I recently found myself mischievously giggling at a bar with a friend as we conspiratorially agreed that David Byrne was not as clever as all that!

I have spent the last three decades (so, well after high school's absolute reverence) proudly standing by Talking Heads. I briefly abandoned them for all their post Speaking in Tongues LPs; that excellent album came out right before my senior year of HS (the earlier Remain in Light, of course, is their masterpiece). But I enthusiastically returned to the 1977-1984 set sometime in the late 1990s as a zealous advocate, counting them as one of the very few artists from my era that actually mattered anymore; Prince seems like another? (It's funny, in high school, I wrote and recorded a song with the lines: "I dig the Talking Heads/they might not stand the test of time/But remember, remember, remember." I'll suffer the cringe factor and link it. )

I've even affectionately nicknamed one of my Seattle bestys "David Byrne"—not only is he a quirky, urbanist planner who bikes everywhere, but he looks like Byrne! Handsome fellow. (He also has the same initials.)

However, over the past year, with the real David Byrne's crafted & gleeful socially awkward personality taking center stage as he continues to produce and produce and produce THE SAME THING (and with all the Stop Making Sense anniversary hoopla), I'm finding I'm finally tiring of his 1980s comedic cynicism (Stephen Colbert is the modern apotheosis of the Byrne shtick).

And so, I recently found myself mischievously giggling at a bar with another cherished Seattle friend, Charles Mudede, as we conspiratorially agreed that David Byrne was maybe not as clever as all that!

How wonderful to see my incorrigible pal go public with his contrarian take in which he topples Byrne (“the soundtrack of gentrification” !) while simultaneously honoring his affinity for him. "If David Byrne had been on our City Council, he would have lost last week," Mudede writes, lamenting this month's conservative backlash.

My Piano Set; “Love Potion No. 9;” COGNOSCENTI Potion No. 44.

Here’s the 6th installment of ripping-off the New Yorker’s weekly Take Three column where one of their staff writers summarizes three things currently preoccupying their brain.

Here’s my brain this week:

1) Playing my piano set.

You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me (1962) Smokey Robinson & the Miracles Stoned at the Nail Salon (2021) Lorde Carry Go Bring Come (1963) Justin Hinds & the Dominoes Police & Thieves (1976) Junior Murvin

And for the encore:

Picture This (1978) Blondie

I can’t play the piano, but I can play these songs on piano. Ever since 2021, I’ve set out to learn a batch of songs over the course of the year, one per month. That’s how I approached the assignment in 2021 and 2022; here’s a 10,000-word essay I wrote called “Absolute Beginner Blues” about the 2021 set.

Unfortunately, my ability to play each song evaporates as soon as I start learning the next one. This year, I realized it was time to change my approach: quality over quantity, as they say.

So, I’ve I made sure to have each song fully imprinted before moving on. As 2023 comes to a close, I’ve got the four songs I listed above well in hand. The Blondie encore is a personal favorite from my 2022 set that I knew I’d be able to re-learn quickly. I added it to this current set as a cool-down after rollicking through Police & Thieves.

Police & Thieves , which I originally knew because of the marvelous Clash cover version (1977), is the apotheosis of the set for me (I get lovingly lost in the reggae rock punctuation). I learned Police & Thieves from the sheet music to Junior Murvin’s original version, but I’ve combined it with the Clash’s arrangement and come up with a version that’s both melancholy and exuberant.

There’s an excellent jazz vocal version of Police & Thieves by Jamaican-London soul singer Zara McFarlane from her 2013 album If You Knew Her.

2. I am setting out to learn one more song on piano this year—the Clover’s 1959 doo-wop rock & roll hit Love Potion No. 9 written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

I started learning it this week, and after some confusion about the jarring opening D#-F#-G# chord, I asked my music genius friend Eliza (also my boss at work) what she made of it. She noted that this triple black key triad was a perfect half-step below the more cogent e minor chord, E-G-B, that starts the action a micro beat later; the song is in e minor. Eliza theorized: Maybe it’s a guitar thing, like you’re supposed to slide into the e minor, adding, But I’d leave that out on piano, it’s suited for guitar not piano.

But wait! The odd D# chord shows up again right away at the top of the very next measure. Ah ha! It’s not a guitar thing, it’s a doo-wop vocal swoop thing right into the e minor. This slurred batch of notes at the top of the song—and at the top of every verse—provides a Get-Set-Go jolt every time.

This discovery attuned my music theory antennae, and as I work through the rest of the song, the revelations are pouring in. For example, there’s an A# slide into a B that announces the chorus. This trick echoes the earlier slide, making the refrain all the more exciting.

3. Speaking of potions, I have to tout San Francisco-based perfume sorcerer COGNOSCENTI for their Fire & Rain scent. A few years back, as part of a New Year’s Resolution to pay more attention to vanity, I ended up ordering some perfumes from this small company. If I remember correctly, I was looking for a fancier version of the hippie scent I liked from my rock & roll youth—carrot oil. Carrot, it turned out, wasn’t popular with the grown-up market. The search led me to COGNOSCENTI, one company that still seemed to understand. They had a magical scent: No. 19, warm carrot.

I’m back on the vanity kick right now, and I returned to my trusted carrot-friendly small business. This time I chose No. 30, Hay Incense.

But the winner has turned out to be the complimentary sample they sent along with it, No. 44, Fire and Rain. I find myself going with a splash of Fire and Rain more often than No. 30. It’s not because I’m disappointed in the birch leaf-leather-oakwood musk of the Hay Incense, it’s because the surprising pine and charcoal combo of the award-winning Fire and Rain—it just won an honorable mention in the Artisan category from IAO (the Institute for Art and Olfaction!)—is swoon-inducing. My complimentary ampule has just about run out.

Charles Dickens’ Hard Times; Trumping the pro-choice vote; a 1963 Ska hit, “Carry Go Bring Come.”

Prompted by the New Yorker’s weekly “Take Three” column, where one of their staff writers summarizes three things they’re into this week, here’s Week #5 of my own version.

1) In last week’s installment, when I was obsessing over Friedrich Engels’ Manchester exposé, The Condition of the Working Classes in England, I noted that Engels’ poetic writing was giving me everything I could ever hope to get from a Dickens’ novel—and without the Byzantine plot lines.

Well, burn on me. Or at least a dose of irony: It turns out, I was clearly craving the excitement you get from fictional dramas and characters. This week, I can’t get enough of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), a class-conscious novel set in a fictionalized Manchester, Coketown. I was initially drawn in by the novel’s circus outcast Sissy Jupe, but as I read on and the book introduced: 1) a House of Commons sub-plot, 2) a mysterious old lady who’s spying on capitalist cheiftan Josiah Bounderby, and most of all, 3) a downcast Coketown factory “Hand,” laborer Steven Blackpool (whose Dickensian name ties right back to Engels’ purple prose about Manchester’s beshitten streets), I’m hooked.

2) Doubt and pessimism. I can’t help turning last week’s pro-choice wins in Red states (Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky), and this week’s equally excellent news about a trans rights win in rural, Republican Texas (!), into an ominous realization: What I think we have learned from pro-choice wins in Red state's is not the Democrats have a winning issue with abortion, but that MAGA is pro-choice. They are more libertarian and libertine than evangelical.

What we’re witnessing in these Red states is a libertarian lean that may actually align them with pro-choice—and even pro-trans voters. Sure, they’re apparently willing and ready to throw women and queers under the bus in a Presidential election year (because, again, they don’t care about women and queers), but big reveal: Trump districts do not toe the Christian conservative line. This means, while Democrats are banking on pro-choice voters to help carry the day for Biden and the Ds in 2024, it’s not going to work because plenty of them will vote for Trump.

Trump voters are drawn to something else. As opposed to “family values,” what’s actually motivating the populist right is an angry mix of racism, Nativism, and the lawless bravado of Trumpist ideology that conjures a laissez-faire fantasy of (white) American liberty. I’m scared, and obsessing that this line of resentment politics will trump any pro-choice vote next year.

*UPDATE, 12/5/23: Having had more time to sit with this unwieldy theory, I’ve gotten slightly more articulate about it:

This recent NYT headline: "Talk About Abortion, Don’t Talk About Trump: Governors Give Biden Advice" gives me an opportunity to make a scary prediction about 2024. I think what we've actually learned from the recent string of pro-choice wins in Red states isn't that Democrats have a winning issue with abortion, but that lots of MAGA voters are pro-choice. Certainly, the evangelical wing is anti-abortion, but the basic MAGA voter is more libertarian and libertine, and they don't want the government butting into their private lives. I predict that 2024 exit polling in swing states like AZ (where Democrats are planning to run pro-choice initiatives) will show that tons of pro-choice voters overlap with pro-Trump voters. Sure, Democrats will come out to vote pro-choice, but the measures will not siphon Trump voters. Meanwhile, the measures will also bring out more evangelicals, and they'll tip the balance. This will be the stunned pundit class analysis on the morning that Trump wins it. : ( P.s. I think the recent, surprise pro-trans win in a Red, small town outside Dallas, TX reflected a similar MAGA voter sensibility.

3) Another dispatch from piano practice: I’m not reveling in Justin Hinds & the Dominoes 1963 Ska hit “Carry Go Bring Come” as much as I was recently reveling in Lorde’s “Stoned at the Nail Salon” and Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” (two earlier obsessions to make this list). But I am obsessing over this Jamaican pop number, nonetheless.

Here’s what’s going on: The sheet music arrangement I’ve got for “Carry Go Bring Come” doesn’t match the record so well. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time lovingly experimenting with the score to make it align with the jumping recorded version that first drew me to this early Ska tune.

The Tennis Practice Wall at Volunteer Park; The Condition of the Working Class in England; Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, 1938

I still haven’t settled on a title for this weekly summary of current obsessions; nor to be honest, do my weekly preoccupations often qualify as full-blown “obsessions.” But, in copying the New Yorker’s weekly “Take Three” column where a different New Yorker staff writer sums up three things they’re currently into, I’m starting to think it’s a surprisingly accurate way to chronicle one’s life.

I’m still sick from the stink of anti-Semitism that’s closing in right now, and which commandeered my thoughts in last week’s installment, but my head did get caught up in some revitalizing stuff this week.

#4

1) Hitting at the Volunteer Park tennis court practice wall.

I was breaking a salubrious sweat within five minutes of volleying against the DIY, wood slat wall affixed (years ago?) to the fence at this secluded city tennis court. I was gleefully sore the next day knowing I’d gotten a gratifying work out slide-stepping between my forehand and backhand, leaning into swatting the ball with a grunt as if I were my favorite WTA star (and this week’s sub-obsession) Aryna Sabalenka. Speaking of, I finished up by practicing my serve, smashing the balls with abandon, hitting some obvious Wimbledon aces.

I biked over to the courts Friday afternoon (singing “Sabalenka Friday” as I went) and again on Wednesday morning, (singing “Sabalenka Morning”); I would have gone Monday morning too if it hadn’t been raining.

2) Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Engels’ materialist poetry is everything I want from a Charles Dickens novel without the labyrinthine plots; he writes with literary flair: “The streets uneven, fallen into ruts; masses of refuse, offal, and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys.”

He’s also a thorough reporter, documenting his tale of two cities—the wealthy and the poor living side by side as a revealing function of industrial capitalism—with columns of stats and excerpts from government reports.

I’m only a third of the way through this urban prole manifesto, but so far, it’s all sumptuous and serious prose: “The more elegant commercial and residential quarters hide the grimy working-men’s dwellings; they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.”

3) Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall

Benny Goodman on Klezmer-induced clarinet motifs. Gene Krupa on horse-hoove drum rolls. And Jess Stacy on sly piano.

My old dad turned me onto this moody yet rowdy live set of big band swing when I was a teenager. I’ve lovingly returned to it on occasion, but this time, its pop shapes, Mahler-esque arrangements, slight blues bent, and Gotham city beats have me cheering along with the sold out crowd.

The Ugly Rise in Anti-Semitism

Week #3

Unfortunately, my weekly “Current Obsessions” re-cap is getting choked by one anxious, overriding obsession this week: the ugly rise in anti-Semitism.

Just like African Americans told whites like me when we were appalled in 2016 at the overt racism of the Trump campaign and his subsequent election: This antisemitism is nothing new.

I’ve felt its heat my whole life, particularly in lefty circles, and yes, at my woke college decades ago.

Of course harsh criticism of Israel is warranted—and has been for a long time—nor is it inherently anti-Semitic to criticize Israel. But it’s not hard to detect the sickness of anti-Semitism when its embedded in those critiques, as it often is.

What makes this week so troubling is that anti-Semitism is out in the open now (even popular) , seething and loud.

Open Anti-Semitism had already been elevated by the right wing Trump era, which makes sense given that Trump’s Nativist America First rhetoric —called out and denounced during its original incarnation in the 1940s by Woody Guthrie !—is steeped in the historic tropes of anti-Semitism. QAnon’s focus on saving the children, for example, is just an updated version of age old conspiracy theories about Jews killing Christian babies.

I wish I could be obsessed this week with the tune I’m currently polishing on piano, “Carry Go Bring Come,” by Justin Hinds & the Dominoes; or with the book I just finished, Tomorrow Will Be Better by Betty Smith (or the one I just started, The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels); or by Benny Goodman’s famous 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall, which I’ve been listening to all day (loving the Jewish Klezmer vibes);

or even by my new vintage 1966 Mod sweater.

But the pathology of anti-Semitism is too heavy today. I’m having a hard time thinking about anything else right now or thinking that the world is a safe place for me to be.

Herbarium, botanical art print black Comforter, Microfiber Polyester Queen; “Stoned at the Nail Salon;” Up-zoning.

Here’s Week 2 of my own private version of the new New Yorker’s “Take Three” column where one of their writers summarizes three current personal obsessions. These are my current obsessions:

1) Despite the global horror show and the national shit show, it’s been a slow week for me personally; one that never seems to have actually started. I blame that on Obsession No. 1: My new 88” by 88” (queen) Black Herbarium vintage inspired botanical art print Comforter / Microfiber Polyester.

I bought it from Society 6, the online market where independent artists sell their goods on demand. It’s where I also got my Creature of the Black Lagoon shower curtain a few years ago. For months, I’ve had my hopes set on a new duvet (or comforter? or quilt? or bed cover?); I couldn’t quite get the search term right. I’ve always just called the cozy, thick top blanket a “pizza sheet.”

Specifically, I wanted a masculine pattern—dark colors? stripes?—but simultaneously, I didn’t want it to be glum nor American Psycho macho. I wasn’t finding anything on sites like Nordstrom, so I ventured over to Society 6, and they had the exact type of pattern I was looking for. Now I know what I meant by a “masculine” pattern: I meant a night forest, like a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story. This one was desinged by an artist named Iz Ptica.

Bonus: They were serious about the “microfiber polyester” technology; this comforter seems to combine low-grade electric blanket warmth with feathery ease. And even though my previous comforter was queen size, this one means it, providing endless cover for your feet. It arrived last Saturday, and I’ve been staying in ever since, forgoing my usual evenings out, and just chilling in bed instead. And going to sleep early.

2) It took practicing Lorde’s melancholy ballad “Stoned at the Nail Salon” on the piano to knock Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me” from the No. 1 spot on my personal music chart.

For weeks, I couldn’t get enough of practicing the 1962 Smokey Robinson hit; it was on last week’s obsession list. I’d been rehearsing it day after day throughout September and October until I decided this week it was time to hone another tune, lest I drive my neighbors crazy. I picked this aching Lorde ode to wistful self indulgence, which I first learned to play this Spring. It’s the second single off her remote (in a late-period Prince kind of way) 2021 LP, Solar Power. I’m stoned on this song.

My favorite lyric the first time around was her teenagers-in love-during-dystopia line: “We'd go dancin' all over the landmines under our town.” But this time, I’m swept up in this: “Spend all the evenings you can with the people who raised you/‘cause all the times they will change, it'll all come around.” These lines cap the song’s shift from the key of D to its relative minor, b—a move that cycles things down, almost impossibly, to an even more dolorous vibe—before rescuing it with a strain of hope.

3) My up-zone zealotry is at peak YIMBY this week. It’s because I’m currently reading M. Nolan Gray’s zoning abolition treatise Arbitrary Lines—from which I learned that up-zone doesn’t just mean more height, but means liberalizing the whole building envelope for more apartments.

My up-zone fervor was matched by two encouraging recent New York Times articles— ”California Slams San Francisco for ‘Egregious’ Barriers to Housing Construction” and “New York City Has a Bold Plan to Fix Its Housing Crisis. Will It Work?” — that seem to indicate up-zones are the zeitgeist coast to coast.

I will say: I wish the NYC plan didn't restrict the big buildup to areas that are already dense. But this note was a pleasant surprise: "One component would also make it easier to build smaller apartments, like for single-room occupancy, that could be relatively cheap to rent."

Joanna Garcia; Andrea Jin; “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me.”

@joannagarciapiano

I’m stealing the conceit of this new? New Yorker column on obsessions. It’s called “Pick Three.” Here’s the idea: a staffer writes quick summaries of three things they’re currently devouring. For example, this week’s installment features: an Instagram account called @lastnightatthemet which “documents peacocking at Lincoln Center;” a “jasmine and orange blossom” Dior “scent” called J’adore L’or, “an elegant, full-fat perfume” that “smells like pulling yourself together;” and the new album from Laufey, Bewitched, which is supposedly “a cross between Snow White and Astrud Gilberto—ideal background music for lingering into the night.”

Well, here are my three obsessions for the week 10/16/23:

1) I kill a lot of time on TikTok.

And though I unfortunately still get a lot of Boomer-centric guitar players and ladies in bikinis, I have been able to nudge my algorithm toward pretty adagio piano clips.

My favorite Tik-Tokker is piano teacher Joanna Garcia. Playing piano with wild eyes and revelations, she shares her unabashed passion for things like “the supernatural darkness of d minor” and the “exploratory reverie and painful depths” of Mozart’s The Fantasia, explaining the chords and melodies as she has at the keyboard.

She’ll often play a short phrase from a piece, rising from the piano bench in slight ecstasy as she does, before pausing to ask, “where do you imagine it might go next?” She’ll plunk out a few notes  (“maybe here?”) and then, wagging her finger, “no, it doesn’t do that. Listen to what it does do.” She then proceeds to close her eyes, lean into the music and sway to the “crazed chords” as she narrates music theory and communes with the spirit.     

(I also love going to sleep to this piano guy’s YouTube videos: Complete Piano Theory Course: Chords, Intervals, Scales & More! )

2) Speaking of TikTok, which is maybe the larger obsession here, I’m currently riveted by comedian Andrea Jin. I can’t get enough of her droll disbelief at the dumb world around her.

 3) Still, after a month of practicing this song, I remain obsessed with playing Smokey Robinson’s 1962 hit ”You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” on piano. I’m still smoothing out the second “you’ve really got a ho-old on  me” in the call & response chorus, making sure I land the combination G# (in the left hand) with the F# in (in the right hand) before segueing into the climactic 3rd “you really got a Ho-oh-old on me.”

I am Interviewed by a Prolific Skateboard Academic

Prolific pop culture critic and academic Roy Christopher wrote one of my favorite non-fiction books of the past five years, Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines The Future, which I’ve lovingly placed on my bookshelf right beside classic cultural texts Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang, Cut ‘N’ Mix : Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music by Dick Hebdige, and How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt (not as monumental, but a personal revelation).

“An aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid… [who] holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin” and who currently teaches at the School of Communication at the University of North Florida, Christopher says of himself that he “marshals the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.” I simply call him a skateboard academic! And marvel at his knack for on-point puns: “Ch. 1 Endangered Theses;” “Ch. 2 Margin Prophets;” “Ch. 7 Return to Cinder;” “Fear of a Hacked Planet.” He’s got some catchy soundbites too: “Ch. 6 Let Bygones be Icons,” “we’re not passing the torch, we’re torching the past.” The pranks match the deceptively playful, but historic topic of his book: DJs as hackers “retrofitting, re-functioning, and willfully misusing the techno-commodities generated by the dominant culture.’”

I met Christopher in 2019 when I came upon his Dead Precedents reading at Elliott Bay Books. Knowing nothing of him beforehand, and suddenly captivated, I asked an audience question (which I never do) about William Gibson and Caribbean music. We ended up getting drinks next door at Oddfellows with his wife and our mutual friend, Charles Mudede (who had emceed the whole bookstore event.)

We have stayed in touch ever since; meaning, I subscribe to Christopher’s newsletter, and I’m continually awed by his non-stop writing and non-stop mind. I asked him to blurb my book The Night of Electric Bikes earlier this year, and he did.

In a cool turn of events, Christopher interviewed me this past weekend and quickly posted it on his blog this afternoon.

I seem to talk a lot about Billie Holiday. Here’s the third mention out of four or five: “for me, Billie Holiday’s small club dates in 1930s and ‘40s Manhattan are one of the crowning achievements of human kind’s city experiment.”

I also describe my long lost “Transit Singles” project as “kind of a mess” and take a stab at describing my current project:

Over the course of the collection, these wayfinding poems become less about city geography, and start to chart other paths: events that lead to events, books that lead to books, thoughts that lead to memories.

These shorter wayfinding poems are paired with larger poems about retail kiosks in subway stations, ancient Athens, Joshua Tree, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, affordable housing, kiss and rides, greenhouses, Hermes, and other city subjects.

“I want to put up posters/on the newspaper boxes/on the banks/and on the Stores”

Those are the opening lines to a song I wrote 30 years ago. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that I was yearning for life in the city; this was right after college when I was making a real go of it with my band in Minneapolis.

(To give you a sense of what a misfit I was, my band was called The Diary of Anne Frank String Quartet; literally, my aesthetic and aspirations did not fit the Midwest. you can find some of the music here. )

Those lyrics convey my reverie about livivng at the center of a scene—a vital time and place where my music would be some sign of all the action. In my imagination, the idea of defacing newspaper boxes (the media), banks (capitalism), and stores (commercialism) was an integral part of my music fantasy.

This wish to be both living in the swirl of a city scene and besmirching the city at the same time, points to a defining aspect of urbanism. Marking up a city—be it with posters, graffiti, gigs, sloppy romance, protests, starting new businesses, adding new buildings, painting new bike lanes, replacing parking spaces with microparks—captures the beauty of city living. As home to millions of people, cities cannot remain in stasis or intact. Mirroring the fact that so many souls, brains, and miles of DNA & skin have set up shop in one place, cities are constantly rebuilding themselves on top of themselves in a messy, iterative process.

Putting up posters was perhaps my favorite part of being in a band. And, though it’s on-line only now, I’ve transplanted the tradition into my poetry practice.

Here are this year’s gig posters (including the most recent one for this Saturday’s reading, opening for Paco & the Cradle.)

Good Weather Bike Shop, 5/25/23, w/ Rob Joynes (computer beats) & Malia Seavey (vocals) from Seattle bands Fell Off and Salt Lick, respectively.)

Good Weather Bike Shop, 5/25/23, w/ Rob Joynes (computer beats) & Malia Seavey (vocals) from Seattle bands Fell Off and Salt Lick, respectively.)

…

And here are some posters from previous readings, dating back to 2018, when I first started reading in public:

Vermillion, 5/25/22, w/ Angie Louise on transit oriented piano pop.

St. Andrew’s Bar & Grill, 10/29/19

St. Andrews Bar & Grill, 10/29/19

St. Andrew’s Bar & Grill, 10/29/19

I’m not sure what this was for. But it’s pretty.

Vermillion, 4/17/19, w/ Paco & Carolyn, and Leah

Vermillion, 4/17/19, w/ Paco & Carolyn, and Leah

Vermillion, 4/17/19, w/ Paco & Carolyn, and Leah

Vermillion, 1/24/19, w/ Leah Tousignant on transit oriented piano pop, and Sarah Anne Lloyd with Seattle Times erasures.

Vermillion, 1/24/19, w/ Leah Tousignant on transit oriented piano pop, and Sarah Anne Lloyd with Seattle Times erasures.

Vermillion, 1/24/19, w/ Leah Tousignant on transit oriented piano pop, and Sarah Anne Lloyd with Seattle Times erasures.

Vermillion, 1/24/19, w/ Leah Tousignant on transit oriented piano pop, and Sarah Anne Lloyd with Seattle Times erasures.

No show. Sometimes, you just want to make a poster.

Cloud Room, 9/27/18, w/ Emily Westman (piano) & Annie Jantzer (vocals) playing transit pop.

Cloud Room, 9/27/18, w/ Emily Westman (piano) & Annie Jantzer (vocals) playing transit pop.

Cloud Room, 9/27/18, w/ Emily Westman (piano) & Annie Jantzer (vocals) playing transit pop.

Cloud Room, 9/27/18, w/ Emily Westman (piano) & Annie Jantzer (vocals) playing transit pop.

Tonight!

Cloud Room, 9/27/28

Vermillion, 7/19/18

Vermillion, 7/19/18

Vermillion, 7/19/18

St. Andrews Bar & Grill, 4/26/18

Our Evidence-based Nightclubs

Three cheers for today’s excellent news from Manhattan.

I’ve been waiting for Congestion Pricing to happen in the U.S. for years; the stats from London, where Congestion Pricing has been on the books for two decades now, are impossible to ignore. It’s boosted transit use, lowered GHG emissions, and yes, reduced congestion.

I snapped this photo on my July 2017 trip to London

I also love how the surprise news challenges today’s conventional wisdom about the value of dense, urban downtowns. Post-pandemic, cities are supposedly dying as we apparently beg people to come back downtown. And yet, people in the suburbs (New Jersey) are clearly pissed about this news. Why? Because: They still fully understand that downtown is an important place to be.

I’ve long believed that urban centers provide free offsets to the stuck-up conservatives and the hypocritical liberals who opt for detached single-family homes and car culture lifestyles. While they frown at cities, these groups, at no charge, reap the universal benefits from all the transit-oriented, low-impact housing choices urban dwellers make.

I understand that many people are priced out of cities. But that’s the result of an intransigent resistance to zoning changes (more density) from both the suburbs and from single-family homeowners in cities themselves. Perversely, this anti-density pathology makes dense, transit-friendly zones more exclusive and, thus more expensive. If we would share the density regionally, a lot of problems, such as sky-high rents and car-dependent suburbs, go away; for example, it’s the opposite-of-efficient to run public transit through low-density neighborhoods.

So, why is dense NYC so damn expensive? Because it’s lit and everyone wants to be there. I’m glad they’re finally charging people to drive their cars into the mix.   

I kid you not, one of my earliest poems was about congestion pricing. It was called “Downtown is an Offset.”

My poems aren’t polemics like this anymore, but it’s a kick to haul this out today:  

Downtown is an Offset

Make drivers pay to enter downtown./ It’s the rejoinder to land/
use codes that have suspended habeas corpus./

If I was still the mayor,/
I would levy a lot-size tax to mitigate the impacts:/
high rent, silence, doggie daycare, maps./

Short of this executive decree, we must find a way/
to put a fee/
on the Philosophy of Hegel/

If you opened a nightclub, what would it be called?/

Just as cities tax things they want to discourage,/ like locusts,/
cities should make those whose yards grow private message boards/ pay to drive/

into/

Every Orchard & Delancey./
Every Istiklal Avenue./
Every Carnaby Street./
Every Midnight in the Rue Jules Verne./

After all, free rides and shrouded/
yards/
are subsidized/
by our evidenced-based nightclubs,/

and science-based bodies./

December, 2017

7/10/23. UPDATE. I wrote a column about all of this on PubliCola.

