dankois.com

Reviews

2008-10-03T23:05:00.002-04:00

"Airlifted in from someplace where they roll their Rs with impunity"

"Beige beardiness"

Vem blir ny chef på Met?

2008-03-02T14:10:00.000-05:00

Anyone speak Swedish?

Chefen för ett av världens största museer bestämt sig för att gå i pension. I 30 år har Philippe de Montebello styrt över Metropolitan Museum of Art, och bland annat lyckats göra det till det populäraste turistmålet i New York, med 4 miljoner besökare förra året. Nu är spekulationerna om vem som ska ta i full gång, samtidigt som Montebello hyllas - men inte utan förbehåll.
I Kulturnytt 13.05 intervjuar Katarina Andersson Dan Kois, kulturjournalist på New York magazine, om de Montebello och hans efterträdare.

[Sveriges Radio P1]

Best Comics of the Year: Supplement

2007-12-09T21:04:00.000-05:00

In this week's issue of New York, I get a nifty little sidebar to list what I think are the best five comics of 2007. Originally, this was going to be longer, with an introduction and everything, so I'm reprinting the intro that was eventually cut for space, along with 25 additional excellent comics published this year.

In the comics world, 2007 was a year in which each of the two dominant houses put all its eggs in one basket -- and smart readers went off in search of other baskets. The mainstream comics landscape was dominated by Civil War and 52, long mega-event series of limited interest to readers who haven't spent the past twenty years memorizing DC and Marvel continuity arcana. Luckily, there were a lot of other places to find pop thrills in 2007.

Manga continued its takeover of the American graphic novel market; bestseller lists and bookstore shelf space are both now dominated by Japanese comics in translation. With varying artistic success, major creators transplanted characters from other media into the comics world: Stephen King's Dark Tower comics haven't added much excitement to an already played-out book septology, but Joss Whedon's comics-only season eight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has invigorated the beloved TV series while bringing hordes of new fans to comics shops – even if there's no proof yet they're buying anything else. And in 2007, two beloved stories approached their ends: Brian Vaughan's standout series Y: The Last Man began its final story arc (its final issue publishes in January), while Tsugumi Ohba's hugely popular (and entertaining) manga Death Note reached its baroque conclusion in July.

In addition to the five best comics of the year, here are 25 more comics of note published in 2007.

Alive: Volume 1, by Tadashi Kawashima and Adachitoka (Del Rey)
All-Star Superman, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home, by Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty (Dark Horse)
Criminal: Coward, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Icon/Marvel)
Crossing Midnight: Cut Here, by Mike Carey, Jim Fern, and Jose Villarrubia (Vertigo)
DMZ: Body of a Journalist, by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (Vertigo)
Elk's Run, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon (Villard)
Flight 4, edited by Kazu Kibuishi (Villard)
Ghost Stories, by Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)
Good as Lily, by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm (Minx)
The Goon: Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker, by Eric Powell (Dark Horse)
I Killed Adolf Hitler, by Jason (Fantagraphics)
James Sturm's America, by James Sturm (Drawn + Quarterly)
King City: Volume 1, by Brandon Graham (Tokyopop)
Laika, by Nick Adadzis (First Second)
Mu Shi Shi, Volume 1 by Yuki Urushibara (Del Rey)
Notes For a War Story, by Gipi (First Second)
Parade (With Fireworks), by Mike Cavallero (ACT-I-VATE/Image)
Robot Dreams, by Sara Varon (First Second)
Runoff: Chapter 3, by Tom Manning (Oddgod)
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, by Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni)
Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, by Jeff Smith (DC Comics)
Shooting War, by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman (Grand Central Publishing)
Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine (Drawn + Quarterly)
Yukiko's Spinach, by Frédéric Boilet (Fanfare/Ponent Mon)

In Which I Somehow End Up Explaining My Dog's Reproductive System to a Random New York City Parks Department Employee

2007-11-03T00:17:00.001-04:00

Scene: Isham Park, Inwood. I am walking my dog, Dora. A Parks employee is emptying the garbage can near the entrance as I approach. He calls out to Dora.

