We went to the parade today, and while my video from that is uploading, I have some amendements to make from my prior post.

I was sort of sour on the whole politics angle of the HONK! bands. I think what I said was true, that basically, if the goal is to convert the unconverted, spectacles like this aren’t going to be the forum where that happens. My experience is that the only time peoples’ minds are changed is when there is some personal connection between two people that transcends politics, and then they have to reconcile their feelings to their viewpoints. Anyway, so, maybe people are not going to hear the Leftist Marching Band’s song about Wal-Mart and are suddenly going to see the light and say, yeah, they treat their workers like crap, I’m not going to shop there.

But I think there is something to the politics of the music itself that I basically buy into. First off, it’s just a total non-product. Very few of the bands there were even selling CDs. None of these people are making their living from their music, they are just out there for the joy of the thing. (I’m guessing here, to be fair: but I suspect that only a relative handful of people are making a living from music these days, and the folks in the HONK bands have not given up their day jobs). But the format of this kind of music is just not salable; it can barely even be recorded well. I mean, it technically can be recorded, and it can even sound pretty good. But unless you have a really crazy sound system at home, it’s just not going to sound like 10 horns and 5 percussionists (or more) standing 3 or 4 feet away from you, there’s not going to be a crowd dancing all smelly after a day of dancing.

I also feel like it opens a viable door for popular music. I guess it’s not popular in the sense that a lot of people like it. But it is pop music in the sense that you don’t need any kind of specialized cultural context or background to have an immediate visceral human reaction to people blowing horns and banging drums in front of you. It’s a popular music that you can participate in just by listening to it and ditching the snobbery and admitting that you like it– you don’t have to buy a T-Shirt, you don’t have to participate in some kind of record store nerd snottery, you don’t have to claim your turf as part of a subculture (there were townies, trustafarians, old crusty Cambridge folkies, new somerville yuppies with their kids in their maclaren strollers, and Click and Clack the Tappett Brothers for god’s sake). You can just listen and shake your butt and be happy to be in the middle of something great on a couple of gorgeous New England autumn days.

And I love that it just harkens to a time when if you wanted music, you just made it. You didn’t go shopping.

I’ve mentioned the HONK! festival in previous years. The third one is happening this weekend (parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square is just 2 hours from now). You can read more about them and what they’re about at their website.

Here’s Providence RI’s What Cheer? Brigade, who knocked my socks off last year (strongly recommend watching this full screen since it’s rather dark).

A shorter clip:

And another, where it’s actually light and you can sort of see them. The gorilla guy wore a scarier but probably significantly less hot mask this year.

Due to a program misprint (which said they were going on in statue park at 8:00, not 6:00), I almost missed What Cheer?. Happily, I did not, though I did miss the first few minutes of their set while I was distracted by these folks playing in front of the T station, whose name I did not catch.

Also a notable group from earlier on were the Loyd Family Players who were sort of a Brazilian-style drum group from California (yes, many bands trek very far to make the fest).
(Photo by Terri)

There were lots of other bands as well who were also notable, but it’s almost impossible to see them all, what with 4 simultaneous stages going on all around Davis Square. Anyhow, I love the HONK! fest, and the general outpouring of energy and creativity and feel like I’m in a good place when such awesome stuff happens within walking distance of my house.

Still, I’m not a political guy, and while I wish them luck in their project, I’m mainly there for the spectacle and the talented musicians and the spirit of the thing. My impression of the effectiveness of most acts of political street theater is the same as Tom Lehrer’s eventual opinion of political satire:

I don’t think this kind of thing has an impact on the unconverted, frankly. It’s not even preaching to the converted; it’s titillating the converted. I think the people who say we need satire often mean, “We need satire of them, not of us.” I’m fond of quoting Peter Cook, who talked about the satirical Berlin cabarets of the ’30s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the Second World War. You think, “Oh, wow! This is great! We need a song like this, and that will really convert people. Then they’ll say, ‘Oh, I thought war was good, but now I realize war is bad.’” No, it’s not going to change much.

Summervillain sent me an email yesterday morning that there was a Kelly Link reading at Harvard Book Store at 7pm; he and Trixie couldn’t go, but he figured I was interested. He was correct.