8/5/23. UPDATE. Excited to re-discover this old poem, I revised it and added it as one fragment in a new poem of collected fragments. Here’s the new version; the 4th fragment of 7 :

•

It helps to think of Emily Dickinson—

to know about souls and bodies —

evidenced-based and ajar.

To know trees by nightclubs , to know

land use by writ

of habeas corpus. If you opened a downtown haunt

on the Autumn pavement,

what would you call it?

Best Seller at Valium Tom’s Bookstore

Seattle Bike Blog Writes about my Reading

Seattle Bike Blog hyped my reading and linked the Q&A that Poetry Northwest did with me this month. They chose my favorite quote from the interview too, the one about the fascism I see in right wing anti-cosmopolitan posturing and left-wing asceticism alike.

Thanks Seattle Bike Blog editor Tom Fucoloro, who I actually interviewed two years ago for a PubliCola article on electric bikes. He gave me some great quotes about how the emergence of electric bikes was good news for bike infrastructure politics.

Transit Oriented Pop

5/25/23 at Good Weather Bike Shop. “That's the way the whole thing started/Silly but it's true/Thinkin' of a sweet romance/Beginning in a queue” —The Hollies, 1966

Rob Joynes & Malia Seavey (of the Seattle bands Fell Off @felloffband and Salt Lick @saltlick_ , respectively) understood the assignment. On Thursday, May 25th at Good Weather Bike Shop @goodweatherinseattle, they delivered a mesmerizing set of transit tunes arranged for weird computers (Rob) & ethereal vocals (Malia).

They blessed the audience with 21st Century re-arrangements of some classic mid-1960s pop gems : The Hollies’ “Bus Stop,” the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready (There’s a Train a Coming).”

5/25/23 at Good Weather Bike Shop.

I read from my new book The Night of Electric Bikes —and also sneaked in a brand new, unpublished poem: “Metro Election Sonnet,” giving the audience two choices for the first line: A) WITH Council Member Tersa Mosqueda’s name or B) WITHOUT.

Poetry Northwest Q&A

Poetry Northwest published a Q&A with me yesterday (May 23).

I'm still processing this. In my mind Poetry Northwest is the Washington Post.

I’m happy to say, the interview captures a few of the things that are near and dear to my poetry practice: My desire to push back against the idyllic, anti-urban notion of “uncontaminated” authenticity (both the right wing reactionary MAGA version …and the left wing ascetic version) ; my mini-history of today’s new urbanism in the context of both its feminist roots in Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson, and its throughline from the 1960s underground press to my alt-weekly experience in the late 1990s and 2000s ; my interest in urban planning concepts such as “desire lines;” and my wide-eyed interest in Greek mythology.

It's hard not to sound a bit loopy when you talk about poetry, so please enjoy the loopiness. Here's some: "Poetry gives you the room to explore these weird juxtapositions where you’re talking about a transit-oriented development, and you’re simultaneously talking about Athena. She rides a chariot, and we’re riding a bullet train."

An Electric Guitar Rendition

My longtime YIMBY comrade Dan Bertolet has returned to his 1990s roots. Last week, he released a My-Bloody-Valentine-demos-style set of pop tunes prompted by teenage poet laureates such as W.B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, e.e. cummings, and Robert Frost, along with a few other geniuses of verse: Louise Glück, Alice Oswald, and Wislawa Szymborska. He also sneaks in an Ocean Vuong poem! It’s an ambitious, shimmering 14-song set that Dan, going by Swirl & Ache (Frost), calls “Bonewebs, Hungry Seas, & Other Delights” (Oswald, I think).

Dan’s warm and plaintive vocals—featuring gracefully crafted recitative-like melodies—are word-for-word renditions of the poems. And the opening track is a rendition of one of my poems: “I’m Delighted My Young Avant-Garde Friend,” which was my attempt, back in 2019, to write a YIMBY villanelle.

Ultra teenage poet laureate Dylan Thomas wrote the famous villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” with the memorable repeated lines: “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” My pro-development version: “I’m delighted my young avant-garde friend/Let there be light, let there be infrastructure, amen,” which Dan leans into with a wicked overdrive guitar hook.

Here’s Dan’s explanation of his project:

“Hey there insta folks, I made some music and I guess it's good to share things that you make, so if you're game, copy/paste this bandcamp link:

https://swirlandache.bandcamp.com/album/bonewebs-hungry-seas-other-delights

”Over the past 16 months I got a bit obsessed with writing and recording little guitar pop ditties using other people's poems for lyrics. You all can blame @city_hex for getting me started.”

And here’s a recording of me reading the poem on the Cathexis Northwest web site back in 2021 (when it was first published.)

Poetry Journals are Published in the Spring

I’ve been posting a new set of poems every quarter going back nearly six years. I don’t typically speak in terms of business calendars, but I started thinking in terms of quarters when my ex—a former Microsoft engineer and now do-gooder entrepreneur—asked me without any irony: “What quarter do poetry journals usually publish?” and I answered gleefully: “Poetry journals are not published in quarters? Poetry journals are published in the spring!”

You’re not supposed to post your poems publicly if you want them to appear in literary journals; I’ve been submitting my poems to journals regularly since March 2019, and I only posted my quarterly sets on a private blog. I’ve written 27 of these secret collections since starting with the 28-poem set Opposite Hex back in November 2017.

I just finished writing my Q1 2023 collection, This Sounds Perfect I Want to Find It. Again: I can’t share it here because I’ve submitted several of the poems to a bunch of literary journals.

As a way to catalog all these quarterly sets, though, I’m listing them below: The title of the collection (bolded and underlined), the date, and the titles of the individual poems; 289 poems to date.

A handful of these poems have since been published in the real world too, either in journals or in one of my two books. I’ve bolded those too and have noted where and when they appeared.

This Sounds Perfect I Want to Find It, January -March 2023

280. Weekend Crowds

281. Saturday, January 7

282. Parking Lot Orchestra

283. Vines

284. Metamorphoses

285. Tuesday, February 14

286. Hermes, I’m Only Dancing

287. The Turnstile Market RN

288. This Sounds Perfect I Want to Find It

289. Saturday, March 11

Let Your Side Hustle Shine, October – December, 2022

266. Biking and Woo-woo (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

267. Teenage Fragment

268. The Partridge Family Underworld Liberation Front (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

269. The Kindness of a Pharmacist

270. Vinyl, Mirror, Papyrus

271. Are They Friends of Your Daughter, Demeter? (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

272. By Possibility, I Mean

273. The Trip to My Parents’ House Used to be a Palindrome (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

274. Catasterism (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

275. I’m Not Telling Anyone I’m Here

276. Lust

277. Hermes, I’m Only Dancing

278. Thursday, December 22 (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

279. December 27th Thru January 1st

Isabel Eyeballs & Other Poems, July-September, 2022

248. The Woman in the Tide Pools Smiles (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)
249. Mother of Demeter, Four Letters
250. Reaganism
251. Mistaken for Parks
252. Loops of leaves —Pentheus and Bacchus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses
253. The Scene of Scenes
254. Scene of Scenes
255. Last Night in Rockville, Pt. 1. Last Night in Rockville, Pt. 2
256. Testing for COVID at Midnight
257. When Poetry Arrives
258. Field of My Own
259. The Weight of Tram Wires in Lisbon
260. 14 Lines for Metropolitano de Lisboa
261. Isabel Eyeballs (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)
262. Into the Parallel World
263. When Poetry Arrives
264. Uh oh. Someone Spilled Some Euros
265. Biking and Woo-woo (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

Only in Malady to Discover, April-June, 2022

240. To the 7-11
241. Saturday Night in the World
242. Only in Malady to Discover (published in my 1st book, September 2022)

243. Data Kid Dared Fate (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
244. Gifted
245. Five Best Falling Asleeps This Month
246. The Mystery of Mahmoud Hassan Pasha (revised)
247. The Woman in the Tidepools Smiles (publshed in my 2nd book, May 2023)

I’m Living My Best Sylvia Plath Life, January -March, 2022

230. Synesthesia Mistaken
231. A Tanka to Remember a Particular Friday Afternoon
232. The First View of the Earth from the Moon
233. Ancient City
234. A Tanka to Remember Our Ancient City (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in Novus Literary Arts Journal, May 2022)
235. Your Fine Beginnings
236. I'm Living My Best Sylvia Plath Life (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
237. The Spirit of the Food Truck
238. The Drum Machine at the Union
239. Aerodynamics

Lambent in the Hey Day of Different World, October – December, 2021

221. Coming Home Safe

222. What was Chuck Berry Thinking?

223. Vamp Philosophy
224. Instructions for Sabbath
225. Nervous System
226. The Night of Lady Day
227. Original DJs in Strife
228. U. District Station Tanka (published in my 1st book as “Infrastructure,” September, 2022 and published in Novus Literary Arts Review, May 2022)
229. It’s Projected to be the Biggest City in the World (published in my 1st book, September 2022)

The Night of Electric Bikes, July-September, 2021

213. Inevitably, Bildungsroman (published in my 1st book as “Athena Dethroned, September 2022 and published in my 2nd book as “Athena Dethroned,” May 2023)
214. These Flowers (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)
215. Shadow Bus (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
216. Time at City Spectacles (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
217. Maybe Anemones
218. The Night of the Electric Bikes
219. City Exegesis (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in Novus Literary Arts Review, May 2022)
220. For New Year's Eve You Drew a Diagram (published in my 1st book, September 2022)

The Sidewalk is Parallel to the Sky & Other Poems, April -June, 2021

207. The Mystery of Mahmoud Hassan Pasha
208. The Sidewalk is Parallel to the Sky (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in High Shelf, April 2022)
209. Sonnet #5,659,674
210. A Different Kind of Light Left on, May Sarton (published in my 1st book, September 2022)

211. Having Just Been to the Graveyard Yourself

212. Obstacle Course (published in my 2nd book, May 2023 and published in Change Seven, October 2021)

I Swear They Were Here, January – March, 2021

200. Celebrant
201. Your Only Witness
202. Who’s Afraid of Susan Sontag?
203. New Year’s Resolution, January 2021
204. Urban Moon
205. Falsework (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
206. Evelyn McHale Chooses the Tallest Building in the City (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and in my 2nd book, May 2023)

Headstands with Nehru, October – December, 2020

189. In the Parking Garage Below, 16 Spots Open
190. Headstands with Nehru
191. Donald Trump Does Not Understand Elvis Presley
192. Seeking Narratives
193. The Young Pharmacists
194. Come In (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)
195. L'histoire des émeutes
196. The Opposite of Fainting
197. Friday Per Se
198. Wayfinding (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)
199. We are Now as Far Away

Essential Trips Only, July – September, 2020

177. An Epigraph Grows in Brooklyn

178. How to Change the Conversation
179. The Need for Renunciation (published in my 2nd book, May 2023 and published Vital Sparks, November 2021)
180. Adjusting Levels
181. An Appointment to Keep
182. Outer Space
183. Two City Perspectives (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
184. The Most Charming Time of Youth
185. Ode to My Teen Pottery Barn Faux-Fur Bean Bag Chair
186. Ms. DeMatteo's Art Class
187. There's No Longer an Excuse Not to Read the Autobiography of Malcolm X
188. Dave's Algorithm

Parks Without Fail, April – June, 2020

167. The Blooming Economy
168. Cities Not Gods
169. In the Course of Life’s Events (published in my 2nd book, May 2023 and published in Cathexis NW Press, December 2021)
170. In the Fields Upstairs
171. Arterial Turns
172. Leave This Meeting
173. Parks Without Fail
174. Electric Music for the Mind and Body
175. A Vegan’s Praise of Slaughter
176. The Defector

We Climb the Wild Hill Wary, January – March, 2020

157. Wayfinding on a Date with My Weird Girlfriend
158. The Airbnb of Innisfree (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
159. The Encyclopedia of Heresies (published in my 1st book, September 2022, published in my 2nd book, May 2023, and published in CircleShow, May 2020)
160. A Food Truck in the Old City (published in my 1st book, September 2022)

161.  Bus Stop (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in Not a Press, October 2021)
162. Waveforms as They Are and as They Are Transformed
163. The Sound of the City
164. Sabbath Blesses Time Not Space
165. We Climb the Wild Hill Wary
166.  Linc Wheeler Parking Lot

164. The Pizza Principle
165. Guest House
166. The Innisfree Light Rail Extension (published in my 1st book, September 2022)

I Decided to Take the Day Off Work, October-December, 2019

150. A Question of Their Own
151. Teen Titans
152. Afternoon at Rest
153.  Upside Down Cross of Gold Speech
154. "What are the Words to White Man?" (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in the Halcyone Literary Review, June 2020)
155.  Reliquary
156.  Ric Ocasek Dream

Enchiladas are Served, August-October, 2019

144. The Transcontinental Railroad
145. Such a Great Ass Saturday
146. The Coronation of Summer (published in my 2nd book, May 2023, and published in the Lily Poetry Review, February 2020)
147. Linger Factor (published in my 1st book, September 2022, published in my 2nd book, May 2023, and published in Vallum, April 2021)
148. Sidewalk Plaque (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
149. Orange Julius

Shops Close Too Early, June & July, 2019

134. Home Remedy
135. Doldrums
136. Leave of Absence
137. From the Airport
138. If I Were Rich, I Would Commission Artists to Save the Cities (published in my 1st book as “Patron of Geography,” September 2022)
139. Word on the Street
140. Bunna Café
141. TBONTB (To Be or Not to Be) 1983
142. Dreaming After Reading Louise Glück
143. Dreaming after Reading Sylvia Plath

The Light Rail Blues & Other Planning Poems, Spring 2019

124. Teen Vogue Published My Villanelle

125. Station Access Planning (published in my 1st book as “Blue Balcony,” September 2022 and published in Bee House as “Blue Balcony” in August 2020)

126. Five Years

127. 1981

128. Not Even the Bernie Sanders/Hillary Clinton Debate Can Ruin This Perfect Day

129. 300 Riverside Drive

130. The Pedestrian Blues

131. Concerning Human Remains

132. The William Carlos Album Blues

133. The Green Piano

Outside, They’re Making All the Stops, February, March, April, 2019

116. I'm Delighted, My Young Avant-Garde Friend (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in Cathexis Northwest Press, December 2021)
117. Tehran Mary
118. Threepenny Policy Paper
119. Revelation to Genesis (published in Cathexis Northwest Press, October 2019)
120. On & Off
121. Lapsed Vegetarians

122. Lunch w Your Ex
123. City Planning Pantoum (published in my 1st book, September 2022, published in my second book, May 2023, and published in High Shelf, July 2019. This was the first poem I got published.)

Seven Modes of Thanksgiving, b/w Listen Closely Robot, November-December 2018

Seven Modes of Thanksgiving

97. Seven Modes of Thanksgiving
98. Tuesday
99. Wednesday
100. Thursday
101. Friday
102. Saturday
103. Sunday
104. Monday

Listen Closely, Robot

105. West Side Side Story
106. Feminism
107. The History of Fare Enforcement
108. Elf Power (published in my 1st book, September 2022, published in my 2nd book, May 2023, and published in Spillway, September 2019. This is the first poem I got accepted. It was accepted in April 2019.)
109. Marxist Decision
110. I’m Trained to See These Things
111. Sunday Night in a Blue City
112. Hafiz is the Guest of Honor at Hanukkah Dinner
113. Dinner (published in my 2nd book, May 2023)

114. Friday Night Orchestra

115. Safe House (January, 2019)

Center Platform, October-December, 2018

90. A Poem for My Daughter
91. Phenomenon
92. Whoever is Running Sound for this Dream
93. Center Platform
94. Pay Attention
95. Johnny Forget Keeps Track
96. Amy, Sad, Ranjit, Alyssa, Ann, & Paul

Flip the 26th, September-October 2018

80. Design Build
81. Jerry Garcia, You’re Tagged in this Tweet
82. A Science Fiction Novel I Will Write
83. Amplitude in the Micro Apartment
84. After the Dynasty
85. A Side of Black Beans Saves the Universe
86. On a Device Similar to a Ouija Board
87. Dead Sea Sonnet
88. Lax as AF
89. Bonus Single: 13 Ways of Seattle (Dub Version Remix)

 The Subway Arts Movement, July -September, 2018

65. The Subway Arts Movement (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
66. Mode Fetishist
67. Fainting Spells
68. Art Transit
69. Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, East Coast Time
70. Families in Motion
71. City Arts Movement
72. Split Level
73. Stealth 4-Plex
74. Witchcraft Oriented Development
75. Peace in the Middle East or at the Columbia City Farmers Market, at Least
76. The City, Pro Se
77. A Good Ass Saturday
78. Welcome to the Night Market
79. Playing Hooky

 When Headways are No Longer Measured in Buses, April-July, 2018

49. When Headways are No Longer Measured in Buses
50. You Had Me at Transport, Emily Dickinson (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in An Evening with Emily Dickinson/Wingless Dreamer, June 2021)
51. Crush Load (published in my 1st book, September 2022)
52. Last Night, the Mentalist
53. You May Also Like, 2018
54. Thirteen Ways of Seattle
55. Jewish Book Store, 11250 Georgia Ave. Wheaton, MD., 1971
56. Governance
57. Dance of the Seven Veils
58. Jews Will Not Replace Us
59. This Ain't No Disco
60. The Piano Teacher Said
61. Wrap My Arms Around the Parking Lot
62. A Tale of 2 Picnics & 1 Day-Glo Satanist
63. Heading Out the Door
64. Pedestrian Contradiction

Fear of Memphis, January –April, 2018

39. Dwell Time (published in my 1st book, September 2022, published in my 2nd book, May 2023)
40. Fear of Memphis
41. Ons & Offs
42. Advice to Robert Mueller (April, 2018)
43. I Can Never Quite Explain Why
44. Dub Shabbat
45. Chet Baker Version
46. The Official Remix
47. Nostalgia
48. Jenny Says to Revelate

 Five More Poems, December, 2017

34.  1356 flat7 653
35.  A History of Smart Girls
36.  Dear, Bar Stool Historians
37. After Extensive Research
38. A History of the City

The Neighborhood Planning EP, December 2017

29. I Didn’t Predict Any of This (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in The Halycone Literary Review, June 2020)
30. Downtown is an Offset
31. How is This Year Going to End?
32. Neighborhood Planning
33. I Don’t Miss Journalism

Opposite Hex, August -November  2017

1. The Suburbs
2. Down with it, Innocence
3. Absolute Flâneurs
4. Piano Teachers Row
5. Checklist for Her Setlist
6. Opposite Hex
7. Water the Plants
8. Teenage Time Machine
9. Five Examples of Urban Alchemy
10. 22nd Avenue Greenway
11. Cosmic Lee & Me Still Hate Reagan
12. Seamless Summer
13. Annual Report
14. Desire Bench (published in my 1st book, September 2022 and published in Not a Press, October 2021)
15. Three Penny Theory
16. Purge City
17. The Case for Making Drivers Pay to Enter Downtown
18. I’m Looking Forward to What You Do
19. Environmental Benefits Statement
20. When You’re Sad on Sunday Night
21. Rebellions Embedded in Infrastructure
22. When the Cement Falls Off My Face
23. For the Worse?
24. Parking Dharma
25. Incidental Use
26. The City Canon
27. I Want to be Close
28. City Council Endorsement

Other Seismic Moves Include…

NYT opinion writer and Columbia University professor James McWhorter has a piece in today’s NYT citing 1966 as the year woke politics emerged.

Agreed. I’ve always believed that my birth year, 1966—the year the Black Panther Party was founded, the year the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, the year the Velvet Underground was in the studio recording their first LP— was a Before-and-After year.

In fact, I have a poem about one of the many explosive events that took place in ‘66: The Sunset Strip Curfew Riots, which I believe were a herald and catalyst for merging two ascendant 1960s phenomenon—rock music culture and youth politics—into a more defined counterculture. Side note: The riots—which grew out of an L.A. rock radio station’s call to protest City Hall’s curfew crackdown on Sunset Strip’s teen music scene—also inspired the famous ‘60s tune: “Stop, children, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down…” (It’s a tune the aforementioned Velvet Underground probably scoffed at, but for what it’s worth, it becomes clearer and clearer as the decades go by that the seemingly disparate cultural factions of that time were part of the same change-agent movement.)

McWhorter’s essay is specifically about the shift in tone the Civil Rights movement took on that fateful year.

He begins:

The difference between Black America in 1960 and in 1970 appears vaster to me than it was between the start and end of any other decade since the 1860s, after Emancipation. And in 1966 specifically, Stokely Carmichael made his iconic speech about a separatist Black Power, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he led expelled its white members (though Carmichael himself did not advocate this), the Black Panther Party was born, “Black” replaced “Negro” as the preferred term, the Afro went mainstream, and Malcolm X’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (written with Alex Haley) became a standard text for Black readers.

Happy that a New York Times column was giving my pet theory about 1966 some play, I emailed McWhorter.

Josh Feit <jfeitinwords@gmail.com>

5:47 AM

to jm3156

Mr. McWhorter,

As a partisan '66er (I was born in 1966), I've long believed it was a
jump cut year in cultural history, and my bar stool theory always
cited Stokely Carmicheal's historic June '66 "Black Power" exhortation
in Greenwood, MS  as the main example.

So, thank you for your piece.

As you are likely well aware, other seismic '66 moves include: Betty
Friedan and (Civil Rights leader) Pauli Murray founding NOW; white pop
music flirting with the avant-garde as it shifted from bubble gum to
psychedelia (Beatles' Revolver, Byrds' 5D, Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, and
the Velvet Underground record their historic debut, for example);
Ralph Nader (and the corporate accountability movement) emerged with
Unsafe at Any Speed (December, 1965, but his famous congressional
testimony based on the book comes in '66); and the first LGBTQ riot (3
years before Stonewall) at San Francisco's Compton's Cafeteria, among
many other breakthroughs and mood shifts.

I recently published a book of poems (about transit, city planning,
and YIMBY politics, actually), but one poem in the collection,
"Sidewalk Plaque"—about the "Curfew Riots" on the Sunset Strip in
November, 1966—attempted to place that moment in context of the
zeitgeist. It definitely includes a line about Carmichael.

I've attached the poem. I hope you enjoy it.

Sincerely,
Josh Feit

Sidewalk Plaque

The #2 bus pulled up to Sunset & Crescent Heights. Google Maps said I’d arrived. The destination is on your right.

 Sightseeing in L.A. I’d arrived at a Chase Bank, a drive-through branch, fronting a strip mall parking lot. But the afternoon’s real destination was the adjacent traffic island.

 No address there and bare, but where once Love, Sloths, Seeds played a place called Pandora’s Box. (City Hall had worried Pandora’s myth was coming true on Sunset Strip. The kids were hopeful about this too.)

Their curfew riot was one of many Constitutional amendments that year.  Pauli & Betty starting NOW. Stokely saying “Power.” The riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.

Compton’s Cafeteria no longer exists, but at least there’s a plaque on the sidewalk.

 Compton’s

Cafeteria Riot 1966

 Here marks the site of

Compton’s Cafeteria where a riot

took place one August night when

transgender women and gay men

stood up for their rights and fought

against police brutality, poverty,

oppression and discrimination

in the Tenderloin

There’s no plaque at the barren traffic island on Sunset Strip. 

Allow me:

 Pandora’s Box

Curfew Riot 1966

Here marks the site

                                     where

                                      night

stood up.

You have arrived. Your destination is found in others.

Get on the Syllabus: What I’m reading and where it takes me.

2024 —

Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife , ©2019

Chris Stein, Under a Rock , ©2024

With his glitter makeup and long hair tales of living off welfare in abandoned lofts, playing bit parts in art film flops, and doing drugs with his band scene pal, precursor punk faerie rocker Eric Emerson, Chris Stein’s stories from early 1970s Lower East Side Manhattan overlap with Murger’s 1840s fables from the Left Bank.

With his first person account of the endlessly fascinating era when hippies were transforming into punks in NYC’s downtown art scene, Stein, who has a charming, humble and earnest online presence today, by the way, is working with rich source material (like the day in 1973 when his girlfriend Debbie Harry comes back to her Little Italy apartment from her job at a New Jersey salon with her hair dyed blond.)

Unfortunately, despite the perfect bohemian trappings, Stein writes with zero craft or reflection and the book reads as if he simply hit record and proceeded to reminisce without purpose. I have no idea, for example, why Stein loves, or even plays music in the first place. Or, for that matter, how his high school band ended up opening for the Velvet Underground.

Alas, I’m reading every word.

From 1975: “We went to some guy’s basement recording studio in Queens. Nobody had a clue where we were… It was miserably hot in the basement but we managed to get five tracks done, including a version of what would later evolve into ‘Heart of Glass.’”

Henri Murger, Scenes of Bohemian Life , ©1851

This is a hilarious precursor to all the (more serious) urchin chic fiction I love. I’m not sure why it took me so long to finish reading it.

Here’s what I wrote about it when I first started it in June, month ago. And with exception of wanting cite more of the constant side-splitting one-liners (which constitute every three lines of every story) and noting that it does offer a more serious side towards the end with Mimi’s death (and the great one-off short story about Francine’s death), my original account is captures it:

My own private city studies seminar (which last year, focused on mid-19th Century Industrial Revolution Manchester novels such as Elizbeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and this year, seems to be focusing on 21st Century Lagos novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Damilare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad), has suddenly returned to the 1850s, though not to Manchester.

It’s Paris this time.

I’m reading Henri Murger’s 1851 Scenes of Bohemian Life. Murger’s novel (more a collection of short stories starring a recurring crew of Latin Quarter young souls in their charming, starving-artist garrets) was the source material for Puccini’s famous 1896 opera La bohème.

I’m only 10 stories in, there are 23 in the collection, and to my surprise, as opposed to more bittersweet urchin chic literature like Bertol Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, or my favorite urbanist novel, Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners, this seems to be an all-out madcap comedy.

It’s as if the Marx Brothers were the main characters in 1001 Arabian Nights. The Marx Brothers in this instance being Rodolphe the poet, Marcel the painter, Schaunard the musician, and Colline the philosopher, gallivanting and stumbling their way through offhanded urban parables, constantly in need of rent (or date) money while pursuing their Quixotic masterworks, such as Marcel’s grand painting “The Passage of the Red Sea.”

A perfect example of Murger’s sit-com chaos plays out in the story “The Billows of Pactolus.” In this installment of Rodolphe, Marcel, Schaunard, and Colline’s merry poverty, named after a river from Greek mythology laced with gold ore sediment (presumably making its riches hard to grasp), Rodolphe suddenly comes into some money (500 francs!) and sets out to “practice economy” with the convoluted logic of a dreamer: the first thing he buys with his windfall is “a Turkish pipe which he had long coveted.”

""This is my design. No longer embarrassed about the material wants of life, I am going seriously to work. First of all, I renounce my vagabond existence: I shall dress like other people, set up a black coat, and go to evening parties. If you are willing to follow in my footsteps, we will continue to live together but you must adopt my program. The strictest economy will preside over our life. By proper management we have before us three months' work without any preoccupation. But we must be economical."

"My dear fellow," said Marcel, "economy is a science only practicable for rich people. You and I, therefore, are ignorant of its first elements. However, by making an outlay of six francs we can have the works of Monsieur Jean-Baptiste Say, a very distinguished economist, who will perhaps teach us how to practice the art. Hallo! You have a Turkish pipe there!"

"Yes, I bought it for twenty-five francs."

