Benjamin Nugent's "Good Kids"

EVERY once in a while, something – a book, a short New York Times story, an n+1 essay – appears by a mysterious character named Benjamin Nugent, and damn if every time it isn't funny, smart and insightful.

Now Nugent – who I’ve interviewed over the years on Elliott Smith, songcraft, and the history of nerd-dom – has a new novel called Good Kids. All I can tell you so far is that its opening chapters have some of the best, most well-observed writing I’ve seen on the blurry mystery of teenage-dom: I expect the publisher and reviewers will compare the novel to Noah Baumbach’s movie The Squid and the Whale, and not just for its kid's eye view of marital discord.

Nugent lived from time to time in Los Angeles during the oughts, which included, I think, a hipster/celebrity brush with greatness I will not get into here. Now back in his native New England, where he lives in Somerville and teaches at Southern New Hampshire University, Nugent happily walked down memory lane a bit for us here at the Misread City. He’s at Vroman’s in Pasadena on Thursday night.

So what years did you live in LA, and how did that time shape or influence your book?

I bounced back and forth between LA and New York from 2003 to 2009. LA was a dominating influence on Good Kids. I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, a college town with an insular culture that followed its own peculiar codes. And it looked like a place that lived by its own closed system of rules. It valued decreptitude and liberalism and Jungian self-scrutiny. 

But LA fascinated me because it was this anarchic miasma of a place, a massive spill of broken glass glimpsed from a plane. And yet the little world of people I knew in TV and music was an insular brother/sisterhood, just like Amherst, with its own initially inscrutable codes. There's a scene in Good Kids at Disney Concert Hall downtown where everybody runs into each other watching Joanna Newsom play with the Philharmonic, and I loved writing it. I was intrigued by this tribe that drew together accidentally from time to time, despite being dispersed across a thirty-mile zone.

Now that you are relocated back to New England, what do you miss most from our shores?

The smell of the hills in Silver Lake; it's like really strong weed mixed with really healthy cat pee.

The Roots of Christopher O'Riley

THE eclectic pianist O'Riley came to my attention a few years ago for his interpretations of music by Radiohead, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. He's recently teamed up with Matt Haimovitz, the wild-man cellist who cam render Bach and Hendrix with equal skill. (In '05 or so, Haimovitz put on a radical and memorable show at a restaurant in LA in which a fight nearly broke out.)

O'Riley, who comes to town with the cellist next Wednesday, is the latest subject of my Influences column. He had a lot to say, so here's a bit I did not have room for:

If I’m not playing the piano, I’m likely reading or seeing a film. I read widely and voraciously. I find the world of the imagination to be enriching, inspiring and a great influence on how deeply I invest myself in creating my own pieces. I am more in awe of writers than I am of most musicians/composers. Some of my faves: David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, James Joyce, Roberto Bolano, Charles Dickens, Thomas Ligotti, Stephen Graham Jones, Chuck Palahniuk, Kris Saknussemm, Ken Bruen, Megan Abbott, Salman Rushdie, Stona Fitch, Donald E. Westlake, Christopher Hitchens, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy.

The Late, Great Elliott Smith

YESTERDAY would have been the 40st birthday of elliott smith, perhaps the finest songwriter of my generation, and a musician who killed himself six years ago. my wife -- a longtime music journalist who considers him the deepest artist she's ever interviewed -- and i remember that dark day well.

smith, of course, came up through the portland band heatmiser, and released some powerful and very spare solo records up there before moving to LA... he came to the southland a few years after i did, and i was lucky enough to see him perform several times, as well as to sit next to him at the bar at the troubadour, where he was nursing a guinness and clearly did not want to be disturbed. (i also recall, maybe a year before he died, smith waiting in line behind me in line at amoeba music, with a basket full of vinyl. his girlfriend had to lead him to the register like he was an overmedicated old man.)

HERE is my piece from 2004, in which i interviewed his girlfriend, producer, biographer, and musical friends, and look back at his life and then-controversial death. as sad as i still am to have him gone, he's one of the people who reminds me of how emotionally direct and inventive the music of the indie-rock movement can be. also: as influenced as he was by indie and by the british invasion (especially george harrison), smith was, musically, every bit his own man.