Safkhet Publishing, 145 pp, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Joey Ramone, on stage at the Rainbow in London on New Year’s Eve 1977, apparently recovering from a pre-gig chow-down at a local Indian restaurant, mournfully groaned into his mic, “After eating that Chicken Vindaloo, I wanna be well.”  The Ramones then blasted into their next fast and furious tune, leaving us wondering—whoa, what was it about that nice, fiery vindaloo?

You say you haven’t thought about the connection between rock ‘n roll and food? You say it’s probably only about the fancy contract rider backstage platters of lobster and God-knows-what-else big name bands demand on tour?

You’d be wrong. It’s much simpler and more humble than that. And longtime rock ‘n roll soundman, writer and self-proclaimed foodie Bruce Moore has cooked up a cheerfully goofy yet serious feast of road-worthy recipes, collected from hard-working bands around the world.

For Those About to Cook (a riff on AC/DC’s immortal anthem, For Those About to Rock: “We ain’t no legend, ain’t no cause/We’re just livin’ for today.” Heavy stuff, man.) is a rock ‘n roll stew of culinary contributions from fifty-five bands and musicians.  Nicely presented and well laid out, each recipe is accompanied by Moore’s complimentary intro, a pic, a bit about the band. But here’s the thing, here’s what gives the book its off-kilter charm—nearly every band photo is a glowering, gonna kick your ass (or worse) collection of long-haired guys—you’ve seen these standard band pictures.  We’ve got bands you might not have heard of, like Dusk Machine, Borganzur, Sasquatch Agnostic, Crimson Glory—we’re talking a heavy dose of the metal genre in all its grim incarnations—thrash metal, death metal, extreme Christian death metal, stoner sludge metal, Finnish folk metal.

I kid you not.

But then the reader, perhaps hesitantly, turns the page and the sepulchral power metal band Crimson Glory scary frontman, Todd La Torre, presents his charming preparation of stuffed artichokes—“The Art of the Choke.” Mom would be proud.

It goes on. We have the badass, guitar-slinging guy from Guns ‘n Roses kindly sharing his recipe for blueberry chocolate chip muffins.

Or metalcore singer Robert Meadows of the band A Life Once Lost humbly offering his Bobby’s Bacon Cheeseburger Explosion. Sounds great. Could also be a great song title. Or band name.

To be sure, though the book is heavy on meat and potatoes guy food, more sensitive, alt-indie-folkie and even one or two out-of-left-field classical music types do inexplicably find their way in. Vegan? Garbanzo beans? Got ‘em. And there’s even Jeremy Haffner of Oedipus, a smiling chef in rock ‘n roll disguise offering his lovely, ready for a nice place in Napa Valley steak pot pie with thyme and cream sauce. Let’s rock.

Overall though, we’re not talking high-end culinary artistry here, just simple, down to earth stuff the boys (or occasional girls) in the band could love. Here’s the first bit of the first concoction in the book, from New Jersey’s A Clever Con:

“Empty the entire box of cereal into a large bowl. I use a metal one, so it’s easier to clean later on. Crack open the cuddly honey bear’s skull, turn him upside down and mix in all of his sticky, gooey delicious insides.”

I’m good with that. And I bet Joey Ramone would be too. Let’s eat.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire – Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever

by Will Hermes

(This review was published in the Washington Independent Review of Books, December 2011)

Music journalist Will Hermes, referring to rock ‘n’ roll critics back in the day, wrote, “… their sense that the entire world of art and culture and human emotion could be compressed into a vinyl recording, left a deep impression on me.” Me, too. And this book, a smart and savvy chronicle of the New York musical underground of the 1970s, aims to capture the magic of an ancient era, relate the secret history of a city when there was music in the cafés at night, revolution in the air, and most everything else was lousy.

On January 1, 1974, the august New York Times Op-Ed page brooded, “With 1973, an era died … an era of profligacy … an orgy of consumption, following the lean years of depression and World War II. This New Year’s Day, symbolized by dimmed lights, chilly rooms, and empty gas tanks, ushers in a new era …”

Man, oh man. Bad times, eh? Things had to get better, right?

