Trivia NYC/DSO Media

Honestly, this is the only book on Harry Houdini most people will ever need. This tome covers his ancestry and birth in Hungary as Ehrich Weiss, his family’s emigration to the United States, his growing fascination and obsession with magic, his long and phenomenally successful career as the greatest theatrical performer of the first half of the 20th century, as well dropping loud hints about a potential side career doing espionage work and how it evolved into an obsession with debunking spirit mediums and fortune tellers that he pursued with single-minded zeal right through to the last moments of his all-too-short life.

The research is strong, there are plenty of good illustrations and photographs scattered throughout the text, and the writing keeps things moving. It does, however, suffer from glossing over some aspects of Houdini’s story. The implication that Houdini did some spy work for the United States is dropped repeatedly, with no actual follow up facts to corroborate it, except that gosh, he sure seemed to be able to get in to meet with a lot of police captains to check out their local jails. His obsession with aviation, and with being the first to fly an airplane in Australia, is just far enough outside of logic that it requires an explanation about why he sacrificed so much time, money and effort to try something so briefly, only to drop it and come home after a couple of successful flights. A hundred years ago, halfway around the world was a far longer trek than it is today. A bit more on why he did it would have been welcome.

These may sound like quibbles, but they do sometimes distract from the greater arc of the story, which is unfortunate. Harry Houdini was unquestionably a brilliant man, an intellectual genius, with founts of drive and resourcefulness beyond anything I’ve borne witness to in my own life, ever. And this book covers a ton of ground, detailing the tricks he used, the projects on which he focused, and the turbulent relationships he had with his wife, family, friends, and occasional indiscretions. But I didn’t stay with this book to read about his potential affairs or his marital spats; I did so to find out more about about his magic and illusions, his spy work, and his research debunking the claims of the paranormal, because it is in those things — the actual stuff of being the real superhero advertised in the title — that this otherwise impressive biography falls short.

Popularity: 91% [?]

Today I absolutely paid the Stupid Tax.

I got to the Kimmel Center at NYU three hours before the box office opened, just to get the same-day-only tickets to see Jandek, our favorite outsider artist still in the game. Wild Man Fischer’s on his meds, and Wesley Willis is dead. Jandek is all we have left. Jandek lives. Viva Jandek.

So I managed to finagle four tickets even though the limit was two per person, because I am a master of disguise and — look, don’t question me. Which would not matter, except that I managed to forget said tickets as I was on my way to the venue, and it was only through the good fortune of Jandek’s relative obscurity (and the fact that he’s been through town three times in the last two years, which even for the Jandek fans in town is largely enough to more or less scratch the itch) that there were enough free tickets left at the theater that I didn’t have to cab all the way back to Astoria for us to see only the second half of the show. If this was, oh, a Taylor Swift show we were getting into, we’d have been at the Stoned Crow or Vol De Nuit instead, watching the hockey game, with me buying round after round after round for the four of us in penance for my own absent-mindedness.

So.

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Popularity: 75% [?]

For a novel that sets out to satirize and illustrate the assorted sillinesses of the American class system, from the blow-your-mind wealthy to the blow-your-mind poor, the reach of “Commonwealth” exceeds its grasp by a long stretch; but don’t let that stop you from giving this book a shot.

Blue Gene Mapother comes from old money, and wants none of it. Having never felt accepted by his family, he soon moves into a trailer and finds a semblance of happiness selling toys at a flea market after the local Wal-Mart he was working at closed down. When his brother John, a recovering addict, decides to run for Congress, the Mapother family, each with their own motives, decides to do what they can to get him elected. Blue Gene reluctantly agrees, until he meets a punk rock singer who opens his eyes to what’s going on around him. Blue Gene’s social and spiritual awakening is the meat of the story.

For stories like this to work as comedy of manners, you need one sane and sympathetic character at the center who reacts the way the reader would. Joey Goebel’s attempts to have Blue Gene serve as that character don’t really work.

He’s a fascinating character; the one thing immensely wealthy and immensely poor people have in common is that the rest of us never really see them, and that blind spot seems to suit Blue Gene just fine. But he’s not a fully multidimensional human being, and neither is anyone else in the book. His apocalypse-obsessed mother, his father, openly contemptuous of any and all who have less money and influence than he does (so, everyone), his the-bottle-led-me-straight-to-Jesus brother, the openly racist military brat with the hair-trigger temper and the huge chip on his shoulder, the skinny punk rock girl-love interest with all the right answers and a speech for every occasion, and everyone else in the large cast of this story, all of them are archetypes, clearly placed in the story to serve a specific purpose. None of them pop cleanly into full human bloom, and that’s unfortunate.