PARKS GUY: Hey Dexter! Hey, Dexter! Dexter! Did I get his name right?

ME: Her name is Dora, actually. You got the "D" right.

PARKS GUY: Dora! So she's a girl?

ME: Yeah.

PARKS GUY: You got a boyfriend, Dora? Or is she, you know, did you fix her?

ME: She's fixed, yeah.

PARKS GUY: Now how do they do that with girl dogs?

ME: Um... [I don't actually know whether they just tie dogs' tubes, or remove the uterus, so I give my best guess.] I think it's like a hysterectomy.

PARKS GUY: What?! They go up her butt?!!

ME: No! Uh, it's like, they remove her uterus.

PARKS GUY: Oh, so she ain't got no cunt.

ME: Well, not... uh, yeah, basically.

PARKS GUY: But if a boy dog wanna come get with her, she ain't got no hole there?

ME: She still has a hole, it just doesn't, like, go anywhere.

PARKS GUY: Huh.

OTHER PARKS GUY WHO JUST WALKED OVER: She doesn't have a hole?

ME: And I mean, I don't think any boy dog is going to, you know, because she doesn't have any hormones.

PARKS GUY: Any what-mones?

ME: Hormones.

[Dora and I walk away. From behind us:]

OTHER PARKS GUY: I don't see no hole there.

PARKS GUY: No, me either.

THE END

Review: Ann Patchett's 'Run'

2007-10-12T00:47:00.000-04:00

Run
by Ann Patchett
Harper, $25.95

Ann Patchett’s last novel, 2001’s Bel Canto, became a bestseller and a book club favorite by virtue of Patchett’s remarkable ability to vividly draw an enormous cast of characters -- teenage Latin American terrorists, a Japanese electronics magnate, an American opera diva -- in just a few deft strokes. So convincing are her portraits of this varied ensemble that the novel stays afloat long after its premise -- a months-long hostage standoff in an unnamed Latin American country -- should have collapsed.

In Patchett’s new novel, Run, she narrows her cast to a single complicated American family, and so it’s a shame that for all their carefully accreted detail, few of the characters ever come to life on the page. Instead, they feel like fictional constructions, players in a plot too dependent by far on coincidence and bad luck.

Run tells the story of Bernard Doyle, a former mayor of Boston, and his three grown sons: academic Tip and dreamy Teddy, black brothers adopted early in childhood by the Doyles, and their older brother Sullivan, Bernard’s biological child, who may be white but is the family’s black sheep.

On a snowy winter’s night the family takes in a young girl, Kenya, after her mother is injured in an accident. If this were a different kind of book, it would spoil the plot to reveal that Kenya’s mother is also Tip’s and Teddy’s biological mother, but Run is so constrained in its purview -- it takes place over a mere 24 hours in a snow-globe version of Boston, populated by few characters who aren’t fortuitously crucial to the plot -- that most intelligent readers won’t be surprised by this twist. Indeed, this is Run’s greatest flaw: like figures in a snow globe, its characters are stuck under glass, more trapped by the machinations of Patchett’s plot than the characters of Bel Canto were by gun-toting terrorists.

That plot smacks of melodrama, replete with uncovered scandal, revelations of parentage, a tragic death, and even a long dream sequence starring a ghost whose description as “the wisest twenty-five-year-old that God had ever created” doesn’t mask that she’s a device meant mostly to graft one extra limb on an already crowded family tree. With all these twists and turns inflicted upon a mere six characters over the course of a single day, the novel begins to have the feel of a soap opera, albeit an extremely sensitively told one.

Late in the novel, Sullivan bemoans that he returned to home after a long sojourn in Africa just in time for a brand new family drama to unwind. “He tried to imagine how interesting this story would have been had he not been a part of it,” if someone simply told him the tale a few months from now, Patchett writes. “He didn’t think the entire story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciating investment of time.” Run isn’t excruciating by any means, but it can be exhausting, despite Patchett’s smooth narrative voice and her treatment of Kenya, who is bright and serious and feels like a real pre-teen girl. If only Patchett had had the vision to smash her perfect snow globe of a novel and see what shook loose.