Sorry. On January 1, 1975, one year later, the Times continued the gloomy riff, “To bid farewell to 1974 is in many ways a relief.”

Bummer

And yet, New York, at that moment, was ablaze in one of those rare, radioactive bursts of new music that spark fleetingly in unexpected places—think ‘60s London or ‘90s Seattle. The ‘70s were New York’s time. Music was everywhere, kids flashed guitars and turntables like switchblades and the place was on fire. As Patti Smith said, “This is the era where everybody creates.”

Will Hermes (grew up in Queens, a real New Yorker, writes for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, NPR, the Village Voice—helluva resume) has written a crazy cab-with-no-brakes panoramic superhero musical ride through the pot-holed dirty streets of Manhattan and the Outer Boroughs. The title? Love Goes to Building on Fire (note singular building) was the first Talking Heads single, released in 1977 but written in early 1975, (note the level of detail here) a catchy paean to fearful times in the big city when buildings really were on fire. Music during a kind of wartime.

Let me just say that the book buzzes, rattles and hums like a beat-up Fender Jazzmaster guitar plugged into a hot, overdriven amp about to blow a fuse, its tubes glowing like the streetlights outside CBGB or the Mercer Arts Center. Amiably written in straight-ahead, three-chord, unornamented prose, it is at its best when Hermes throws in his own aching tales of teenage sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in Queens with the glittering Manhattan skyline in the distance.

The book is arranged chronologically by year—“1973: Wild Side Walking” or “1974: Invent Yourself.” Throughout, Hermes zooms in on a history-making musical event—say, the Ramones’ first gig at the dumpy CBGB on the Bowery. He tells us what happened in deliciously downtown graphic detail, tells us why it’s important, places it in social context, makes connections for the reader and then swoops away to some other gig happening uptown or around the block the following week—maybe Philip Glass’ performance at a loft just off Bleecker Street. The narrative moves fast across the grimy surface of the streets. Though expertly woven together to show the striking interrelationships among musicians, scenes shift and artists and genres mostly flash by like subway stops on a Lexington Avenue express. Deep musicological study à la Greil Marcus’ scholarly Lipstick Traces it’s not—there is no discussion of why all this happened, no illumination of its historical, political or musical origins. Another book awaits.

But I also must confess that I skipped and skimmed through maybe thirty percent of the book. Sorry, but I just don’t care about the salsa scene. I feel guilty. And the early days of rap and hip hop? Yes, it was instructive, and I have a new respect for Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc and 1520 Sedgwick Avenue and I admit it would be good for me to expand my universe, but I wanna get back to the good parts for me—the New York Dolls, Television, Talking Heads, Ramones, Springsteen, Philip Glass. If you are a potential reader of Love Goes…, and I believe you know who you are, you’ll skim too. Unless you’re an amazingly hip, culturally omnivorous, intense fan of every genre of music out there—rock, jazz, disco, salsa, hip-hop, classical (sorry, no country or blues here)—or somebody as passionate and well-informed as Will Hermes, you’ll skip around. But that’s okay—this is a book, it turns out, for dipping. Go ahead, whip through it and then return to it—open the book to any page and you’ll find something, a little trail to follow, a nugget from Hermes’ college of musical knowledge. And be prepared to fire up that iPod, or better yet, drag out your old turntable and dusty records—you’re gonna wanna hear what Will hears and you’ll learn a thing or two.

The central artistic pillars of Love Goes… turn out to be Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, two Jersey kids who rode the bus to the big city, played the dives before people cared. Both released their breakthrough LP’s in the autumn of ’75—Horses and Born to Run. (Ever notice how similar the covers are design-wise? Me neither. “Sans-serif comrades in arms,” says Will.) And I had no idea that Springsteen had such firm New York roots. On the book’s accompanying website (lovegoestobuildingsonfire.com, highly recommended itself), there’s a scratchy video from Max’s Kansas City, August 1972: Springsteen solo, acoustic guitar in hand, opening for the New York Dolls, of all people. He’s working through a tune that, in a year or so, will become Rosalita, an anthemic landmark, here caught in mid-creation. It’s an underground moment that underlines why these secret scenes are so important and still resonant today. Hermes’ book is full of them.

