Nature is art, art is writing, writing is books, books are film, film is music, music is people, people are nature. More...
Esker
I have published two volumes of a chapbook titled "Esker." The most recent volume, "Nowhere Else But Here," was released in January 2010. It features writings from every day of June 2009 in an old Japanese form called haibun.
I bought my copy of Jack Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur” at City Lights Bookstore when I visited San Francisco in 2006. I then proceeded to read it during a camping trip down to the namesake region of the California coast with my friends Zack and Steve.
It’s a dark book about Kerouac’s struggles with fame and alcohol. In it, he is plagued by hangers-on and wannabes; the “King of the Beatniks” can find no relief in the wake of the publication of “On the Road.” It can be argued that Kerouac never really recovered from the publication of that book and the demons he confronts in “Big Sur” led to his alcoholism-related death in 1969.
My own trip down to Big Sur was more about camping in the redwoods and hiking at a state park than suffering through delirium tremens, but it was poignant to read the book near where it was written. And I heard the song of the crashing waves that Jack famously meditates on in the book.
The new soundtrack album for the documentary “One Fast Move Or I’m Gone” by Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) has received quite a bit of airplay and other attention, but the film for which it was produced has been fairly under the radar. “One Fast Move or I’m Gone” takes a look at Kerouac’s life through the lens of his novel “Big Sur.”
The film looks like the typical talking head thing, but with some pretty good heads: Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to name a few. Also, through digging around the film’s website a bit, I learned that the guy who played restaurateur Artie Bucco on The Sopranos is also a Kerouac “interpreter” (he provided voice-over work on the documentary).
Heard some music tonight that took me back a few years, and I started thinking of a short list of songs that stand out from the past decade. Nothing too obscure here, these are just the hits that seem to represent parts of the last 10 years, in quasi-chronological order:
St. Germaine – Rose Rouge
The Strokes – Last Nite
Outkast – Heya
Neko Case – Deep Red Bells
MGMT – Time to Pretend
M.I.A. – Paper Planes
Bon Iver – Skinny Love
Cloud Cult – Everybody Here Is a Cloud
Interestingly, the artist/album that I would say is the biggest stand-out for me from the zeroes is Arcade Fire/Funeral, but that album truly worked best as a single entity and there’s isn’t one single off it that I would pick out for the above list.
I can only wonder now how these songs will endure, and what new sounds the upcoming decade holds. Do you think music reflects the mood of the time in which it is created or more so contributes to that mood? Cause or effect?
Yo La Tengo has always been one of my favorite bands. I don’t know quite what it is, but there’s an intensity and a sweetness that just works for me. They also put on some pretty awesome live shows (or at least, they did in 2003).
My first impression is that the album could be a bit of a return to form. The albums they put out since 2000’s “And then nothing turned itself inside out” have not really appealed to me. They got sort of “schmaltzy” for lack of a better world, with the wrong kinds of jazz influences and strange singing from Ira Kaplan. Here’s video of them performing one of the new tracks on French television:
As a website commenter somewhere said, it’s nice to know that the Ira Kaplan guitar freakout still lives.
January 2nd, 2010
I bought my copy of Jack Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur” at City Lights Bookstore when I visited San Francisco in 2006. I then proceeded to read it during a camping trip down to the namesake region of the California coast with my friends Zack and Steve.