Jazz, Joni Mitchell and the Hollywood Bowl

YOU'LL get less of the introverted poet of Blue and only a hint of the lipstick-and-beret chanteuse of Court and Spark. Instead, Wednesday night will summon the jazz phase Joni Mitchell went through in the mid-to-late '70s.

HERE is  my LA Times story on the Hollywood Bowl show, Joni's Jazz, which will include all kinds of good people -- including Herbie Hancock, who recently took some well-aimed criticism about the pedestrian nature of the Bowl's jazz offerings, Glenn Hansard, Aimee Mann, Cassandra Wilson and Wayne Shorter.

I enjoyed speaking to several of the above -- though I must admit Shorter and I got lost walking down memory lane a bit: He mused about his years in the army, during which he met Lester Young at a mid-'50s Canadian gig (Pres took him downstairs to the wine cellar to see if they could find better cognac than what they were serving at the bar) and raving about the open-mindedness of European jazz fans. ("The crowds -- they're poppin'. All the generations; 13-year-olds into really out stuff. Really feeling it.")

Michell's jazz period included the album The Hissing of Summer Lawns -- which has what we'd later call "world music" touches and which will be performed in its entirety at the Bowl -- and ends with her tribute to bassist/composer Charles Mingus, who died a few months before its release. (Though some very good people play on Mingus, its fusion vibe makes it a lost opportunity for me.)

Mitchell is of course a major figure and innovative guitarist -- Richard Thompson is fascinated with her alternate tunings and his old band Fairport Convention covered "Chelsea Morning" and "I Don't Know Where I Stand" -- who I find it easy to like and hard to love. I'm happy for the the Bowl concert -- which has a mix of the usual suspects and some imaginative choices -- to change that.

Simon Reynolds Goes Retro

HAS the end of cultural history ever been so much fun?

Your humble scribe has been reading Simon Reynolds since his work was a well-kept secret of the British music press. (He was also, during the ‘90s, one of two rock-crit Simons in the Village Voice, the other being the code-cracking rock sociologist Simon Frith.)

He’s written with insight and intelligence about rock n roll, subculture, shoegaze, “post-rock,” electronica and rave culture. His biggest hit stateside has probably been Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984, published in this country in 2006. (Due to Henry Rollins plug for the British edition, I had my Manchester-dwelling sister drag one home for me for Christmas one year.)

Reynolds’ latest book – which arrives about a year after his move to Los Angeles – is Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. The book concentrates on popular music, but it stretches to include all kinds of related subjects, among them memory, hipster retro culture, the psychology of the collector, the "big in Japan" phenomenon, commodity fetishism, YouTube and digital means of recording and storage.

I read nearly everything I find by Reynolds, but this book taps into several longtime passions of mine: In college, as I tried to make simultaneous sense of postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson and the emerging sample-madness of hip hop, I wrote an essay called “Pop Will Eat Itself” which laid out some of the issues that would continue to fascinate me for the next two decades. But I only scratched the surface what Reynolds gets into here. (I also had no idea how much of a retro cat I would become as an adult.)

Now please allow me to slip back to my Vox tube amp, collection of ‘60s jazz records and stash of prewar noir novels: Here’s Simon.

When did you realize that it had gotten this bad? That we were not just living through garden-variety nostalgia but might be poised to swallow our own future?

Shortly before deciding to do the book! Which would have been 2007 or so. But the feeling had been creeping up on me for a while, I’d been blogging stuff with retro themes for quite a while.

The book comes out of this mounting sense of bemusement at the phenomenon of retro that built up over the Noughties, and from a feeling of alarm at what it seemed to herald for the future – which is to say precisely an absence of future, the repetition of the already-heard.