"How is that! You talk of economy, and give twenty-five francs for a pipe!"

"And this is an economy. I used to break a two-sous pipe every day, and at the end of the year that came to a great deal more."

"True, I should never have thought of that."

They heard a neighboring clock strike six.

"Let us have dinner at once," said Rodolphe. "I mean to begin from tonight. Talking of dinner, it occurs to me that we lose much valuable time every day in cooking ours; now time is money, so we must economize it. From this day we will dine out."

"Yes," said Marcel, "there is a capital restaurant twenty steps off. It's rather dear, but not far to go, so we shall gain in time what we lose in money."

"We will go there today," said Rodolphe, "but tomorrow or next day we will adopt a still more economical plan. Instead of going to the restaurant, we will hire a cook."

"No, no," put in Marcel, "we will hire a servant to be cook and everything. Just see the immense advantages which will result from it. First of all, our rooms will be always in order; he will clean our boots, go on errands, wash my brushes; I will even try and give him a taste of the fine arts, and make him grind colors. In this way, we shall save at least six hours a day."

Five minutes after, the two friends were installed in one of the little rooms of the restaurant, and continuing their schemes of economy.

"We must get an intelligent lad," said Rodolphe, "if he has a sprinkling of spelling, I will teach him to write articles, and make an editor of him."

"That will be his resource for his old age," said Marcel, adding up the bill. "Well, this is dear, rather! Fifteen francs! We used both to dine for a franc and a half."

"Yes," replied Rodolphe, "but then we dined so badly that we were obliged to sup at night. So, on the whole, it is an economy."

Needless to say, abiding by their delusional budgeting scheme, they promptly go broke. As the story concludes (and after firing their costly servant), Rodolphe muses: “Where shall we dine today?'“ and Marcel replies, “We shall know tomorrow.”

Emma Cline, Daddy , ©2020

I turned to one of my favorite contemporary novelists, Emma Cline—The Girls (2016), The Guest (2023)—to jar me out of my recent reading slump. And it worked. In this instance it was short stories, her riveting 2020 collection, Daddy.

Given that most of the 10 dark stories here play out in proximity to male violence—or the ubiquitous possibility of male violence—the title, as my book store bestie Valium Tom suggested, seems to be a Sylvia Plath reference. Otherwise, the only explicit reference to “Daddy” here comes in the final story “A/S/L” (sex hookup slang for “Age, Sex, Location”) as the online handle—”DaddyXO”— of Thora, a woman who spends all her time catfishing oafish men. The listless wife of a non-descript, “not a bad person”-husband named James, Thora lies awake texting “furtively on her phone…while James slept, his back turned to her” posing as an 18-year-old high school cheerleader. The story is set, presumably after Thora crashes and burns from her phone sex addiction, in a high-end rehab facility where she then contemplates seducing a famous Me-Too’d TV chef, “G”—who has landed at the facility as well. Thora is exactly the kind of damaged soul who inhabits Cline’s fiction.

However, the majority of the stories, the best of them set in Cline’s flawless simulacrums of ennui-laden, Slouching Toward Bethlehem Southern California, feature men as the despondent central characters: a diminished abusive 60-something father who is bemused by his distant and aimless adult children during their annual holiday season visit home; a Me-Too-disgraced magazine editor now groping through a pity assignment working on a book by a wealthy tech/lifestyle guru, and then botching the rare career opportunity by aimlessly hitting on the guru’s assistant; a divorced, fading movie producer suffering through his surfer-bro son’s banal directorial debut during a tacky theater rental screening; a simmering and distant father (with an alcohol and opioid addiction) called in to rescue his troubled, violent son after the boy gets expelled from an elite private school.

And, in the collection’s showstopping story, “Arcadia” (originally published in Granta and which I actually first read in The Best American Short Stories 2017), one of the few characters here who appears to have a moral center: an earnest boyfriend/live-in farmhand navigating the fraught household of his pregnant girlfriend and her erratic and frightening older brother, who owns and runs the farm.

Like much of today’s short fiction, Cline’s stories remain mum on specifics, only hinting at the crux of the conflict at hand while preferring to linger in deceptively casual dialogue, quietly startling observations, and the minimalist realism of daily lives. The understated stories usually include a dramatic scene too, well-placed land mines that offer some sort of allegory when their explosive glare sheds light on the otherwise repressed narratives.

Cline is a master of this form, particularly pivoting to violent scenes—the impromptu dentistry in “Marion” (which struck me as an early draft of Cline’s Manson Family novel The Girls), or most notably, a terrifying porn-inspired night, drunkenly orchestrated by the dangerous aforementioned older brother in “Arcadia.”

It’s the quality of Cline’s keen observations, with their crisp verisimilitude, that make her stand out from the pack of writers working in this style of enigmatic storytelling. Whereas most writers—I’m thinking of Sally Rooney—tend to tack on observations that fall outside of the scene (I jest, but something akin to, “a crash of thunder sounded in the distance…”), Cline’s breadcrumb asides—"We sat in the back of Bobby’s pickup as he drove the gridded vineyards and released wrappers from our clenched fists like birds” … “‘Home around five,’ she said… [loosening] her hood, pulling it back to expose her hair, the tracks from her comb still visible….”—feel intrinsic to the action at hand while simultaneously commenting on it.

What also makes Cline stand out from the pack, is this: While feminist at their core, her stories are deeply sympathetic to both women and men (who she seems to have a surprisingly uncanny inside track on) as she portrays both genders as trapped in the manufactured doubts scripted by societal roles, but also born of the stultifying human condition.

(I wrote a review of Cline’s second novel, The Guest, last year, which also includes a lot of thoughts about her first book The Girls. Scroll down down down to find that review.)

Jos Charles, a Year & other poems, ©2022

These poems are songs; rhythms punctuated by gorgeous phrases that have an effortless way of finding the contradictions afloat in the subconscious: ”between the hole of/a stone & dove within it;” “Let us hold a coconut It is dusk;” “canopies of collapsing light;” “I put you into a poem/you climbed the giantest tree/I put a dozen grapefruit into a tree/You ate every one.”

It reminded me of the obscure imagery and shrouded narratives you find in cryptic John Ashbery poems. It’s all a bit bewildering.

I read Charles’ (Pulitzer nominated) 2018 book of poems Feeld back in 2020 and remember feeling the same way; though in Feeld, she embraced the rhythmic trance and cryptic meanings to the point of creating a brand new language. A gorgeous feat. Unfortunately, I didn’t find nearly as much of that here.

Erin Williams, Commute, ©2019

Incredibly brave and startlingly vulnerable. But she doesn’t translate this diary into a new or larger narrative.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, ©2013

So much hype and this was disappointing. There was too much telling and not enough storytelling.

And most of the telling, while undeniably true and important, was well-tread talking points about the tangible, systemic walls and everyday slights that make life for Black people in America a barbed wire fence of challenges. Again. Undeniable analysis. But not new nor shown here.

Damilare Kuku, Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, ©2021

I have been searching for the great Lagos novel;Teju Cole’s thoughtful Every Day is for Thief (scroll down for my review) wasn’t grand enough to fit the bill.

I’d hoped Nigerian Nollywood movie maker, actress (that’s how she describes herself) and creative artist, Damilare Kuku was en route to pulling it off with her 2021 short story collection, Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, which is just now being published in the U.S.

And while it is an addicting collection of reverse-rom-com tales (the affairs do not work out here), the stories felt more like binge-era-TV pilot episodes than literature.

This might not be the classic I’m looking for, but indeed, I did binge. This is a flippant, fast-paced book; I read all 12, neatly crafted, 20-page stories (which often experiment with narrative POV, including rotating narrators and even some Bright Lights, Big City second person) in a few delightful sittings this week.

Certainly, Kuku’s candid, mostly female narrators—no-nonsense entrepreneurial strivers who fall for good looking lover boys with rizz and fatal flaws—convey the tragicomic condition of life in Lagos for women caught up (along with their guardian angel, best girlfriends) in the go-go capitalist patriarchy that fetishizes them as both subservient wives and party girls.

Set against Lagos’ backdrop of lush compounds and first-time apartments, clubs, scandalous texts, social media melodrama, ubers and public transit, nepotism, hustles, corruption, starter jobs and start ups, Kuku’s city stories focus on wary characters whose inner monologues ruminate on class, raunchy sex, tragic pasts, toxic family dynamics, love, and lousy men (even the sensitive guys.)

The breezy, pop culture tone and rushed, tidy finales interrupt Kuku’s frequent literary and philosophical turns, so I’m hesitant to recommend it. But, admittedly, I’m recommending it.

John McPhee, Levels of the Game, ©1969

I wrote about this book on my I’m All Lost In post for the week of 3/1/24-2/8/24:

I devoured 70 pages of Levels of the Game, John McPhee’s literary dispatch from the 1968 U.S. Open, in one sitting on Monday night.

Originally published serially in the New Yorker in 1969, Levels of the Game is a minutely and lovingly detailed account of the semifinal match between tennis legend Arthur Ashe, (“his body tilts forward far beyond the point of balance”) versus Clark Graebner, Ashe’s bruising, top-ranked, opponent. Ashe wins and goes on to become the first African American to win the Men’s U.S. Open.

McPhee approaches sports writing as if he’s Sherlock Holmes, seamlessly combining a meticulous tennis-match details—”He takes his usual position, about a foot behind the baseline, until Graebner lifts the ball. Then he moves quickly about a yard forward and stops, motionless, as if he were participating in a game of kick-the-can and Graebner were It…”—with the slow motion backstories that inform each volley: “‘It’s very tough to tell a young black kid that the Christian religion is for him,’ he says. ‘He just doesn’t believe it. When you start going to church and you look up at this picture of Christ with blond hair and blue eyes, you wonder if he’s on your side.’”

For me, McPhee’s crack reporting skills—he knows exactly how Graebner places his feet when he brushes his teeth in the morning—confirmed McPhee’s revered status as a progenitor of creative non-fiction.

Those reporter’s chops are certainly on display as McPhee conjures Ashe’s childhood with evocative quotes from Ashe (“The pool was so full of kids in the summer you couldn’t see the water”), to his research into Ashe’s junior games (“he read books beside the tennis courts when he wasn’t playing,”) plus a wonderful anecdote from a high school date about Ashe’s “antique father.” He does all this right alongside the immediate tennis play-by-play (“a difficult, brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else”), while adding his transcripts of the rivals’ internal monologues: ”Graebner dives for it, catches it with a volley, then springs up, ready, at the net. Ashe lobs into the sun, thinking, ‘That was a good get on that volley. I didn’t think he’d get that.’”

And he serves quiet axioms along the way: “Confidence goes back and forth across a tennis net like the ball itself, and only somewhat less frequently.”

One disappointing oddity: For a book about such a turbulent era, McPhee writes with a square, AM radio voice; as a result, a time that is decidedly connected to our own is rendered strangely remote here.

That said, it’s a pleasure to disappear into a lost world drawn so vividly.

———

I’d add that the in the final 30 pages or so, McPhee directly addresses the “Black Militant” politics of the time—or quotes moderate Ashe on the subject; keeps rolling with the internal monologues; and has a lovely locker room scene before the final set when the Davis Cup coach (Ashe and Graebner are both on the U.S. team) visits each player separately to give them last-minute advice.

Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries, ©2024

I wrote about this exciting book in my weekly obsessions post, I’m All Lost In :

I still remember reading an excerpt from Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti’s innovative memoir two years ago when the NYT ran a preview — and how it struck me that her writing should be filed under poetry rather than memoir.

When I saw that the book finally came out this month, I had to buy a copy.

Innovative how? Heti downloaded a decade-worth of journal entries into an Excel spreadsheet and re-sorted it alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.

From Chapter 9, for example:

I have never been so screwed for money, and I am angry at Lemons for not returning my emails. I have never known what a relationship is for. I have never worn such dark lipstick before. I have no money. I have no one. I have spent the whole night in my hotel room, eating chocolate cereal. I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.

While the effect can be a bit like refrigerator magnet poetry—with entire sentences instead of single words—Heti’s idea that “untethering” her lines from their original chronological narrative “would help me identify patterns and repetitions…How many times had I written, ‘I hate him,’ for example?” works as exegesis for the reader as well. By scrambling the traditional notion of a diary, often comically so, Heti’s non-stop and remarkable juxtapositions reveal how life’s epic and mundane moments intertwine—indistinguishably at times—to create a super-narrative distinct from specific plot twists.

It’s a useful, and ironic directive (from a diary!), to get out of one’s own head and notice the larger stories that define us.

I’m only on Chapter 14, N, which begins, “Neglect my friends and family. Never having felt so sad. New sheets for the bed. New York, I think, made me depressed…” but I will have surely finished the whole book by the time you read this. I’m addicted to the clipped rhythm that’s transforming Heti’s non-sequitur flow into a logical story. It’s as if each sentence is commenting on the preceding one. Glued to her “untethered” account, I’m dying to see what happens next.

Heads up—not that this going to ward anyone off—these diaries are salacious.

————

And having finished it now, here’s what I’d add:

Late in the book, in the W chapter, Heti breaks from her steady, minimalist cadence and rolls out a run-on sentence (a fantastically specific description of a woman on a 13-hour train ride, the person Heti wants to write a novel for) that’s simultaneously anxious and calm—the sentence, not the woman—which, with its meta overtones, is, as much as possible, a summary of the character we’ve come to know after immersing ourselves in her musique concrète diary revision.

Also: Affirming that this instructive lesson about the human condition is inseparable from a personal, intimate, and vulnerable autobiography, late in the T chapter, Heti outdoes the salacious standard she’d already set with a super risqué account: “This was the weekend that Vish hog-tied me, fucked me up the ass for the first time, …”

She closes the book with a playful sentence about Zadie Smith’s husband, the lone sentence in chapter Z.

Jane Wong, How To Not Be Afraid of Everything, ©2021

This book of excellent poems topped this week’s (2/16-2/23) I’m All Lost In post, my regular roundup of current obsessions. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Wong’s poetry splices her outcast biography—mostly her formative experience in white America/”the Frontier” (growing up poor with a Chinese immigrant mom and derelict, alcoholic father)—into the harrowing history of her grandparents’ crushed lives under Mao.

She still speaks to them: “Was I a pigeon in this city in your dream? Were you/ hungry when dreaming?” And they still speak to her: “…I can only hear the vowels of your questions,/your fists curling and uncurling in sleep, the low rush of wind along ferns so tall—they must be pulled up by the sky.”

Wong is a master of the fine detail (”a butterfly crawls into a chip bag;” “fruit flies fluttering about like snow;” “my father’s ruined jaw/misshapen like a novice ceramist’s bowl”); the liberating revelation (”let all your hexes seep into your pores;” “beware of light you cannot see;” “leave any country that has a name”); and sumptuous mic drops (“Serenade a snake and slither its tongue/into yours and bite. Love! What is love/ if not knotted garlic”).

Her evident talent effortlessly lifts her verse beyond politics into poetry. An uncommon skill!

Marking my favorite poems in this collection with stars became redundant, but there’s definitely this one:

I Put on My Fur Coat

And leave a bit of ankle to show. 

I take off my shoes and make myself

comfortable. I defrost a chicken

and chew on the bone. In public, 

I smile as wide as I can and everyone

shields their eyes from my light. 

At night, I knock down nests off

telephone poles and feel no regret.

I greet spiders rising from underneath

the floorboards, one by one. Hello, 

hello. Outside, the garden roars

with ice. I want to shine as bright 

as a miner's cap in the dirt dark, 

to glimmer as if washed in fish scales. 

Instead, I become a balm and salve 

my daughter, my son, the cold mice

in the garage. Instead, I take the garbage

out at midnight. I move furniture away

from the wall to find what we hide. 

I stand in the center of every room

and ask: am I the only animal here?   

William Wordsworth, Selected Poems 1793-1850, ©2004

My recent foray into 19th century literature—Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, and Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater—all from a subset of my self-induced City Studies Seminar— has led me down another autodidact path: 19th century poetry.

(Just like the city syllabus, my 19th century poetry reading list is research for my all-consuming poetry practice.)

I led off this 1800s poetry inquiry with William Wordsworth.

His idyllic and philosophical nature poetry, which, channeling the age-old and persistent Babylon trope, casts cities as havens of corruption and inauthenticity—”Love cannot be; nor does it easily thrive/In cities, where the human heart is sick/” (The Prelude, Book 12, Same Subject)—certainly seems at odds with my own pro-city, city-planning poetry; and, by the way, his religious reverence of nature comes with the trite and adjacent narrative that fetishizes childhood .

But Wordsworth’s 100% gorgeous writing (“the stars have tasks”; Gipsies); his calm strong suit, writing verse as short stories —The Ruined Cottage, The Brothers, The Thorn, Michael, Idiot Boy); and the larger space-time continuum philosophy that governs his scenic Romanticism, all render my political disagreements with his pastoral odes irrelevant.

In fact, I found Wordworth’s nature walks—”I love a public road…like a guide into eternity…” (The Prelude, Book 12, Same Subject)—simpatico with my own city strolls. Wordsworth is a great flaneur.

All his vales and crags and nooks and “foxglove bells” (Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room) aside, what always seems to be at the heart of his sylvan perambulations are the characters, the freaks (!) he invariably meets along the way: noble beggars, ghosts, orphans, leech collectors, spooky kids, gipsies, sailors, ancient men; and mysterious women with “a tall Man’s height, or more….” in “ a long drab-colored cloak” (Beggars).

Coincidentally, Wordsworth is also drawn to the the exciting characters of the city; in fact, in the finale of The Prelude, Book 7, Residence in London, he exalts the street entertainers that define his crowning metaphor of the city’s “press of self-destroying, transitory things.”

His “Parliament of Monsters” is pure urban exhilaration:

The hurdy-gurdy, at the fiddle weaves,/
Rattles the salt-box, thumps the kettle-drum,/
And him who at the trumpet puffs his cheeks,/
The silver-collared Negro with his timbrel,/
Equestrians, tumblers, women, girls, and boys,/
Blue-breeched, pink-vested, and with towering plumes./ — All moveables of wonder, from all parts,/
Are here — Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,/
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,/
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,/
Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,/
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,/
The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft/
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,/
All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,/
All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts/
Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats/
All jumbled up together to make up/
This Parliament of Monsters. /

No wonder in the next chapter of The Prelude, Book Eight, Retrospect. — Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind, Wordsworth sounds like city zealot, poet Frank O’Hara:

“London!”—O’Hara would say Manhattan— “to thee I willingly return./Erewhile my Verse played only with flowers.”

Yes, I’m cherry picking lines. Wordsworth exclusively reveres the “internal feelings” of dandelions, the “gentle agency of natural objects,” (Michael) his “darling Vale!” and the “active universe” (The Prelude, Book Two), and regularly returns to his overarching idea that glimpses of the glorious natural world and its “gem-like hues!” (Ode Composed upon and Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty) sustain us during the otherwise downcast prison of the daily world.

Wordsworth’s topic isn’t my thing, but his subject is.

In Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth channels his “wild green landscape” to cast light on the “unintelligible world”:

Almost suspended, we are laid to sleep/In body, and become a living soul/…We see into the life of things.

I have been enamored with this collection—and its non-stop reservoir of possible epigraphs—all January and February, writing about it along the way here, here, here, and here.

2023—

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ©1848

Fans of Manchester novels, a sub-genre of Victorian fiction that explicitly deals with owner-worker conflict during the Industrial Revolution, undoubtedly put Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times and Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton on their lists of classics.

Of all the similarities between these two Communist Manifesto-era standard-bearers—the beshitten backstreets, the righteous working class heroes, the saintly women, the pompous, oblivious privilege of the master class—one curious plot device quietly figures in both novels: the good guys’ unquestioned decisions to shield a family member from the law. In Hard Times, the nearly spectral protagonist Loo Gradgrind helps her remorseless, selfish brother, Tom Jr. elude the police after he embezzles money from his fancy bank job. And in Mary Barton, hero Mary conceals evidence—she burns it—that will clearly implicate her father in the cold-blooded murder of callous young capitalist, Harry Carson.

Yes, the victims in these crimes are bad guys—a bank and the noxious wealthy son of a capitalist. But the whole point of both novels is the Christian tenet of forgiving your enemies; Christianity is a term that was synonymous with social justice during this period. As if serious crimes weren’t shocking enough in the morally black and white 19th Century (and used as literary symbols of depravity), both Dickens and Gaskell make it extra clear to the reader that these respective crimes are “abominable.” In the case of Tom Jr.’s crime, Dickens points out that this wayward lout robbed hard-working depositors. As for the murder in Mary Barton, not only does Gaskell give us the gruesome head wound autopsy report—”they lifted up some of the thick chestnut curls, and showed a blue spot (you could hardly call it a hole, the flesh had closed so much over it) in the left temple. A deadly aim!”— but she writes about the murder in the unequivocal terms of sin.

Why then are both cover-ups presented as logically coherent givens for the protagonists, as they go unquestioned by the author and presumably, the audience.

Is the intent to foster a debate about the justness of desperate acts within a morally bankrupt capitalist society? That’d be great. But, again, in both instances, there’s no discussion of a moral conflict whatsoever—either by the narrator or in the lead character’s brain. It’s presumed without question that eluding the law by saving her brother (Loo Gradgrind in Hard Times) or father (Mary in Mary Barton) is the protagonist’s natural priority.

In Mary’s case, turning her father into the law—as he himself later intends to do—wouldn’t only match the Christian themes of the novel, but it would exonerate her lover, who is falsely accused of the crime. Gaskell, in fact, uses the evidently unthinkable option of turning over the evidence, as a binding condition that creates the literary poetics of her mental torture: visions of watching her condemned finace hang at the gallows.

The only rationale I can come up with here is that private forgiveness— that is, overlooking the crime as an extension of familial love— is more Christian than participation in the formal legal system.

Gaskell’s confusion on this point is both more palatable and more complex: The criminal in Mary Barton, Mary’s opressed, hard-working father (as opposed to the reprobrate brat in Hard Times), and the victim, a toxic playboy who not only exploits workers, but cavalierly, sexually exploits Mary herself, make the murder more comprehensible. However, the crime, cold-blooded murder (as opposed to the sneaky, sad sack theft in Hard Times) is more abhorent. This, I suppose, raises the stakes of the question itself. This story line, in turn, is a better thematic match to Gaskell’s novel, the more pensive and philosophical book of the two. And again, the stakes of the plot twist are already higher than in the Dickens novel; the question of Mary’s father’s guilt has dire ramifications for Mary’s own future in terms of her pending marriage to her lifelong friend and now fiancee, Jem Wilson. Conversely, in Hard Times, Tom Jr.’s fate is not super germane to Loo’s future, which is entwined with her spiritual comrade, former circus outcast, Sissy Jupe.

For me, the ways in which these similar plot devices differ when you game them out, serves as a symbol for how these novels are ultimately distinct. Overall, there’s more at stake in Mary Barton.

I actually got to the less-well-known Gaskell, Mrs. Gaskell, as she was known at the time, through Dickens; her name comes up in all the academic essays and intros to Dickens’ books. It turns out, Gaskell’s narrative is calmer, wiser, and has a more contemporary sensibility when it comes to the human condition.

I will say, even though, for hundreds of pages, Christian/Marxist Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) seems on track to be a Victorian Brit lit masterpiece, the hurried concluding chapters do trip it up a bit; they’re also marred in turn by some cheap literary symbolism (a blind character regains her sight).

That said, for 35 chapters or so (there are 38), Mrs. Gaskell is a patient, concerned, and artistic narrator, who expertly unfurls stories about star-crossed love, intimate family tragedies, potent proletarian immiseration, along with a Nancy Drew mystery to boot, complete with epistolary ciphering.

The disappointing ending is an ironic misstep because it’s here that Gaskell re-introduces the novel’s most compelling character, Esther, Mary Barton’s long lost aunt. Esther, who sets off the novel’s spiral of heartbreaks in Chapter 1 by abandoning her family to marry a soldier (not gonna happen, even though he promised), subsequently shows up in pivotal scenes as Mary’s jinxed angel. She’s an outcast, alcoholic prostitute who lives on the damp, gas-lamp streets of Industrial-Revolution-era Manchester watching over young seamstress Mary from the shadows. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, Gaskell misplays Esther’s final appearance by rushing the drama rather than taking her time with the complex character she initially created.

But my disappointment in that final turn just speaks to how invested I was in this great novel.

I savored this book; I wrote a couple of iterative takes as I lovingly read the novel throughout December and January. The tidy TV-series-wrap-up (Gaskell fast forwards a decade after the drama to a hokey scene of domestic bliss) nonwithstanding, Mary Barton brims with literary craft. Gaskell is particularly skilled at creating meaningful parallels within the natural flow of the plot, such as when Jane Wilson, busy tending to her sick sister-in law Alice, first learns that her son Jem has been arrested for murder. Stricken, she unburdens her sorrow to Alice.

Gaskell writes: “She told the unconscious Alice, hoping to rouse her to sympathy; and then was disappointed, because, still smiling and calm, Alice murmured of her mother, and the happy days of infancy.”

This knack for telling two stories at once seems to mark every scene as the novel’s main concern—owners versus workers—is replicated with binary after binary such as vengeance versus forgiveness and hope versus despair. Mary’s own story line is plagued by another stark binary: innocence versus guilt. Her lover Jem is falsely accused of murder, but again, as only she knows, it’s her beloved and morose father, mill worker John Barton, who’s guilty.

Gaskell’s poetic 19th Century prose—”the men were nowhere to be seen, but the wind appeared”—successfully immerses readers in the private worlds of her anxious characters’ inner monologues, all the while, set in the visible world of bleak lanes, cellar flats, seamstress workshops, foundry shop floors, pubs, candle-lit kitchen tables, and glimpses of the wealthy reclining on divans in the drawing rooms of their estates. The ultimate setting, however—spiraling downward in fustian rags and opium addiction toward murder—is class war.

And class analysis! In the big trial scene, wrongly accused working man Jem Wilson is defended with powerful exculpating testimony from an eye-witness sailor. When the no-expenses-spared prosecuting attorney (working for factory master Mr. Carson) cross examines, asking the sailor if he’d “have the kindness to inform the gentlemen of the jury…How much good coin of Her Majesty’s realm have you received, or will you receive, for walking up from the docks, or some less creditable place, and uttering the tale you have just now repeated…” the sailor, Will Wilson (Jem’s long lost cousin) responds with a withering juxtaposition class conscious rejoinder that exposes the unbalanced scales of justice:

Will you tell the judge and jury how much money you've been paid for your impudence towards one who has told God's blessed truth, and who would scorn to tell a lie, or blackguard any one, for the biggest fee as ever lawyer got for doing dirty work? Will you tell, sir?--But I'm ready, my lord judge, to take my oath as many times as your lordship or the jury would like, to testify to things having happened just as I said.

This is a particularly satisfying for readers to hear because we know that Mr. Carson already offered double the typical reward money (1,000 pounds as opposed to 500). And bent on vengeance, Carson told the police: "Spare no money. The only purpose for which I now value wealth is to have the murderer arrested… My hope in life now is to see him sentenced to death. Offer any rewards. Name a thousand pounds in the placards.”

By contrast, Mary got Will Wilson’s testimony through a shoe leather labor of love and not through any high-paid legal team of her own.