Overkill

2007-09-29T17:25:00.000-04:00

To: aceofspades_kingofhearts_joker@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: new email address
Date: 15 June 2007 22:51:50

Dear Keith,

Sorry I’ve been out of touch, but as you’d changed your email address again I was having quite a time getting hold of you. Thankfully I was finally able to get the new one from Mick, who’s been more than helpful throughout this process.

We’re on the home stretch now, and I plan to submit the proposal and excerpt to a select group of editors. I’ve looked over your proposed list, and while I appreciate the time you’ve taken to compile it, I’d as gently as possible like to suggest that you let me handle the publishing industry details. For instance, the late Jacqueline Onassis is no longer an editor, and Pirate Meridian Cherry Bomb Press does not exist as far as I know.

I’m thrilled with your willingness to solicit favorable comments – what we in the industry call “blurbs” – from your friends in the music business. I’m still worried that Robert Johnson and John Lennon being dead might complicate your plans, but you’ve assured me it’s of no consequence, and I’m happy to keep an open mind. I think a blurb from Jesus might be overkill, though.

Finally, while I appreciate the playful spirit in which you let loose a hundred gold-armored mongooses in our offices, I must confess that they made work a bit hard to get done. Svetlana, in particular, seemed to have a real problem, as her only recently-returned lucidity was dealt a blow due to traumatic memories of her time at the Richards Estate. Our filing has fallen seriously behind as a result.

All best,
Ed

Memory

2007-09-08T16:58:00.000-04:00

To: robert_johnsons_bastard_son@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: re: Outline Fuck Yeah
Date: 01 May 2007 09:00:26

Dear Keith,

I’ve read your proposed outline for the memoir, and I think it’s quite good, very vivid and detailed. I might ask that you really make an effort to cast your mind back and recall more stories from the short periods of your life of which you profess to have no memory at all. Specifically, are you sure you don't remember anything from 1956, 1957, 1959, 1961-1963, 1964, 1966, 1968-1972, spring 1973, 1975-1977, “the Eighties,” 1990-1993, New Year’s Eve 1996, 1999, 2000, or 2002 to the present? Even a quick anecdote of the smallest detail – a favorite shirt, some friendly words from a girlfriend, your entire Rolling Stones discography – could really help sell the book to editors. (We’ve done some research here and determined that you were born in 1943, so you shouldn’t worry about your lack of memories of the French Revolution; you weren’t even there!)

Best wishes,
Ed

PS Your gift arrived in the mail; it was far, far too generous, Keith. Also, the package was signed for by my assistant Sean, and the Royal Mail’s reported him to the police. Please do be careful in future about what you send to our offices.

Titles

2007-08-14T23:32:00.001-04:00

To: robert_johnsons_bastard_son@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: re: TITLE-IVE GOT IT MATE
Date: 18 April 2007 08:31:50

Keith,

Many thanks for your email. I’m not sure Snorting Me Dad is exactly right, but let’s keep working at it. I like the new email address, though.

-Ed

475 Supermodels

2007-08-12T00:09:00.001-04:00

To: zombieflashlightning@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: our tea
Date: 28 March 2007 16:14:14

Dear Keith,

It was a great pleasure to meet you, as well as your manager, your road crew, your well-managed staff of shamans, and Svetlana, who is quite stunning. I am invigorated by the thought of helping you put your amazing story to the page, and am certain that I’m the right agent for the job. And I am both surprised and thrilled that you’re interested in taking such an active role in the crafting of the memoir proper; surely you know that this is rare among celebrities of your stature, but will add to the book’s value -- as a work of literature, as an historical document, and in the marketplace as well.

I’m quite frankly in awe of your wonderful ideas to build editorial enthusiasm for the book. However, I may ask you to reconsider your plan to compose the entire manuscript of your memoir on the naked backs and buttocks of 475 gorgeous supermodels. Though your idea would certainly catch the attention of each and every editor to whom we submitted the book, I’m worried that shipping and duplication costs – always a concern during the submission process – might escalate more quickly than you’d be comfortable with.