It also comes from curiosity about how things had gotten like this, and how far the roots of retro could be traced. Because as soon as I started thinking about the subject in depth, during the writing of the proposal, I realized that retro had been this spectre on the periphery of my consciousness going way way back. There is a piece I wrote in a fanzine in the mid-Eighties, when music seemed to be stagnant and deadlocked, where I mention en passant that there’s been a glut of reissues and retrospection and that hasn’t helped the situation! So one of the things the book is showing is that retromania as a phenomenon is not an overnight development, it’s something that’s built up over a couple of decades.

What happened in terms of the swarming, ever-expanding digital archive of pop culture that has accrued over the past decade — filesharing, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc etc etc — that was the fruition of tendencies and directions that go back to long before the Internet. So part of the book is also an investigation of the history of retro; I’m looking back at pop’s own looking back, the history of revivalism and what I call “timewarp cults’.

You open the book describing the 17th century origins of the word “nostalgia." For how long have human beings longed for the past? Did Cro-Magnon man pine for the days when he was pushing the Neanderthals aside?

I think looking back to the past and venerating it is something that runs through the entirety of human civilization and is almost certainly part of every culture on the planet. The idea that things were better in the some glorious earlier time, that the ancestors were wise and just and existed in some kind of perfect state of equilibrium, but that at some point things went awry and the current situation we inhabit is fallen or lesser...  this is a near-universal way of seeing things. And on the individual level, we are all prone to nostalgia, I’m sure. Certainly daydreaming about my personal past, feeling wistful about lost moments, is a big part of my make-up.

Nostalgia in the sense of nostalgia for the popular culture and everyday trappings (food, clothes, transport, how stuff looked and was designed, etc etc) of an era that you personally lived through...  I think that is a relatively recent development, though. It seems like a 20th Century thing. That kind of nostalgia is inextricably linked to how fast fashions, entertainment, and so forth, change: they’re two sides of the same coin. And that cycle definitely got faster and faster as the 20th Century proceeded. Hence there’s more to be nostalgic about.

That kind of nostalgia is different from antiquarianism or an interest in history or the olden days. When I was very young I wanted to be an archaeologist and that impulse is to do with the thrill of treasure seeking (I had a very naïve idea of what being an archaeologist was like, which was shattered when I attended my first dig) and a fascination for how differently people lived in olden times. There are many ways of being interested in the past that don’t have anything to do with nostalgia. People who form Early Music ensembles aren’t nostalgic, I don’t think. They don’t want to go back to the days of bubonic plague and petty criminals being drawn-and-quartered.

But retro is something a little different from nostalgia, right?

In the book I talk about retro in two ways. There is a sort of vague use of “retro” as an umbrella term for anything to do with phenomena that have some relationship to the past; usually it’s a derogatory or slightly mocking use of the word. 

All the things that get loosely described as ‘retro’ are dealt with in the book: nostalgia, reunion tours, heritage culture, rock museums, revivals, reissuing, remakes, etc. However ‘retro’ actually has a more specific meaning that actually has little to do with nostalgia as an emotion of genuine loss and longing towards the past. Retro in this narrower, precise sense refers to a cultivated appreciation of past styles, usually with a sense of irony as opposed to anguish. Retro aesthetes are charmed by the quaintness of things from the past, but they don’t want to go back in time. This “pure” retro is much more aestheticized and style-oriented. In a non-pejorative sense, just a simple statement of fact, it is superficial: it attends to and delights in the surface properties of the style.

That’s why ‘retro’ in this sense first manifested in the world of fashion and graphic design. Then it gradually spread into, or emerged within, music. And initially it was a rarefied, sophisticated sensibility, and in the rather earnest context of rock culture in the 70s, it was cutting edge. The pioneers of it in rock would have been figures like Roxy Music, or later the  B-52s. Art school and/or gay musicians.  Nowadays it is really widespread in “post-indie” music culture and a lot of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking operators currently active approach the past as this gigantic flea market of sound and style and imagery through they sift for style signifiers to play with.

Haven’t cultural critics decried this kind of thing before? Paul Weller and company went retro decades ago, and I recall a 1986 Esquire article calling the ‘80s “The Re Decade.” What’s different now?