Meanwile, the sailor angle isn’t merely a working class plot device. It also brings the story a-train-ride-away to British port town, Liverpool, which sets the novel’s immediate Manchester-based factory strike narrative in the broader setting of national and international capitalist markets. This geographically expansive theme (again, a binary juxtaposition to Gaskell’s hyper local “Tale of Manchester Life,” the novels’ subtitle) is established early on. In addition to Mary’s patron saint Job Legh’s tragic London-based origin story (Legh is Mary’s best friend’s grandfather), and weaver union member John Barton’s eye-opening and dispiriting trip to London to plead the workers’ cause to an inattentive parliament (the weaver is also turned off by the hipster fashions), Gaskell makes it plain that forces beyond Manchester are always present.

Most prominently, Mr. Carson cuts wages to compete for “an order for goods from a new foreign market [which was] necessary to execute speedily and at as low prices as possible [because] the masters had reason to believe a duplicate order had been sent to one of the continental manufacturing towns.”

Certainly, Gaskell, who opens the novel with a comparison between the local countryside and the city, does an expert job focusing on Manchester itself, especially on its filthy gloom—a la Friedrich Engels’ influential The Condition of the Working Class in England, published in 1845, three years before to Mary Barton—penning sentences like this: “As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which overflowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were the stepping-stones…”

But it’s actually the climactic Liverpool chapters, when Gaskell introduces a sort of Jane Jacobs civic pride tour guide (a street-smart teenage boy named Charley who’s on a first-name basis with the Liverpool stevedores), that readers are able to place Manchester, now set in relief against its neighboring port town, fully in its own sunken context.

At both the macro and micro level, this novel lives on conjunctions like these, including my favorite passage of all, which also gives you an idea of Gaskell’s intoxicating city prose:

It is a pretty sight to walk through a street with lighted shops; the gas is so brilliant, the display of goods so much more vividly shown than by day, and of all shops a druggist's looks the most like the tales of our childhood, from Aladdin's garden of enchanted fruits to the charming Rosamond with her purple jar. No such associations had Barton; yet he felt the contrast between the well-filled, well-lighted shops and the dim gloomy cellar, and it made him moody that such contrasts should exist.

As for the social justice Christianity I noted in passing in my first sentence ^ (Christian/Marxist binary!), Gaskell rolls out this showstopping line about the evil of pursuing vengeance, which concludes a chapter titled “Murder,” symbolically transmogrifying mortal sin into a discussion about forgiveness.

Ay! to avenge his wrongs the murderer had singled out his victim, and with one fell action had taken away the life that God had given. To avenge his child's death, the old man lived on; with the single purpose in his heart of vengeance on the murderer. True, his vengeance was sanctioned by law, but was it the less revenge?

Are ye worshippers of Christ? or of Alecto?

Oh! Orestes, you would have made a very tolerable Christian of the nineteenth century!

By the way, this social justice novel also has a sense of humor. Mary’s confusion (and my own) about the “pilot-boat” plan, the mermaid story (!), and Harry Carson’s utter bewilderment at Jem Wilson’s confusing motives are just a few of the goofy moments in this wonderful book.

Bryan Washington, Lot, ©2019

Here’s another book from my own city studies seminar, Bryan Washington’s short story collection Lot, which serendipitously overlaps with a city planning, non-fiction book I read earlier this year as part of my same personalized, city syllabus: Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. The connection between that academic book and Washington’s fast-paced story collection? The city of Houston, which Arbitrary Lines hyped as the only non-zoned city in America (you can scroll down for my review). Meanhwile, my besty Erica, who hails from Houston, recommended Washington as a talented city chronicler.

Lot, set in Houston’s cynical, hardened (and vulnerable) immigrant, POC neighborhoods—it comes with a black & white replica of the city’s street grid opposite the table of contents—revolves around Nicolás, the youngest brother in a biracial family headed by a single mom. The family is struggling to keep the restaurant they run (and live above) afloat as the the earnest mom’s incurable longing, the eldest brother Javi’s violence and reckless machismo, the distant sister Jan’s cool alienation, and the always-present subtext of Nicolás’ queer identity, along with the absentee father/husband’s ghost, haunt these stories.

The street-drug economy, the specter of homelessness, the grind of marginal jobs and petty bosses, racism, violence, and poverty also loom as a constant presence in their lives, and the lives of the characters in all the intertwined stories here, which include a few that aren’t about Nicolás’ family. Two of those stories, two of the longer stories in the collection coincidentally at 20-plus and 30-plus pages, “South Congress” and “Waugh” (all the stories here are named after Houston streets and/or districts), are explosive, showstoppers that, by stepping away from Nicolás story line, document the tenuous trappings of Nicolás’ world. “South Congress,” narrated by a young Latino named Raúl who works the drug deal circuit driving an old Corolla for his older, experienced and chatty African American mentor who sells from the open car window, and “Waugh,” narrated by a young homeless kid named Poke, who’s taken in by a Fagin figure with a flop house crew of young sex workers, amplify Nicolás’ angsty biography as Washington blurs Raúl and Poke’s pensive accounts with Nicolás’ own coming-of-age story.

While I could do with less of the tough guy dialogue throughout, Washington is an outstanding writer whose superpower is writing attention-to-detail asides—“stepping through the kitchen you cross border after border,” “we were always out of everything on the menu”— that work as slow motion metaphors for how the immediate action at hand reflects each story’s larger themes. Most often, that theme involves the idea of home and escape per the collection’s opening Gary Soto epigraph: “And how did I/Get back? How did any of us/Get back when we searched/For beauty?”

Washington, whose class-and-race-conscious immigrant narratives—a popular genre these days, particularly in poetry—stand out from many I’ve read thanks to his understated, economical prose, takes up Soto’s question head on in the story, “Elgin.” In this, the collection’s final story, Nicolás’ mother’s decision to leave Houston and move back in with her sister in Louisiana overlaps with Nicolás’ workmate Miguel’s mission to save up enough money so he can help his parents get back to their small hometown in Guatemala. “You go somewhere else and stay there and then go back home” Miguel says as the young pair, stuck in their dead end back-of-the-house restaurant jobs, ask each other why they haven’t followed their parents out of Houston.

Nicolás is the sole resident of the family house by now where “what you had to do was watch the neighborhood grow further away from you.” As in many of Nicolás stories—including a sweep of poignant childhood, tween, and teenage tales early in the collection—his quiet and nearly telepathic friendship with Miguel, who has taken the first step toward leaving town by walking out on his job after a bloody fist fight with their kitchen boss, turns into a substantive love affair. In the story’s closing scenes (and the book’s), the pair are debating staying in town or leaving as they play house in the home Nicolás family has since left behind; along with his mom’s retreat, his sister Jan has a family and home of her own, and Nicolás’ older brother Javi is dead. “You could leave. I want you to think about it, Miguel said. I want you to think about what could happen.”

Nicolás tests the question: Leaving Miguel asleep in their rumpled lovers’ bed, Nicolás suddenly drives out of town to the ocean’s edge in Galveston. “This is the furthest I’ve been from the city, my city, in years, but it doesn’t feel like anything’s changed, and honestly why would it. You bring yourself wherever you go. You are the one thing you can never run out on.”

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ©1854

As this lively and hardly subtle novel of philosophical binaries and dramatic dialectics begins, our abandoned circus youth, Sissy Jupe, is taken from her default family of tight rope walkers, horse riders, clowns, and freaks and adopted by the stiff Gradgrind family. The Gradgrind patriarch, educator Thomas Gradgrind, commands a school (and a son, daughter, and wife too) under his strict, rationalist code. In Dickens’ comic-book parable of humanist Christianity versus conniving Capitalism, the seemingly hapless Sissy Jupe, suddenly captive in the uptight Gradgrind home, symbolizes the emotional and fanciful side of human nature. Watch out fragile Gradgrind family!

By the novel’s finale, godly Sissy and Tom Gradgrind’s pensive daughter Loo Gradgrind—initially Sissy’s standoffish counterpart, who represents the stifled side of hyper rationalism and its contorted allegiance with industrial capitalism—blur into one character. Or more accurately: Loo Gradgrind blurs into Sissy Jupe as the circus side wins the dialectic battle.

And I should clarify: Loo symbolizes the outcome of her father’s didactic code rather than representing the code itself. Brilliant, beautiful, but subconsciously longing for more as she often gazes into the fireplace (a metaphor that’s simultaneously paired with the town’s blazing capitalist smokestacks or with the fire inside her), Loo is originally incapable of love. She ends up trapped in a chilly, lifeless arranged marriage with Gradgrind’s social colleague, the bombastic banker and factory owner, Josiah Bounderby.

Loo is Incapable of love, that is, until the fragile structures of the world around her are revealed and toppled by a Rube Goldberg chain of events involving: the incorruptible laboring “Hand” Stephen Blackpool; his working class soul mate, the angelic Rachael, who should be wearing a halo; the sycophantic young bank employee, Bitzer, who we originally meet as a tattle tale teacher’s pet in Gradgrind’s school; the scheming playboy, layabout James Hartouse; the meddling Mrs. Sparsit; the hypocritical, aforementioned Bounderby; and Loo’s misguided, tragic brother Tom Jr., who’s deep in debt with a gambling addiction. The cascading story line—both dramatic and comedic—ultimately lands right back at the doorstep of the Gradgrind home in the form of Loo’s feminist monologue, which she directs at her now capsized father as the book’s final act, Book III, beings.

This pivotal confrontation follows on the heel’s of my favorite sequence here: Loo’s tour de force breakout in Book II’s closing chapter, “Chapter 12: Down,” which features her take down of arrogant trickster James Harthouse and her clever footwork outsmarting the devious Mrs. Sparsit as she makes her way home (there’s that cartoon Dickens’ symbolism again) rather than to an infamous rendezvous with Harthouse. Book II’s penultimate chapter, “Chapter 11: Lower and Lower,” is also dynamite; though, showcasing Dickens’ range, we’re treated to slapstick comedy this time as Mrs. Sparsit hides in the bushes, Shakespearean comedy style.

In the novel’s dreamy denouement, Dickens’ reverses the opening scenario: Set decades in the future, when Sissy and Loo are middle aged women, Loo is taken in by Sissy’s Jupe’s loving daughters, who symbolize the outcome of Sissy’s circus paradigm.

In a novel that’s famous for its opening paragraph, a send up of rationalism …

“Now, what I want is, facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wqnted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else… You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I brig up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”

… let me instead quote from the fanciful mirror on Dickens’ concluding page, which, formalizes the sort of Bibi Andersson/Liv Ullmann meld (a la Ingmar Bergman’s Persona) between Sissy and Loo that I noted earlier. (Coincidentally, is that Sissy or Loo on the book cover?)

Herself again a wife—a mother—lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing, and a possession, any hoarded scrap of which, is a blessing and happiness to the wisest?  Did Louisa see this?  Such a thing was never to be.

But, happy Sissy’s happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will be the Writing on the Wall,—she holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be done,—did Louisa see these things of herself?  These things were to be.

This is obviously a fun and tidy book. But two objections, one minor, and one major. First, the gripe. It’s a bit incongruous that Thomas Gradgrind and Loo aid and abet wayward Tom Jr. after they have rejected the nihilism at the heart of industrial capitalism. I understand that assisting Tom Jr., despite his crimes, could be read as placing the amorphous bonds of family over the rational rule of law—and even seen as a Christian gesture of forgiveness that follows the the gospel of martyred working man Stephen Blackpool who preaches forgiveness in his death bed monologue. But to me, it reads more as an endorsement of cynicism.

My bigger complaint is about the standard Christian populism at the heart of this novel. While meant as an endorsement of brotherly Socialism, it’s not dissimilar to the simplistic Fight Club reactionary utopian-ism that often ends up scripting fascist Year-Zero purity politics of holier than though crusades for authenticity. Watch out, fragile Jupe family.

I trust Dickens, but his quaint style of moralism can quickly give way to the Huey Longs and George Wallace’s of the world. Interestingly, Hard Times itself features a character who fits this exact mold: Slackridge, the “United Aggregate Tribunal” (LOL) union demagogue that Dickens spoofs in Book II, “Chapter 4: Men and Brothers.” Here, Slackridge turns the workers against their factory brother, good guy Stephen Blackpool.

Betty Smith, Tomorrow Will be Better, ©1948

This is the follow-up to Smith’s blockbuster classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s not literally a Part Two, but all eyes were on Smith after her mega-hit debut. This 1948 novel, published five years after A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, drops the reader into the same bittersweet pre-war Brooklyn universe of struggling, working-class Irish and Italian, first-generation immigrant families who are caught on the treadmill of menial labor, tight budgets, spent, loveless marriages, and fumbling young overtures. Set in class-and-race-conscious 1920s Williamsburg and Bushwick where fathers approve of suitors simply if they vote a straight Democratic ticket and street peddlers double as philosophers, the novel mostly takes place in spare flats over meager family dinners in between lives lived watching the clock at work (or gossiping in the lady’s washroom), riding home on crowded streetcars, haggling with (though more often bonding with) proprietors of corner shops, bakeries, and laundries, and occasionally dressing up for a Friday night dance. Differentiating itself from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Tomorrow Will be Better leans more into the bitter side of bittersweet.

Gloomy might actually be the better word here as the novel’s protagonist, teenager Margy Shannon, patiently attempts to escape her stifled home life where her bickering parents cycle through the same fights night after night. Margy thinks young love is her ticket out, but hope quickly gives way to the trappings of privation and the scarred upbringings that have damaged both her and her young husband, Frankie. He, for one—thanks to his bullying father and suffocating mother —recoils at intimacy and sex.

At times, Tomorrow Will be Better can read more like an earnest YA novel than a sophisticated literary one, but Smith’s consistently crisp prose, catchy and poignant narrative turns, and genuine insights about the human condition often distill psychological blocks into surprisingly candid reflections.

“Why? Why? Give me one good reason why.” He thought of his mother’s reason. “Aside from the fact that you want to tie me down.”

Then she said something shew hadn’t known was in her mind. “We’ve got to have children because you and I have nothing between us.’”

Reminiscent of the more uplifting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, there are certainly light touches, humor, and sweet moments in this novel, particularly between Margy and her gregarious, off-color pal, Reenie. But as Margy comes out on the other side of hope in the concluding chapters here, her youthful idea that tomorrow will be better becomes more of a resignation that it will simply be more layered.

M. Nolan Gray, Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, ©2022

A book about zoning that’s a total gas.

For city hall reporters, policy weirdos, and YIMBYs who are already familiar with housing regulations such as FARs, maximum lot coverage rules, off-street parking minimums, setbacks, building envelopes, and R1 Zones, M. Nolan Gray’s book Arbitrary Lines is an energetic and engaging refresher that will help you collect your thoughts and re-calibrate as you consider his treatise: Abolish zoning altogether!

For the general reader, Arbitrary Lines is a friendly primer on what all the fuss over density is about right now. Gray believes doing away with the ubiquitous single family residential zoning rules that dominate ~70%-80% of the land in most American cities could be a direct route to lowering housing prices. Cities, Gray contends, are vital to the well being of the U.S.A., but he’s worried they are currently at risk of failing because their exclusionary zoning rules prevent them from being universally accessible.

Gray is no man-splainer. His tone is humble and playful. His writing is plain and engaging. And he’s well-versed in the urgent, ongoing, and reasonable disagreements —and talking points on both sides— about gentrification, incompatible land uses, racism, concurrence, environmentalism, and historic preservation that (endlessly) define the debate.

He starts the book by saying what zoning is: Rules that segregate land uses and cap densities, “That’s it.” And what zoning is not: City planning. “Abolishing zoning doesn’t mean the death of planning—on the contrary, it could mean the resuscitation of a once vibrant field” that matches growth to uses and infrastructure.

Gray also explains why zoning came into being in the first place: It wasn’t to segregate slaughterhouses or glue factories from residential areas, it was ushered in during the early 20th Century to appease real estate interests that wanted to drive up property values by limiting land use and density through exclusion. He also shows that the push for exclusion was, in large part, driven by racism, detailing how the very first two zoning codes in the U.S.—in Manhattan and Berkeley in 1916, respectively—were explicitly about keeping Jews (“flies”) out of Midtown and Chinese (“heathens”) out of white residential neighborhoods.

This did not go unnoticed by the courts who fielded several challenges to zoning as it became standard practice for municipalities nationwide in the 1920s. The landmark case, Euclid (1926), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the constitutionality of single-family zoning, was originally struck down at the district court level where the appellate judge ruled: "The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped 16 square miles [compromising Euclid, Ohio] in a strait-jacket… The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living persons who hereinafter inhabit it. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and to segregate them according to income or situation in life."

As to the glue factory question, ie, isn’t zoning necessary to segregate harmful or nuisance land uses from the general public?, Gray shows both that zoning has, in fact, failed to do this (in city after city, zoning consistently slams working class and poor people right up against harsh environments) and even if done right, he argues, zoning is not the correct tool for segregating incompatible uses.

There does seem to be a bit of free market hocus-pocus in his thesis. Left to our own devices, Gray says, city dwellers will organically sort out land uses: “At a basic level, different types of uses will have different locational needs,” he writes. Maybe? I will say, and this gets back to Gray’s belief in planning versus zoning, he argues persuasively that with an attentive eye to the crux of planning questions such as transit, parks, utilities, and environmental regulations (emissions standards, for example), planners can help guide land use without relying on restrictive, largely class-based and aesthetic zoning guidelines.

Additionally, his case study (Houston, the only American city where zoning doesn’t exist) is compelling. For one thing, unlike heavily zoned cities such as Seattle and San Francisco, Houston is currently affordable because housing production has been able to keep up with demand thanks to the un-zoned fact that all kinds of housing typologies (ie, apartments!) are allowed in the vast majority of the city. “In 2019,” Gray reports, “Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large.”

Gray concludes his exciting addition to the city canon stating simply: “Zoning has had a destructive effect on cities, which is why we should abolish it.”

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, ©1951

To deal with a bout of insomnia, I found a recording of someone reading The Catcher in the Rye on Youtube. Rather than lulling me to sleep, I got sucked right in. Again.

I read this rite of passage (for Gen Xers) novel long ago, and I’ve even read it a few times as an adult. It holds up every time, and I’m always wowed by some scene I had completely forgotten about; this time I think it was the summer backstory with “Old Jane” when they’re on the back porch playing checkers.

Since it’s a teenage monologue in the first place, the book lends itself to being read out loud, and this actor does a fantastic job. Here’s the link. Enjoy.

John Fante, Ask the Dust, ©1939

I can’t remember where, but I recently read that this 1939 book is the great L.A. novel.

The next read on my City Canon syllabus?

While I was perusing Elliott Bay Books earlier this week, looking for, and failing to find, Betty Smith’s Tomorrow Will Be Better (a great Brooklyn novel, I imagine, at least based on her 1943 YA classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I just read for the first time not long ago), I checked my phone notes and saw “John Fante, Ask the Dust,” jotted down. I found that one on the shelves, and I took it over to a table and read the first few pages of clipped Raymond Chandler-like, hard boiled, bachelor-life prose. And then this: ”Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to meet me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” Bam. More like Raymond Chandler meets John Rechy’s City of Night, perhaps! (City of Night is one of my City Canon all-stars.)

I bought the Fante novel, and read it over the next 48 hours. Unfortunately, despite the hype around this novel, at least back in the 1980s when it was rediscovered as a grimy, hipster classic—and despite some poetic and sensual passages about cheap diners, Filipino dance halls, “Negro” night spots, back-alley hophead dens, and the desperate characters who inhabit this geography of alienation, Ask the Dust falls short as a must-read. Chandler’s noir L.A. crime narratives from the same era are light years better at presenting the human condition than Fante’s self-conscious attempt to do so. Chandler seeps us in the details of L.A.’s murky world while Fante sticks to the surfaces.

Certainly, plenty of scenes in Ask the Dust can be moving and even sparkle with literary flair. There’s the late-night ocean swim and failed tryst between Fante’s roman-a-clef-narrator, striving writer Arturo Bandini, and his elusive love interest, music tavern waitress Camilla Lopez. There’s the gory cattle robbing excursion orchestrated by Bandini’s unstable next door neighbor to address their starving poverty. There’s the awkward short-story-in-its-own-right scene between Bandini and 14-year-old Judy, who indulges Bandini’s delusion that he’s a famous American writer. There’s the deformed vulnerability of naked Vera Rivken whose “old child’s eyes swim in blood written like mad sonnets.” And of course, Camilla’s descent into addiction and desperation haunts the whole short novel.

But despite these well-rendered glimpses into human yearning and suffering—often set at night where carbon monoxide and “the smell of gasoline makes the sight of palm trees seem sad” or set in stark rooms “like ten million California rooms, with cobwebs and dust, her room, and everybody’s room … a few boards of plaster and stucco to keep the sun out”—the novel as a whole is insular without revelation.

My disappointment also comes despite Fante’s woke narratives about race. I must give Fante proper credit here. With calm insight, Fante makes Mexican American, African American, Asian, and white minority ethnicities—Italian and Jewish—front and center in this novel of precarity as his cast of outcasts circle one another with postures framed by vulnerability.

Yes to the City, Max Holleran, ©2022

I am so glad this hyper-eloquent book exists.

It’s an even-keeled contemporary history of the emergent YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement, which the author, a calm, thorough, and earnest Melbourne-based academic, traces to San Francisco circa 2013. That was when pro-density agitators and newcomers started challenging the city’s anti-housing development rules and its “‘hysterical hippies’ who care more about their vegetables than about people becoming homeless.” One agitator explains: “When you ask people if we should have more housing, they say, ‘absolutely’ but if you say ‘do we need more development’ they’ll answer ‘not at all.’”

I actually started reporting on Seattle’s YIMBY push for more density in exclusionary single family zones back in 2004, including a pro-missing middle housing feature story I wrote for the Stranger late that year;  I had been profoundly influenced by this pro-density October, 2004 New Yorker article “Green Manhattan,” which counter-intuitively identified cities as engines of environmentalism.

This was all happening in the wake of George W. Bush’s November, 2004 re-election which seemed to codify the rural/urban split in American politics, and motivated our already urgently pro-city paper to turn up the editorializing on urban sustainability. (For a special issue that year called “The Urban Archipelago,” an electoral organizing strategy our editor Dan Savage championed in the wake of Bush’s win, we called on Democrats to play to their city base. The feature included a piece that my newsroom colleague Erica C. Barnett and I wrote together channeling New Yorker writer David Owen’s “Green Manhattan” mantra by identifying cities as solutions to global warming; scroll to the “Urban Independence” section here .)  

By 2007,  pro-density, pro-pedestrian, pro-transit sentiment was full blown in the Stranger newsroom, and also on original Seattle YIMBY Dan Bertolet’s new blog, HugeAssCity. Fortuitously, when I exported this urbanist political aesthetic to my online-only news start-up, PubliCola, in 2009, a green group called Futurewise was pushing YIMBY legislation in the state legislature to up-zone neighborhoods adjacent to transit stops. It became PubliCola’s first editorial crusade. The legislation lost, but the fight served to introduce nascent YIMBYs to one another.

This isn’t meant to dispute Holleran’s San Francisco 2013 premise. The impromptu urban planning happy hours he describes where pro-housing activists, political operatives, analysts, and young people just feeling squeezed by the housing market got together at default organizing meetings in S.F. bars and breweries, were also happening in Seattle circa 2013. I remember being on an email list at the time called “Urbanist Happy Hour.” It was at those meetings—just as Holleran sees it in S.F.—that the YIMBY fight became less about piecemeal legislative efforts or specific initiatives or campaigns and more about an overarching political philosophy that helped pro-city, pro-density voices analyze a host of issues through a coherent lens. In this sense, Holleran is totally right. And his play-by-play report on San Francisco, and its original YIMBY group, BARF (Bay Area Renters Federation) works perfectly to set up a cohesive, compelling narrative of YIMBism. The cheekiness of the BARF moniker also works as an instructive moment for a movement that plays to Millennial social savvy.

Mainly I’m glad this book exists because Holleran is a skilled writer who ably articulates the essence of the YIMBY cause for more housing (while turning zoning and housing debates into a dramatic narrative). More so, he’s also able to clearly explain the nuanced political challenges YIMBYs face, most notably the strained and ongoing stand-off the predominantly white YIMBYs have with a group that should be their natural allies: the anti-gentrification, social justice groups and the largely POC communities they represent (along with those communities in their own right.)

Holleran simultaneously, shows how it’s the YIMBYs’ direct foes, the Baby Boomer NIMBYs, informed by 1960s and 70s counterculture, but transformed into a parochial homeowner class, who’ve been able to make common cause with the POC victims of gentrification.

In his excellent chapter on supposedly progressive Austin, Texas and their resistance to changing the city’s tight single family zoning code, Holleran writes: “In fact, many YIMBYs…run into a double bind: their pro-growth stance makes housing activists wary of their solutions, which bring in developers, while homeowners dislike them for the same reason. In some cities this has put welathy homeowners and poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods on the same side: opposing growth.”

Thankfully, Holleran’s also very good at explaining why this situation is deeply ironic, and moreover, comparing it to MAGA’s “Build a Wall” mentality, why it’s hypocritical on the part of the white Boomers to resist new apartments in their exclusive neighborhoods to protect the “neighborhood character.”

In addition to quoting [italics mine] a pro-YIMBY African American named Tommy Ates who calls out the fallacy in the NIMBY narrative that adding density displaces black communities—”the current code [that prohibits density] has destroyed the community,” Ates notes—Holleran zooms in on urban liberal Boomer hypocrisy:

“The desperate scramble to protect home values reveals a kind of left-wing double standard in which empathy is something saved for those who live far away and with whom one does not have to share parking, schools, and hospitals.”

Holleran deftly titles this chapter on Austin’s ex-hippie class and its single family zoning zealotry: “Exclusionary Weirdness,”

“Keep Austin Weird—and white” might be a more appropriate slogan for their anti-density sensibility. Holleran quotes one Austin YIMBY’s rejoinder to the “neighborhood character” defense: “‘I think neighborhood character is enhanced by having more characters in my neighborhood.’”

Holleran’s concluding chapter offers a solution for the YIMBY movement, one that pushes back against the YIMBY free-market orthodoxy of pro-any-and-all-housing. Instead, Holleran, sides with a targeted focus on putting development in privileged neighborhoods. YIMBYs, he urges, should aim to share the density, rather than settling for any development they can get, which typically, and unfortunately, means clustering new development in low-income communities that lack political clout. He couples his insistence to add housing stock in more privileged neighborhoods with the warning that YIMBYs are missing a zeitgeist chance to capitalize on the political will government and regulatory agencies have right now to enact policies that prioritize sustainability and resilience. In this context, Holleran recommends, YIMBYs need to partner with government and advocate for a more interventionist model that includes social housing.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Thomas De Quincey, ©1821

With all the philosophical throat clearing, intellectual asides, and long winded analogies that come with this circuitous 19th century prose, I couldn’t quite track De Quincy’s thesis here, but summarizing as best I can, it was something like: The straight world should not pass judgement on opium addicts.

I read this book (as part of my own city studies seminar) expecting more poetic descriptions of De Quincey’s stoned nighttime perambulations through the streets of turn-of-the-century (1700s into 1800s) London, but there wasn’t a lot of that. The poetic passages are reserved for his tortured, opium-addled nightmares.

“The waters now changed their character. From translucent lakes shining like mirrors, they now became seas and oceans…The sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens. Faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by generations, by centuries. My agitation was infinite — my mind tossed and surged with the ocean.”

