‘True believers ... change of sound ... David Shankel ...’

For Petitioners/Manowar fans only:

More scrapbooking

A few weeks ago I posted some old pieces that I had dug up among the yellowing stacks deep in my closet. These were from 1998 and 1999, when I began writing for New York Press. (I continued until 2002.) I made the mistake of re-burying most of those clips before making scans, and it may take me another 10 years to dig them out again.

But for the time being I’ve got another small pile of digital newsprint for you, Dear Reader. And there is some good stuff in here.

From 1998:

• “Kaiser Rock, Kaiser Roll,” my first feature for the Press, about Scotland’s great Beat obsessives, the Kaisers, with a classic Mike Wartella illustration.
  
• A review of the Nuggets reissue. This also has a Wartella image, but for a Marilyn Manson review that ran alongside it.
  
• Leon Parker live review.
• Apocalyptica CD review.
• Review of the Figgs’ Couldn’t Get High..., the album they made after being dumped by Capitol. In a feature several months later I called it my favorite of the year.
• “Crazy Japanese Music”: Review of Keiji Haino’s three-day residency at Tonic, as well as a disappointing High Rise show at the Mercury Lounge. 

From 1999:

• Review of Beth Orton’s second album, Central Reservation, which says pretty much everything I have to say about Beth Orton.
• Vince Martin live review.
• R.L. Burnside at the Cooler.
• Live review of T-Model Ford, another of Fat Possum’s crusty old blues guys, who in the days before Fiery Furnaces and Andrew Bird were that label’s bread and butter. (Burnside died in 2005 but the octogenarian T-Model is, amazingly, still making records.)
  
• Review of a concert called “All the Percussion Music of Iannis Xenakis (Almost)” by Steven Schick’s Red Fish Blue Fish.
  
• Another contemporary/avant/“classical”/“new music” review, of the Flux Quartet. This was a historic performance of Morton Feldman’s Second String Quartet, which lasted more than 6 hours, forcing the musicians to face unusual “anxieties about bladder control.”
  
  
  

Favorite quote, from the Flux Quartet review:

“Is this what music is really all about — sitting by yourself in silence, watching other people move their bodies? Then I would think about sex and food. Over and over again. So is this what it’s all about? Sitting by myself watching somebody make music while I dream about sex and food?”

More to come, maybe.

‘Ultrasonic Melody’

The Defenders/The Petitioners/Ben and Sam, July 2003. Calling Tresider Burns ...

Reading Reed, Reed reading

Saw Lou Reed the other night at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in SoHo, reading from his new collection of lyrics, Pass Thru Fire.

Like everything Reed does, it was amazing and perplexing. When he didn’t look bored, he looked wounded; when he didn’t look wounded, he was angry, physically so — the crowd was told that flash photography was forbidden, and when some poor schmuck snapped him with flash at close range, Lou slammed his fist in rage.

He’s constantly slipping between emotional extremes, on the one hand aloof and cynical, on the other vulnerable and coiled like a snake. When he performed Berlin in Brooklyn two years ago, I couldn’t take my eyes off his face: such numbness and yet such pain. You can see it in Tony Cenicola’s wonderful portrait of him that accompanied my interview with Reed for that show. I was jealous; I hadn’t even come close to cracking that shell.

Nor will I ever, and nor will you. Because perhaps the most important part of his persona is something that I realized was the answer to one of the questions put by the Housing Works audience. (They couldn’t ask directly — the mere mortals had to write their questions down on slips of paper, to be asked later by Alan Light, whose expression upon being shot down by Reed’s gruff answers was priceless.)

The question was, “What’s your secret to being cool?” He’s a pro, so he made some pithy joke, and he got his laugh. But the real answer is: Be an asshole. Be superior, be indifferent, be too self-absorbed to care about anyone else, but then lash out. Show gratuitous anger. Show that the slightest thing that other people do can piss you off — that their very existence pisses you off. That’s how to be cool, and it’s why no one will ever be cool the way Lou Reed is cool.

But enough about that.

Pass Thru Fire. Not impressive, for several reasons. Not because of the literary content — though Reed himself seemed barely interested as he read his own words, two or three of the songs, especially “Rock Minuet,” froze me.