It’s a recurrent complaint that’s emerged at moments of seeming stagnation in music. In the Seventies, journalist and cultural pundits noticed that there was a lot of revivalism going on, particularly the Fifties revival that was big in rock but also took in things like American Graffiti and Happy Days, but I think there was also in the Seventies a bit of Twenties revivalism going on and probably some other decades got dabbled with too. 

In the Eighties postmodernism reached the music and youth press as well as mainstream magazines, so I’m not surprised to hear about that Esquire article; I can remember pieces in The Face about ‘The Age of Plunder’. There was recycling going on all across from music (with so many Eighties pop groups referencing Sixties soul) to Swatch watches with their use of Constructivist and Suprematist imagery. In the early 90s I wrote a piece whose working title was actually ‘Retromania’ for the Guardian and it talked about the reissue explosion and also two then-new rock magazines, Mojo and Vox, that had a very pronounced orientation towards the rock past, collector culture, and so forth.

As I say this has been building for years, but I think what makes it different now is the scale and intensity, and how it’s been affected by digital culture, how that has induced a state of atemporality. Also this current stagnant, directionless phase has gone on much longer than any previous lull: it’s been like this for about a dozen years, where no new major movement or genre in music has come forward.  Indeed, tying in with what I said about digiculture, I think you can loosely time the onset of the current malaise-without-end-in-sight to when broadband kicked in and a whole bunch of things to do with the Internet took off and started pushing us towards the Cloud and the state of perpetual connectivity.

If someone wrote a book this year about the dangers of pollution, or overpopulation, or global warming, I don’t think anyone would say, “oh we’ve heard this before, there were lots of scares about environmental issues in the 1970s, or people were worried about the ozone layer back in the early 90s...  ’. 

Someone in the UK compared Retromania to An Inconvenient Truth.  I think there’s some truth to that in so far as the problems I’m examining didn’t come about overnight and at various points people have remarked upon these syndromes before and expressed alarm about them.

The advent of recording and photography made retro possible. How has technology – which we associate with the future – quickened the process?

Well I go into this in some depth in the book, obviously. It’s a BIG topic. To keep it short, I will say that we’ve seen in the last twenty years a bumpy but implacable transition from the Analogue System to the Digital System, with things like CDs and iPods as transitional formats and technology that will disappear as all culture becomes subsumed as the Cloud.  The Analogue way of experiencing culture involved dearth, distance, and delay: there was a limited number of cultural artifacts that most individuals could afford, these took a solid form that had to be physically transported (in the case of magazines, recordings, if not radio and TV, although the latter were limited by broadcast range), and that involved waiting (for things to be released or published or broadcast). The Digital way of experiencing culture is organized around super-abundance, post-geographical proximity, and instantaneity/immediacy. There are no limits. Yet human beings remain stubbornly analogue entities and as many many people are discovering there is a lot to be said in favour of limits.

This can’t be good. What does it tell us about Anglo-American society in the 21st century, that we’ve become -- as your subtitle has it -- addicted to our own past?

Well, it could be telling us lots of things. That we’ve become victims of our technology. That we bought into the ideology of convenience as a supreme value. Or could it be that old stuff seems comfortable at a time characterized on the one hand by mind-blowing technological changes (the aforementioned digiculture stuff) but on the other hand characterized by an anxiety-stoking sense of political-economic deterioration/deadlock/instability. The past seems alluring because the present is a mess and the future is hard to envisage in positive terms. “Better days” have become something it’s more plausible to project backwards in time rather than forwards in time. 

Retro rock with LA's Dawes

ONE of my favorite newish West Coast bands is the LA quartet Dawes, who both draw from the classical canyon rock of the 60s and 70s and work to carve their individual place in the tradition. The voices of Jackson Browne, the Byrds, Neil Young and others echo through their songs.

HERE is my profile of the band in today's LA Times.