At about 6 I left work, made time for a drink with the kids from work at Kingston Station (the kids were drinking beer, I left after one martini), and made it to the HBS right as the reading started.

I thought I had blogged more about her, but I can only find one passing mention, which is too bad because she’s been pretty much my favorite writer for a couple of years now. So, the Internets can fill you in on her as easily as I can, but I just recommend reading a couple of stories that are freely available online. “The Specialist’s Hat” had me so creeped out the night that I read it that I didn’t want to go downstairs alone and made Terri come with me. I think about “The Hortlak” every time I go into a convenience store late at night. And I have always loved “The Faery Handbag” because it mentions the Garment District in Cambridge near where I used to work.

She read part of one story from her new young adult book Pretty Monsters, and she basically just stopped as soon as it started to get really scarey. For the record, she mentioned that the Brian Johnson mentioned in the story is based on her real cousin, Brian Johnson, who told her to write the story.

Highlights from the Q&A:

• The story “Magic for Beginners” is indeed inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer which she claims to have been obsessed with for a while. Specifically, it started with ideas that she had for it that couldn’t or wouldn’t be done on TV (diferent actors playing the same characters each episode, no regular airing schedule, etc.)
• She had a good response to the question about why the new collection of stories is categorized as young adult when none of her others are. I can’t reproduce the answer perfectly, but the many points included that her stuff is always hard to categorize, that she thinks it’s definitely YA and it’s more than just a convenient marketing label, and that it is does not involve looking back on youth with nostalgia but instead has an immediacy and the sense of intense critical importance of everything.
• She didn’t talk too much about her reasons for publishing this with large publisher (Viking) this time rather than publishing it through the Small Beer Press which she runs with her husband. But she did mention that she got far more creative control over the whole thing than she ever expected including working with the illustrator she wanted and veto power on the cover art. She said it was kind of a nice change to have someone else do everything, and just have to say “yes” or “no”.

No photos: it would have felt weird.

Postscript: I’ve wondered this before in respect to seeing films at the Brattle Theater but what is it about Cambridge audiences that laughter is their only reaction to any critical moment in any performing art? There were just moments in the story where there was certainly some sort of emotional peak or moment of revelation, but where laughter was totally inappropriate. It’s some kind of bizarre intellectual emotional repression that’s endemic to our fair neighboring city.

The first time I read Thoreau was in 8th or 9th grade English class, and I had no use for the guy. I grew up on a farm, feeling pretty disconnected from the modern world, and was pretty actively trying to connect to it. So I had little patience for some earnest jackass who preached about renouncing it.

But clearly, I had a pretty strong reaction, and he definitely touched a nerve. And I find little bits of Walden coming in to my head from time to time.

Every time I find myself getting a news addiction, I think of this:

After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe” - and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

… And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter - we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

…What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!

I find this kind of thing comforting when news cycles seem to be heating up, when world events seem to be impossibly dire. And I am occasionally attracted by more contemporary variations of this attitude.

I guess what I ultimately don’t buy is that withdrawal from the world is somehow the answer. I think that it’s better to stay engaged, while keeping it all in perspective. People have been feeling like the world is spinning out of control for thousands of years — O tempora! O mores! — and sometimes it is, but usually it isn’t. A coward dies a thousand times, etc. (which also comes straight to you from 8th grade English class…)

TCM played Nothing’s Sacred the other week; I hadn’t heard of it before, but it’s a fun 1937 comedy with Carole Lombard and Frederic March, in dazzling 1937 Technicolor.

The plot is that a New York reporter seeking a tear-jerking human interest story finds a young woman in rural Vermont who is supposedly dying of radium poisoning. She isn’t, of course; she was simply misdiagnosed by her alcoholic rural doctor (played by familiar character actor Charles Winninger), but she goes along with it to get a free trip to New York City on the newspaper’s tab. The city relishes mourning her, but hijinks ensue as it grows increasingly hard to fake her incurable fatal illness.