I’ll be in touch soon. Incidentally, Svetlana is still here, and is conducting a loud and somewhat embarrassingly personal conversation with herself in our conference room. If you have a moment to send someone round to fetch her I’d be grateful.

All best,
Ed

Peacocks

2007-08-10T09:12:00.000-04:00

To: zombieflashlightning@therollingstones.com
From: agent@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: memoir
Date: 6 March 2007 12:21:03

Dear Mr Richards,

I must admit that when I asked Sean to ascertain whether you were, in fact, the real Keith Richards, I never expected such an immediate or extravagant response. You may rest assured that the twenty trained peacocks outside our offices have put their point across and may now be returned to your estate. I would be honored and pleased to talk business with you. Could you join us for tea?

All best,
Ed Victor

Keith Richards' Memoir: The Emails

2007-08-08T21:16:00.000-04:00

To: zombieflashlightning@therollingstones.com
From: victor.assistant@edvictor.co.uk
Subject: your submission
Date: 6 March 2007 09:45:22

Dear Mr Richards,

Thank you for your recent submission to our agency. Mr Victor has asked me to write to ask you to confirm that you are indeed Keith Richards of the rock band the Rolling Stones. If you could please send along some proof of identification, we’d be grateful. Of course we regret taking this embarrassing measure but we were quite surprised to find your letter in our slush pile.

All best,
Sean Wylde
Assistant to Ed Victor

A Horrible Crunching Sound

2007-06-15T10:35:00.000-04:00

My favorite response so far to my Slate piece conflating Harry Potter and Tony Soprano comes from blogger Harry Pata, who patiently lists the reasons why my proposed ending to the series obviously wouldn't work at all:

"Do the Hippogriff" is non-canonical; if you're gonna parody the ending of the BOOKS, don't steal shit from the MOVIES.

Awesome.

Here's a little bit that was cut from the piece for space:

Harry was tired – tired of everything. He walked into the Three Broomsticks and took a seat in a booth near the back, still shaken by his visit earlier that day to Gilderoy Lockhart at St. Mungo’s Hospital – Lockhart, who nearly killed Harry once in the catacombs underneath Hogwarts, but was now demented and sad, with no memory of the power he’d once held.

Cheating

2007-05-16T22:59:00.000-04:00

So the near-total radio silence on this blog is a result of my daily duties on another blog, New York Magazine's new arts and culture blog, Vulture. Since I've never been a particularly steady or consistent contributor even to my own blog, it seems ludicrous that an actual, legitimate magazine has hired me to write in the first-person plural for them, but there you go. Given that I'm responsible for five to six posts a day on Vulture, I've been cannibalizing even my most stupid ideas for that outlet, leaving very few stupid ideas for this one.

We'e done pretty well in our first four weeks; we already got our first threatening-yet-vague letter from a celebrity's lawyer, and famed Hollywood media hothead Nikki Finke got mad at us on our first day. We've had a couple of good scoops that nearly no one has paid any attention to. Overall, a good launch.

So anyways, instead of coming up with anything new for this blog, here's a guide to some of my notable posts from the first four weeks of Vulture.

‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics,’ Decaf Edition

‘Harry Potter’ Land, the Only Theme Park We'd Actually Want to Visit

Wagner Startled By Porn-Star Fan Base

New York ‘Times’ Commenters Still Confused About Snoop Dogg

Great Moments in Addiction Subplots

Peter Jackson's ‘The Lovely Bones’ to Cost Someone $65 Million?

So How Is Peter Jackson's Script for ‘The Lovely Bones‘?

Joe Eszterhas: Plagiarist?

Mike White Calls Out Judd Apatow

Agent Turns Down $1 Million Offer for First Novel

Turning Down a Cool Mil Works Out Great for ‘The Gargoyle’

Emmy Contenders Show Their Best (and Worst) Sides

Video: American Girls Dream Big

Author Has Sex for 100 Straight Days, Book Editors Get to Read About It

I've been especially proud of our Comics Page, which offers daily excerpts from new comics, manga and graphic novels:
Flight 4
King City
The Salon
Stuck in the Middle

Finally, every morning I do a post called The Industry, which is a roundup of arts and entertainment deals from the trades and news sites. In its brutal rhythm of headline-news item-punchline, it makes me feel a little like Joel Stein, which as you can imagine can be rough. Nevertheless, I've thought a couple of them have been both funny and informative without totally fucking sucking.