I really enjoyed talking to singer/guitarist Taylor Goldsmith: We could have discussed music all day. (I especially enjoyed the alt-country version of the Replacements "Achin' to Be" he knocked out on his J-45.) Taylor told me he and the gang run a wedding band as a side project where they play Motown and Stax/Volt songs -- I'm tempted to get married again just to book these guys to play.

When I'm away from California, playing Dawes' music in the car is one of my best way to remember my adopted home state. Weirdly, at a restaurant last night I heard "Time Spent in Los Angeles."

Please note: An editor at the Times wrote a deck suggesting that the band lives in Laurel Canyon. For all their roots in that sound, these guys are rockin in La Crescenta.

Rockin in 1970

ON Friday I have a New York Times review of an interesting if imperfect new book called Fire and Rain, which looks at the year 1970 and the making of four hugely popular records -- The Beatles' Let it Be, CSNY's Deja Vu, James Taylor's Sweet Baby James and Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.

If you love all these artists, by all means pick up David Browne's book. Otherwise -- as I get into in the review -- it's a mixed success.

Browne's key records sold like crazy at the time -- but even then there were people who considered them insubstantial. "I consider his soft sound a cop out," Ellen Willis wrote of Paul Simon in the New Yorker. "And I hate most of his lyrics; his alienation, like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore." (My guess is that she was rocking out to CCR at the time.)

(This BBC video of James Taylor from 1970 is better than almost anything on his albums, by the way.)

More on all this later. What's your favorite record from 1970?

Britain's "Electric Eden"

THE best of it still sounds as fresh as the day its long-haired practitioners pulled out their mandolins and plugged in the amps: British folk rock is one of the great unsung stories, at least in this country. The new book, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, gets at the movement's greatest musicians -- Vashti Bunyan, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, Bert Jansch, Anne Briggs, many others -- and connects them to currents deep in British literary and cultural life, including the resistance to industry, the flight to the landscape and the search for a distinctively British (and sometimes pre-Christian) culture.

HERE is my LA Times interview with author Rob Young, former editor of Wired magazine and clearly a major Brit-folk obsessive. He was inspired to write about music by Revolution in the Head's Ian MacDonald's book on Shostakovich and sees the aim of music writing as deciphering cultural codes.

This is a wonderful and well-researched book, though like the music it chronicles, it rambles a bit. It's hard to imagine an American publisher allowing this much backstory -- William Morris, Holst, druids, etc. (The book is put out by FSG in this country but is primarily a reprint of a Faber and Faber book published previously in the UK.)


And while this was not the book's primary goal -- which was to chart the late '60s/early '70s heyday of British folk rock -- I would have liked to see a bit more on the contemporary scene. Gen X West Coast artists in particular -- Stephen Malkmus, The Decemberists, Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart -- have been voracious at consuming and reviving this stuff otherwise ignored by the marketplace. (It recalls to me the way Boomer musicians both in Britain and America helped bring black blues figures -- Lonnie Johnson, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt -- back into the light in the '60s.) 

Here are some bits from my conversation with Young that did not make it into my Times piece:

Which recordings or artists from the classic period seem to hold up best?

I guess that's a cue for some of my personal favorites. If you allow that the classic period is 1969–72, which I call the Indian summer of folk-rock, then I'd have to mention Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, Incredible String Band’s Wee Tam And The Big Huge, Fairport Convention's Liege And Lief, John Martyn’s Bless The Weather and Sandy Denny's The North Star Grassman And The Ravens. 

All very different: Drake is Romantic in the original sense, and his "River Man" is a haunting and supernatural vision, with the ghostly string arrangements of Harry Robinson. Martyn is ecstatic and almost funky, using his Echoplexed acoustic guitar for the first time in scintillating patterns. Fairport's album is one of the cornerstones of modern English folk, with rocked-up ballads and wistful, melancholic songs written in a traditional idiom. 

ISB are on a personal quest, and their album pulls in all kinds of ethnic and exotic instruments in a panoply of world religions and spirit codes. Denny's LP is loaded with omens and her songs are autumnal, washed by the unruly sea of fortune. I could have chosen many more but this is a radiant selection that couldn't have come from anywhere else but Britain. 