It’s a potentially dumb plot, but as with many potentially dumb plots, it’s all about the excution. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of little touches that are so thematically consistent that it all adds up to a pretty entertaining and smart satire. For example, at a night club event where Hazel, our heroine, is being feted as one of the great women of history (including a stage show with a parade of Catherine the Great, Lady Godiva, Pocohontas– all on horseback), an average film would have cut to shots of other clubgoers looking mournfully at her. But in this, there are little extra touches: one of the “mourners” makes sure her table companions are watching her before she begins weeping; Hazel says “look at how miserable that man in the toupeé looks” (it’s not enough for there to be a miserable man looking at her, he has to have fake hair).  And these individual acts of personal hypocrisy all add directly up to individual acts of public hypocricy. When she’s exposed as a fake to a small group of government officials and “community organizers” they force her to go through with a fake funeral because they have each individually found ways to politically profit from public sympathies to Hazel’s bravery in the face of her illness.

The staging and cinematography are surprisingly avant garde. Several shots where key dialogue is happening are made where the speakers are completely offscreen (or are obscured by some large object, and you only see the speakers’ feet). In the opening montage, there’s a gorgeous rare color shot of Times Square ca. 1937 at night.

The final scene, on a boat, where Hazel and the reporter are in dark glasses, making a getaway after her fake funeral, the reporter is lecturing Hazel on how quickly the public will forget her. Suddenly, from below, a voice is crying out “Hazel! Hazel!”. You see the doctor’s panicky face through a porthole, then you see the ocean as he sees it, and then he’s scrambling to get out of his room. “Hazel, the whole city is drowning!” And then “The End”. Like much of the movie, it’s sort of a cheap gag, “haha, the drunk doctor thinks they’re still in the city”, but with the preceding dialog and the way that it is cut abruptly short, there is more than a little hint that it’s meant as a little commentary as well.

It’s no surprise that writing credits were from Ben Hecht (Scarface, The Front Page (later remade as the fantastic His Girl Friday), and according to the IMDB, Ring Lardner Jr.

Senator, you may sing “Bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”. You may pick an unqualified zealot from the hinterlands to be your second. You may have your vicious temper and your flights from reason and your lack of domesticy policy chops combined with flawed positions on foreign policy.

But. You. May not. Steal. “Barracuda”!!!!

Disclaimer #1: I know I’m about four days late in bothering to write about this; sorry, gang, I do sort of have a Real Life. Disclaimer #2: I’m going to assume you are aware that last week was the Democratic National Convention, that Barak Obama gave a speech, that you watched it, and that if you wanted a full rundown and insightful commentary that you have already gone elsewhere.

OK, here’s the line that caught me most:

Instead, it is that American spirit that American promise that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; That makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

Now, I’m glad I’m not the only one who instantly thought of Moon River at that line.

Two drifters
Off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world
To see…

We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting around the bend
My Huckleberry friend
Moon River and me…

I love this. I think it totally taps into a deep well of What It Means To Be American™, the sense that our hearts desire is somewhere out there just beyond reach…

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter-tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further…and one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This McSweeney’s bit is an instant classic.

Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

The Good Soldier Schweik— I bought a copy at a used bookstore on our recent trip to Virginia/DC, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s sort of a World War I classic that’s fallen off the radar about a Czech soldier who’s basically an idiot who not so stupidly manages to avoid ever making it into combat. SchweikThe novel starts in Prague, and weirdly, the humor reminded me of Kafka, and there’s probably a thesis in comparing Schweik and K. from The Castle; where K. employs all the intelligence at his disposal in struggling against a vast, almost metaphysical bureaucracy to gain admittence to the caslte, Schweik uses his idiotic blank grin and the deep incompetence of the Austrian army bureaucracy to constantly frustrate their efforts to get him to the front. Seems like it’s often called an anti-war novel, and the novel does preach at times, but Schweik’s honest idiocy seems impervious to all kinds of cant, and he seems like as basic and original a comedic character as Don Quixote. It ends abruptly when the author died of TB.

The Last Tycoon— We got this in our great plundering of Terri’s parents’ book and record collection last weekend and I blew through it in a couple of evenings. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel (which ends abruptly when the author died of a heart attack) about a movie tycoon. Seems patterned after any number of film tycoons, but the one that comes to mind most to me is Irving Thalberg. It’s pretty uneven at times, and you suspect that it would have been seriously rewritten and cleaned up a lot once it was finished. But that in itself is part of the charm; the edition I read had author’s notes and outlines of what Fitzgerald expected to happen, so you get the interesting task of finishing the novel for yourself, as well as an interesting vivisection of a novel in progress. The main character Stahr is a workaholic producer who, while driven into the future out of dissatisfaction with his past a la Gatsby, seems to genuinely love his work, and the scenes where he is prodding his writers and directors to work creatively are alone unlike anything I’ve read elsewhere and are themselves worth the price of admission.

