The Dozen
Occasional Observations On Music, Media, and Memoir
1. It was going to be called the Dazzling Dozen. Why dazzling? For the alliteration, of course. It's not "Dirty Dozen" because that's a cliché, (and not "so cliché"), as my students would have it. This won't necessarily be monthly, or weekly, because the idea of Substack is to be my own editor. (All typos intentional.) Also, it might sometimes be Drizzling Dozen. Or Doozy Dozen. Or Baker's Dozen, which is 13 items, though not alliterative. It won't be like Utopia Bagels in Queens (the best bagel place in the world), when and where it's "buy three/get fourth free" on Wednesdays. (Editor's note to writer: "Dazzling" is pretentious and the alliteration coy. Just call it The Dozen and let the reader decide whether it dazzles, or dribbles, or drizzles, or diddles. Suggest strikethrough. Does Substack have a strikethrough function?)
2. Bia: "Whole Lotta Money." I asked some of my students who will be taking my Writing Music, Movie, and TV reviews course in the fall to pay attention to what might make a "song of the summer," which is what we usually discuss as the first assignment when we meet at the end of August. One of them suggested I listen to this song by the Puerto Rican/Italian-American rapper from Medford, Mass. I liked the slow screwy grind of the beats, and the ablity to rhyme, "I put on my jewelry to go to the bodega...My feet is on Bottega." She shows a lot of butt. Curious what a pair of Bottega shoes might cost, I checked the website: $900 a pair for stripper heels isn't too bad, unless it is $900 per shoe. The prices for Bottega menswear are crazy, though: I need some new pants to deal with couch potato waist-expansion, but men's slacks go for around $2,000 a pair.
3. Shopping With Patti Smith. I once went shopping for pricey clothes with Patti Smith. This was 1978, when the single "Because the Night" put her on the radar of my editors at Newsday. They had forgotten that I had done a big Sunday profile of her about six months earlier, and I thought, maybe too soon for another sit-down interview. The original was in the 1 Fifth Avenue apartment she shared with then-boyfriend Allen Lanier of the Blue Oyster Cult. So instead of another sit-down, Patti and I decided to go shopping. She was finally making some money, and bought herself a fine leather jacket that was being tailored at Bergdoffs. Or Henri Bendel. One of those places. While we waited for the jacket, we were both bewitched by a pair of pants, a kind of striped velvet trouser that Brian Jones might have worn in a Rolling Stones album cover shoot. We each grabbed a pair and retreated to our respective dressing rooms. Patti came out grimacing; they hung baggy on her slim frame. They fit me like they had been cut for me by a Savile Row tailor. The price was $110, about $450 in today's dollars. That was almost a month's rent in those days. I thought hard about it, but they seemed too precious to wear. Patti was slightly miffed, I think, that I looked so good in those cherished slacks. But then she looked at me and said, "If I was Elvis, I'd buy 'em for you." We smiled at each other; we both knew she meant it.
4. Perdido Street Station. I am deeply engrossed in reading Perdido Street Station by China Miéville. It is 867 pages in print, and about 1,600 pages with enhanced font on my iPad, and it is wonderful, especially about interspecies sex between a humanish man and an insect: Think of an older and aggrieved Peter Pan getting it on with Tinker Bell. (An aside: when I was 11, I had a dream in which I took Wilma Flintstone to the sixth grade prom; she and I held hands.) On Dave Alvin's latest album, From an Old Guitar: Rare and Unreleased Recordings, he covers Lil Armstrong's "Perdido Street Blues." I created what might be called a "speculative fiction" review for PS Audio’s Copper online magazine, linking the enigmatic multidimensional and hyper-dystopian geopolitical creation New Crobuzon of the book to Alvin's rendering of the song. I had not yet read Miéville's book (I was a big fan of his novel The City and the City). But I'm pretty sure I got the vibe right, and maybe that's why I'm finding it such a quick read: I feel like I've already been to New Crobuzon, mapped the vectors of Perdido Street Station, through Alvin's music.
5. Raymond Chandler I went to a Barnes & Noble for the first time in a year. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, so all I bought was a new copy of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the March-June 2021 issue of The Strand Magazine, which has an unpublished Raymond Chandler item called "Advice to a Secretary." I will buy any magazine with unpublished Chandler, Walker Percy, or Don DeLillo, no matter how slight. Chandler's essay is much less sexist than the unpromising title; in fact, it is progressive in thought and deed, and I plan to adapt it for my syllabi in the fall. "Assert your rights at all times. You are a human being...You wil be tired and want to lie down. Say so. Do it."
6. Greil Marcus and I played transcontinental ping pong (meaning email). It was very fulfilling, as it was like a student (me) debating a Zen master about Nothing. The Nothing was Greil's Real Life Rock for April 2021 (a format this Substack segment transparently borrows), which now runs in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He praises a particular line from the brilliant but not infallible Rachel Kushner in the title essay of her recent collection The Hard Crowd. She offers a spanking to Joan Didion for her assertion in the title essay of the collection, The White Album, that Jim Morrison of the Doors, who Didion was observing at close range in a non-session in a recording studio, wore pants of black vinyl:
"Dear Joan: Record albums are made out of vinyl. Jim Morrison’s pants were leather, and even a Sacramento débutante, a Berkeley Tri-Delt, should know the difference. Sincerely, Rachel."
I sent a missive to Greil, that a precise observer such as Didion, famously the winner of a nationwide contest for a summer internship at Vogue, would likely know the difference between leather and "leatherette." The latter term was made famous by David Johansen as a rhyme in his solo song, "Frenchette." It is faux leather, made of vinyl. Greil replied that "any swipe at Joan Didion is ok with me." I shot back that Rachel Kushner's presumption was not evidence based, and he said, "I realize Rachel is supposing." We each sent more elaborate emails, explaining our positions, me as a Didionite, Greil as a conscientious objector to Didion's approach. We agreed that we both disliked Janet Malcolm, for the same reasons we disagreed about Didion. By the way, despite the disdain for hippies of Kushner's generation, the title of her book is from a line in "White Room" by Cream.