The Incredible String Band

Where can we hear the legacy of this period in contemporary music? Did it leave any traces in mainstream – or not so mainstream – culture or thinking in Britain or the States?

Well, I hear it in all sorts of unexpected places -- the weirder side of Kate Bush, the pulverising, organic avant rock of late Talk Talk, even the uncanny electronic reveries of Boards of Canada. But this is not too much about the folk tradition any more, more a shared set of sensibilities that tap into the complex British relationship with the landscape, with memory and nostalgia, the constant longing to reconnect with a more innocent age. 

Interestingly, the musicians who I find most convincingly replicate the sound world of classic folk-rock tend to be Americans -- Joanna Newson, Devendra Banhart, Espers, Matt Valentine's various projects... There seems to be an empathy in musical terms there – whereas it's hard to find current British folk music that doesn't sound trite, but which preserves some of the mystery, the occult presences that the best folk contains. 

Neil Young Poll

Over here at The Misread City we've been spending a lot of time lately mulling on what makes West Coast music distinctive. We were hoping to launch a poll of best West Coast rock album (Forever Changes? Pet Sounds? Sweetheart of the Rodeo? Wild Gift?) but realized that for some artists there's no obvious best album.

Neil Young may be the most extreme case of this. The Canadian associated with Topanga Canyon, who has long since moved to the northern part of the state, has put out so many good records it's easy to get lost in his body of work. (There are also plenty of clunkers in the '80s.)

So this week we honor St. Neil with a poll of his finest albums. I struggled over which ones to include -- for various reasons it's hard to do these polls with more than four or five options. I added Everybody Knows this is Nowhere after some unrest. That's not only the first Crazy Horse record but the first Neil album I ever heard -- blasting from record store speakers -- that showed me a side of him I did not know from the stuff overplayed on AOR radio.

There are so many good Neil records -- though the unmistakably great ones seem to be clustered heavily, if not completely, in the early '70s -- that I've had to restrict this category to studio records. So if you're asking where Rust Never Sleeps -- a real breakthrough that sounds, to my ears, less fresh than it did years ago -- that and others are disqualified be they are at least in part live albums.

With a poll like this there are always a few that must be left off to keep voting concentrated, and I do regret that there was no room for the blistering Ragged Glory and others.

In any case --- you can vote for as many of these as you like. So whether you like your Neil mellow, electric, folky, grungy... just vote!

UPDATE ON JUNE 3: AFTER A TIE BETWEEN TWO LPS AND A TIE-BREAKING VOTE, AFTER THE GOLD RUSH IT IS!

The Long Career of Michael Medavoy

NOT long ago, Mike Medavoy was hanging out with a bunch of other producers – most of them guys who had been too young to work in the business in the ‘70s but looked back with longing at its maverick glory. Medavoy, by contrast, had played a small but important role as a studio exec who’d helped Rocky, Apocalypse Now and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest see the light of day.

“They all said, almost in unison, that the best movies were all made it the ‘70s,” Medavoy recalls from his Culver City office, dominated by a Persian rug and overstuffed furniture that make it feel like a comfortable living room. “And I said, When were in the ‘70s, making these movies, I thought of the ‘40s as the era I was interested in – a combination of ‘40s movies and the New European movies coming out.”

The one person who wasn’t sentimental for that period, then, was the one who’d really been there. Those were good years, he says now, but why pine?

Despite working during this blossoming of American film – which he saw undone, he’s written, by “filmmaking by committee” and corporate takeovers in the 1980s -- Medavoy doesn’t rail against the forces of history. He’s old-school in his tastes, in many ways, but resists easy nostalgia. (He's more recenty worked on Shutter Island and Black Swan.) 

“I don’t despair of where it’s all going,” says Medavoy, who has thinning red hair and is dressed in faded jeans and a baggy black shirt. “I can’t change it. I never get emotional about things I can’t change.”