Good Night, Sweet Prince

2007-05-07T12:37:00.000-04:00

Herbert J. Kornfeld, dead at 34.

We shall never see his like again.

Honolulu Advertiser Covers IZ Book

2007-04-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Honolulu showbiz eminence grise Wayne Harada mentioned my IZ book in the Advertiser last week, quoting a press release that I think came out from the Mountain Apple Company, IZ's record label.

...with New York-based writer Dan Kois (a former Honolulu resident who has contributed to The Advertiser and Honolulu magazine) zooming in on the late Island entertainer's "Rainbow" connection, thanks to "Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World."

Well, I do hope the book will zoom in on a lot more, but I'm grateful for the mention. Thanks, Wayne!

The Sanjaya of His Era

2007-04-17T09:16:00.000-04:00

Don Ho, who died of heart failure Saturday at 76, was inarguably a terrific entertainer. In many ways, he was his era's Sanjaya: a crooner, a showman, a lover boy. Like the ponyhawked American Idol contestant, he could connect directly with an audience, whether on TV or live; like Sanjaya, he also represented to mainstream America the harmless exotic, the "other" who was safe to admire from a distance. Ho's long and happy career should serve as warning to those who dismiss Sanjaya as a flash in the pan whose fifteen minutes are about to run out. (It's not hard to imagine a 76-year-old Sanjaya playing to packed houses in Vegas, as Ho did in Waikiki; all he needs to find is his signature song.)

For his whole career, Ho represented a certain image of Hawai'i: the islands as vacation mecca for haoles from the mainland, a kitschy paradise of co-eds, beach boys, and tiny bubbles. Despite his outdated act, and despite the fact that few locals attended his Thursday-night shows at the Waikiki Beachcomber, he's being canonized in Hawai'i today. The flood-the-zone coverage in his hometown paper reflects the state's love for any native son, no matter how little he has to do with everyday Hawaiians, and no matter how skilled he actually is. (I still remember the 2000 World Series, in which local boy Benny Agbayani was the lead story in the Honolulu papers, not the Mets or the Yankees or even the games themselves. AGBAYANI HITS DOUBLE, the headlines would scream, and then in tiny type underneath: "Mets Lose 6-5.")

Ho began and ended every concert with his signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles" -- a song he professed to hate but nevertheless played twice, once early for the audience members who had to go to bed, and once late for the audience members who wouldn't remember he sang it the first time. I prefer to remember him for his jaw-dropping 2002 cover of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey." It's not that good, but he sure sounds like he's having a great time singing it. Me ke aloha pumehana, Don Ho.

Kurt Vonnegut Joins Rodney Dangerfield in Heaven

2007-04-12T11:04:00.000-04:00

Unlike many readers, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut not through a friendly English teacher or an older brother or a dog-eared copy of Breakfast of Champions found at a local hippie's rummage sale. No, I discovered Vonnegut through his cameo in the Rodney Dangerfield film Back to School.

In Back to School, Dangerfield's character, millionaire Thornton Mellon, has returned to college in order to encourage his son's faltering academic career. Assigned a paper on Kurt Vonnegut, Mellon commissions an essay from the author himself, who (as I recall) appears at the front door of Mellon's spaciously remodeled dormitory suite in the middle of a raging kegger. I still remember seeing Vonnegut's cheerful, rumpled-suit person in the midst of that madness and thinking, "Is that guy real?" To start with, Vonnegut looked like Central Casting's idea of a novelist more than he looked like an actual novelist. And a famous writer -- a writer famous enough to be taught in English classes, anyways -- showing up in a movie that even my 12-year-old self could recognize as somewhat trashy (though awesome) seemed so out of line with the mein of a Serious Writer that I immediately became interested in his work.