Patti Smith, now a National Book Award Winner and revered founding mother of punk, spoke to Hermes in 2005, recalling the captured fizzing magic recording Horses at Electric Lady Studios at 52 West 8^th Street, said, “I remember the exact moment where I peaked: there’s a line in it [Birdland], ‘Shoot ‘em up like light/like Muhammad boxer’—my little tribute to Muhammad Ali. That moment something happened. It was a moment where you shiver, y’know?

Will knows. Now I know. Something happened. Shivers.

“Please mister postman, look and see, if there’s a card in your bag for me.”

Marvellettes, 1961. Big hit.  Also fourth song, side two, the Beatles’ Second Album, spring of 1964—a bouncy bit of Beatlemania. A sprig of middle of the century sunshine, youthful optimism, teenagers in love. And we waited so patiently for that card, or just a letter. A million years ago. Gas was cheap and a first class stamp cost a nickel.

So what’s all this about closing post offices or maybe even eliminating the US Mail altogether?

Roll over Beethoven, say it ain’t so, Joe, and where you going with that gun in your hand?

Yes, I am an over-the-hill boomer, indulging in some faded as your jeans nostalgia trip.  But hold the phone. May I offer a sort of literary perspective?

Two-way long haul communications—other than an expensive long distance telephone call, an innovation of the early Twentieth Century—has been paper-based since, well, forever. In the Marvelettes’ day, you’d write a letter, put a stamp on it, and a few days later, after being routed through unseen networks of central offices and invisible sorters and carriers, an agent of the Federal Government would personally hand deliver your sealed, private message to its proper destination. Mostly. That patient girlfriend or boyfriend would get the message—signed, sealed delivered like Stevie Wonder, or maybe she wrote upon it—return to sender, like poor Elvis.

Rewind two hundred years. Thomas De Quincey, early Nineteenth Century English opium junkie, writer and ahead-of-his-time founder of the romantic notion of the Artist as Strung-out Outsider, which came to be central to the ethos of Twentieth Century Beats, jazzcats and rockstars, loved the Royal Mail. So much so, that under the influence of his beloved daily opium-based tipple, a potent-sounding concoction called Kendal’s Black Drop (also favored by Byron and Coleridge), he wrote a long essay called The English Mail Coach – or the Glory of Motion. Over its fifty pages or so, it morphs and twists like a light show at the Fillmore, becomes increasingly psychedelic, almost proto-Gonzo, highlighted by a vision of a scarlet and gold-clad crocodile driving a four-in-hand mail coach (we Moderns might here see a Hunter Thompsonian riff straight out of 1970s Las Vegas and a crazy ink-splattered drawing by Ralph Steadman). But the point is, the piece, written in 1849, by which time, the railroads had formed the basis for all mail service in the British Isles (De Quincey was not impressed with the railroads). The English Mail Coach nostalgically celebrated the romance, in De Quincey’s words, of the grandeur of communications, the nobility and necessity of the Mail, qualities, he felt, were lost by the mere speed of fifty mile-an-hour rail transport.

Here’s De Quincey describing the daily departure of the mail coaches from the central post office in London;

“Imagine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard Street…the absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, and the magnificence of the horses, were what might first have fixed the attention….every moment are shouted aloud by the Post-Office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years – Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow – expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions.”

In other words, he’s talking about person-to-person long-distance communications at the horse-based, natural speed of ten miles per hour.

A charming notion.

Much as I’d like to preserve the vintage village green aspect of all this, I fear in the long run that the future of paper-based mail seems doomed to go the same way—the way of the English Mail Coach—a comforting relic of a Currier & Ives autumnal nostalgia.

Today’s communications world is bit-based. Digital, not paper, flesh and bones analog. I know it, my kids know it and perhaps the good people in line at the Elm Grove post office suspect it.