What’s irritating is that the book is one more bit of redundant catalog exploitation, and it’s sloppily done, too. By my count this is Reed’s fourth book of lyrics. It follows Between Thought and Expression: Selected Lyrics of Lou Reed, which I got for Christmas in 1991; The Raven, from 2003, which is the lyrics to POEtry, Reed’s “disjointed gray mass” of a theater piece, after Edgar Allan Poe; and the previous edition of Pass Thru Fire, from 2002. The new edition adds about 100 pages, with The Raven and a short section called “The Latest.”

And that’s just the books. This is the guy whose music has been compiled, boxed and otherwise repackaged at least 12 times in the U.S. (and still more overseas): Walk on the Wild Side: The Best of Lou Reed (1977), Vicious (1979), Rock and Roll Diary: 1967-1980 (1980), City Lights (1985), Walk on the Wild Side & Other Hits (1992), Between Thought and Expression: The Lou Reed Anthology (1992), The Best of Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground (1995), Different Times: Lou Reed in the ’70s (1996), The Definitive Collection (1999), NYC Man: The Collection (2003), Platinum & Gold Collection (2004), and Playlist: The Very Best of Lou Reed (2008). (Only one of these is really essential: Rock and Roll Diary, with definitive liner notes by Ellen Willis.)

Plus eight live albums: Rock n Roll Animal (1974), Lou Reed Live (1975), Live: Take No Prisoners (1978), Live in Italy (1984), Perfect Night: Live in London (1998), American Poet (2001), Animal Serenade (2004), and Berlin: Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse (2008).

Who knows how much of this clutter Reed himself can be blamed for, and how much is the cheap and greedy work of anonymous label executives over the years. But there’s no excuse for the book, which was laid out as though the designer had just gotten his first copy of QuarkXPress and was dying to show off that he new how to add smudges and wavy lines to the text, and have it all line up in a circle pattern and then fall apart, etc., etc.; if you saw a copy of Ray Gun in 1993, you’ve seen it all. But it’s more than dated, and it’s beyond gimmicky. It’s idiotic, tasteless and even disrespectful — to his own work.

Here are a few pages from the book. These are not doctored and are not scanner mistakes — this is really the way it was designed. Lou, how could you. Is it just so that you can release The Ultimate Pass Thru Thought and Expression Collection, Velvet Edition in 2013?

Scrapbook

Found while purging huge amounts of crap from my now-slightly-less-cluttered apartment: my earliest “professional” clips, from when I began contributing to New York Press in 1998.

They had run a solicitation on their front page bulletin-board column, which said something like: “Even though we know we’re going to be flooded with hundreds of pages on ‘heaven rock,’ we are hereby looking for music writers; send in a sampling of what you can do.” I went out and reviewed an Oblivians show at Maxwell’s, and faxed it in. John Strausbaugh, still one of the best editors I’ve had, told me to keep them coming, and the first one they printed was on You Am I.

Also accomplished on last week’s much-enjoyed staycation: finally figured out how get my printer to scan. So one plus one here equals a bunch of non-Googlable 10-year-old clips scanned and uploaded for your enjoyment, Kind Reader.

Included: that You Am I review, which appropriately enough begins with talk about temp jobs; more “Live Dates” on Daniel Johnston, Michael Hurley, Brad Mehldau, Pharoah Sanders, and the reopening of Maxwell’s with Neutral Milk Hotel and Fugazi; an early review of Fantômas, accompanied by a brilliant Mike Wartella illustration; a review of an S.O.D. reunion show, with wonderful art by Roy Tompkins, which I later bought from him and has hung on my wall ever since; an angry CD review of my beloved Pastels (Illuminati, their remix album); and a Q&A with Nick Lowe.

There’s plenty more, from both New York Press and the defunct New Times L.A., which I contributed to for a couple of years (here’s a Freedy Johnston CD review); I’ll post more when I can.

John Forté freed

John Forté, a Haitian rapper from Brooklyn who wound up going to Exeter Academy and hanging out with Carly Simon and the Fugees, was pardoned yesterday by President Bush. He’d been in jail for seven years on a drug trafficking charge that he had long disputed.

Here’s the piece I wrote on him in the Boston Globe six years ago, which is trapped behind their paid-archive firewall. I wrote it as a tryout for a job I didn’t get.