The rest of my story on Medavoy runs in the new Hollywood Reporter.

R.E.M., Britfolk and White Bicycles

A lot of us are excited that Fables of the Reconstruction -- R.E.M.'s most poetic and mysterious album -- has just gotten a deluxe reissue complete with remaster and new material. Much of the weird, echoey Southern Gothic mojo on that 1985 album came from Britfolk producer Joe Boyd, and I'm reminded how great Boyd's memoir of the '60s and early '70s, White Bicycles, is.

In fact. I will second the statement of Brian Eno, who calls it "a gripping piece of social history and the best book about music I've read in years."

I knew Boyd's name for his work with Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson, Vashti Bunyan and Nick Drake. Boyd was an American college boy who went London while very young and helped invent British folk rock. He met Drake when the sad poet was a lost Cambridge student. He also ran the London psychedelic club UFO which helped birth Pink Floyd.

What I hadn't known was that Boyd got his start as a teenager -- whose friends had discovered that the great Lonnie Johnson was working as a cook in a Philadelphia hotel, tracked him down and invited him to play a house party in Princeton before they left for college.

Within a few years he was accompanying Muddy Waters and Coleman Hawkins through Europe as part of the early '60s boom in blues festivals... And Boyd became stage manager for the 1965 Newport Folk Festival at which Dylan notoriously plugged in. The book puts him close to much of the action, in a kind of Zelig-like way.

Of course, all of this would be a kind of glorified name-dropping if Boyd could not write and observe so well. White Bicycles is as good a document as I know on the social revolution of the '60s -- the utopian dreams and musical possibilities as well as the drug casualties and damage done by kook religions.

In any case, here is one book where I am quite eager for the sequel.

Let me close with Fables for a second. This was the first R.E.M. record whose release I was aware of -- and I remember the bizarre, muted beauty of songs like "Green Grow the Rushes" and "Maps and Legends" on the local alternative radio station, and the weirdly understated video for "Driver 8." It was around time I started to open my own taste up from the steady and fervent diet of Beatles-Stones-Dylan to the music of my own time.

And while R.E.M. went on to put out at least two records I feel strongly about, there's something on Fables they never captured again.

Overpopulation and Robert Silverberg

This week sees the reissue of The World Inside, a long-obscure science-fiction novel that could become a miniseries on HBO.

Of course, it's delicious to think of this hyper-urbanized future world -- in which people live in 800-story apartment complexes and have sex whenever they want -- serving as the setting for the next Deadwood or The Wire.

The novel's author, Robert Silverberg, is a veteran sf writer who really his his stride in the early '70s, around the time he moved to Oakland, where he still lives.

He's aways been a bit of a contrarian, and during the field's late '60s/early '70s period, much of sf was especially left wing. Silverberg has framed himself in contrast as a Burkean conservative with a respect for tradition, allegiances to traditional "high" culture and libertarian leanings.

With books like The Population Bomb and other expressions of Malthusian dread appearing in this period, Silverberg released a novel in which people have adapted to overpopulation and live with it more or less happily.

Here is my piece on The World Inside for io9, which includes a brief interview with Silverberg. And here an earlier (and broader) LA Times profile of the author, tied to the reissue of another "lost" early '70s classic, Dying Inside.

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool

NOT long ago, I attended a lively discussion at LA's Book Soup about the origins and demise of cool. Ted Gioia, the author of "West Coast Jazz" and "Delta Blues," was talking about a seismic, beneath-the-surface cultural shift. The cool detachment --sometimes spiked with irony or cryptic gestures -- originated by Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young and Miles Davis is reaching its sell-by date.

How can cool lose its cool? And what kind of "post-cool" culture will replace it?