Vonnegut's inability to take himself too seriously -- so much so that he was perfectly willing to cameo in a Rodney Dangerfield movie -- characterizes his writing, and it's what made his books the perfect gateway writer for young readers like me moving from genre books to literary fiction. Kurt Vonnegut was the first "serious" writer I ever read, but I read him precisely because he wasn't "serious." His novels were approachable and playful and used plots and techniques I was already familiar with from the sci-fi novels of my youth.

In Back to School, Mellon's essay on Vonnegut -- written by Vonnegut -- gets an F. "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!" Mellon's professor rages. Cut to Mellon on the phone, shouting, "And another thing, Vonnegut! I'm gonna stop payment on the check!" I always liked to imagine a giggling Vonnegut on the other end of this conversation, lighting a cigar with Thornton Mellon's check, delighted to have delivered an intentionally incompetent essay on himself. So it goes!

Anti-Climate Change Concert: Exit 16W

2007-04-11T23:28:00.000-04:00

So "Live Earth" US has been scheduled for Giants Stadium on July 7. It's a concert benefiting anti-climate change charities, and will feature a lot of acts I'd really like to see: the Police, Kanye West, Smashing Pumpkins, Ludacris, Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson. However, Giants Stadium is such a total nightmare to get to that it would take some kind of dream lineup to get me there. Like, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, circa-1981 R.E.M. and Wolfgang Amadeus Fucking Mozart. The one time I ever went to Giants Stadium, for an exhibition match between Juventus and Manchester United, getting in and out of the stadium required wells of ingenuity of the depth usually reserved for solving the Middle East crisis.

We probably should've driven, but instead tried to take a bus from the Port Authority. After walking past the (literally) block-long lines for Meadowlands shuttle buses, we bought tickets for a regular NJ Transit bus and convinced the driver to just let us off at a gas station a half-mile from the stadium. We got into the stadium in time, but when the game began less than half of the seats in the sold-out house were filled and most of our friends didn't get there until halftime. After the game, it took us over three hours to get home.

So to recap: unless you are willing to drive the New Jersey Turnpike to this anti-climate change concert, you should probably leave right now to get there on time.

Kornheiser on Theismann

2007-03-28T00:19:00.000-04:00

Joe Theismann has been replaced on ESPN's Monday Night Football by Ron Jaworski. I interviewed Theismann's MNF boothmate Tony Kornheiser last September, at the beginning of his first season on the program. The Q&A was killed for space by New York Magazine and never ran anywhere.

An excerpt:

Kois: Does Joe Theismann like the Penguin Dance?

Kornhesier: I don’t think he’s ever seen the Penguin Dance. I don’t think that’s ever come up on his radar. (Laughs.) The thing about that relationship -- and I have no idea where it's going to go -- but when I started at the Washington Post, I covered Joe Theismann as a player. Joe has told me that he feels that I ripped him unmercifully, whereas I look back on it and I think I treated him great. I had some laughs at his expense, but I always found him to be somewhat charming.

Kois: Theismann seems kind of like the perfect straight man. Has anyone told him that most of the things you say are, like, jokes?

Kornheiser: (Long pause.) That's a good line. (Laughs.) I can't answer that.

The Crossover Dribble

2007-03-25T11:26:00.000-04:00

In his memo to the LA Times' staff about the Andres Martinez/Brian Grazer fiasco, editor James O'Shea writes:

The suggestion that I make decisions simply to curry favor with the staff is also simply untrue. We face hard times. If I have to make decisions that are unpopular with the staff but in the best long-term interest of this newspaper, I will not hesitate to do make them. That is what leadership is about. I've said that openly from the day that I walked into this newsroom.

Am I the only one who finds it awesome that -- given all that Tribune management have put the staff of the LA Times through, and how disparagingly I have heard LA Times staffers openly discuss the Tribune Company -- the paper's new, Tribune-installed editor has managed to turn this into an argument about whether he curries favor with his staff? I am sure that all those employees will greet O'Shea's revelation that he is willing to make unpopular decisions with great relief.