I Will Soon Be Invincible by Austin Grossman — a friend recommended this novel about superheroes and supervillains that are all too human. I liked it a lot (I blew through it it last night and this morning), but if you’ve seen The Incredibles, imagine it as novel, make it slightly moodier and less cartoony, and you’ve got the idea.

So this was our big brand-name rock show of the year. Terri instigated it (I kind of peaked with Devo sometime in high school), but I figured what the hey.

Tom Tom Club opened. I wasn’t really a fan of their music back in the day and I’m still not. But I really enjoyed their set; they were really pretty solid, and they had a ton of energy and they were just a great dance band. And now that I have gotten a little more of a taste for the NYC post-punk scene, I kind of get their context a little more– they easily could have showed up in Downtown 81 alongside James White and The Blacks or Kid Creole and the Cocoanuts. It was also much harder back when the Talking Heads were still in operation to see them as their own thing, but that is a little more obvious to me now. And the very afro-beat / world music sound of the last Talking Heads record seems less of a David Byrne tangent.

Devo was pretty faithful to their schtick– no big deviations in their stage show from the DVD we have of their 1980 stage show. Pretty similar set list, too. Their yellow hazmat suits are a little wider. But the spirit was still intact, and they had people up and dancing from the start. Some of the little films that they projected were clearly vintage Devo, but seemed like they might have been re-dubbed. And for the last song, Boojie Boy came out wearing some kind of frock and a pink baseball cap with a rhinestone skull-and-crossbones on it; during his nonsensical diatrabe I could sense the mood in the place was patient, but there was just a touch of “um, maybe you could take that stupid mask off and play Whip It again?”, but I think it was probably my favorite part of the set. And you know, it really is something to see the little film of them from 1981 in their Duty Now for the Future outfits with the wind in their hair, projected 30 feet high, with the Devo Corporate Anthem playing, with a few thousand other people in a place called the “Bank of America Pavillion” drinking a fluorescent green “margarita” from a slushee machine on a summer night. Mmmmm. Devolution.

Decent Slate piece on space imagery in African American pop, from Sun Ra to Lil Wayne. Could be expanded to be a whole thesis!

And they’re doing it in dialect!

oor heids have just been blown clean off

From this Telegraph article on Brian Eno turning 60:

“Heroes” was famously made in Hansa Studio 2, shadowed by the Berlin Wall and once used as a Gestapo ballroom, while Bowie grappled with smack addiction, “living at the edge of his nervous system,” in Eno’s words. But the latter’s talent for relaxing fragile superstars with creative play was already apparent. “We slipped into Peter Cook and Dudley Moore characters,” he recalled. “Bowie was Pete and I was Dud, and for the whole time we stayed in character. ‘Ooh, I dunno about that synthesiser part, Dud…’”

Sorely disappointed in the TMBG show tonight.

I guess you can’t go home again.

I tried to make sure it wasn’t just me being all jacked up and trying to hold them up to what they meant to me when I was 16. But no, I just didn’t see the guys born of some wacky DIY art scene Brooklyn of 1986. it was very much the ZZ Top vibe you mentioned, Marco. It was all rock, with a full band, none of the feeling of “holy crap, what are these guys going to do next”.

And I felt like I was bumming out the dorky girl standing next to me who seemed super excited to be there and was doing some dance that was a cross between playing the air keyboard and flailing like a beached squid.

I walked out during “Birdhouse in your soul”, and waited for Terri and Doug in the upstairs lobby, trying to figure out if it was the 2nd or 3rd worst show ever. (1st was the Godspeed You Black Emperor show we saw at the Somerville Theater in Feb 2001, 2nd or 3rd was the Screeching Weasel show in Bloomington IN that I fell asleep at in 1995 or so).

I sort of wish that the economics of pop music were such that they could just stop touring, like the Beatles or Glenn Gould in 1964, and just make brilliant studio music and sell it to millions. This may be the last time you ever hear me lament the heyday of recorded music, but there you go.