FACING JAIL TIME, FORTÉ FINDS THE MUSIC WITHIN
RAPPER’S ARREST STIRS AN EMOTIONAL RELEASE

BYLINE: By Ben Sisario, Globe Correspondent

At a time when rap is becoming increasingly one-dimensional, John Forté is a fascinating study in contrasts. He is the Haitian boy from the streets of Brooklyn who won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and ran with the Martha’s Vineyard set. He studied classical violin, but dropped out of college to pursue a career in hip-hop. He is the bleary-eyed player in dreadlocks who wears a knit sweater, silk tie, and crisp white shirt.

“Balance is a way of life,” he rapped on his debut album, 1998’s “Poly Sci.” “Right, Left / North, South / Two sides balance out/ Black, White / Either or.”

Now there’s a new kink in Forté’s double life. In November, he was sentenced by a federal judge in Houston to 14 years in prison for drug trafficking. Forté was arrested at Newark International Airport in New Jersey in July 2000 on charges of accepting more than $1.5 million worth of liquid cocaine, and he is currently preparing an appeal while serving out his sentence in a Texas prison.

Meanwhile, his second album, “I, John” (Transparent), recorded while he awaited trial last year, will be released Tuesday. Far from rap’s usual jailhouse boasts, it is one of the most complex, introspective hip-hop albums to come out in years, with an emotional depth and musical vision that rivals the work of Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill, his mentors in the Fugees.

“While I awaited trial, emotions ran through me like never before, and they weren’t all bad,” Forté says from prison, where he can communicate with journalists only by written interview. “There was a realization that took place, and for perhaps the first time in my life I was able to see what was important. Love was at the top of a very short list.”

Forté has his defenders, among them Carly Simon, who has forged a special bond with the 27-year-old rapper. Forté met her through her son Ben Taylor, when he visited the family on Martha’s Vineyard one summer a few years back; he spent six weeks there.

“We have a really close relationship,” says the woman Forté calls “Mama C.” “It’s like this happened to my child,” Simon says, adding that Forté has sent her some 60 long letters from prison.

When Forté was arrested, his one phone call was to Simon, who rushed to pay his $250,000 bail.

He is not the first hip-hop artist to go to jail, of course, nor is he the first to record an album while awaiting incarceration. Two members of the Wu-Tang Clan, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Ghostface Killah, for example, have had repeated run-ins with the law, complicating the release of solo and group albums.

Forté is no thug. He was raised by his mother in Brownsville, a tough section of Brooklyn, but won a full scholarship to Exeter. He enrolled in the fall of 1989 and soon was rapping about Dostoyevsky. He dropped out of New York University after just a semester to devote himself to hip-hop.

After meeting a girl named Lauryn Hill, he joined the Fugees’ extended family, the Refugee Camp, and worked on the group’s 1996 smash, “The Score,” as a producer, writer and performer.

Wyclef Jean of the Fugees took Forté under his wing, giving him guest spots on his solo album “The Carnival” and coproducing Forté’s own solo album.

Like the Fugees albums, Forté’s “Poly Sci” has melodramatic, vaguely spiritual lyrics and slow, luxurious tunes that borrow from reggae and drippy R&B. It was not an original approach, and in a marketplace flooded with Fugees copycats, it sold less than 100,000 copies, a respectable number for an underground rapper, but a failure compared to the 6 million sold by “The Score.” His label, Columbia, dropped him, and he began DJ’ing in Manhattan, trying to regroup and redevelop his skills.

According to the prosecution’s case, this is when Forté made his connection to the underworld. He is accused of procuring young female couriers to pick up packages of drugs coming in from Mexico and Central America as part of an elaborate smuggling ring.

When Forté was arrested, prosecutors charge, two women handed him packages containing about 14 kilograms of liquid cocaine. The women had been caught before they boarded their plane in Houston, and the meeting with Forté was a setup.

In taped phone calls with the women before they left, prosecutors said, Forté gave them instructions on how to care for the cargo, telling them, “put the ice cream on ice.”

But throughout the ordeal Forté has maintained his innocence. “I dispute the charges wholeheartedly,” he says.

Forté says that he knew nothing of cocaine and that he thought he was only receiving cash to deliver to a third party who Forté’s lawyers say was a known and trusted business associate.