The more entrancing part of this brief book comes early in De Quincey’s narrative when he documents his descent from being an academic standout at an elite university (and a cocky, well-read rebel) to becoming a homeless wanderer in and around London. De Quincey lovingly details his threadbare existence as a squatter where he teams up with a “hunger bitten” 10-year-old servant girl:

“From this forlorn child I learnt that she had slept and lived there alone for some time before I came, through the hours of darkness. The house was large, and from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious echoing of the spacious staircase and hall—and amidst the real fleshly ills of cold and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts. I promised her protection against all ghosts whatsoever, but, alas, I could offer her no other assistance.”

This desperate partnership immediately foreshadows De Quincey’s next friendship with a prostitute named Ann, his “orphan companion…this poor friendless girl [who I had] rested with on steps and under the shelter of porticoes.” They have a brother/sister relationship and on one hopeless night resting on the steps of a house off Soho Square, Ann saves De Quincey’s life by “paying out of her own humble purse, when she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare necessities” to get provisions and stave off his withering starvation.

Despite De Quincey’s many attempts elsewhere in the book to write a philosophical treatise—wordy attempts loaded with allusions to Wordsworth and Greek mythology that make up the majority of this memoir—the de facto short story he writes detailing his spiritual bond with Ann emerges as the defining center of this book. It helps that he writes it more as a literary narrative than as lecture, relaying a near biblical parable that tracks De Quincey’s doomed effort to repay Ann for saving him, including their poignant, botched rendezvous on “Great Titchfield Street, which had been our customary Haven, as it were, to prevent missing each other in the great Mediterranean of Oxford Street.” Despite his frantic search, he never sees his “youthful benefactress” again. “How often in succeeding years, standing in solitary places and thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love.”

De Quincey, a humanist in general, also comes across as something of a woke feminist when it comes to his friendship with Ann as he tries to help her regain her footing and “avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had plundered her little property.”

De Quincey writes: “Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence, and one which, if London beneficence had better adapted its arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might oftener be interposed to protect and avenge. But the stream of London charity flows in a channel not readily accessible to poor houseless wanderers.”

Of course,De Quincey is also clearly well ahead of his time by intimately portraying drug addiction as a complicated disease rather than as a disgraceful sin. But, in my opinion, it’s his contextual narrative on poverty and economics—including a nuanced, sympathetic section on Jewish money lenders— that struck me as the heart of this classic.

Every Day is for the Thief, Teju Cole, ©2007

I continued my urbanism crash course with Teju Cole’s “Lagos Novel.” This is his first book, published in 2007, an autobiographical novella about his return trip home to Lagos after an abrupt, and evidently on the sly, bolt out of there to the U.S. for college 15 years earlier. As the book starts, he’s now a post-doc in New York City. The novella is told in a series of stand-alone, philosophical, and compelling vignettes culled from his month-long stay at his aunt and uncle’s comfortable home in their leafy, Lagos neighborhood.

Told with a sense of comedy and tragedy, the vignettes often dramatize the ubiquitous, low-level scams, shakedowns, and larger corruption shaping Lagos economic life—and Lagos life overall. The hustler touts—“the original wiseguys of Lagos”—are the tricksters who define Lagos for Cole. “Touting is not a job. It is a way of being in the world…They do not go home in the evening and stop being touts. The thing is bound to their souls. The regular non-tout-Lagosian, too, has to share this attitude” or else become another one of their “victims.”

Cushioned by his privilege, Cole isn’t at the total mercy of the larceny-by-1,000-shakedowns that he encounters here (the passport and airport rip-off artists, the traffic cops on the take, the wily gas station attendant, the CD pirates, and the danfo touts.) Nor does he seem ultimately threatened by the constant potential for violence that accompanies daily routines. In one scene that takes place in a lot behind a local school where Cole’s family is meeting a truck loaded with goods they’ve ordered from overseas, including books and a car, the group of “area boys” who are circling and demanding money “or else” certainly create tension, anger, and tears. But it never quite rises to the level of a crisis as much as moment of introspection. “Crazed by the situation and the need for an end to it, I no longer know myself.”  

Just as the cozy shower at his aunt and uncle’s home washes off the sheen of red dust that comes with Cole’s out-and-about city adventures, his economic class—epitomized by the refuge of the house (though, one subject to the daily power outages)— creates a buffer that allows him to reflect on larger, adjacent narratives such as the public belief in magic and religion, along with the anti-intellectual culture that drove him from Lagos as a precocious teenager in the first place. “There is no battle over versions of stories that marks the inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices?”

Yet here’s the enticing friction that colors these philosophical and sometimes catty musings: He’s forever drawn to Lagos.  From the noisy markets, to the crowded danfos, from the neighborhood labyrinths to the shops and bars, from disappointing, lackadaisical local museums to the striving music school, his observations are sewn with love and affection and hope for Lagos. “The champion of the people was also the fiercest critique of the people,” Cole writes about Nigerian Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti, spelling out what he quietly and clearly sees as his own, if not a bit cocky, compassionate mission statement.

Cole weaves family history and visits with past school chums and an old girlfriend into his local account too, adding yet another layer of warmth—and poignancy—to the occasionally didactic report on his flawed home city.

The closing chapter (about an alley where coffin making shops have clustered) works as a perfect example of the tenderness Cole conjures from the labyrinths and mazes of Lagos; “the shavings fall in a nest about his feet…There is a simple dignity about this little street. Nothing is preached here. Its inhabitants simply serve life by securing good passage for the dead…a comforting sense that there is an order to things.” For Cole,  Lagos’ labyrinths and mazes themselves highlight the concomitant contradictions of his home city. Cole defines labyrinths as “winding paths [that] lead, finally, to the meaningful center,” and mazes as “full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, false signals; the trickster god’s domain.”

Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention, Ben Wilson, ©2020

Intent on finding the next book for my own private city studies seminar, I went to Elliott Bay Books a few weeks ago and made a beeline to their urban planning section. Typically, when I’m trying to dig into the city canon, I turn to city-based novels, like one of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo epics or one of Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe tales set in hard-boiled Los Angeles. But I was hungry for some data and information this time. Unfortunately, everything seemed to be yet another man-splainy book about density and sustainability; a shelf full of dudes trying to be the next Jane Jacobs without coming up with anything new. But then, there on the bottom shelf, I spotted this. Rather than all the pontificating, it looked to be a bona fide history of cities that promised to show me how they came to work, not tell me how they ought to.

 The book is a delight. Starting with Uruk, Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago (around 4,000 BC), author Ben Wilson chronologically charts the evolution of cities. Each successive chapter is dedicated to a specific city (Babylon 2,000 BC, for examples, follows Uruk), as Wilson documents the way urban culture developed, using each city to represent a significant, emergent urbanist tenet. Chapter 5, “Baghdad, 537-1258,” for example, maps the rise of the city as an international crossroads documenting how Baghdad became a magnet for multicultural talent and thought.

Through it all—from Athens (507 BC-30 BC) and its vibrant civics, to London (1666-1820) and the rise of sociability as a creative function; from Chicago (1830-1914) and industrial capitalism’s default outcast class of slum district innovators, to Los Angeles (1945-1999) and the new, aggregate city of meshed suburbs—Wilson’s larger thesis emerges: A city’s duality of organization and chaos—with the latter being a magical ingredient forged from urban density —is the most powerful and positive natural force in world history.

The final chapter, “Chapter 14:  Megacity, Lagos, 1999-2020,” wraps up this theme with literary flair. As if penning a cyberpunk novel, Wilson writes about Otigba Computer Village, the city’s unwieldy, square-kilometer hive of off-book tech entrepreneurship and its “staggering daily turnover of $5 million.” “In this bustling unregulated tech village, the largest gadget market in West Africa, over 8,000 big, small, and individual businesses and 24,000 traders and geeks offer the latest smartphones, laptops, and accessories alongside repaired and repurposed devices,” Wilson writes. “They fix screens, upgrade your software, perform data recovery and repair motherboards. Big tech companies compete with individual traders and artisans to capture a slice of the eye-popping $2 billion annual turnover.” Criticizing the authorities for trying to “sweep it away,” he identifies the  “warren of scammers, technicians, freelance IT technicians, danfos [mini-buses], vendors, hawkers, and piles of keyboards” as the power button of this booming, 21st century megacity, concluding that with its “unregulated trade associations, internal government, and justice system” Otigba Computer Village is the “DIY urbanism that keeps Lagos going.”

Tied to the idea of sweeping away (or burning down) urban chaos, another overarching theme that runs through Wilson’s city history is the reactionary politics of anti-urbanism, which he traces back to the bible’s inaccurate depiction of Babylon as a sinful and crooked den of apostates and hucksters. Chapter 2 on Babylon (“Sin City, 2000-539 BC”), Chapter 3 on Athens, (“Cosmopolis, 507-30 BC”), Chapter 4 on Rome (“Imperial Megacity, 30 BC- AD 537”),  Chapter 8 on London (“The Sociable Metropolis, 1666-1820,”), and Chapter 11 on New York City (“Skyscraper Souls, 1899-1939”) track the persistent anti-Babylon theme throughout world history while simultaneously documenting how these cities, despite populist animosity towards them, drove, and have been driven by ingenuity, idealism, and profound achievement.

 In a clear defense of cities, and a not-so-veiled affront to today’s MAGA nativists, Wilson highlights Athens’ idea of kosmopolites, the citizen of the world, which distinguished the super city from its neighbors. “The stunning success of Athens in the fifth century BC was in large part ascribed to the fact that over a third of its free population were foreign born—a radical statement in an age of fiercely xenophobic city states…The dynamism of Athens…was in large part a result of a citizen population that rocketed from around 30,000 in 480 BC to 50,000 by 450 BC, the result of immigration. Athens allowed access, through its public spaces and open institutions, to an array of newly minted citizens. The congested urban environment facilitated the circulation and exchange of ideas; its cocktail of politics, philosophy, art, retail and business at street level gave it its remarkable effervescence.”    

 “Chapter 12: Annihilation, Warsaw, 1939 -1945,” brings the history of anti-urbanism to a terrifying climax, as Wilson documents Adolph Hitler, the ultimate reactionary, and his obsession with deracinating Warsaw. Wilson has a knack for interpreting the nuance and dualism of history, and uses this chapter about World War II’s unprecedented assault on cities—he details the siege of Stalingrad here as well—as another way to tell the tale of the ineradicable human networks at the root of city living.

Wilson concludes this chapter by talking about the DIY economy and improvised markets of Tokyo that guided that city’s inexorable re-emergence from the ashes of WWII. “Tokyo laid the foundations for the city’s rise from devastation to become the great global metropolis of the second half of the twentieth century. Informal settlements and high density emergency shanty towns became the platform for urban growth.”

It’s the perfect example. It also highlights one not insubstantial quibble I have with this otherwise informative book. Given that Wilson instructively weaves Asian cities such as Tokyo into his narrative quite often (“Hong Kong and Tokyo,” he writes off-handedly, “are examples of cities that have managed to combine skyscrapers with a pulsating street life, retaining a mix of shops and activities at the ground level, in striking contrast to the sanitizing and deadening effect of other skyscraper cities”), the book is oddly negligent when it comes to giving a proper primer on Asian urbanism. Tokyo, for example, surely deserved a chapter of its own for unique innovations like its vertically stacked shops (Zakkyo buildings), not to mention its world renowned mass transit. Mass transit in general is curiously absent from Wilson’s historical tally of core urban attributes and world-changing innovations.

 Wilson’s Eurocentric narrative—Lisbon and Lubeck (?) headline Chapters 7 and 6, respectively—also gives short shrift to the history of Latin and Central America cities; this is especially notable given that the book’s conclusion focuses on Latino Urbanism as he posits that mega-metro-L.A. is the harbinger of our “urbanburb” future. (To be fair, he does write about Tenochtitlan, the original Mexico City in the 16th century, but only briefly, and only in the context of Spanish imperialism.)

I will say: I strongly agree with Wilson’s conclusion that urbanizing the suburbs is the key to a sustainable future. He writes: “What I am talking about is the urbanization of metropolitan neighborhoods—the suburbs and peripheral neighborhoods—so that they take on the forms and functions, the density, diverse uses and spatial messiness associated with city centers.” I often push the same idea —share the density—in my PubliCola column.

 In fact, I think I agree with Wilson on a lot of things—including his taste in movies! About a year-and-a-half ago, I found my way to an obscure 1932 pre-code Hollywood movie called Skyscraper Souls. I watched it on YouTube, special-ordered the out-of-print novel the movie is based on, and even tracked down a print of the vintage poster. I had it framed and hung it on my wall as an emblem of my interest in urbanism.  

Fast forward: After buying Wilson’s book and devouring the opening chapter, I flipped ahead to peek at the pictures section. Bam! The first thing I see: a reprint of the Skyscraper Souls poster; this corresponded, I soon discovered, with Wilson’s New York City chapter, which explored vertical Manhattan in its early 20th century heyday. The chapter also included Wilson’s synopsis of this long lost MGM melodrama. Wilson was evidently my skyscraper soulmate. After finishing his book, I slipped it onto my bookshelf right next to Faith Baldwin’s novel Skyscraper, the aforementioned inspiration for Skyscraper Souls, another gem in the city canon.    

Open City, Teju Cole, ©2011

I actually set out to read a different Teju Cole novel, his Lagos novel, 2007’s Every Day is for the Thief—which I learned about from Ben Wilson’s Metropolis: A History of the City.  I’ve wanted to learn more about Lagos ever since the Washington Post profiled the Nigerian coastal city in late 2021 as the mega-city of the future. I ran out to buy Cole’s novel, but I ended up buying his 2011 follow-up, Open City, instead.

This one is a New York City novel. And Even better: A flaneur’s New York City novel. The main character, Julius, an intellectual Nigerian ex-pat who’s finishing med school with a psychiatry residency at a Morningside Heights psychiatric hospital, keeps an immaculate diary of his after-work, citywide peregrinations, chronicling the minutiae of his walks with loving, thoughtful, and literary care. Set in somber and lonely post-9/11 Manhattan, Julius is often the only person out and about from Wall Street to Central Park to Harlem to the George Washington Bridge making his gloomy observations about the color of the sky. The painstaking attention to detail in Open City stretches the picayune into the poetic: “No one sat at them or played chess. Around the tables, where they sank into earth, moss grew, spreading up the concrete and into the ground so that it seemed as if the chess boards had grown roots.”  

Julius’ earnest inner-monologue often ricochets along stream of consciousness lines—giving us glimpses into his personal history: his longing to reconnect with the mysterious German grandmother he bonded with as a child; his estrangement from his impersonal mother; his high school days at a Nigerian military academy; his father’s premature death and tricky funeral; and his mixed emotions about his recent Ex.

 Most often, though, Julius’ ruminations quickly lead to erudite and impromptu TEDTalks on whatever museum exhibit, photo show, classical concert, play, or historical sidewalk plaque he’s reflecting on. In passing, Julius’ fairly remote, academic flights of fancy take up, among many subjects: Mahler symphonies, the 1930s Berlin photography of Martin Munkasci, Chinese poetry, 17th century church architecture, bird migration, jazz great Cannonball Adderley, and the science of bed bugs.

The history lessons here also include a startling discussion about 17th century Dutch American colonist Cornelius Van Tienhoven, who slaughtered New York’s native Canarsie and Hackensack tribes; and another equally brutal discussion about City Bank of New York President Moses Taylor’s ugly connection to the sugar slave trade. These two mini-dissertations loom larger than Julius’ other reader-friendly history lessons because they work in concert with Julius’ present- tense Manhattan diary, which mostly features the alienated lives of black and brown people; it’s notable that one of few recurring characters in the novel, Julius’ now-elderly, former undergrad literature professor and mentor, Dr. Saito, was held in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. In short, the victims of intertwined American capitalism and racism are persistent concerns in this novel.

Indeed, this is a story told by Nigerian immigrant, who finds New York City magical, but shares his fellow outsiders’ wariness of some lurking discrepancy here. “Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren’t we all,” one of Julius’ academic, immigrant friends says, pointing to a tree outside his Upper West Side apt. window that reportedly arrived in New York from China in the 1700s. This formulation of immigrant self doubt strikes me as Cole’s broadened definition of what goes on in an “open city.”

Most of Julius’ chance encounters are with fellow Africans, African Americans, and POC. Just a sampling from his random excursions: There’s a pseudo intellectual Black Power poet who works at a nearby post office (“I made a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future”); there’s a suddenly distant Uber driver who turns the greeting “brother” into a fraught dynamic; there’s an MTA HVAC repair man who “seemed surprised anyone noticed him at all;” there’s an unctuous Caribbean immigrant at a Financial District Bar whose “tawny eyes were immobile… Then it struck me that his eyes were asking a question. A sexual question;” there’s a Liberian detainee at an immigration detention facility. However, this is not a “woke” nor ideological book. Julius is a thoughtful, even-keeled narrator whose meditations on race are nuanced, grounded, and humanist.

The novel’s most dramatic—and surprising—scenes, a back-to-back pair of troubling finales that stand out from the otherwise lackadaisical, non-linear narrative—complicate the novel’s left-leaning themes. In fact, the second, and more meaningful of these dramatic climaxes recasts Julius’ character as a villain in prescient (for 2011) #Me-Too feminism terms. This turn of events brings some sudden clarity to Julius’ non-stop academic tangents, which, though fascinating, also obscured the personal trek at the center of the novel. “When we don’t choose good, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves,” he rationalizes.

In the next, and final, chapter, Julius ignores the startling revelations and simply returns to his intellectual meanderings. With this, it becomes clear that while Julius’ catalog of academic lessons stand in as instructive metaphors about the book’s larger political themes, there’s perhaps a more harrowing message about Julius himself in these stories. And more so, in Julius’ need to constantly linger behind them. In this final chapter, Julius goes to a Mahler concert at Carnegie Hall—“the third movement, the rondo, was loud, rude, and as burlesque as it could conceivably be”—before taking a detour on his way home along the Chelsea Pier. There, a friendly boat tourguide invites Julius to tag along on a random late night cruise into the Upper Bay past the Statue of Liberty. Cole ends the novel there with an anecdote from 1888 about fourteen hundred birds flying to their death in confusion at the sight of the Statue of Liberty.       

*On a personal note: As opposed to many modern progressive voices that confront the realities of racism, Julius (Cole?) is learned about, and attentive to, antisemitism. He made a point, it seemed to me, of including the tragic Jewish experience as part of the novel’s inquiry into the “epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world.” In this context, it was engaging, as opposed to dogmatic lefty fare, when Cole introduced a zealous and youthful African Marxist character who thinks Palestine is the paramount issue of the times. Cole dedicates a few pages to the realistic discussion.

Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, John Szwed, ©2015

Author John Szwed’s cocky intro to his book offers a grand mission statement: He’s done with the countless Billie Holiday biographies that revel in her sad life as a means of casting her trauma in the role of artistic DNA. Instead, he proclaims, he’s going to focus solely on her artistic craft and dissect Holiday’s music itself. How does her music tell her story, as opposed to how does her story define her music? I definitely like Szwed’s premise as a response to the pseudo intellectual “Rosebud” approach to biography, which mystifies art and artists as magical mediums rather than discerning them as skilled human beings. As a teeny bopper Marxist, I used to derisively call the psychologically Romantic approach to arts criticism “The Beethoven Thing,” frowning on its non-material explanations, and its lean into the supposed supernatural power of genius. And so, Szwed’s alternate tact had me.

A hyper academic, and a jazz musician himself, Szwed, who is a professor at Columbia University and a former director of the Center for Jazz Studies there, ultimately succeeds.

Unfortunately, the first 100 pages of his exercise are frustrating. By curiously and immediately leaping into a discussion of Holiday’s controversial 1956 memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, Szwed gets stuck in the very trap he’s trying to escape; the famously unreliable memoir, which was published three years before Holiday’s death, and co-written by her friend and journalist William Dufty, is the source of much Holiday myth-making. Szwed’s opening foray into supposedly setting us straight, simply bogs down in the maddening flaws of Holiday’s book itself: It feels random, anecdotal, disorienting, and mythological, while chasing name-dropping tangents that raise more questions than they can possibly answer. First and foremost, why am I reading so much about Hollywood kook Tallulah Bankhead or Orson Welles? Next, in chapter three, “The Image: Film, Television, and Photography,” Szwed takes on what he sees as the other culprit in Holiday mythology, her media presence. This section, dictated by an ultimately random set of media data, is as desultory and circuitous an approach as chasing Holiday’s confusing memoir. Ultimately, the reader gets bogged down in long side stories about, for example, Hollywood optioning battles.

Thus ends the “The Myth” section of the book and we’re on to “The Musician.” Szwed starts off going deep into the history of the musical styles that lead to Billie Holiday: Tin pan alley, blues, torch songs, jazz, “coon songs,” and minstrelsy. This seems logical and would otherwise be on-point, but given that we land in Szwed’s long-winded minstrelsy lecture, more a hodgepodge of chosen examples than the traceable history, the book continues to bewilder.

At this point, I’m only sticking with the book because 1) As disorienting as all Szwed’s bingo history is, he’s clearly brilliant and earnest and seems somehow on the cusp of telling us something interesting, and 2) I’m obsessed with Billie Holiday.

Starting with Chapter 5, “The Singer I” (we’re 100 pages in to a 200 page book), we get into Billie Holiday’s craft. Here, Szwed, a musician and erudite music and cultural history professor, begins to tell a much clearer story. We hear from early advocates and critics about Holiday’s signature morose delivery—"she sounds like she’s asleep”; we get an insightful account of her every day speak/sing aesthetic; and an academic, yet accessible description of her deft ability to sing behind the beat.

I loved this account of “dual-track time”: “there are two beat systems functioning simultaneously, one governing the accompaniment and the other regulating the vocal line… These two parallel strands organizing the passage of time might be irreconcilable, yet they have to be grasped simultaneously because that is the conceptual challenge of Billie’s art.”

The book’s powerhouse (and well-worth-the-wait) finale comes next, in the closing two chapters: “The Songs I” and “The Songs II.”

These two chapters chronologically catalog Holiday’s recorded repertoire with fascinating academic insight about her obbligato, inflection, and paraphrasing to explain why her early work with pianist Teddy Wilson and clarinet player Benny Goodman, her classic work with saxophonist Lester Young, and her belittled late work, druggy and set to strings, sounds the way it does.

Here’s Szwed on the breathtaking set Holiday recorded in 1935 as 20-year-old with pianist Teddy Wilson’s small group combo: “Billie Holiday, like all great jazz musicians, was first and foremost and improviser and secondly an interpreter, and when a tune like ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’ offered her little in the way of melody or lyrics, she compensated by detuning the melody, shifting the rhythm accents around, and ignoring the moderato tempo indicated on the song’s sheet music, taking it instead at a stomping-ly immoderate presto.”

Per Szwed’s mission, learning about Holiday’s musical choices and decisions helped me learn about her.

Grapefruit, Yoko Ono, ©1964, 1970

Yoko Ono’s brief musings—written as instructions for absurdist art performances—read like poetry. And more specifically: like precursor counterculture poetry. Most of these arty, Dadaist, and hilarious missives are from the early 1960s—and some are from the 1950s. But they have a stoned and protest-kid edge that hint at the anti-consumer, anti-war-machine verse of the late ‘60s hippie era.

What distinguishes Yoko’s writing from other 1960s broadsides against mainstream culture is a kindness, care, and warmth that accompanies her prankster-ism, not unlike the 1960s poetry of Richard Brautigan.

A PIECE FOR ORCHESTRA

Count all the stars of that night

by heart.

The piece ends when the orchestra

members finish counting the stars, or

when it dawns

This can be done with windows instead

of stars

1962 Summer

Most important, or more defining: Ono’s penchant for landing cosmic punchlines that re-position mundane routines, such as putting away the leftovers, boiling water, or setting your alarm clock, continually make the reader pause to consider the universe.

Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery, ©2023

One review of this novel—a coming of age, page-turner about a lost young woman working as an invisible cog in Andy Warhol’s Factory—posits that the obvious comparison is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The review claims, “the two books share a lot of DNA… both tales of 1960s New York.”

I mean, yes, both young narrators, awkwardly attending glamorous apartment parties with their respective newfound, besty urban sherpas, are struggling to find footholds in glitterati Manhattan? But the very first sentence of The Bell Jar references the electric chair death sentence for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an infamous McCarthy-era, i.e., 1953, milestone. This sets Plath’s Esther Greenwood very intentionally in stultified Eisenhower America—a completely different world than Warhol’s dark Edie Sedgwick/Velvet Underground/Midnight Cowboy Manhattan. This is not nitpicking. The late 1960s setting is key to this new novel.

To me the obvious, and immediate comparison is Emma Cline’s The Girls, a fictionalized account I seem to come back to a lot about a lost teenager who becomes a peripheral character in Charlie Manson’s hippie cult. Both novels, written by young women, swing the camera away from the charismatic male gurus at the center of these famous/infamous late ‘60s downers—Manson’s Spahn Ranch and Warhol’s Factory—and train the lens instead on the young women who made the slippery segue from America’s new youth counterculture to the un-moored, precarious life of dreamers and runaways who joined these bleak scenes. Both books also feature flash forwards to the 21st century, giving us the main characters’ matured perspective on the otherwise roiling teen narrative.  

The dark side of the 1960s is very important context to this debut novel by talented, young Irish writer Nicole Flattery (who, LOL, calls subway cars “carriages”) because ultimately, this is a novel about idealistic rebellion petering sluggishly out—much like the ambitious 1960s gave way to the morose early 1970s overall.

Close friends of mine like Valium Tom will know the 1960s, youth narrator context had me at “1966”; the dust jacket text begins: “New York City, 1966, seventeen-year-old Mae…” It does not get closer to my inner life than this!

Unsurprisingly, I dug it. It’s certainly riveting for about 100 pages anyway as Flattery writes perfectly clipped and neat paragraphs with surprise, poetic punch lines. “I wanted to deliver a sermon. I wanted a milkshake” one of Mae’s exegesis narrations concludes.

Flattery’s near-perfect exposition tracks Mae’s truancy as she rides the Macy’s escalators all day, has a listless, first sexual misadventure with a jerk, and lands a “job”—through a very creepy “Doctor”— as a typist at Warhol’s Factory. This was news to me, but in real life, Warhol published a novel in 1968 called a, A novel based on taped verbatim conversations of his insouciant, droll “stars,” such as Pope Ondine, Paul Morrissey, Ingrid Superstar, Sugar Plum Fairy, and Warhol himself. Warhol, a background specter in this novel, apparently hired a pair of high school-age girls to transcribe the tapes. This fictionalized account casts one of those young women, Flattery’s Mae, as the narrator of this, fast-paced sad novel.

Warning: the book definitely loses some focus halfway through when Flattery starts pin-balling from existential tangent to existential tangent, trying and failing to portray the tapes—and the act of listening to tapes—as a profound metaphor for alienation. But Flattery re-centers at about page 170, and the last 60 pages of this short novel deliver by focusing on the poignant and tender relationships she’s expertly crafted here.

There’s Mae cosmic friendships with her fellow teenage typist, the awkward and unfashionable, yet oddly confident and wise, Shelley. Throughout the novel, as they explore the grungy city together, their connection is steeped in flip teenage candor that, ironically, and ultimately, cannot bear its respective secrets. Those secrets—about class trappings, aspirations, letters home, vengeance, and sabotage—are grist for a succession of finale scenes that Flattery turns into nuanced short stories in their own right. For example, when Mae sneaks out of her mom’s apartment for the final time, supposedly on her way to liberation, she lands at her new, default home, the Factory, stumbling upon, appropriately enough, Shelley’s humiliating late night screen test. “When I pulled open the elevator door I was struck by a blinding light…” Then, eyes adjusted, Mae witnesses the reality of her new family: Warhol’s camera crew becomes a vicious firing squad armed with probing questions and mocking demands. “The silence in between each question and her answer was a pit. I watched her slip out of her dress.”