But that doesn’t mean “Commonwealth” isn’t worth reading. It’s a quick-flowing 500 pages, with a plot that never stops moving. (You can see why Tom Robbins really liked this book; it reads like an early draft of something he’d have written himself.) It’s just that there isn’t anything in “Commonwealth,” or in the character makeup of Blue Gene Mapother, that wasn’t better executed in, say, Mike Magnuson’s masterpiece “The Right Man For The Job,” another novel about a lower-class lummox clinging to the bottom rung of society and looking for his personal guardian angel.

But Joey Goebel is a fine young writer, and “Commonwealth” is quite a good read. He’s going to get better at this. Keep him in mind.

Popularity: 24% [?]

I’m typically a sucker for the Great Rock Critic’s Memoir, the collection of tales of their time in the business combined with their best work from the day and maybe a few extra stories or pieces that deserved to see a bigger audience and help fill in the gaps in their literary worldview. It’s kind of a cliché at this point, but similar volumes from Jim Derogatis, Nick Tosches, Richard Meltzer and my personal lord and savior Lester Bangs take these messed-up people with amazing skills, and turn their short pieces into a mosaic that reveals something of the time they wrote in, the bands they covered, and how they approached their writing, their love of music, and their art.

Those books are the template for this one. Mitch Myers didn’t roll with the punk crowd so much, and it doesn’t sound like he really got the edgier stuff that lit the creative fire under Bangs & Meltzer. Sure, he covered them — he may not have understood Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” the way Bangs (thought he) did, though clearly it wasn’t for lack of trying — but his best writing comes when he waxes elegiac for the John Faheys and Doug Sahms of this world, more laid back types who swim in a different musical end of the pool than the gritty fuckyou types over whom Creem and Rolling Stone went skeetcrazy every week.

I want to fault this book for being boring. I suspect it’s largely that he seems to like music that I’m not crazy about, but you know, one of the jobs of a critic is to make the reader interested in what they themselves are interested in. I don’t think Myers is all that great a writer, especially compared to the Christgaus, Guralnicks, Marshes & Toscheseses of the world. And the “Adam Coil” fable-between-pieces conceit gets old real quick. (He mentions his music-executive father and his uncle Shel Silverstein many times in the book, and it makes me wonder how he got some of these writing gigs.)

Look, if you want a book about the about the music of the last 40 years that crackles with the force of literature, don’t start here. If, on the other hand, you’re really down with people like Leo Kottke and think he’s been woefully underappreciated in modern music, then maybe this book will signify with you, the way I wish it did with me.
[**1/2]

Popularity: 20% [?]

 The Internet marketing team at McMillan Publishing has graciously provided us with this informal video showing us how digital promotion works.

I had no idea the Great Gatsby was merely a particularly inspired mad-lib, and that the industry relies so completely on the work of swarthy Italian lumberjacks. Every day, learn a new thing.

Popularity: 24% [?]

SHOUT OUT TO MY HOMIEZ, B-DOLE & LIDDY, MY MAIN HOMEBOY CHAIN-CHAIN, B-ROCK AND HIS POSSE WHO GONE SAVE ALL US ASSES, ALL YOU CRAZY MUTHAFUCKAS IN THA FOX ROOM WHO CAUGHT MY FARTS AND FLUFFED MY SHIT, I GOT YOU, BABY! I AIN’T NEVER GONE FORGET YOU RIGHTEOUS JIGGAZ ON THE SUPREME COURT, I COULDNA DONE SHIT WIDOUT YOUSE, OUR ENEMIES IN THE BROWN TOWNS WHO KEPT MY RHYMES DROPPIN ALL OVER LIKE ROVER THE CASANOVA, MY LOBBYISTS AND BANKROLLAZ, A COUPLA RANDOM WHODAFUCKS WHO DID REAL SHIT I CAN GLOM OFF AND PASTE THEY GLORY ON MY OWN BACK, AND LASS BUT NOT LEAST MY ONE LORD AND SAVIOR THE ALMIGHTY GOD HISSELF WIFOUT WHOM I AIN’T GOT NO COVER FOR ALL MY PLANS. I DID THE BEST I COULD, HOMIES, NOW IF Y’ALL’L SCUSE ME, I’M MOVIN ON UP TO A DEELUXE APARTMENT IN DUBAI! NO EXTRADITION TREATY, BITCHAZ! SUCK IT, CATE BLANCHETT!

Popularity: 18% [?]

Look, I am as aware of the vagaries and importances of music history as anyone I know, and I know a lot of music nerds. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the people I know are as aware of both where things are right now in music and of where the stuff of today came from as anyone alive. (I may even have measurable proof of this, but that’s another digression for another time.)

In that light, I could not possibly give less of a shit about the release of Guns & Roses’ Chinese Democracy this week.

I understand it’s been 14 years in the making, and represents the culmination of everything the greatest of the great late-era hair-farmer bands had in them (or at least what Axl Rose had in mind), and the parallels to Smile, the lost Brian Wilson/Beach Boys decades-in-coming apotheosis, are easy and an adequate form of explanation as to what the hell happened.