The world shifted underneath Thomas De Quincey and it is shifting under us. Our nostalgically clinging to hundred year-old post offices will seem as quaint and Masterpiece Theatre cozy to a future Thomas De Quincey as the fine steeds of Lombard Street do to us now.

You may ask yourself then, where is the beauty and grandeur in today’s communications? Is there any? Does it require a wee draft of Kendal’s Black Drop to see?

Wouldn’t hurt.  But a little x-ray vision would be handy.

Today’s communications grandeur can be found in the vast arrays of monster electronic switches, clustered in digital clouds connected by many miles of flashing fiber optics found in the world’s humming core internet exchange points—where bit and bytes stream and flow ceaselessly, day and night at terabits per second and where our “cards and letters” are sorted and very precisely delivered nearly instantaneously anywhere in the world.  Can you see it?—right next to the crocodile in all his scarlet and gold Royal Mail finery.

And the Beatles and Marvelettes can look and see and just check their email. For the umpteenth time today.

On January 22, 1984, in what has become an iconic moment in advertising history, the first Apple Macintosh computer was introduced to the world. Striking a cinematic blow against an Orwellian Big Brother figure haranguing a grey and faceless army of brainwashed drones, an attractive and athletic young woman eludes pursuing stormtrooper guards and heroically hurls an iron hammer that shatters Big Brother’s huge black and white telescreen, ending oppression, freeing everyone—changing the world.  The voiceover intones—“1984 will not be like 1984.”

1984. You know—the dystopian novel by George Orwell written in 1948 that depicts a nightmare no-hope future where everything is rotten and nobody ever has a nice day.

Rewind your cassette tape. On an average spring day in central Tokyo, April 1984, an impeccably attired, attractive young woman, Masumi Aomame, late for a very important appointment but marooned in a taxi on a hopelessly jammed elevated expressway, takes an extreme measure. At the suggestion of her slightly odd driver, she escapes the highway using a little-noticed rickety emergency exit to street level underneath a prominent Esso put-a-tiger-in-your-tank billboard.  Before departing the cab, the driver cautions that if she does this, “Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There is always only one reality.” And with that, while Leos Janacek’s Sinfonietta booms ominously on the taxi’s high-end FM radio, Aomame enters a world where there are two moons in the night sky and everything she knows is wrong—to her 1984 will not be like 1984, it will be 1Q84. Magic.

With this bravura and memorable opening, Haruki Murakami’s vast, ambitious but flawed novel of everything, 1Q84, leaves the flat earth world of conventional fiction and begins the long, sometimes thrilling and entertaining, slog to the far distant end of some nine hundred beautifully written and translated pages. Not unlike flying to Tokyo on the Concorde, taking the long way around with the airbrakes on.

So, the title: 1Q84. The Japanese word for the number nine is kyu. The year 1984 is thus spoken sen kyu-haku hachi-juu shi-nen. The use of the English letter Q is a multilingual pun, signifying to the Japanese reader (and should to anybody else), “we ain’t in Kansas anymore.”—Reality has changed, old rules don’t necessarily apply. We see that a weird novella named Air Chrysalis is rewritten, conspiracies are hatched, passions explode, people die, lovers are lost, puzzles and questions posed. While 1Q84 is indeed a novel of everything, probing notions of reality, truth, death, religion, identity, time, connections, pop culture, anger, duality, mirrors and strange sex, (the novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace and the stories of Jorge Luis Borges come to mind), it is not an envelope-pushing, hard to follow postmodern pyrotechnical fizz-fest. At its heart, it is a love story, sometimes achingly romantic.

Our two protagonists, Aomame (a tough, outwardly cold chick who happens to be a very capable assassin of abusive men—think a Japanese Lisbeth Salander) and Tengo Kawana (a blandly quiet math teacher, novelist and ghostwriter), are both outsiders, both lonely. They are disconnected from each other and much of the world and have been since a long ago innocent grade school encounter was indelibly etched on their souls. They must traverse nine months in a strange new world filled with weird characters and baffling events, where, as in 1984, good days don’t happen. Stand-ins for Orwell’s Big Brother, the so-called Little People are maybe real, maybe unreal, and bizarre obstacles and complications must be overcome. Whether they know it or not, Tengo and Aomame are in love, and, like lovers everywhere, they must connect. Will they find each other? That is the venerable V-8 engine of the novel—though it is in much need of a slimmed-down tiger in its nine hundred-page tank.