During his trial Forté was offered a generous plea bargain deal by prosecutors but rejected it because he was certain he could win in trial. Forté was charged with several crimes but in the end the jury rejected a conspiracy charge and only convicted him of the relatively minor charge of possession with intent to distribute. His sentence was so great only because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Simon insists that Forté is innocent. “John has been victimized,” she says, “It’s a Sacco and Vanzetti case. It’s being tied to other things, not for the crime they think he’s committed.” She said Forté’s case has alerted her to the injustices of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses, and she says his fame can help raise awareness for the cause. “It’s good that John’s case might be one to be focused on,” she says. “It might make people aware of what’s going on.”

The experience has had a humbling effect on Forté and has inspired him to do his best work so far. “I, John” has a depth and maturity not found on “Poly Sci.” It begins with “What a Difference,” which samples Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes” and finds Forté rejecting the macho hip-hop code for a simpler life.

“I’ve evolved to better things,” he sings, rather than raps. “I want homes instead of rings.” Elsewhere he says, “I’m disgusted with rap.”

Indeed, Forté raps very little on “I, John.” The album is mostly sung, in a cool, thin tenor that makes its first appearance here. He says it was Simon who encouraged him to sing. “She pushed me to take things up a notch, and, oh, yeah, sing them myself,” he says.

Simon seems to have learned something from the collaboration, too. She contributes an angry rap to the song “Been There Done That,” saying, “Do not underestimate me / People have before and ended up looking so silly!”

The album is structured as a series of reflections on Forté’s life and on what he calls his “trouble,” imagining the ramifications of one fateful day. He imagines loved ones left behind, lost pleasures and happy times in the past. Some rage comes through in “Been There” and “Trouble Again,” in which he complains about media coverage: “Heard the words in the paper / Now what will they think up?” He makes peace with a parent he has never known on “Dearest Father” and prays for freedom on “Reunion.”

There are few overt references to his incarceration; instead, he uses the situation as an opportunity to reflect on his life. His producer, Joel Kipnis (who is known as J.K.), sees the album as an exploration of universal themes. “It holds true to everybody’s life,” Kipnis says. “There’s one moment, one day, one minute, when everything changes. As a storyteller, John takes the event and describes the different roads it leads him to, directly or indirectly.”

Forté is rightly proud of the album, but is careful to hang on to his newfound humility. “Would this record be as strong, had I not gone through this? I have no idea,” he says. “The only thing I know is that everything happens for a reason.”

Acme Garfunkel library

Art Garfunkel has been keeping a detailed list of every book he has read since 1968. It’s quite an impressive list. The last entry is No. 1,023, Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons, dated 2007. It was apparently compiled by Mr. Garfunkel with help from a fan.

His Favorites page lists 135 books, from Rousseau’s Confessions, read in June 1968, to Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, dated February 2003. I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve read only 18 of his 135 faves:

5. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
22. Bulfinch, Mythology
23. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
30. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
34. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
35. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
39. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged)
41. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
44. St. Augustine, Confessions
71. Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
80. Harold C. Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers
82. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
95. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
97. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
99. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men
100. Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization VIII: The Age of Louis XIV [Actually, I don’t know if I’ve read this one, but I’ve read a bunch of the Durants’ series]
112. Franz Kafka, The Trial
130. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

(Of these, Gulliver’s Travels, St. Augustine’s Confessions and Freud would also place high with me.)

The photo above seems to have been taken in July 1981, while he was reading one of his favorites, David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be. Before that he read Goethe’s Faust, Part One. Apparently he didn’t spend a lot of time with Piers Anthony and Ghosts I Have Been.

(Via BB.)

The peep-hole of the past

Comfort for any bookworms with fond and sad memories of card catalogs:

The Health Sciences Library at Columbia University recently “pared down its card catalog” — adorable: this means they’ve still maintained one? — and made this sideshow of some of the more unusual cards. This is the medical school library, so most have to do with microbes and “nurses on horseback.” Besides the one above, my favorite is for a 30-page study from 1815 entitled “A foetus found in the abdomen of a young man, at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire.”

Just as fascinating and heartwarming are all the quirks of format and typeface — the weird brackets, the inscrutable codes and their inscrutable placements, the additions by typewriter and pencil. This was knowledge at its most compact in the pre-computer age.

Thanks to D. for the tip.