And okay, let’s start there. The Beach Boys were the greatest chart-topping capital-A American Band of the pre-Woodstock 60’s. (Sure, Buffalo Springfield’s stuff was great, but they weren’t topping the charts with every song they released. Hell, not even Dylan had the Beach Boys’ track record, and the Velvets famously only sold records to other bands. If there’s someone I’m missing, let me know.) You could maybe make the case that Guns & Roses were the best band in their scene, but they didn’t have the consistent chart success of an REM or even Motley Crue, and just because Axl was an erratic space cadet who fought with his bandmates doesn’t make him Brian Wilson.* And I don’t know if anyone really noticed, but when Smile finally came out, it wasn’t exactly the second coming of Pet Sounds. The music was lush and pretty as you’d expect from a master arranger like Wilson, but as a lyricist, Van Dyke Parks was little more than a kiddie version of Bernie Taupin.

I heard a couple of the leaked tracks of Chinese Democracy through the usual nefarious means, and it sounds like the muddled mess I kind of expected. But honestly, if he’d managed to finish it in 1987, I don’t suspect it would have been a whole lot better. And while the world could always — always use more Beach Boys music, now that we have Soundgarden and all their descendants, and Queens Of The Stone Age and all of theirs, there are a hundred bands out there right now who can do what Axl did, and better.

Besides, we need to save Tommy Stinson. I know Tommy needs to get paid, and even a full-blown Replacements reunion wouldn’t make anyone rich, but goddamn, he’d have more integrity playing on a cruise ship.

So in the interest of the glorious future, I move we just let Guns and Fucking Roses** fade into history, like Oliver North, painter’s pants and the AMC Gremlin, quaint totems of an earlier era that frankly are better off staying there.

*And Brian wasn’t a danger to anyone other than himself. What Axl did (allegedly; thank you, out-of-court settlements and sealed court records!) to the women in his life was really fucked up. To paraphrase Robert Christgau, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll doesn’t mean fucking her in the ass after she passes out from the drugs you put in her drink.

** “G’n'F’n'R”? Really? Oh, Axl, how rebellious you are! At least spell your shit out, fergodsake.

Popularity: 32% [?]

I wrote a piece for BoingBoing Gadgets on a new kind of motion capture software, into which I manage to shoehorn a digression about pasting ping-pong balls to Tiger Woods’ face that frankly sounded pretty genius as I was typing it.

Yes, there’s also video footage of me looking like I’m eight miles high in an Amsterdam brothel, listening to “I Can’t Help Myself” and trying to act out the story.

Look, the point of the article is this: the fireballs are fake. The technological advance is real.

Popularity: 32% [?]

You know, I’m totally going to miss Total Request Live. For real.

It was the cultural touchstone for a generation, the reason I was late for work when I lived near Times Square for a couple of years and I had to wade through the throngs of screaming preteens begging & clamoring for a glimpse through the second-floor window of whassisface from 98 Degrees or whatsername from that Disney show, not that one but the other one, no no no, you know who I’m talking about. Man, times none of us will ever forget, things those people will go home to their places where people are sensible and rational and grow old, and tell their grandkids about. God’s children, every one of us.

Over the entire run of TRL, I watched, cumulatively, a grand total of about 40 seconds of it. That includes clicking past it to get to something else, all the time I spent loitering in TV showrooms (handy hint: talk about a great place to meet people!), the occasional DVR leftover from when I was wanting to watch — oh, okay, I have never DVR’d anything on MTV. I’m just trying to be nice. But yeah, if I’ve watched an entire minute of TRL over the course of my (and its) life, that would be more than I thought.

But I will miss it. Because now, Carson Daly now has no fallback position, and when his show gets cancelled*, he’ll be up for the same temp jobs I’m going for, and that would be bad.

I will miss it because now all those teenpop would-bes are going to spill into other shows I actually watch, like Jeopardy! or Washington Week In Review or Antiques Roadshow or Billy Mays commercials. And really, that’s no good for anyone concerned, especially me. And Billy Mays.

I will miss it because it kept a significant group of obnoxious truants, hoodlums, ne’er-do-wells and — and other people I have been in my life — in a clear and easily-avoidable place in the city for a couple of hours every day, and now they’re gong to be infesting every corner of town, including and especially the places I go to in my daily travels. Again, nobody really wants that.

I understand the vagaries of ratings and market demand and corporate branding and the economy and all the other reasons shows like this bubble up and then fade back into the flotsam of the television world. But today, the world of popular culture is a little less spangled, and for that, as a species, we are poorer.

* Is that even still on? That’s another show I’ve never seen, wouldn’t know where to find, and have no real desire to find out about. I don’t hate Carson like some people I know do. It’s just that this world actually is big enough for the two of us. Does my apathy make me a bad person?

Popularity: 33% [?]

New post up at Cocktailians:

The Final Presidential Debate Drinking Game Thread (Probably)

Popularity: 37% [?]