But how does one edit a Japanese National Treasure, an acknowledged master of world literature, a writer perhaps in line for a Nobel Prize? How? Slashing lines, cutting entire episodes—go from here to there, eliminate that back-story, do we really need to know that? Or how about the long passages of half-baked arcana of that sinister religious cult—you lost me there. Let’s off-load some unnecessary baggage, fly higher.

Murakami, though, is a wizard. Using a technique familiar to his loyal readers around the world, Murakami, developing his theme of duality and reflected identities, alternates the narrative’s point of view chapter by chapter. He is convincingly inside Aomame’s head, then Tengo’s, and in Book 3 adds the dogged and froggish detective Ushikawa—only then does the novel finally achieve lift off. Murakami carefully braids the threads of the story, gradually tightening them like a Chinese finger trap, ultimately permitting the reader differing views of the same event, resulting in our seeing the action from a higher altitude, a crafty cinematic device. Throughout, each chapter’s title is a fragment of a line in the narrative—a delightful motif that prompts an engaging bit of paging back and forth as the reader works to decipher Murakami’s narrative trail of bread crumbs.

With a painstaking Japanese, perhaps Apple-like, attention to detail, the book itself is beautifully designed and produced. Fine paper, a lovely binding and a translucent moon grey rice-paper dust jacket with haunting frontispiece images of the twin moons of the story add to the proposition of the presence of a new world. Page numbers alternate, printing backwards, sometimes left hand, sometimes right.  And the book’s logo, 1Q84, is mirrored across facing margins, reflecting itself, helping to produce an effective and unique coherence to the novel as a complete package.

And yet. The magic and promise of the opening chapter, the image of the elegant Aomame descending that fragile stairway into the heart of a gritty new Tokyo, is not sustained over the many miles in the long distance flight of this novel.  The slim and beautiful Concorde flew fast and high. But the fat and beautiful 1Q84 aspires to do more, to fly us to the moon—too bad it staggers under its own weight, never quite leaving the orbit of this flat earth.

David Mitchell, after writing his first historical novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, said that one of the great appeals of the genre is that it “delivers a stereo narrative: from one speaker comes the treble of the novel’s own plot while the other plays the bass of history’s plot.”  Well, I’m here to report that Mitchell rocked the joint.  With late 18^th/early 19^th century Nagasaki as its gorgeous stage populated with a thoroughly convincing cast of European and Japanese characters, some good, many rotten, Mitchell has written something rare—a page-turner with writing that is achingly lovely. At its core, it’s a love story surrounded by a tale of treachery and betrayal. And the story doesn’t resolve until…the…final…sentence.  A stereo narrative indeed—and I turned it way up, up to eleven.

From the first atmospheric high-country page, Stevens’ world of peaks, forests, mesas, heroes, villains and creeps, comes at you like a winter storm at ten thousand feet—it’s dangerous and exhilarating.  The reader is plunged into a cold rocky mountain torrent of beautifully written prose and intricately crafted mystery.  Like the click of a well-made box—or the sudden snap of a twig in the dark, somewhere beyond the light of the campfire—Buried by the Roan is an immensely satisfying, rare pleasure.

My digital turntable is spinning.  I have flipped on the magical Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Rob Young, writing in his marvelous new survey of Britain’s “visionary music” of the last one hundred years, Electric Eden, calls the piece, “magisterial…gliding out of the dock like a gigantic galleon.”  This gorgeous orchestral poem has been a favorite of mine for decades and it doesn’t take much prompting for me to turn it up loud, allowing the music’s alchemy air to breathe.