Mae’s relationship with Mikey, her alcoholic mom’s well-intentioned, bohemian boyfriend, also provides a series of literary moments. In a moving scene on the night before Mae quietly quits high school, she goes to an independent film with Mikey (I’m assuming at the Waverly in the Village!). Flattery concludes the scene with a dose of poetic writing that reflects back on the ineloquent and faltering parental heart-to-heart Mikey had attempted before the lights went down: “The film started in black-and-white, and then color seeped in. The color made the sets look bright and fake. The color concealed everything that should have been revealed.” This moment foreshadows the Wizard of Oz jolts Mae ultimately finds behind the curtain of the Factory and at all the aimless pill parties.  

I use “aimless” as a euphemism for tragedy as Flattery transforms the fundamental aimlessness at the heart of the Factory into heartbreaking revelations. The novel’s standout scene describes Mae’s dismay when she suddenly finds herself privy to Pope Ondine’s desperation. Mae is on the elevator at the end of a long work day heading down to E. 47th St. when Ondine, her favorite voice on the cassettes, rushes on board: “He was counting a few grubby bills that he’d clearly just stolen from Anita’s drawer. When he turned to face me, I couldn’t believe how fragile he looked up close. ‘You won’t tell anyone will you?’”

Mae does not. But Flattery’s novel does, and more.     

Kenyon Review, Summer 2023

Right now I’m reading the “Nature’s Nature” section, an annual feature they do that’s dedicated to nature poetry … or eco poetry! I’m comforted that 3 of the 5 featured poets are some of my modern favorites: Arthur Sze, Victoria Chang, and Joyelle McSweeney. The thing I like about about McSweeney, who writes a poem here called “Death Styles, 1/8/21,” is that she doesn’t fit today’s woo-woo zeitgeist. She’s very clearly a death metal poet and savors words such as “immiseration” and “transoceanic grafting.” Wonderfully fitting, the poet she presents here, Santiago Vizcaino, writes macabre verse that sounds a bit like her own. (Each of the five featured poets was tasked with championing the work of an emerging poet they like)

Letters to a Young Poet , Rainier Maria Rilke, first published in German in 1929 and in English translation in the U.S. in 1934. ©2023

Poet Rainier Maria Rilke’s 1923 Sonnets to Orpheus is on my poetry Top-5-Favorites list (and on the right day—i.e., a dramatic and ethereal day!—it totally takes the #1 spot). So, I was excited this month to read his classic, Letters to a Young Poet—which I’d never done before. W.W. Norton & Company, the original publisher of the famous book, is celebrating their centenary this year (they were founded in 1923 as the People’s Institute Publishing Company, simply putting out prints of college lectures to make extension courses more widely available), and they’ve marked this 100-year anniversary by releasing a gorgeous hardcover edition of Letters to a Young Poet, one of their historically prized publications from the 1930s. The classy new cover and blue-inked pages caught my eye at Elliott Bay, and I couldn’t resist.

This is Rilke’s super famous set of letters to a young fan, military academy cadet Franz Xaver Kappus. Like my great friend Noah C.  sending his geeked out letter to REM’s Peter Buck in 1983, Kappus wrote to Rilke in 1903 while reading an early collection by the still-not-famous-at-all Rilke. Upon receiving the fan mail, Rilke clearly saw a kindred spirit in the frustrated youth. Rilke, who was a military academy drop out himself, was less than 10 years older than his star-struck 19-year-old correspondent, and in the ensuing exchange between 1903 and 1908, Rilke wrote a remarkably heartfelt and earnest set of 10 letters about art, love, and depression to the young cadet.

Rilke’s soothing words are wise and zen with an intellectual candor bordering on outre. They aren’t gold, though, and can be a bit ramble-y and pseudo-cosmic, and also a little trite and cringe-y when it comes to the subject of sex. I think it may have simply been the peek-behind-the-scenes vibe of the spontaneous storybook circumstances that turned the letters into a hit.

More importantly: Norton’s slim volume introduced Rilke to U.S. readers; Rilke (1875-1926), originally from Prague, was strictly a European poet, novelist, and public intellectual during his lifetime.  

Rilke’s weird and magical poetry was just beginning to get traction among U.S. publishers when W.W. Norton released Letters to a Young Poet in 1934; it was originally published in German in 1929. It’s the Norton backstory that makes Norton’s new, celebratory edition such a wonderful read. The inky, elegant book comes with a new foreword that lays out the story of Norton’s unsung co-founder Mary D. Herter Norton, whose husband William Warder Norton (i.e., W.W. Norton) long overshadowed her role. It wasn’t until the 1980s that feminists started telling Mary’s story. The insistent (almost bratty) foreword here, by translator and scholar Damien Searls, goes into an exciting play-by-play account of Mary’s philosophical approach. Mary was the Rilke fan, translated the book, and wrote the original, riveting afterword, known as the “Chronicle,” a keenly researched, calmly incisive, and disproportionately lengthy—in comparison to such a short set of letters—biographic finale to the Rilke letters.

Additionally, this new edition comes with a fantastic afterword of its own by W.W. Norton’s current president, Julia A Reidhead. She connects the focus of Rilke’s advice to his young fan (work rather than think) to the focus of Mary Norton’s observations in the “Chronicle” (the quest for knowledge is the work at hand) while distilling both into a powerful feminist reading of this 20th Century literary classic. “Reframing requires materials,” Reidhead writes,  “and when telling stories, those materials come ideally in the form of primary documents. Fortunately, Mrs. Norton gave the company its most influential and enduring document…”

 If you read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet back in college, I’d highly recommend checking out this edition with the updated context.    

I Do Everything I’m Told , Megan Fernandes, ©2023

The New Yorker (which rarely writes full-fledged reviews of new poetry collections) wrote about this book in its latest issue—6/26/23.

After a busy and tiring Friday at work, I sat on the edge of my bed and drank in the review like it was the cold beer I craved. Fernandes’ celebration of city living sounded like something I needed to have on my poetry shelves. So far, I’m liking it a lot. …

UPDATE: This was not quite as exciting as the New Yorker made it seem. But per the review, this collection is a satisfying meditation on cities. “For Megan Fernandes, ‘here’ often seems to designate a city…the proliferation of these cities imbues them with a sense of unreality; the poems don’t feel so much set it in the cities as gestures toward them from some other place.”

In other words, she finds traces of urban magic wherever she is. City-ism as a solution, perhaps, to the human condition! Imagining Fernandes as a fellow zealot, I raced out and bought her book. She’s definitely a comrade in the cause—“I leave an MTA card and a wild daisy” (on Ezra Pound’s grave)—and she can heighten consciousness with her closing lines: “Yes. It was joy, wasn’t it? Even if it was ugly, it was joy.”

The centerpiece of her collection is a set of 9 sonnets, each named for a certain city—“Brooklyn Sonnet,” “Los Angeles Sonnet,” “Philadelphia Sonnet,” for example, along with the last two that remake the batch through clever recalibration: “Wandering Sonnet” and “Diaspora Sonnet.” But as you might glean from “Brooklyn Sonnet,” the book can, at times, be a bit too steeped in hipster observations and diary-like memos; there’s a poem here called “Fuckboy Villanelle.”

Having said that, this book is definitely crowded with electric poems and killer lines (“spotting land, at last,/grow gills at its sight.” … “One must look for signs/to believe in them.” …“When we play back to hear/from the dead, we expect a song. What we get/is a warning that goes on and on and on.” … “and can’t tell/what is kink or worship or both.” … “There’s nothing/at the bottom/but a view.” …)

My Hijacking, A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering, Martha Hodes, ©2023

Stick w/ me. I get critical. But this book...wow.

I was drawn to this memoir because of the dramatic/historic subject: a 1970, Palestinian hijacking operation.

While 1970 is a minute or two early for me (I’m more of a 1973 little kid), this era—and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular—is rich and roiling for me, a secular-left American Jew growing up during the intensely politicized early 1970s. To be clear, I was a little kid, and certainly not political, but it was an unavoidably stormy time, impossible not to absorb the currents: Vietnam, the hippies, women’s lib, the counterculture, Watergate, Patty Hearst(!), Black Power, and yes, all the hijackings, AK-47s—and the Marxist demands.

And here comes this new, on-topic memoir. And with such an exciting origin story: The author, Martha Hodes, is a successful academic—she’s currently an NYU professor specializing in 19th Century American history (President Lincoln, slavery, race). She goes to pitch her next book to her agent (publish or perish)…and after rattling off her big ideas about the 1830s and the runup to the American Civil War, she says, and, oh, lately I’ve been processing the time when I was a 12-year-old girl held hostage in an international hijacking. (?!?)

And it turns out: a major, headline hijacking,

On September 6, 1970, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked 3 airplanes to bring the plight of displaced Palestinians to the world’s attention. (Oh, how I long for the early 1970s when terrorists—called Guerrillas!— were secular, feminist, Marxists—or Maoist! in the case of the PFLP. As opposed to today’s religious reactionaries, the “Third World” revolutionaries of the 1970s espoused super woke rhetoric; several of the hijackers were women.) The PLFP commandeered the planes to the desert floor just outside Amman, Jordan where Palestinian refugees had essentially set up a shadow state and were nudging Jordan into a low-level civil war. The PFLP held the planes in the desert for six tense days in early September 1970 demanding the release of Palestinian political prisoners in Europe and Israel, threatening to blow up the (now-dynamite-rigged) airplanes with hostages on board, including 12-year-old Martha Hodes.

Umm. Write THAT book, Hodes’ agent told her. And boy did she.

Hodes' story is steeped in the times. Her divorced parents, a pair of avant-garde modern dancers working for their mentor Martha Graham (!), split up when her mom moved to Israel to help start a Graham dance troupe in Tel Aviv (the mom was also having an affair with a handsome Israeli dancer). The dad, a Lower East Side bohemian in NYC, gets custody, and the author (named after godmother Martha Graham, btw) visits Israel every summer with her "groovy" older sister, Catherine. On their TWA flight back to NYC after their annual summer with mom in 1970, the PLFP strikes.

Again, 1970 is a minute or two early for me. But I definitely identified with young Hodes, a precocious, secular, Lower East Side little Jewish girl who kept a diary at the time modeled after Anne Frank, but slyly, she reports, consciously switched to "the scoffing voice of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye."

Unfortunately, Hodes’ "My Hijacking," while riveting at first—after all, she’s chronicling a first-person account of a charged, historic event that commanded the full attention of the New York Times, Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and CBS' Walter Cronkite for a solid week in 1970—starts to flag several chapters in. Or at least, it becomes increasingly frustrating to read. It turns out Hodes doesn’t remember much of the experience at all. And the book starts to become a repetitive account of the few things she does recall (like a hijacker’s gun at the co-pilot’s neck and the fact that the airplane’s toilet is clogged). It’s also repetitive in the sense that she keeps ruminating on her psychological brick wall itself. Yes. We get it, despite her 6th grade-going into-7th grade contemporaneous diary, she doesn't remember much. Moreover, the book's tightly objective, academic tone highlights the lack of moving details; hilariously, it's unsurprising (and symbolic of her stoic approach as an academic today) that no one she tracks down and interviews seems to remember her childhood presence on the plane. "I'm not sure Susie remembers Catherine and me at all. Another reminder of our seemingly phantasmic presence on the plane in the desert."

There’s a meta aspect to the book as she turns to her historian training, applying her research skills to overcome her own lapsed memory. In addition to trying to stir her recollections by interviewing people she’s tracked down from the time (stewardesses, pilots, fellow passengers, her older sister, her now-elderly parents), she also combs through old government records and interviews from the time, and she reviews contemporaneous news accounts and TV footage—it’s freaky how she sees video of her younger self.

She also delves into PLFP accounts and documents. Yes, sorry to surprise all the non-Jewish lefties out there: She’s quite sympathetic to the PLFP cause—as she was at the time. LOL. She notes how 12-year-old her fully understood that the Black Panthers, who she and Catherine idolized, marched for, and supported as smarty Manhattan Jewish kids at the time, found common cause with the Palestinians.

Anyway, I started getting grumpy with the book as Hodes repeatedly failed to come up with any revelations or transcendent details. Additionally, her clunky “literary” conceit of quoting Le Petit Prince—the classic French novella that precocious her was obsessed with that fateful summer—becomes unbearably cringe-y; okay, okay, the tween-conscious narrator in Le Petit Prince is ALSO stranded in the desert after an airplane crash. Talk about ham-fisted.

However: Whoa. Please stick with this book—and Le Petit Prince's disdain for adults. Just as the Exorcist (1973!) is not about 12-year-old Linda Blair’s Satanic possession, Martha Hodes’ story is not about a hijacking. It’s most certainly about her absent mom and divorce. Transcending the wildly colorful politics of the early 1970s to tell a distinctly universal and personal story takes some high-wattage writing, and despite the trivial flaws here, Hodes nails it in the closing chapters when, a half century later, she (and her husband) visits Israel for the first time since the early 1970s. She also visits the hijacking holding site in the desert and, breaking down in tears, the Amman hotel where the guerrillas eventually released her and her fellow hostages. She also uncovers reel-to-reel tapes of a startling and totally forgotten (to her) interview that she and her sister did with the Boston Phoenix alternative-weekly immediately after the hijacking. This proves to be defining documentation of the psychological games Hodes’ mind has been playing.

This is a breathtaking, remarkable book about psychology, memory, and childhood.

I’m hoping my smart-as-hell memoirist pals Erica C. Barnett (Quitter), Zoe Zolbrod (The Telling), Claire Dederer (Love & Trouble), and Kristi Coulter (Exit Interview) have some time to read this book. So curious to know what they’d make of it.

The City-State in Five Cultures, Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas, ©1981.

…really just the introduction and the first two chapters: Ch. 1 Sumerian City-States and Ch. 2 The Greek Polis.

Billie Holiday. The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Melville House/Penguin Random House, ©2019

Wonderful to eavesdrop on Billie Holiday’s speaking voice (brain power) in these transcripts of radio and TV interviews. Much like her memoir, Lady Sings the Blues, she’s far out ahead on the issue of drug addiction as a disease.

One serious complaint, though: I was disappointed that the racially & politically cognizant introduction to the book, which opens w a discussion of “Strange Fruit,” leaves out the fact that “Strange Fruit” was written by a Jew, Abel Meeropol. Meeropol was a public high school teacher in the Bronx, a Communist, poet, musician, and civil rights advocate. (He was James Baldwin’s high school teacher!)

The Guest, Emma Cline, ©2023

Cline wrote one of my favorite contemporary novels, Girls (2016), which puts the Manson Family girls front and center in a fictionalized account of the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. Cline’s conceit? Instead of having her main character, Evie, a pensive teenager, fall under Charlie Manson’s spooky spell, Evie falls instead for the hypnotic Susan Atkins character. Cline’s account of Evie’s amorphous, listless coming of age story in eerie, late 1960s California among Manson’s street-smart acolytes also includes Evie’s strained relationship with her concerned mother, her estranged father, and his girlfriend. It’s a minimalist story of details and internal monologues.

With the same poetic attention to detail—sentence after sentence reads like a quiet allegory (“Alex cut the pizza into ragged squares with a bread knife”)—Cline’s new novel, The Guest, evokes a similar languid, tense, and thoughtful mood. (It also has this quotable quote: “Dresses with some of the same sad reach for elegance as a prom dress. Girls clutching a purse with both hands. Girls in drag as girls.”)

Just as the Manson Family girls broke into Beverly Hills homes on their “creepy crawly” reconnaissance and burgling missions, the main character in The Guest, Alex, with a second nature for survivalist kleptomania, spends her time breaking into wealthy homes; though, in this case, she uses her wiles as a con-artist, gaining sunny admittance by befriending unsuspecting marks as she surfs through this novel’s micro-odyssey of small disasters.

As opposed to late-60s California, The Guest is set today in a super wealthy Long Island summer community. Alex, 22, is a grifter with a murky backstory as a failed, expensive sex worker, who owes a lot of money to an ominous, though maybe equally hapless pimp named Dom. Evidently, having alienated everyone she knows in New York City, the novel starts as Alex lounges away her days at the beach, high on pilfered pain medication, having found brief, safe harbor as the mistress of a wealthy older man named Simon. She has moved in with him at his summer home. But just 50+ pages into the book, after one of Alex’s alcohol and pill-induced mishaps at a neighbor’s cocktail party, Simon clinically ends the relationship; he asks his assistant to drive Alex to the train station. With no footholds in the City—and, worse, with the apparently volatile Dom stalking her, Alex doesn’t get on the train. Instead, she floats back into town to hide out as an uninvited guest.

Comparisons to John Cheever’s great short story The Swimmer are inevitable as Alex’s odyssey of desperation momentarily touches down in the homes, summer clubs, swimming pools, and comfortable, yet strained, lives of the rich. More to the point: Like Cheever’s Neddy Merrill, Alex’s plan is openly delusional and doomed from the start. I also couldn’t help thinking of Rebel Without a Cause: In one of the final segments, Alex lands with her last sitting-duck, a troubled teenage boy, in an abandoned home where they play house for 48 hours in the run-up to yet more wreckage.

And I don’t know what to make of this: The Guest reads more like a short story than a novel, lacking the ties to a more fully drawn world that you typically feel when you read a 300-page book of fiction. Perhaps that’s intentional—meant to highlight Alex’s untethered state? Anyway, like a short story, The Guest is both accessible and mysteriously pliant.

One weak point: Alex’s pitch perfect ability to soothe the often distressed people around her. Her calm, mature, articulate, and wise empathy for others, seems out of sync with her own impulsive, reckless, and ill-conceived behavior. A neat juxtaposition? Sure. But it was hard to believe.

I will say, at first, I was disappointed that of all Alex’s temporary sidekicks, Cline chose Jack for Alex’s lengthiest, penultimate, and climactic vignette. Jack’s standard story line—caustic, controlling yet distant wealthy Hollywood father, nervous-breakdown expulsion from fancy private high school backstory, and tender-yet-sullen-and-violent male character trope—was not as interesting as the other vulnerable people Alex glommed onto. There was Jack’s friend Max, a townie who seemed to share Alex’s outsider, criminal wits; Margaret, a super sad sack lonely teen, lost among her wealthy friends; and most of all, Nicholas, a hardworking domestic staffer (for one of Simon’s rich colleagues), with a soft working class charm behind his butler expertise. Nicholas, one of the few characters who rejects Alex’s sexual advance, seems to be the novel’s moral center during his all too brief cameo. (The Nicholas segment includes Alex’s most symbolic mishap, which is also the novel’s best literary turn. I’ll just say, it involves a valuable piece of art.)

Having said all that, Cline eventually brings the Jack plot line to life with the aforementioned Rebel Without a Cause set up as Alex and he find a fleeting reprieve from their respective rootlessness by playing house. Only Alex seems to know it’s a ruse.

Quant by Quant: The Autobiography of Mary Quant, Mary Quant, ©1966

In my ongoing list of Urbanism all-stars, I add Mary Quant to Billie Holiday, Jane Jacobs, and Frank O'Hara.

In my firmament of city gods, I’m trying to make sure all the tenets of Urbanism get a patron—or that is to say, that each patron represents a city tenet: Currently, I’ve got 1950s Trinidadian-UK calypso star Lord Kitchener representing local music scenes, city planning theory sage Jane Jacobs representing pedestrian street life, and I recently added pastoral cityscape artist Edward Hopper to represent infrastructure. There are many more concept slots to fill: mass transit, diversity, counterculture, density, innovation, commerce. Of course, I’ve slated Billie Holiday as the overall Goddess of Cities.

Today, I’m adding London’s Mary Quant to represent one of the most electric tenets of Urbanism: Youth.

Starting when she founded her independent Kings Road clothing shop, Bazaar, in mid-1950s Chelsea, Quant ushered in a fashion revolution that Vogue editor Diana Vreeland eventually dubbed the “Youthquake,” as its mass produced and affordable affront to Haute couture clothing jolted the world in 1965. With Polyvinyl Chloride, mini-skirts, bobbed hairdos, stripes and zigzags and dots, Quant’s mod concoctions made cutting edge fashion comfortable, accessible, and on-point for young women, for teenagers. Quant also integrated London’s 1950s nascent counterculture of coffee bars, late night jazz clubs, and pop music into her aesthetic.

Quant on Quant, a memoir she wrote when she was just 36 at the height of Youthquake fashion in 1966, begins with an account of her early days as a DIY designer wielding scissors and a sewing machine on her bedsit floor as she alters Harrods prints into dresses she liked. It’s like a Lee “Scratch” Perry dub remix.

Documenting her rapid success after opening Bazaar, the book turns into a fast-paced chronicle of her day-to-day business operations as she strikes deals with major retailers and puts on shocking fashion shows (defining the modern runway aesthetic we know today; by the mid-60s, she was including an American garage rock band I’d never heard of, The Skunks, into her shows in mainstream U.S. stores.) Her stories are colored with anecdotes from dressing rooms, hotels, airplanes, elevators, cocktail parties, NYC corporate suites, and JCPenney outlets.

Along the way, Quant, a casually disarming pop philosopher—think Warhol, but boisterous rather than bitchy—tosses off substantive asides and aphorisms, that seem to carry ideological implications beyond fashion. “Girls…are busy people who have no time to switch clothes during the day…They want clothes they can put on first thing in the morning and feel right in at midnight; clothes that go happily to the office and equally happily out to dinner.” “What ready-to-wear does today, the couturiers — even the Paris couturiers — confirm tomorrow.”

Quant’s asides—”when you start a distinctive trend in fashion, you are also digging its grave”—capture the interesting contradictions of a populist uprising that brought high fashion out of the Paris atelier to the teeny bopper set, or “birds” as Quant calls the girls buying up the “Look.” These contradictions: revolution versus capitalism, bespoke design versus mass production, feminism versus sexy fashion persist today—as does an empowered, self-conscious youth culture that Quant helped create 60+ years ago.

This timelessness is matched by on odd detail about Quant’s account. She doesn’t give any dates. This reflects, perhaps, the out-of-breath sense Quant had when she was writing the book: The exciting events at hand were, well, at hand.

Clearly a rushed attempt to capitalize on her sudden notoriety, Quant on Quant is also—in addition to being a memoir—an important contemporaneous artifact itself. It’s peppered with casual references to the Rolling Stones, Patty Boyd, Vidal Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh, and, as I said, The Skunks?

Given the historical nature of the book, it’s frustrating that she didn’t include any dates. I’ll add the key ones: She graduated from college in 1953 and she opened Bazaar in 1955. It’s also fitting, however, that she overlooks dates. As I noted, the story line of youth culture as society’s change agent is a timeless tale.

Kenyon Review, ©Spring 2023

I savor this subscription. Mesmerizing short stories in this issue.

Chuck Berry, An American Life, RJ Smith, ©2022

The lead anecdote about the Smithsonian’s efforts to get Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac for its new African American history museum was fair warning that this book was another banal exercise in rock and roll hagiography.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, ©1916

Mr. Joyce, it turns out, is not a God. This is an energized, addicting, and experimental book that keeps you on your toes with its classy literary imagery (and gruesome, death metal imagery), witty dialogue, Irish politics, and lectures on the philosophy of art. But it’s not—as I had imagined since putting off reading it in high school—a holy literary scripture. Stephen Dedalus’ coming of age drama is a predictable—per other late 19th Century and early 20th Century novels—adolescent wrestling match with parents, religion, class, sexuality (heavy on the sexist tropes), and individuality, as he contemplates his own voice.

My favorite thing about the book? All the walks around the sodden, windswept streets & bridges of Dublin. I don’t mean to sound blasé. I liked this novel a lot, and there are rich literary layers here—many that surely went over my head. But I wanted fewer lectures and more story telling, more meaningful vignettes immersed in the book’s expertly crafted atmosphere, which was hallucinatory yet simultaneously firmly set in the material action of everyday life.

Prognosis, Jim Moore, ©2021

Dubliners, James Joyce, ©1914

I’ve set out, unsuccessfully, to read this famous collection of James Joyce short stories several times before. My high school best friend Marty was a Joyce fanatic, but, despite his enthusiasm, I couldn’t crack it. At best, I remember reading the story Araby, which I actually associate with my sad stint in Minneapolis and my accompanying sad apartment. This was nearly a decade after high school, and now, decades ago.

This time, the idea of a “City Canon” (my imaginary greatest-hits list of books, movies, and music about the city) sparked a sincere interest in Dubliners, and I wolfed it down. And well, wow. This collection (published in 1914, but written between 1904 and 1907) is an obvious masterpiece. And a page-turner at that. I’m not a literary scholar, so I’ll simply say these enigmatic parables about personal revelation capture life’s intimate doldrums with succinct, poetic prose.

But it’s the City Canon subject matter that swept me away: trams, bar districts, shops, municipal politics, slang, live music, quays, artistes, and late night perambulations.

My favorite bit of slang in the book, spondulics, shows up in the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room—a dialogue-driven story about city election canvassers, Irish nationalism, British “shoeboys,” and the politics of nostalgia.

Spondulics means money, or specifically, spending cash. (Shoeboys means boot lickers.)

Field Guide, Robert Hass, ©1973

The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, Edited by Robert Hass, ©1994

Palace of Desire, Naguib Mahfouz, ©1957

Upon which, I finish the Cairo Trilogy! I read Book 3 (Sugar Street) in 2021 and Book 1 (Palace Walk) in 2022. I liked both of those novels better: Sugar Street translated Cairo’s factional early-20th-Century politics—the Wafdist nationalists, the Marxists, and the the Muslims— into poignant, literary parables; and Palace Walk teetered into transcendence with its poetic story telling and imagery. By comparison, Palace of Desire, though set in the same mesmerizing coffee houses, alleys, shops, and brothels, felt a bit rushed and slightly trivial. Not that Mahfouz’s knack for casting his characters in the throes of psychological tumult, highly symbolic dramas, and philosophical crises is absent here.

Certainly, Mahfouz, who writes like a 19th Century Naturalist or Realist novelist (or even a Romantic novelist) more than a 20th Century one, still draws readers in with his page-turning family melodramas and diligent character studies. But unlike the other two books in the trilogy, the existential stakes don’t seem as high in Palace of Desire. Here, we simply have young Kamal (Mahfouz’s stand in) obsessing over his rich, best friend’s Westernized sister, Aïda—and getting crushed. And we have his father, the hypocritical patriarch, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, visiting the same prostitutes as his shit-show (older) son, the dissolute Yasin. In the other novels, the personal dramas merged with life and death politics. In Palace Walk, for example, we have Fahmy, the third brother, whose existential journey leads to martyrdom in the 1919 revolution.

The default short stories that make up the chapters of Mahfouz’s huge novels are also more profound in Palace Walk and Sugar Street, particularly in Palace Walk; I’m thinking of the car accident that injures Kamal’s mother in the hectic bazaar, after she and Kamal surreptitiously visit the local mosque.

I do love Mahfouz’s go-to trick (here and in the other two books) of having his characters’ internal monologues read in stark contrast to the out-loud conversation at hand, revealing both banal and grand contradictions of daily life and pointing to the greater mystery of the human condition.

