I think it safe to say be tried to do too much. An ambitious book? Surely. Overly so in the sense that all of the various elements did not fit into a whole and coherent novel. There’s just too much here, and too much that does not belong. Fans of the book would defend it by saying the parts that ‘do not belong’ (in my opinion) are the whole point of the novel. Really?

There are several threads in the novel. They jump back and forth in various time frames (no problem here): chapters identified by a year. These run from “the time when the animals were men” (cut) to 2008 (and 2009) – the present. The primary focus of the novel is a troubled family consisting of Jaz Matharu, his wife Lisa, and their  4-year old, severely autistic son, Raj. Jaz is from a Baltimore Punjabi Sikh family, and Lisa is from an upper middle-class white family. The cultural differences are explored.   Eventually they find themselves in a rundown motel in the California desert on a “vacation”. The kid goes missing. We don’t know all these things at once, nor do we know the stories of the other  characters, but Kunzru is adept at very comfortable weaving in the back stories of all the major characters. It’s just that I found many of them completely unnecessary. Some of them are more ‘major’ than others. Some themes that the author probably thought were ‘necessary’ to pull it all together, pulled it all apart.

We move back and forth between these stories and time frames – some of them connected directly, some of them only thematically and loosely: 1947, 2008, 2009, 1778, 1958, 1969, 1920, 1970, 1971, 1871, 1942. Topics? Take your pick: cults, Mormonism, the financial crisis, the effects of cultural differences on marriage and especially the generational perspectives, the news media and the public’s voracious appetite for drama and tragedy and the need to alternatelt praise and demonize, alien presences, drug running, shamanism, shape-shifting…..I could go on and on. You get the picture. Pass this one by.

Ok! I got that one out of the way!