7. The Team (MhZ) One of my passions in the last few years, long before the pandemic, was the subgenre of streaming TV known as Quaint Location Crime Fiction, or QLCF. The nomenclature was introduced in season one of Republic of Doyle, the entertaining father/son detective series set in St. John's, Newfoundland, as a meta concept. I wrote about QLCF in the online magazine Cineluxe. I expected to love The Team, a nine episode series on MhZ, since it features top investigators from Copenhagen, Berlin, and Antwerp, Belgium, all great QLCF cities, uniting to capture a Lithuanian mobster of somewhat poor character, as he is sought for sex trafficking, serial murders, rape, incest, and other offenses so grotesque that it is no surprise that his drivers park in handicap spots with impunity. But the huge cast and multiple subtexts of former relationships among members of the team make the crime fighting business slow and hard to follow. And the flawed private eye has been a staple of the business since the 1940s, but each of these men and women live lives of such deep personal anguish that it is hard to identify with them. Their internal pain is so brutalizing that they are lousy human beings, and worst, not very smart cops. Most wasted performer is Belgium's best actor, Koen de Bouw, whose seriocomic tour de force as Professsor T, the neurotic criminolgist and consultant to to Antwerp's police, is one of the great characters of any TV series in the last 10 years. De Bouw's character is reduced to a nearly mute secondary role. You keep waiting for him to betray someone; he seems to carry a grievance that he has been supplanted on the international team by the much younger woman on the trinational team, Alicia Verbeeck, played by Baetans but he has noting to do except arch is eyebrows. Lars Mikkelson, Jasmin Gerat, and Veerle Baetens lead the Danish, German, and Belgian teams working together to catch the evil Lithuanian, Marius Loukauskis, played with bipolar glee by the great Austrian actor Nicholas Ofczarek. Despite the lovely pan-European scenery, it all plays like a DC Superhero movie that is far less than the sum of its parts. A second season not yet available in the United States features an entirely new team.
8. Spencer Davis Group: Gimme Some Lovin' (United Artists). This 1967 album was bequeathed me by my Franklin Square friend Bill Gangi, who moved to Arizona a few years ago and let me pick my way through whatever vinyl albums were worthwhile. I'm still thumbing my way through the collection, but this one is a winner. It not only has the title song and "Keep On Running," but features the Hammond organ and singing of 18-year-old Steve Winwood. "In the future I would prefer to be known as an organist rather than a singer," he told Chris Welch of Melody Maker for the liner notes. There are indeed organ-driven instrumentals such as "Trampoline," but Winwood's singing scores even with Lead Belly's "Hammer Song" aka "Take This Hammer." They knew their stuff.
9. "Zorro," by Charles McCullough and the Silks. I still like to do "crate digging" online for musical rarities. Craving something old and strange during lockdown, I searched the Ace Records U.K. website (which emails a monthly update). Because of licensing issues, the mp3's available for download in the United States are limited. Dootone Records: Doo-Wop Volume 3, because it had nothing I was familiar with. (Dootone's biggest hit was, of course, "Earth Angel" by the Penguins.) "Zorro" by Charles McCullough and the Silks caught my ear. It's one of those pop culture novelty songs so popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and if they did more than one take I'd be astounded.
10. Bob Dylan's 80th Birthday, on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," in which we are promised comments from someone who teaches a college course on Dylan. I thought it would be my longtime colleague from the daily newspaper music journalism fraternity, Don McLeese, who teaches such a course at the University of Iowa. Instead, we get Richard Thomas of Harvard, author of Why Bob Dylan Matters (really?), and Charles Pierce of Esquire, whose booking seemed a desperate afterthought. Squeezed into the last three or four minutes, nothing much could be said. A Harvard prof to Dylanize on "Morning Joe," the people's show! Both agreed that Blood On the Tracks is Dylan's best album, which may have accounted for the sad passivity of the brain-dead discussion. At least book two guests who disagree, or one who picks Gotta Serve Somebody. Hey guys: "The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle." Discuss. You have three hours.
11. Writing Bob's Obituary. I've done this twice: Once with a snarkiness I now regret, when he first started changing the arrangments of his songs beyond recognition. That was around 1979, the concert was at Stony Brook University, and the audience highly knowledgable, some even expert. The acoustics in the arena did not help, but because my photo appeared regularly in Newsday and I was scribbling in a notebook, people gathered around me so we could collectively decipher some lyrics and name that tune. The snarky review was seen by editors at New Times, then an A-list magazine I was delighted to break into, and I adapted the review as a back-of-the-book obit. The second time I wrote Bob Dylan's obituary was when I was a contract writer starting in 1995 at the new MSNBC.com/aka MSNBC On the Internet, a new online news publishing venture between Microsoft and MSNBC. I had a column called Raising Daddy, about the changes in my family life, and wrote about families and society. But they asked me to prepare an obit for Dylan, who in May 1997 was hospitalized with what was described by the Associated Press, quoting from a Columbia Records press release, described as "histoplasmosis, a fungal infection of the lung that causes swelling of the pericardium, the sac surrounding the heart." It was very serious. Had he died, he would have been 56.
12. Celebrating Dylan at 80. I'm not. I'm hiding from social media and podcasts and radio and news specials: The mass appeal facetiousness of such tributes is obvious: I'm not there. But if I had a radio show, what I would do is triple lock the door to the control room, barricade myself inside, and play "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window" repeatedly for as many hours as it took for management to drag me out and fire me.