One of my favorite scenes in Palace of Desire is when Kamal’s easy-going best friend, Husayan Shaddad, and his sister, Kamal’s super crush, Aïda, take Kamal out for a joy ride in their fancy car. They drive to the pyramids where they have a picnic and, eventually, a strained political conversation that stands in as an alternative narrative for Kamal’s endless brooding. Really though, I liked being out and about in Cairo and realizing that the magnificent pyramids are simply part of the local landscape.

Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, Jorge Almazan, ©2022

Absolute Beginner Blues

 “Well, I looked at my watch, it was ten o-five,
Man, I didn't know whether I was dead or alive!
But I was rollin', reelin' and a-rockin'...

Well, I looked at my watch, it was ten twenty-six,
But I'm a keep on dancin' till I got my kicks!
We were reelin', reelin' and a- rockin'...

Well, I looked at my watch, it was ten twenty-eight,
I gotta get my kicks before it gets too late!
We were reelin', reelin' and a- rockin' ...”

—Chuck Berry, Reelin’ and Rockin’ , B-Side to “Sweet Little Sixteen,” 1957

 “Oh, well, I look at my watch, it says nine twenty-five
And I think ‘Oh God, I'm still alive’” —David Bowie, Time, from “Aladdin Sane,” 1973

Intro: Euphoria

I apologize in advance for this man-splainy atrocity. As my best friend Erica might derisively say: this is a “Boy Lecture.” It’s definitely a white guy lecture. Worse, it’s about 1950s Rock & Roll. And I’m not even a Baby Boomer. I’m a Gen-Xer.

But I love to play 1950s Rock & Roll on piano, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

Early 1950s Rock & Roll sparks euphoria in my brain. I don’t know why. I’m a 1980s teen—15 in 1982—who loved David Bowie and WHFS radio, Washington, D.C.’s underground station (“alternative” wasn’t a word yet).

Three and a half decades later, under the influence of my weekly Saturday afternoon routine (listening to Uncle Marv Goldberg’s “Yesterday’s Memories Rhythm & Blues Party” in the shower), I started taking piano lessons. I had a fantasy that in 10 years, I’d be able to walk into my future apartment, a gorgeous two-story condo with hard wood floors and high white walls, sit down at my expensive piano and smash out beautiful Stride-influenced jams when I got home from work.

With this Jerry Lee Lewis dream in mind, I stuck with formal lessons for about a year from a teacher who lived in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a feel for Rock & Roll; one time, I brought in the sheet music to Ike Turner’s 1951 No. 1 R&B hit Rocket ’88, and she was flummoxed. During lessons, she mostly talked about the Feldenkrais method. And at best, Boogie Woogie Bear was my Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I did learn to sight read a little, though, and she taught me some helpful hand positions.

A couple of years later, in December 2020, I made New Year’s resolution: By the end of 2021, I would be able to play a set of 1950s Rock & Roll songs on piano.

By early August, I had sort of learned 12 songs; I was still shaky on most of them because when I spent time learning one song, I’d forget an earlier one. Plus. I’m just not very good. Realizing I had five full months left in 2021, I decided I’d dedicate the rest of the year to working on these songs rather than adding any more.

As August comes to a close now (today is August 26th), my song-by-song review is going well. The songs I learned early in the year are further along than I thought they were. As opposed to re-learning them from scratch, I’m actually spending time discovering cool nuances that I didn’t have down earlier, or that I totally missed the first time, like moving the right hand (not just the left hand bass line) to the lovely IV chord—Eflat/A/C over the walking F bass line—on Big Joe Turner’s Shake Rattle and Roll.

I know songs with tricky beats like Calypso Blues will continue to bedevil me as I make my way through the set. And getting up to speed, literally, on bangers like At the Hop remains intimidating to an absolute beginner like me. But I’m feeling energized by this project. .

The euphoria I feel when I play these songs isn’t just about pressing my fingers into glorious chords such as the heavenly A sharp/G sharp/D/F sharp/A sharp arpeggio in Chuck Berry’s School Days. There’s also a sense that these 12 songs, which I chose iteratively over the first half of the year, have a collective narrative.  

Here are the songs in my 2021 piano repertoire (in the order I learned them):

 1.  In the Still of the Night (The Five Satins, 1956)

2.  Junco Partner Blues (Worthless Man) (James Wayne, 1951)

3.  Heartbreak Hotel (Elvis Presley, 1956)

4.  Earth Angel (The Penguins, 1954)

5.  Shake Rattle and Roll (Big Joe Turner, 1954)

6.  Rock Around the Clock (Bill Haley & His Comets, 1954)

7.  School Days (Chuck Berry, 1957)

8.  Calypso Blues (Nat King Cole, 1950)

9.  At the Hop (Danny & the Juniors, 1957)

10. Rudy, a Message to You (Dandy Livingstone, 1967)

11.  Get a Job (The Silhouettes, 1957)

12. Come On Eileen (Dexys Midnight Runners, 1982)

To explain the through line of this set, let’s start with the obvious outlier on the list, Come on Eileen.

Note: I am going to capitalize the names of musical styles. For example: Blues, Punk, Soul, Rock & Roll

1. Come on Eileen: 1980s Soul revival

 As opposed to all the 1950s “Golden Oldies” that make up the supermajority of my set, Come on Eileen, a post-Punk, Gen-X Pop hit, is from 1982. Just like following a dropdown menu path, this early ‘80s British record establishes the first step in the sequence that guides my piano repertoire:

Soul music revivalism  >  original 1960s Soul > 1960s Ska > the Roots of  Ska, 1950s Calypso > Calypso’s Diaspora twin, 1950’s U.S. Rhythm & Blues  > 1950s Rock & Roll > 1950s Doo-wop.

Come on Eileen was written and recorded by a British Pop band called Dexys Midnight Runners starring ex-Killjoys Punk front-man, Irish songwriter Kevin Rowland. Dexys Midnight Runners were part of an early 1980s British crop of bands intent on reviving, or at least celebrating, London’s mid-1960s teen scene heyday with an ‘80s New Wave update. Dexys Midnight Runners—dexy is short for Dexedrine, an amphetamine popular with mid-60s Mod youth—used layered horn arrangements, swift bass lines, falsetto vocal figures, swirling keyboards, jukebox-friendly melodies, and SNCC overalls (plus bandanas and mascara), as they conjured Soul music, a primary artifact of the mid-‘60s scene.

With their 1980 debut LP, sentimentally titled “Searching for the Young Soul Rebels,” and featuring Geno, their hit single tribute to ‘60s African American ex-pat British Soul singer Geno Washington, Dexys became leading figures in England’s retro “Northern Soul” movement.  Northern Soul worshiped deep 1960s dance cuts, predominantly from the African American Soul catalogue. Dexys claimed to eschew Motown in favor of channeling lesser known material, but their driving bass lines were pure Supremes; check out snappy Dexys’ tunes such as Seven Days Too Long, Let’s Make this Precious, and Keep It. Meanwhile, Rowland’s dramatic croon was a hybrid of Culture Club’s Boy George and Motown’s Levi Stubbs from the Four Tops.

In addition to mid-‘60s American Soul music, another signifier popular with the early ‘80’s bands was the mid-60s barre-chord garage Rock that pre-dated bombastic and psychedelic late-60s Album Rock. The Power Pop band the Jam defined this exuberant wing of the movement. The Jam were my favorite band from this early ‘80s era; I wasn’t a Dexys Midnight Runners fan, although the two bands occupied kindred factions in the revivalist movement. (And I did like Come On Eileen. How could you not?) While Dexys Midnight Runners, along with Blue Eyed Soul cohorts like Culture Club and Haircut 100, went for bass grooves, the Jam were guitar-driven, jacked up on precursor Punk Kinks riffs and Pete Townshend’s pre-“Tommy,” pop-art Who.

The Jam also had an affinity for 1950s and 1960s African American songwriters. They started out playing amphetamine-tempo versions of  early African American Rock & Roll and Soul tunes, including Larry Williams’ Slow Down (ha!) and Wilson Picket’s In the Midnight Hour, which they included on their first and second Punk-scene L.P.s respectively, both released in 1977. Notably, the Jam concluded their career in 1982 with an L.P. that balanced their guitar Power Pop with a batch of bass-heavy, retro Soul originals such as Precious, Town Called Malice, and Trans Global Express along with their final single, the irrepressible Soul rave up, Beat Surrender. Meanwhile, they were still covering Soul standards—more faithfully at this point—from acts such as the Impressions, solo Curtis Mayfield, and the Chi-Lites. Postscript: The Jam’s songwriter, Paul Weller, founded a Jazzy, Blue-Eyed Soul group in 1982 with former Dexys Midnight Runners’ pianist Mick Talbot called the Style Council. I did dig them.

Aligning themselves with Black music was an intentional political move on the part of early ‘80s, white Pop bands like the Jam and Dexys Midnight Runners: Another defining feature of their movement was fierce anti-racist politics. This was a response to Thatcherism (conservative Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979), a retro story itself. While it was certainly re-packaged in a softer guise, Thatcherism—like Reaganism in America—was a backlash against the progressive politics of the ‘60s and ‘70s. In Thatcher’s case, this meant in part, reclaiming the anti-immigrant politics of Enoch Powell, a former, conservative British Member of Parliament. Powell was famous for his 1968, anti-immigrant “Rivers of Blood” speech. Thatcher’s ascent looked similar to Reagan’s, who himself re-packaged George Wallace’s Civil Rights-era backlash racist populism. Dissident U.K. youth and their favorite bands, particularly the Jam’s noisier Punk circuit cohorts the Clash, were hyper cognizant of Thatcher’s reactionary politics. 

While the Clash offered the most explicit lyrical attack on Thatcherism, the clearest musical response came from another subset of Britain’s retro music scene: 2 Tone Records and its roster of Ska bands. (Two-tone was shorthand for interracial). These interracial bands included the English Beat, Selector, and the Specials.

AllMusic’s write up on Ska and 2 Tone Records explains:

“Ska evolved in the early '60s, when Jamaicans tried to replicate the sound of the New Orleans R&B they heard over their radios. Instead of mimicking the sound of the R&B, the first Ska artists developed a distinctive rhythmic and melodic sensibility, which eventually turned into Reggae. In the late '70s, a number of young British bands began reviving the sound of original Ska, adding a nervous Punk edge to the skittish rhythms. Furthermore, the Ska Revivalists were among the only bands of the era to feature racially integrated lineups, which was a bold political statement for the time.”

 2. Rudy  A Message to You:  Diaspora Pop in mid-60s London

With its bouncy nostalgic sound and its nod to mid-60s African American Pop, the ‘80s neo-Soul hit Come On Eileen is first cousins with a 1967 Ska single by British-Jamaican ex-pat musician Dandy Livingstone, Rudy A Message to You. This Ska record, released alongside his 1967 debut LP “Rock Steady with Dandy” on Ska Beat Records, is the second chronological outlier in my set.

Before the Specials revived it in the late 70s, Dandy Livingstone sang it in the mid-60s.

When it comes to what the early ‘80s revivalist kids were going for, Rudy A Message To You is a perfect find. Ska was the contemporaneous, Jamaican British version of high-energy 1960’s American Soul; both Ska and Soul were identity conscious brands of Pop, recrafting teen beats for Black youth. In a sense, 1960s American Soul and 1960s British Ska are examples of early African diaspora Pop. Shorter version: Geno Washington and Dandy Livingstone are musical soul mates.

With its off-beat Jamaican dance rhythm and catchy Kingston slang hook, Rudy A Message to You is a flawless cultural touch point. The fashionably Mod, 2 Tone band the Specials had a breakout hit with their 1979 cover of Livingstone’s original Ska record, re-titled A Message to You, Rudy. The Specials founder and keyboardist, Jerry Dammers, also founded 2 Tone Records. Though representing different particulars of the revivalist moment—Ska and Soul— the connections were clear: The Specials were early tour mates of Dexys Midnight Runners.

 3. Calypso Blues: Diaspora R&B in 1950s America

 A Message to You Rudy’s Caribbean off beat (or Bluebeat as it was also called in the 1960s) is clearly adjacent to another song in my set. Like the all the remaining tunes here, this one is from the 1950s: Calypso Blues, written and recorded in 1950 by pioneering Jazz and R&B piano prodigy, Nat King Cole.  I included Calypso Blues—an intimate track featuring a lone bongo beat, a catchy Afro-Caribbean melody, and Cole’s casual delivery—to demonstrate the close relationship between Caribbean sounds and early, American R&B.

Working as a cool nightclub trio in the late 1930s through the 1940s, Cole, with guitarist Oscar Moore and stand up bassist Johnny Miller, set the standard for Swing, Jazz, and Blues-textured Pop; his trio’s 1946 LP “Live at the Circle Room,” recorded at Milwaukee’s Hotel LaSalle in September 1946 over nightclub chatter, clinking glasses, and occasionally, a cash register, is a master class in Blue-spiked Pop. Former New York Times Pop and Jazz music critic Ben Ratliff included the 1946 King Cole album in his book A Jazz Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings. King Cole’s beautiful set includes a precursor Rock & Roll version of Duke Ellington’s C Jam Blues.

Seen as a safe crossover artist by the late 1940s, Nat King Cole made a race-conscious statement in 1950 by putting his connection to the African Diaspora front and center with Calypso Blues. And the lyrics openly disparage ersatz elements of white culture:

Dese yankee girl give me big scare
Is black de root, is blonde de hair
Her eyelash false, her face is paint
And pads are where de girl she ain't!

She jitterbug when she should waltz
I even think her name is false
But calypso girl is good a lot
Is what you see, is what she got

Nat King Cole Trio, 1946, photo, Library of Congress

Calypso was a 1950s precursor to Ska. Calypso music originated in Trinidad and came to the U.K. when Caribbean immigrants started arriving in London as part of the Windrush Generation, a reference to the first ship, the MV Empire Windrush, to bring cheap labor from the U.K.’s  Caribbean Commonwealth nations to London. The mass migration between 1948 and 1971 eventually fueled Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant backlash.

Much as Southern African Americans helped spark Rock & Roll when they transported the Delta Blues to Northern American cities during The Great Migration (King Cole’s family moved from Montgomery, Alabama to Chicago in 1931 when he was 12), the Windrush Generation brought Calypso to the U.K. and helped spark the emergent London youth culture that would explode in the mid-60s Swinging London era. Collin MacInnes’ 1958 London novel Absolute Beginners depicts the early scene with literary flair. And Trinidadian-U.K. immigrant Sam Selvon’s earlier 1956 novel, The Lonely Londoners, amplifies the Caribbean perspective of the same scene.

Along with its strong dance beat and playful Pop guise, and as seen in King Cole’s Calypso Blues, Calypso featured witty, up-front socio-political lyrics. Calypso artists echoed their lyrics with their stage names, taking on “Lord” sobriquets as sarcastic commentary on their down and out Afro-Caribbean immigrant status. There was Lord Beginner and Lord Invader. And, of course, the most famous Calypsonian Aldwyn Roberts took the stage name Lord Kitchener, a spoof on an early 20th Century British military hero of the same name. (He’s the mustachioed official in WWI’s “Britain Wants You” posters, the forerunner to America’s Uncle Sam campaign.) In a great example of Calypso’s nod and wink style, Lord Kitch (Kitsch) is a wonderful play on words too, a meta one at that, deftly calling attention to the style’s own aesthetics of reclamation.

Cole’s take on Calypso gained immediate credibility with his U.K. compatriots. Trinidadian-U.K. actress-singer Mona Baptiste covered King Cole’s Calypso Blues in 1951 for the indie U.K. record label Melodisc. Melodisc, the label that also recorded Lord Kitchener and Lord Beginner, was the parent company of Blue Beat, a popular R&B and Ska label by the 1960s.

4. Junco Partner: Limbo Leanings

Featuring an off-kilter left and right hand mismatch Calypso Blues is the most rhythmically difficult song in my set. I’m still trying to get the timing of the chorus right. Calypso Blues shares its off-time beat (and the prominence of the lone percussion) with Junco Partner Blues, another Caribbean-tinged song in my set.  Junco Partner Blues is much easier to swing, though; it’s got a Limbo beat.  

Widely considered a traditional Blues song, Junco Partner was adapted and first recorded in 1951 by a somewhat mysterious American R&B vocalist and guitarist named James Wayne (also Waynes), who was either from New Orleans or Houston, and who recorded for several independent R&B labels in the early 1950s, including Aladdin, Imperial, and Sittin’ in With.

Before releasing Junco Partner Blues on New York City-based Sittin’ in With, Wayne had a No. 2 R&B record on the label, a B-side called Tend to Your Business. Also released in 1951, it’s a spritely, sax-heavy number over a boogie-woogie bass line, and features a repetitive, crushed note piano solo that invents Rock & Roll music on the spot. Unfortunately, no one seems to knows who’s playing that rocking piano, not even Rock & Roll historian Uncle Marvy Goldberg, who I emailed to ask.

The A-Side to Waynes’ Tend to Your Business B-Side, 1951

Following a 12-bar Blues structure,  Junco Partner has a much sparser arrangement than Tend to Your Business. It features see-sawing piano chords, a light sax, Wayne’s matter-of-fact vocal, and a Limbo beat tapped out on drum sticks. As the other instruments drift away, the lone drum sticks take things home solo under Wayne’s improvised vocal outro. 30 years later, the Clash directly lifted the Junco Partner drum sticks beat on their late masterpiece, Straight to Hell, from their final L.P., 1982’s “Combat Rock.”

In fact, the Clash covered Wayne’s Junco Partner itself (twice!) on their 1980 triple LP “Sandinista,” amplifying James Wayne’s precursor Ska rhythms by turning his tune into a Reggae song (Junco Partner on Side One) and a Dub experiment (Version Pardner on Side Six).

Reggae and Dub are direct descendants of Ska, and, as the centerpiece band in London’s late ‘70s music scene, the Clash were steeped in it. Originally, the Clash translated their garage rock into updated Punk songs while also echoing the Mod era’s political kinship with Caribbean immigrants. Alongside their three-chord Punk tunes, the Clash’s 1977 eponymous first LP includes a beautiful cover of Jamaican musician Junior Murvin’s reggae epic Police and Thieves and also their own original Reggae-induced Punk ballad, White Man in Hammersmith Palais, which picks up Clash front man Joe Strummer’s off-mike exhortation, “Dress back, jump back, this is a Bluebeat attack.” More and more the Clash became practitioners of Reggae and World Music, which explains 1980’s Dub heavy “Sandinista” LP.  It’s worth noting that Strummer saw an early Specials show and, evidently impressed, asked the Specials to open for the Clash, giving the interracial Ska band their first prominent billing.

Junco Partner Blues is a pivotal song in my piano set. For all its Limbo leanings, it simultaneously remains a traditional 12-bar Blues number. It’s a magical record that way, protean in its ability to define two genres at once. Subtitled “Worthless Man,” Junco Partner was known as "the anthem of the dopers, the whores, the pimps, [and] the cons… a song they sang in Angola, the [Louisiana] state prison,” according to the liner notes of New Orleans R&B pianist Dr. John’s 1972 New Orleans tribute album, Gumbo, which added: “The rhythm was known as the 'jailbird beat'."  

5. Shake, Rattle, and Roll: Rock & Roll structures

Tied to songwriter James Wayne’s mysterious Bluesman persona, Junco Partner inhabits the same gritty world as the defining Rock & Roll song in my set, 1954’s Shake, Rattle, and Roll by Blues shouter Big Joe Turner. (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll” was a reference to throwing dice before Turner transformed it into sexual slang.)

Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked in after-hours Jazz clubs as a cook, bartender, and eventually singer, Turner hit the national Jazz and Blues circuit in the mid 1930s and early 1940s singing his risqué Boogie-woogie Blues songs in clubs from New York City (appearing on the same bills as Benny Goodman, and later Billie Holiday) to L.A. (in a Duke Ellington revue.)

By the mid-1940s Turner was releasing rowdy R&B singles for small, independent R&B labels such as National, Aladdin, and Freedom. In 1951, R&B enthusiasts Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun (Turkish-American immigrants) saw Turner perform with Count Basie at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and immediately signed him to their upstart Atlantic Records label. Turner had a series of R&B hits at Atlantic, though often due only to Juke Box play; the songs were too naughty for radio.

Recorded and released in 1954, Shake Rattle and Roll was the most successful of Turner’s Atlantic releases, reaching No. 1 on the R&B charts and No. 22 on the (white) Billboard singles charts that year. Ahmet Ertegun had asked Atlantic’s in-house song writer, arranger, and producer, Jesse Stone, a former R&B band leader in both Kansas City and New York City, and the only African American on Atlantic’s staff, to write a song for Turner that would match Turner’s raucous style more than the traditional Blues tunes he was putting out. It worked.

The song includes two of the most satisfying chords to play in my piano set, the dissonant Eflat/C combo that kicks off the last four measures of every verse, and more so, the F/Eflat/A/C  combo that marks the 12-bar Blues jump to the IV in the 5th measure of every chorus.

Shake Rattle and Roll’s twelve-bar Blues is the template for three other pure Rock & Roll numbers in my set: Bill Haley and His Comets’ 1954 rave up Rock Around the Clock, Elvis Presley’s 1956 Rockabilly hit Heartbreak Hotel, and Chuck Berry’s 1957 banger School Days, sometimes called, School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell).

 6. Rock Around the Clock: Teenage structures

 Among these three tunes, Rock Around the Clock, with a slapping standup bass in the driver’s seat, and all downhill velocity, sounds the most like Shake, Rattle, and Roll (both songs came out in 1954, the first official year of the Rock & Roll craze.) And, in fact, Bill Haley and His Comets also covered Shake, Rattle, and Roll.

I don’t have much interest in Bill Haley; he was a goofy Country and Western swing band leader—and, at 29, a bit awkward for a Rock & Roll breakout artist. Haley lucked out with Rock Around the Clock. The tune was written by a professional music biz  songwriter  named Max Freedman, with a writing credit also going to music publisher James Myers, who shopped it around. Myers offered the song to Haley after Haley had some success with his own 1953 Rockabilly hit, Crazy, Man, Crazy. Myers partner originally sold the song to a Virginia-based Italian American R&B novelty act, Sonny Dae and His Knights, who recorded it first, earlier in 1954, with some slight local success.  

Written in 1952 or 1953, Rock Around the Clock was a take on several earlier songs, including Country icon Hank Williams’ first hit song, 1947’s Move It On Over. In turn, Williams' song was very similar to Delta Blues guitar legend Charly Patton’s 1929 Blues song Going to Move to Alabama. Born in Mississippi, Patton is widely considered one of the most important Blues musicians in history. P.s. Interestingly, despite the strong association between early Blues and African Americans, no one is really certain of Patton’ race. Historians think Patton, who had strong white and Native American features, may have had Black, white, and Native American ancestry. His song, Going to Move to Alabama, meanwhile, seems derived from early 20th Century African American Blues player Jim Jackson’s 1927 song Kansas City Blues.

Rock Around the Clock also lifts exact phrases from Jazz great Count Basie’s 1939 piano Blues frolic, Red Wagon. And Big Joe Turner himself had a record in the mid-1940s called Around the Clock Blues, a Boogie-woogie piano roll jam that sounds just like Shake Rattle and Roll, but not much like Rock Around the Clock.  

Rock Around the Clock is often associated with Hollywood’s 1955 sociological teen exploitation flick Blackboard Jungle. In the movie’s final scene, teenager Gregory Miller, a thinking man’s juvenile delinquent played by a young Sidney Poitier, walks into the street under the elevated subway tracks outside his New York City high school. Crack. A hard snare drum snap kicks off Rock Around the Clock as the credits roll. The film also kicked off a jump cut in mainstream culture; Black Board Jungle is widely considered one of the key cultural shock points that popularized Rock & Roll to a broad (white) teen audience in the mid-1950s.

Rock Around the Clock has some great sad chords. I only noticed the melancholy notes because I’m not an effortless sight reader. In my hands, the famously riotous Rock Around the Clock became a mournful ballad with its gorgeous cascade of A and B flats raining down throughout the chorus. It turns out, the song sounds good fast too; I’ve finally mastered the right hand mess of sliding notes, from the D to the C and then to the A/C/Eflat chord as the chorus begins. This passage into the chorus, which settles into another sick Blues chord in the right hand, F/Aflat/C, is probably driving my neighbors crazy.   

7. Heartbreak Hotel: Rock & Roll mythology

 Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel is not a banger like Rock Around the Clock or Shake Rattle and Roll. It’s a sparse, minimalist 12-bar Blues.  It was co-written by a Florida-based singer-songwriter, session musician named Tommy Durden and his 41-year-old friend Mae Boren Axton, an English high school teacher who wrote and successfully sold songs on the side. While it’s more a strip tease burlesque than a rocker, Heartbreak Hotel does rely on the same standby left-hand Blues scale that drives Big Joe Turner’s locomotive bass lines. Heartbreak Hotel simply uses graceful chords instead. As for the right hand, Heartbreak Hotel features the same flat fifths and slip notes that grown-up, post-War songwriters used to color Rock & Roll’s otherwise happy teen beat melodies with Existential dissonance.  

Axton knew Presley’s new manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and she presented a demo of the song to Presley at the perfect time: right as Presley was making the switch from Sam Phillips’ indie Memphis-based Sun Records to the national RCA Victor label in late 1955. Presley loved the song and pressed RCA to go with it; at first, the label evidently thought it was too quirky.

Before Heartbreak Hotel and RCA, though, there was That’s All Right Mama and Sun Records. I do love the mythological anecdotes about those July 1954 Sun sessions:

Anecdote #1) The hyperactive, 19-year-old Presley breaking into a wild vamp on his acoustic guitar during an antsy breather between yet another tame and unsuccessful pass at a song from his country and R&B repertoire. In this fortuitous improvisational moment, Elvis started playing That’s All Right Mama, a number originally written and recorded in 1946 by searing Blues guitarist Arthur Big Boy Crudup. As Elvis’ electric guitarist Scotty Moore recalled in Peter Guralnick’s 2015 Sam Phillips bio: “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around, acting the fool. Then Bill [Black] picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them…He [Sam Phillips] stuck his head out [of the control booth] and said, ‘what are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.’” (pgs. 212-213, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock’n’Roll, Peter Guralnick, 2015). They did, catching a groove for the first time in the otherwise mundane evening session. Moore concluded: “We thought it was exciting, but what was it? It was just so different, but it just really flipped Sam.” When Phillips got home late that night, he woke up his wife Becky, and as she’s quoted in Guralnick’s book: “He announced that he had just cut a record that was going to change our lives. He felt nothing would ever be the same again.”

Anecdote #2) WHBQ D.J. Dewey Phillips’ decision (Dewey was not related to Sam) to play the acetate test pressing of Presley’s suddenly vital take on That’s All Right, Mama the very next night, which lit up the phone lines  during his popular, late night “Red, Hot, and Blue” R&B show. (P.s. Crudup’s original version doesn’t wail like the rest of his distorted, slow-burn 1940s Blues records—and, in fact, it clearly insinuates the up-tempo Country swing Presley dialed in to. There’s poetic justice having an African American shredder like Crudup, whose raucous guitar playing sounds like heavy metal 30 years early, at the center of Rock & Roll’s origin story.)

Meanwhile, the accompanying anecdote about speed-talking D.J. Phillips summoning Presley to the WHBQ studio for an immediate interview, and not-so subtly asking Elvis to tell listeners which high school he graduated from, is fraught American history in all its naked psychology.