Now, I don't agree with every line in Ted's new "The Birth (and Death) of the Cool." At times he is too reductive and sweeping, and movements like '70s soft rock show that a yearning for feeling and authenticity can exist right in the middle of an otherwise "cool" era. But he's certainly on to something, and I like the audacity of the way he puts modern jazz, styles of acting, trends in black culture, and corporate sponsorship into the same argument. Overall, he's persuaded me.

Here is my conversation with Ted. We've become friends, but I read his work (starting with the book-length essay "The Imperfect Art") a decade and a half before we met.

Q: So where did cool come from?

A: There was a major shift in American culture in the 1950s as people embraced cool in a way that previous generations hadn't -- after fighting for survival during the Depression, they were adding some flair to their lives. Cool came out of nowhere via jazz, from actors like James Dean and Marlon Brando. And in the '60s and '70s it was in the ascendancy.

Q: Why did so much of cool come from black culture?

A: In an odd sort of way, the predicament of black culture in the early part of the 20th century predicted what would happen to everybody. Urbanization, being torn from family roots, from cultural roots -- this happened to black people when they came to this country. The modern predicament is to have these ties cut loose. And many of the mechanisms for coping and surviving from black culture were adapted by everybody.

Q: Is there a special West Coast resonance to the notion of cool?

A: When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s and '70s, it was far more pronounced than it is now. I remember the first time I went to New York, the intensity overwhelmed me.

The works of art that came our of the West Coast had that tone: West Coast jazz played off that cool sound and found a receptive audience. People responded more fully to the music because they associated it with the lifestyle of California -- a Hollywood of the mind. Bill Claxton understood the psychology of the West Coast and captured it in his photography.

Q: What happened to cool?

A: A number of things too place in the last 10 to 15 years to rob cool of is centrality -- 9/11, the mortgage meltdown, terrorism. The aging of the Baby Boomers.

But more important, cool has been commoditized by corporations eager to market it, and as people have become suspicious of corporate marketing they've become suspicious of cool as well.

You can generalize: There are eras where people follow the crowd, and others where they follow deeply held convictions. There's a fundamental instability to cool: When you decide you want to be cool, you're looking outside.

Cool is always in danger of being replaced by something deeper and more intrinsic. I list the lifestyles that are replacing cool -- eco-friendly, Nascar dads, the return to traditional religion. These people have very little in common, but they all believe they are going beyond cool.

There are many good aspects to this -- people are embracing the authentic and sincere, and returning to roots. But there's a downside: I think there's a connection to the new anger and confrontation in our discourse.

Q: What does postcool music sound like?

A: Part of the problem the music industry faces right now is they're still operating under the cool paradigm. When someone like Susan Boyle or Norah Jones emerges, who appeal to authenticity or feeling, they're puzzled by it.

Q: Anything that's surprised you as you barnstorm the country talking about cool?

A: About 10% of the people get angry. They don't want to discuss it -- they just rant. I realize now, These people must think they're really cool. It's like I had attacked their religion or something.

Steve Erickson's West Coast Dreams

THE recent release of "a new literary history of america," has gotten me thinking again about longtime LA writer steve erickson. this fascinating volume, edited by greil marcus and werner sollors, includes a brilliantly counter-intuitive essay by erickson, which manages to wrap thomas jefferson and john adams around the songs of stephen foster. (he was born on the day in 1826 on which those two died.)

here is my profile of erickson, around the publication of his novel "zeroville." the book is one of my favorites of his -- set around the time of the manson killings and the emergence of the "easy riders, raging bulls" generation of american filmmakers, and both captures and undermines the myth of the 1960s and '70s.

as a novelist, of course, erickson is often likened to thomas pynchon, tho his work is more obviously anti-realistic. he was drawing from some of the techniques of magical realism before that style became overexposed, and he was an early champion of philip k. dick.

erickson tells me he is hoping to finish his next novel in 2010.

the question of why erickson is not better known outside california has interested me for two decades. his work may simply be too rooted in the clash of reality and surrealism, the confusions of artifice and a disappearing past, that baffles the rest of the world but that we angelenos take for granted.

