…there may be some good stuff, but I haven’t read it yet because it hasn’t arrived in my mailbox. (Hey! Irene ate my New Yorker!) I can read it on my iPad but somehow it’s not the same. Plus there’s a long takeout on Ry Cooder by Alec Wilkinson that’s ONLY available on the magazine’s website. I’m like Wilkinson: Cooder is a huge culture hero of mine (and was the first famous musician I ever interviewed, as an extremely callow college sophomore in Houston, at the time of his Paradise and Lunch album).
But instead of talking about The New Yorker, I want to give a shout out to New York magazine for this week’s 9/11 issue. I didn’t think anyone could come up with anything about 9/11 that a) hasn’t been done before and/or b) that I would want to read. But leave it to Adam Moss to come up with an ingenious concept, “The Encyclopedia of 9/11,” which manages to encompass some pockets of curiosity that managed to intrigue me and lure me into reading stuff I never would have otherwise. (Some entries that stand out: The Fake Widow, how Saturday Night Live handled that week, the weird story of Sneha Anne Philip.) It’s impressive journalism without straying too far into cheesy or cheap sentiment. I’ve known Adam since we were both kids (he edited my profiles of Phoebe Snow and Wally Shawn back when he was a junior editor at Esquire, and he hired me as arts editor for 7 Days), and I continue to admire his editorial restlessness, creativity, fearlessness, and insistence on quality.
In this week’s New Yorker
September 1, 2011Quote of the day: IDENTITY
August 31, 2011IDENTITY
Identity germinates from humiliation’s soil. Humiliation isn’t merely the basement of a personality, or the scum pile on the stairway down. Humiliation is the earlier event that paves the way for “self” to know it exists.
— Wayne Koestenbaum
Quote of the day: CHANGE
August 30, 2011CHANGE
Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.
— Margaret Mead
Theater review: OLIVE AND THE BITTER HERBS
August 29, 2011My review of Charles Busch’s Olive and the Bitter Herbs, produced by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, has just been posted on CultureVulture.net. Check it out here and let me know what you think.
Dan Butler, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Richard Masur, and David Garrison in "Olive and the Bitter Herbs" (photo by James Leynse)
Good stuff online: Bon Iver’s “Holocene” video
August 29, 2011
I’m a huge fan of Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, and have been delving deeply into his second album (called Bon Iver, Bon Iver). His voice is distinctive, the sound spectacular, and his songwriting very peculiar, haunting and yet impenetrable. Even his girlfriend, the very fine songwriter Kathleen Edwards, confessed to the NY Times, “I mean this respectfully, but most of the time I have no idea what Justin’s songs are about.” (Read Jon Caramanica’s very good profile here.) But I spent some time during the, uh, hurricane hunkered down with the headphones and his record company’s website, which very thoughtfully provides the lyrics to all the songs on the new album. (I purposely bought a hard copy of the CD just so I could get the lyric sheet, but with characteristic perverseness Vernon wrote out all the lyrics by hand and they’re almost impossible to read, just like Rufus Wainwright’s on his most recent album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu.) Reading them while listening to the songs gave me a lot. Many of them absolutely scan like dadaist poetry, with lines I plan to memorize and spout at (in)appropriate moments, such as “Unpeel keeness, honey, bean for bean” or “Fuck the fiercest fables, I’m with Hagen.” Not since Van Dyke Parks collaborated with Brian Wilson on Smile has there been such a match of gorgeous melodies and sense-defying lyrics.
But I had a whole other experience watching the video Bon Iver made for “Holocene,” which opens up the song in a whole other way. The chorus, repeated three times with slight variations, leaps off from the line “at once I knew I was not magnificent,” which sounds somewhat abject and self-negating. But in the video, shot in Iceland, makes the line positively Whitmanesque — it captures the ecstatic moment when a sentient being abandons his solipsism for a moment and realizes that he is only a small part of something gigantic and wondrous. Notice how when that line comes up, the video cuts to the sky, the mountains, an eagle — indeed, they are magnificent.
Holocene
“Someway, baby, it’s part of me, apart from me.”
you’re laying waste to Halloween
you fucked it friend, it’s on it’s head, it struck the street
you’re in Milwaukee, off your feet
…and at once I knew I was not magnificent
strayed above the highway aisle
(jagged vacance, thick with ice)
I could see for miles, miles, miles
3rd and Lake it burnt away, the hallway
was where we learned to celebrate
automatic bought the years you’d talk for me
that night you played me ʻLip Paradeʼ
not the needle, nor the thread, the lost decree
saying nothing, that’s enough for me
…and at once I knew I was not magnificent
hulled far from the highway aisle
(jagged, vacance, thick with ice)
I could see for miles, miles, miles
Christmas night, it clutched the light, the hallow bright
above my brother, I and tangled spines
we smoked the screen to make it what it was to be
now to know it in my memory:
…and at once I knew I was not magnificent
high above the highway aisle
(jagged vacance, thick with ice)
I could see for miles, miles, miles
another eye opens 