Dewey Phillips, the be-bop, jive talking D.J. at WHBQ Memphis, circa 1954

Elvis’ genesis aside, I must say, RCA’s 1956 Heartbreak Hotel single (the big label ultimately went with Elvis’ instincts on the song) is one of those rare examples when the “sell out” version not only replicates the original magic, but surpasses it. The producers gave the tune a stark, small group combo treatment—stand-up bass, piano, electric and acoustic guitars, and drums—and the players shambolically followed Elvis’ vocals down his “Lonely Street” where he “cried there in the gloom.” To re-create Sun’s haunted, signature slap-back vocal delay, RCA drenched Elvis in echo. (Sam Phillips had hot-wired the original slap back effect at Sun by recording vocals live onto one tape machine's record head while also recording the playback vocal, which tracked a micro-second later, on the other head—as it piped through over a different machine!)

Presley’s decision to add Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer, famous for “bent” notes, to his original Sun band—Moore on electric guitar and Black on stand-up bass—was a master stroke. Not only is Cramer’s confident and tinkling piano solo a crowning achievement of Rock & Roll, but it puts the song in American Fake Book territory.

Heartbreak Hotel was Presley’s first gold record, hitting No. 1 on both the Billboard Pop and Billboard Country & Western charts—and No. 5 on the R&B chart, a trifecta only matched by what’s considered the world’s premiere Rockabilly single, fellow Sun artist Carl Perkins’ 1955/56 chart topper, Blue Suede Shoes. Heartbreak Hotel stayed in the Top 100 for 27 weeks and sold a million copies as the top single of 1956. The record changed Elvis Presley from a curious regional, hiccupping hillbilly phenomenon into a national sensation.

The fact that Rock & Roll was predominantly a product of Black music going all the way back to the early 20th Century —Stride, Ragtime, Boogie-woogie, Blues, Jump Blues, and R&B—has, unfortunately, turned Elvis Presley into shorthand for cultural appropriation. However, not only was Elvis’ favored position a symptom of systemic racism, a larger, brutal force that rendered Presley a mere pawn, but Presley himself was, relatively speaking, a progressive Southern white teenager when it came to race. He was basically an R&B fan boy, a Southern town odd ball at the white High School who wore his greased hair long and aspired to Black styles.

The woke factor was even more pronounced for adults Sam Phillips and Dewey Phillips. Sam Phillips, who made Memphis-based Blues guitarist B.B. King’s earliest recordings in 1949, went on to found Sun Studios in 1952 with an initial focus on recording Black musicians, including Howlin’ Wolf, Bobby “Blue” Bland, The Prisonaires (inmates at the Tennessee State Penitentiary), Roscoe Gordon, Junior Parker, and Ike Turner and His Rhythm Kings. Turner and the Rhythm Kings have been credited with recording the “First Rock & Roll record,” Rocket ’88, at Phillips’ nascent studio in 1951. Ike Turner was on staff at Sun as a talent scout and producer. Meanwhile, D.J. Dewey Philips’ “Red, Hot, & Blue” radio show featured a boldly integrated playlist, amplified by his hillbilly/beatnik patter. Given the context of the times, the nascent Civil Rights era, none of this was cringe-worthy virtue signaling nor embarrassing liberal paternalism out to romanticize or, by default, other Blacks. These were earnest gestures to give wider exposure to the African American artists they dug

Unfortunately, despite Elvis’ own gregarious, public deference to the Black artists he imitated— “Let’s face it,” he said of his rhythm and blues influences during a 1957 interview, “nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that”—Black Artists didn’t get the credit or compensation they deserved during this era.

8. Chuck Berry

Electric guitar innovator and prolific songwriter Chuck Berry was one African American artist who fought for his due. And got it. His music estate at his death was estimated to be worth around $20 million.

Angry about his initial Chess Records contract (Berry was startled to see that Cleveland Rock & Roll D.J. Alan Freed, a business pal of the Chess brothers, got a writing credit on his debut single Maybellene), the savvy guitarist quickly got up to speed on contracts. He subsequently locked in royalties and other terms that assured fair payment—sometimes including up-front cash for gigs and films. Barry, who also fought legal persecution with counter-legal claims asserting racism, scoffed at the bigotry that tried to relegate him to the background.

Berry was raised in a middle class St. Louis family in the 1930s and 1940s; his dad was a contractor and his mom was a public school principal. Berry took up music in his teens, playing Blues guitar, but also getting into trouble and landing in reformatory for armed robbery. He continued developing his musical talents in reformatory, and went straight upon his 1947 release: getting married, working in local auto plants, working as a janitor in the apartment building where he lived with his wife, and getting a beautician license.  

He also continued pursuing music in and around St. Louis with Blues pianist and collaborator Johnny Johnston. Berry started developing a sound that mixed the styles of two African American electric guitar greats: the guitar bends, syncopated triplets, and showmanship of mid-1940s Blues guitarist T. Bone Walker and the Jazz riffs of Carl Hogan, the lead guitarist in Louis Jordan’s famous Jump Blues combo, the Tympany Five. (Listen to Hogan’s guitar intro to Jordan’s 1946 hit Aint that Just Like a Woman? If you aren’t aware of Berry’s heist, your jaw will drop.) Berry also added the calm and precise vocal style of Nat King Cole (as opposed to Blues shouters like Wynonie Harris and Big Joe Tuner). Berry recorded a few tracks in 1954, but it wasn’t until a year later when he met Chicago’s Chess Records success story Muddy Waters, another one of Berry’s guitar heroes, that Chuck Berry blew up the world.

Mississippi-to-Chicago transplant and Blues great Muddy Waters (real name McKinley Morganfield) connected Berry with Chess Records owner Leonard Chess in May, 1955. Ironically, Berry, in a style that seemed like Muddy Waters on speed, displaced the Chess Blues star by releasing an unmatched string of perfect Rock & Roll singles on the label between 1955 and 1959. They are worth listing. I’m leaving several out, but these are my favorites, in chronological order:   

Maybellene (the height of backbeat rock, with its bent out of shape, hall-of-fame and distorted guitar solo);

Roll Over Beethoven (an off-hand, gorgeous mess);

Too Much Monkey Business (hi, Bob Dylan);

You Can’t Catch Me;

School Days;

Sweet Little Sixteen;

Reelin’ and Rockin’ (that crazy piano!);

Johnny B. Goode (see Carl Hogan);

Around and Around (a minimalist tour de force which paralleled contemporaneous, early, avant-garde computer music with its emphasis on looping, overlaid counterpoint, and mounting repetition, which Berry does without tape splices or overdubs, but rather through crafty implication);

Carol;

Sweet Little Rock and Roller;

Little Queenie;

Bye Bye Johnny;

and Wee Wee Hours (Maybellene’s flip side, a gone Blues rave up).

My sense is that most people aren’t familiar with Wee Wee Hours. The musical conversation between Berry and his unconventional pianist Johnston makes for delightful eaves dropping. On the B-Side of what may be the first intentional Rock & Roll record, Berry’s debut single Maybellene, Wee Wee Hours’ lyrics  seem to ridicule the elderly Blues, even as Johnston is lighting it up on unhinged Blues piano in the background:

“One little song
For a fading memory
One little song
For a fading memory.”

In his groundbreaking academic study of early Rock & Roll, The Sound of the City, music historian Charlie Gillett highlighted Johnston’s piano playing as the secret ingredient to Chuck Berry’s records, a seemingly contrarian observation when it comes to a catalogue known for its game-changing electric guitar acrobatics. It’s a canny observation that’s always stuck with me—and rings true when you listen closely to Berry’s records for the catawampus piano mixed in the background. It also made me fall in love with quirky Rock & Roll piano playing. Gillet writes: “…the effect was complicated by a piano that seemed to be played almost regardless of the melody taken by the singer and the rest of the musicians…few rock ‘n’ roll performers dared to challenge the conventions of harmony in this way, and part of the immediately recognizable sound of Berry’s records was the interesting piano playing.” (pg. 81, The Sound of the City, Charlie Gillett, 1970)

I don’t know why I chose School Days for my piano set. Roll Over Beethoven, Around and Around, Reelin’ and Rockin’, Maybellene, and Wee Wee Hours are my favorite Berry songs. But what I’ve learned by spending time with School Days is this: The right hand melody line, set over the standard 12-bar blues chord progression in the left hand, is absolutely un-intuitive—the notes don’t land when and where your brain thinks they should. For example, what’s with going from the E flat in the 9th bar to the disorienting Gflat? (The song is in the key of Eflat major, which does not include Gflat). But once you get it down, School Days is addicting to play, even as it remains cryptic.

9. Get a Job: Rock & Roll as Doo-wop

Just as Junco Partner gave me the perfect segue from Caribbean mode to Rock & Roll mode, the Philadelphia-based Silhouettes’ 1957-58 mega-hit Get a Job—No. 1 on both the Pop and R&B charts in 1958—provides the perfect segue from the pure Rock & Roll of School Days, Heartbreak Hotel, Rock Around the Clock, and Shake Rattle and Roll to Rock & Roll’s glorious sub-genre, Doo-wop. (To be clear: I’m not saying Get a Job literally provides the segue from Rock & Roll to Doo-wop; if anything, it nudged Doo-wop, which emerged several years before 1957’s Get a Job, back toward Rock & Roll. I’m just saying for purposes of my set, Get a Job provides the bridge between the two genres.)

Technically, Get a Job is more Rock & Roll than Doo-wop: It features a honking Blues-happy sax solo, a propulsive piano, an exaggerated backbeat in the chorus—banged out on a rocking floor drum, and a signature V-back-to-the-IV 12-bar Blues turnaround in the penultimate measure of the signature melody line. It’s the song’s novelty vocal play, particularly by bass vocalist Raymond Edwards—"Dip dip dip dip dip dip dip dip/ Sha na-na nah/Sha na-na-na-nah nah”—that make Get a Job a Doo-wop classic.  Vocals were central to Doo-wop.

 Get a Job’s swinging “Sha na-na nahs” make the same historic move Chuck Berry made. Just as Berry sped up the Blues to make it youth music, or more accurately, spiked the Blues to make it Pop music, Doo-wop transformed another elderly African American musical style: Vocal Harmony music, which was the secular version of Gospel. In Doo-wop’s case, it took the opposite approach than Berry: Doo-wop spiked Vocal Harmony music with doses of old-fashioned Blues and R&B.

Vocal Harmony music was dominated by overly sentimental ballads; the indulgent Ink Spots, with their dramatic spoken-word breakdowns, are the most famous vocal harmony group. Despite the new R&B touch, the dreamy mood of Vocal Harmony persisted in Doo-wop. Doo-wop simply re-invented the staid 1940s Ink Spots’ church-adjacent sound with an energized teenage groove. Get a Job may be the most energized song of the Rock & Roll era—it just goes, daddy-o!

Historic Footnote: Unlike the Ink Spots and other secular Vocal Harmony groups, the Gospel vocal groups themselves, such as the Golden Gate Quartet and the Soul Stirrers had already been dosing Gospel with a little bit of R&B as early as the 1930s when they first emerged on the scene. The roots of both Rock & Roll and Doo-wop, and Soul too, are present in Gospel. (As a teenage phenomenon, Soul music progenitor and heart throb Sam Cooke got his start in the 1950s iteration of the Soul Stirrers.)  

Doo-wop’s defining feature is the well-known, melodramatic “1950’s Chord Progression.” A slight tweak of the 12-bar Blues I IV V sequence, Doo-wop’s signature move is: I vi IV V. This progression establishes a yearning sensation by immediately creating a more circuitous route to the dominant V, setting up a homesick musical journey by initially overshooting the V, and then teasing its way back.

With this aching cadence turning aspiring teen vocalists into composers on city street corners nationwide, Doo-wop singles and their woeful tales of young love started coming out in droves in 1953, most notably the B-Side Gee sung by Harlem-based Daniel “Sonny” Norton and his vocal group the Crows.  Formed in 1951 by five aspiring NYC teen vocalists, the Crows were Apollo Theater’s Wednesday amateur night favorites, where they were discovered in 1952 by music agent Cliff Martinez. Martinez eventually steered the Crows, now with an electric guitarist added to their pure vocal group set up, to George Goldner’s local indie label, Rama Records. Goldner booked Norton and the Crows for a session as the backup group to African American R&B trailblazer, pianist and singer Viola Watkins. Gee, with its background “Do da-da doot do-dos,” was written by the group’s baritone William Davis, and arranged by Watkins. They recorded it as an extra song in the April 1953 Watkins’ session and released it as an afterthought that May. It took a year, but by the spring of 1954, Gee went to No. 2 on the R&B charts, No. 14 on the Pop charts, and ultimately sold over a million records by the end of 1954—the first Doo-wop song to hit that milestone, bringing Doo-wop to the mainstream. Accordingly, Gee is often mentioned in the endless debate over what constitutes the first Rock & Roll record. (Gee is an up-tempo number as opposed to the Crows’ dreamier Rama Doo-wop records: Gee’s A-Side I Love You So, along with June 1953’s Heartbreaker and 1954’s attempts to ride Gee’s coattails, Miss You and Untrue. The 1954 sessions also included two up-tempo Gee knockoffs, Baby and I Really, Really Love You. None of these records were hits, though in my opinion, the Crows’ ballads are elementary Doo-wop perfection.)

Doo-wop was the bright core of a broader, nascent counterculture that would ultimately shake up America for two decades with a Civil Rights, Rock music, youth, and DIY aesthetic. Doo-wop has a notably innocent sound for something that would bloom into revolution. This contradiction makes for satisfying detective work. Doo-wop lyrics can come with witty sendups of capitalism, sly digs at racism, and narratives about police brutality. (Doo-wop’s trans-Atlantic co-conspirator, early ‘50s London-based Calypso, was more up front about the political agenda at hand, which, in the case of Calypso, also included challenging sexism. Sadly, Doo-wop didn’t get the memo on that fight.)

You’ll mostly find the politics of doo-wop reflected symbolically in the split personality of the music itself: The songs feature grandiose melodies cast in spare minimalism; they feature gleeful energy backed by sad chords. These basic contradictions mirror the central dissonance that haunted the lives of 1950s African American youth. Doo-wop’s hopeful American idealism comes with a gloomy footnote: the American Dream is great and all, but we don’t have access! Academic and Blues historian Albert Murray makes the very same observation about the Blues in his classic book Stomping the Blues, writing: “Even the most exuberant stomp rendition is likely to contain some trace of sadness as a sobering reminder that life is at bottom, for all the very best of good times, a never-ending struggle.” [pg. 17, Stomping the Blues, Albert Murray, 1976]

In his ur text, 1970’s The Sound of the City, Rock & Roll historian Charlie Gillett has a similar thing to say—specifically about the Silhouettes’ Get a Job. Gillett wrote, “The Silhouettes were revolutionaries in disguise to judge by the scarcely intelligible lyric of their top ten hit Get a Job (1958): the lyric could easily have been fitted into the opening chapter of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son.” [pg. 75, The Sound of the City, Charlie Gillett, 1970.]

Get a Job certainly addresses the elusive “American Dream,” capturing the economic plight of African Americans.

Tell me that I'm lying
'Bout a job that I never could find

 Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Dip dip dip dip dip dip dip dip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Get a job, sha na na na, sha na na na

The Silhouettes, 1957

10. Earth Angel: Doo-wop mythology

 The two other Doo-wop tunes in my set, The Penguins’ 1954 hit Earth Angel and the Five Satins’ 1957 record In the Still of the Nite (the shorthand slang spelling was meant to distinguish the teenage tune from Cole Porter’s unrelated, 1937 American standard) track more to the I vi IV V “50’s Progression” than Get A Job’s R&B Doo-wop hybrid.

 P.s. David Bowie and the early 1970s ‘50s rock revivalists, who dressed up their nostalgia in camp, glitter, and distorted electric guitars, relied heavily on the Doo-wop progression. Divine examples include: Bowie’s Five Years, Lady Stardust, and Drive in Saturday; T. Rex’s Monolith and Girl; the New York Dolls’ Lonely Planet Boy; several cuts on 1975’s “Rocky Horror Picture Show;” Elton John’s Crocodile Rock; and Glam-to-Punk pioneers Suicide’s Cheree. All these tunes are essentially Doo-wop songs. P.p.s. Precursor Punk music like 1972 Bowie, with its 1950s revivalism, quickly gave way to the 1960s retro fetishisms of ‘80s bands like the Jam, the Specials and Dexys Midnight Runners that I noted earlier. Basically, 1970s proto-Punks and 1980s Punks and New Wavers, reveled in Rock & Roll’s first decade, the mid-50s to the mid-60s. You’ll notice that by the 1990s, the Grunge craze moved on to fetishizing the next decade’s jam, 1970s hard rock.

Mid-1950’s Doo-wop breakthrough Earth Angel may be the prettiest song in my set. Every section features a gorgeous flatted note, adding a melancholy flight of fancy to the sweet melody. I love playing Earth Angel late on Saturday nights when I come home a little sad after drinks on the drag. In addition to the sneaky Blue notes in every measure, my favorite thing about the Earth Angel arrangement is the transition from the single note right hand melody to a chorded version during the last two verses.

The story behind Earth Angel is as epic as the mythology of Elvis’ Sun sessions.

The early 1950s L.A. youth music scene revolved around local indie R&B label Specialty Records and their star singer, 21-year-old Doo-wop sage Jesse Belvin, a Jefferson High School graduate; Jefferson High School was a mecca of (African American) music education that produced a parade of legendary Jazz and R&B musicians. In 1953, four local teens (2 who had just graduated from Jefferson’s rival Fremont, and two current Fremont students) formed the Penguins, named after the Kool cigarettes mascot. One member of the vocal group, 19-year-old Curtis Williams, brought Earth Angel, which he’d been writing with Belvin, to the Penguins. (The song echoed Belvin’s own 1952 Specialty single, Dream Girl). The Penguins recorded it for L.A-based indie R&B, Gospel label Dootone in the fall of 1954. As opposed to Art Rupe’s Specialty, which admittedly had an amazing African American roster—the Blind Boys of Alabama, Little Richard, Lloyd Price, Percy Mayfield, Roy Milton, and Sam Cooke’s Soul Stirrers— Dootone was Black-owned. Dootone was founded in 1949 by 1940s African American band leader Walter “Dootsie” Williams; for the first two years of Dootone’s existence, the label was called Blue Records. The Penguins recorded the song in the garage of Williams’ relative Ted Brinson, a Big Band era bassist; Brinson played bass on Earth Angel. The young Curtis Williams played piano. 

Much like the Dewey Phillips story—only this time with a nearly all African American cast—Williams brought the acetate demo recording, with its accidentally lopped off opening measure (a quirk of music history) to local taste maker, African American record shop owner John Dolphin. Dolphin’s Central Ave. shop, Dolphin’s of Hollywood, founded in 1948 and open 24 hours-a-day, was a West Coast Jazz and R&B mecca that doubled as a broadcast studio for KRKD, where L.A. D.J. Dick Hugg, a white R&B enthusiast, often manned the booth. Hugg played the sparse dub mix and the excited radio audience response was immediate. Williams passed on the planned overdubs, and Dootone pressed the song as is. By early 1955, Earth Angel went to No. 1 on the national R&B charts, and it cracked the Top 10 on the Pop charts (#8)— a few notches better than the Crows’ earlier crossover hit, Gee.

Interesting footnote: Gee also got its boost from John Dolphin’s record shop broadcast.

Doo-wop historian Marv Goldberg writes about Gee’s 1953 release: 

“Its initial reception was nothing to write home about. ‘Gee’ may have had potential, but it was sure taking its sweet time. While the record itself was a Pick Of The Week in the trades on September 19, it was [the A-Side] ‘I Love You So’ that was reportedly making noise in Dallas, St. Louis, Nashville, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. ‘Gee’ finally became a Tip in Detroit on November 28, six months after its release. Then, in December, it started riding the local charts (becoming a Tip in Los Angeles on December 19).

“It looks like ‘Huggy Boy’ was the cause. Dick Hugg was one of the DJs who broadcast from the front window of John Dolphin's record store in Los Angeles. He had played ‘Gee’ months before, and decided he didn't like it much. The disc ended up with his girlfriend, who really loved it. One night they got into a fight and, to make up, Huggy Boy played the song over and over on the air for her. For some reason, that episode triggered an explosion of sales in LA. Kids who were lukewarm to the song when they heard it once in a while, went nuts for it when it was played non-stop.” (Marv Goldberg’s R&B Notebooks, The Crows, 2004.)

11. In the Still of the Nite: Doo-wop mythology, Pt. 2

1956’s Pop hymn, In the Still of the Nite, glowing with  “50’s Chord Progression” left hand arpeggios (F/D/Bflat/C in this case), rivals Earth Angel for heavenly Doo-wop beauty.

There’s not much of an origin story to the song, though. Recorded for a small New Haven, Connecticut label late in the Doo-wop craze by local African American quintet the Five Satins, and written by group member Fred Parris, the record was a minor hit, but hardly a smash like Earth Angel or Get a Job.  In the Still of the Nite went to No. 24 on the Pop charts and No. 3 on the R&B charts.

Its ascendance (and transcendence) seems to have happened after the fact, coming out on influential compilations (as early as 1959) and on subsequent movie sound tracks (Dirty Dancing in 1987, for example.)

I’m not sure when the song grabbed me—maybe in high school when I realized David Bowie was keen on the I vi IV V “50’s Chord Progression.” In fact, as a 15-year-old Bowie rip-off artist, I wrote a song called Punk Love that appeared on my 1983 LP “Josh Feit Right Now” and revolved around a series of snide “doowop doowop/shoowop shoowops,” mimicking the Five Satins background vocals with a Johnny Rotten POV.  My high school songwriting pal D. Shiller played the famous ‘50s teen cadence on distorted electric guitar, which I backed  up on a chiming acoustic, eventually giving Shiller the runway to start a barbed wire solo.

In college I thought In the Still of the Nite was a holy text, associating it with my cool Jazz D.J. roommate, a talented musician and crooning vocalist named Rich Kurschner from New York City.  

I felt vindicated when I later learned that famous rock critic Robert Christgau worshiped In the Still of the Nite.

When I set out to have a Rock & Roll set, In the Still of the Nite was the first song I chose to learn.  

12. At the Hop: A Pop sensibility

 Another Rock & Roll-Doo-wop hybrid in my set is late 1957’s No. 1 hit At the Hop by Danny and the Juniors. Like the Silhouettes, whose Get a Job also combined Rock & Roll and Doo-wop, Danny and the Juniors were from Philadelphia. Unlike the Silhouettes, though, Danny and the Juniors were white white white.

Danny and the Juniors (with 16-year-old Danny Rapp on lead vocals) were a high school Doo-wop act originally called the Juvenaires. They came to the attention of a local record producer named Joe Madara who helped them write and record a demo, Do the Bop. After one label rejected it, they got the recording into the hands of “American Bandstand” TV host and Philadelphia D.J. Dick Clark. Clark liked it, but suggested they change the archaic title. (He also suggested they change their name.) After they revamped the song, Clark asked the group to perform on “American Bandstand,” which quickly catapulted At the Hop to No. 1 on both the Pop and R&B charts. I first heard the song as a little boy when my Brother took me to the 1973 nostalgia film American Graffiti. I was captivated and have loved it ever since.

Indeed, I’m not trying to be dismissive of Danny and the Juniors by calling them white; I dig this record. Its driving piano intro (openly copped from Sun Record’s bona-fide Rock & Roll keyboard master Jerry Lee Lewis), its majestic Doo-wop vocal intro (and subsequent low Doo-wop swoops— “Oh, baby”), its infectious internal rhymes (“All the cats and the chicks can get their kicks at the hop”), and the Blues-y Bflat over the low G and then repeated over the lower C in the chorus, make for a dynamic and dynamite record. 

I point out their race because despite the song’s Doo-wop and 12-bar Blues trappings, it does a curious thing: Rather than going to the traditional flatted VII for a pure Rhythm & Blues sound during the verses, it descends from the VI back to the V instead—and then continues as if nothing had changed: VI V III. By removing the flatted VII from the traditional Blues bass figure, they shift the mood from hurt-so-good Blues to actual feel-good Pop. It also frees the right hand to go with a sunny melody rather than a stormy one. To my ear, this moves At the Hop away from its African American Rhythm & Blues influences and toward white American glee club music.

This is not to say white musicians weren’t playing and recording fiery Rock & Roll. Jerry Lee Lewis, as I just said, was a demon at the piano. And I put Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and Bill Haley and His Comets’ Rock Around the Clock in my set because I think they’re exceptional Rock & Roll songs. And by the way, earlier, I failed to call out Danny Cedrone’s wild Rock Around the Clock electric guitar solo. His innovative, white lightning fusion of Jazz, Blues, and Country during the historic Bill Haley recording session rivals Chuck Berry’s guitar craftmanship. Incidentally, like Berry, Cedrone’s tricks sound a lot like Louis Jordan’s Jazz/Jump-Blues guitarist Carl Hogan.

Ultimately, though, At the Hop’s Pop sensibility takes us full circle back to those 1980s New Wave bands like Dexys Midnight Runners and their Pop interpretations of 1960s Soul. Come On Eileen is as much a call out to ‘50s sock hops as it was to groovin’ ‘60s Soul. Specifically, it’s a shout out to At the Hop: Kevin Rowland’s “Too ra loo ra too ra loo rye aye” C to C octave vocal climb is a direct homage to Danny & the Juniors “Ba ba ba ba” D to D octave vocal jump that starts At the Hop.

In turn, Danny and the Juniors did some call outs of their own. First, in general, the tune is an immaculate homage to all the the musical styles that inform my Rock & Roll piano set. The Wikipedia entry for At the Hop sums that up well: “Musically, it [At the Hop] is notable for combining several of the most popular formulas in 1950s rock'n'roll, the twelve-bar blues, boogie-woogie piano, and the 50s progression.”

But there’s also a literal shout out in At the Hop’s lyrics. 16-year-old Danny Rapp sings:  

“When the record starts spinnin'

You Chalypso when you chicken at the hop.” 

The Chalypso was a late ‘50s dance craze inspired by Calypso. And with that, At the Hop cues Nat King Cole’ Calypso Blues > Dandy Livingstone > James Wayne >  Big Joe Turner > Bill Haley and His Comets > Elvis Presley>  Chuck Berry > The Silhouettes > The Penguins > The Five Satins > and those 1980s outliers, Dexys Midnight Runners.

©Absolute Besmirchers, August, 2021

“Pay Attention to the Ways they Intersect.”

In December, 2020, Vallum magazine interviewed me; I had won an Honorable Mention in their annual poetry contest.

I’ve always liked how the interview turned out, particularly my plea for someone to recommend a good history book about mid-20th Century Egypt. This fateful request eventually led me to the great Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who has since become one of my favorite authors.

Favorite Book of Poetry Discovered this Year

Victoria Chang’s “Obit.“ Ruminating on loss, Chang presents a series of philosophical thought experiments in plainspoken metaphors. Mostly, she uses the traditional newspaper obituary format (both in form and tone) to write breathtaking poems about the death of optimism, logic, home, and other things that suddenly vanish when a loved one dies. She accents the obituary poems with Tankas (my new favorite form), tiny five-line poems that loom large.

What’s on your reading list for 2021?

Non-fiction is the ticket. I’m looking for a good history of 20th Century Egypt with Nasser and Nasserism at the heart of it. Does this book exist? Recommendations please. Otherwise, Donald Shoup’s “Parking and the City,” the follow-up to his urban planning classic, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”

Best Writerly Advice.

Read multiple books at the same time and pay attention to the ways they intersect.