John D. MacDonald Vs. Hollywood

I CAME a bit late to the work of john d. macdonald, the floridian whose most famous character, self-proclaimed "boat bum" travis mcgee, has sold more than 40 million books worldwide. but these books, while light on the surface, are not only fun reads -- in some ways resembling detective novels -- they lay out an appealing and persuasive worldview that resonates in our uncertain times.

for decades people have been wondering why the 21 mcgee novels, which appeared mostly in the '60s and '70s, have never been successfully translated to the big screen. (especially baffling given how good both "cape fear" movies -- both based on jdm's "the executioners" -- are.) HERE is my sunday LATimes piece on what appears to be good news.

i'm still more a ross macdonald man (i like the psychological depth, chiseled writing and unobtrusive use of symbol in the lew archer novels), but john d. is far more than the literary jimmy buffett i'd sort of expected.

here's the way jonathan yardley put it in this very fine washpost assessment:

"This man whom I'd snobbishly dismissed as a paperback writer turned out to be a novelist of the highest professionalism and a social critic armed with vigorous opinions stingingly expressed. His prose had energy, wit and bite, his plots were humdingers, his characters talked like real people, and his knowledge of the contemporary world was -- no other word will do -- breathtaking."

this blog welcomes comments from those who know the mcgee -- and many other -- novels of this writer whose work has fallen into neglect of late.

The Visions of Robert Silverberg

THE term "literary science-fiction writer" is nearly as awkward as renaming comic books "graphic novels." but for some figures it's important to understanding, as it is in the case of robert silverberg, author of "nightwings," "the book of skulls," the valentine series of fantasy novels and the darker-than-dark philip-roth-gone-telepath novel from the early '70s, "dying inside."

i had the great honor to meet silverberg up at his medieval style home in oakland recently, and HERE is the ensuing LATimes story. was surprised by silverberg's presence -- he is a kind of dignified old dude, gore vidal in the body of a straight jewish libertarian. his idols are h.g. wells and edmund burke.

glad to report that my rereading of "dying inside," which was just reissued and which i had not read since i was a teenager, confirmed my earlier ardor for it. michael chabon and jonathan lethem, who i interviewed for the story, share my fondness for the novel. the esteemed pulitzer winning critic michael dirda just penned this wonderful washpost review.

interested parties should come see my panel at latimes bookfest this saturday, where i interview silverberg alongside SF legends harry harrison and joe haldeman.

Photo credit: Locus magazine

  

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss

TODAY i'm wishing a happy 105th to one of the greatest writers this country has known, and one i've come to appreciate more as i've revisited him for the sake of my son. (i only regret that the good doctor did not have the good fortune to be born an aquarius.)

there are many wonderful authors for little kids -- lucy cousins, eric carle, byron barton, ezra jack keats -- but for an adult who loves the sound of language, what an electric jolt it is to get to the point where you can read junior dr. seuss! even a simple, almost monosyllabic book like

"hop on pop" is quite ingenious.

perhaps my favorite of his, and certainly the most poignant of his books, is THE LORAX. here is a recent LAT story, not by me, about that book and how is speaks to both the past and present of the green movement.

part of what has struck me as i've read the book for the second and third time on the same day to my son ian is how stodgy the lorax himself is. that is, here is a book written effectively, in "the 60s" (it came out in 1971), with an enviro/countercultural message, and where the hero is someone who represents not youth but the wisdom of the ages. in fact, the once-ler, the spirit of full-speed-ahead capitalism and innovation, has a younger, more dynamic spirit and actually calls the doomy lorax "dad" in a condescending way. we have geisel, an older liberal, looking at his times and coming to an original conclusion about what's needed. it also presages the way al gore was often portrayed.

(a great overlooked book is "on beyond zebra," which posits a kind of psychedelic alphabet that picks up where ours lets off. appealed to my childhood love of codes and hidden things.)

but you've surely got your own favorites. either way, happy birthday to the good doctor!!

Photo credit: Flickr user 31