My mental turntable is spinning.  Segueing from the romantic gloom and feminist valor of Jane Eyre, now I am immersed in the romantic gloom of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.  Like Jane Eyre, Hardy’s novel is firmly planted in the earth, under heavy horses plodding over tracks high in the bracken of the moors, the roll and yaw of misty meadows and sun-spackled greenwoods that breathe and communicate deeply not only with the reader but with its author and his characters.  Hardy’s mythical Egdon Heath, remote, sparsely populated and moody, is a character in itself:

“The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night, its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.”

Writers don’t do this very often.  Certainly place can be critical in fiction, when vividly described it is a delight and becomes part of the fabric of a story, but it is rare when the landscape listens or waits.  An organic being. Faulkner comes to mind.  Flannery O’Connor.

Marvelous.

Advancing the clock ahead to mid-20^th century England and following Electric Eden’s beautifully written road over the hills and far away, I come to the tragic story of Nick Drake, a Keatsian Romantic with a guitar in 60’s/70’s London. Pink Moon, his third and final album, released in 1972, is a spare, brooding and influential masterpiece, even among young hipsters today. Young writes, “it is possible to hear the Blakean attempt to ‘Hold infinity in your hand/And Eternity in an Hour.’”

Whoa.

Dying early and leaving behind a small musical body of work, like a hippie Chatterton or Shelley, Drake’s music depicts a paradise, lost to all things Modern that might be found again if:

“…we all abandoned the calendar of industry, fashion and routine, slowed down to the magical time, stepped far beyond the chime of a city clock, took more time to hear what the trees whisper, what the sea sings and the moon brings, dusted by oak, ash and thorn, we might yet be granted a glimpse of Paradise.”

With that, I remember Robert Plant wistfully asking the LA Forum audience in ‘73, “Remember laughter?” as the band launched into Going to California, a magical landscape, the Golden State.

Don’t scorn the happy, hippie sentiment. We could use a bit of that these days.

William Blake, in 1810, wrote:

“The Nature of my Work is Visionary or Imaginative;

It is an Endeavour to Restore what the Ancients called the

Golden Age.”

Quickly, I acquire Pink Moon from iTunes, and Drake’s words and music haunts my darkened garret in summertime Wisconsin, fireflies blink a strange semaphore under the ancient trees and cicadas sing a buzzing chorus, reveling in the midsummer Midwestern heat.

Forgive me. I am working on my Blakean ear.  It’s not there, yet.

Writers—how about you?

Breathing landscapes, whispering trees. Winking moons. Chorusing cicadas. Do they speak to you?  I mean, do they really speak to you?

Let’s take this a step further.

May I ask, when was the last time some bird on a fence spoke to you, philosophizing, grinning, puffing on a stogie?  What did she say?  Did you write it down? Has it gone into your work?  Or how about last Sunday, did the mob on Monkey Island at the Bronx Zoo offer inappropriate, insulting commentary on your presence?   Were they making a valiant stab at interspecies communication?

This is nothing new.  Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickinson, Melville, Kipling, Thomas Pynchon, Jane Smiley have all done it—a focus on an unexpectedly sentient character, from Scylla and Charybdis, to Pynchon’s Learned English Dog to Ahab’s white whale.

Early drafts of my novel, Pepperland, included talking crows, rhyming parrots, smart-alecky teddy bears, wise-guy roaches and lobsters hurling fastballs in a Chinese restaurant. In the end, only the teddy bear survived.  Call it evolution, the survival of the fittest.  Or maybe I came to my senses.  Or it was just sensible editing.  Or maybe I was still discovering the story. But, still, it was all there and it seemed right, at the time.  Maybe it was.

Readers may know that I’m fiction editor of Hunger Mountain, a Journal of the Arts based in Montpelier, Vermont. What you may not know is that our forthcoming print issue has got a theme going on—the menagerie of the imagination.  We’re featuring out-of-left field writing that dives deep into a menagerie of the imagination, or, in other words—a trip up critter creek.  Cats and dogs, dogs and cats, bats, spiders, pufferfish, haints, lions and tigers and bears—oh my!  Wonderful stories by wonderful writers, exploring this strange world of critter creek.

Don’t worry—you won’t need a paddle, up on critter creek.  You won’t spring a leak.