Jackson Pollock in Inwood

2007-03-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

Two days ago a mysterious and striking piece of public artwork appeared on Park Terrace East in Inwood, my neighborhood in New York City. Propped up in the plastered-over doorway of an adandoned nunnery that's now owned by a Seventh-Day Adventist high school is a wooden frame, maybe nine feet by ten feet, with a black-and-white photo printed on it.

Upon closer inspection, the photo seems to be of Jackson Pollock working in his studio.

The image is printed on what appear to be a hundred-plus pages of an advanced mathematics text, carefully pasted up to assemble the photograph.

It's a fascinating piece, made more fascinating by its size and mystery. How did this immense collage get here? Why Inwood, a neighborhood not particularly known for its visual arts scene? Why did the artist choose to prop up his or her work underneath a dripping overhang with no protection from the elements? How long will it last before it's removed by the school, or trashed by the Department of Sanitation, or vandalized by neighborhood kids or the high schoolers who pass by in packs every morning and afternoon?

And who the hell made it?

Facing Future

2007-03-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

Much to my surprise, my book proposal for Continuum's 33 1/3 series has been accepted, and I'll be writing a book for them to be published sometime in late 2008. My book is about Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's 1993 album Facing Future.

The entire list of accepted submissions is pretty impressive. For instance, my own book isn't even close to being the one I'm most excited about reading. That book is, naturally, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle writing about Black Fucking Sabbath.

Here's an excerpt from my book proposal:

When he died on June 26, 1997, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole weighed almost 800 pounds. He'd just won the Nā Hōkū Hawaiian music awards for Entertainer of the Year and Album of the Year, and had watched the ceremony from his Honolulu hospital room. After IZ's death, from respiratory failure, the flags on state government buildings flew at half-staff and 20,000 people a day came to view his body, lying in state in the state capitol building. (He was the first non-politician in Hawaiian history to be afforded this honor.)

He was without a doubt the most popular and beloved singer in Hawai'i. His popularity stemmed not only from his music but from his outspokenness on issues of native Hawaiian sovereignty. IZ's transformation from feckless, apolitical youth to politically engaged maturity is a familiar story, but his engaging personality -- plus his almost-literally larger-than-life stature -- made IZ a folk hero in a state struggling like no other with the weight and responsibility of its native heritage.

In that light, Facing Future represents, to most locals and especially to Native Hawaiians, the shining apex of a brilliant career and a crucial artifact of local culture. It's an everyday treasure, an album everyone owns and plays constantly, and two versions of "Hawai'i '78" -- a song first popularized by IZ's brother in the group they formed together, the Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau -- bookend the album. Over a lush wash of ukulele, synthesized strings and throbbing drums, IZ bemoans what the old kings and queens of Hawai'i would think if they saw what their great land has become in these modern times.

But to fans outside Hawai'i, "Hawai'i '78" isn't the album's standout track; for most, it's IZ's delicate cover medley of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World." His unique vocals, applied to a pair of deeply familiar songs, have made the track a licensing bonanza for IZ's label, Mountain Apple Records; the tune has appeared in ads (for eToys and Sony), films (50 First Dates, Finding Forrester and Snakes on a Plane) and TV shows (like Anthony Edwards' final episode of "ER"). That's how most Mainlanders first became acquainted with IZ, and it's that track that has made Facing Future the most commercially successful Hawaiian album ever.

I would guess that most Mainlanders who own Facing Future don't own many other "world music" albums, and I'd guess most listen to very little on the record other than "Over the Rainbow." "Hawai'i '78," to these listeners, is one of a series of nice but unfamiliar songs that exist mostly to be skipped over when they come up on an iPod's random play. To Mainlanders, the album is something of a curio, or kitsch -- a touch of the unthreatening unfamiliar in an otherwise staid record collection.

That disparity -- between a curio and a treasure -- is the starting point for my book for 33 1/3.

So the future that I'm facing is an awful lot of research, writing and editing, though it certainly doesn't hurt that some of that research will happen in Hawai'i. My book is something of an anomaly on the list of accepted proposals -- at the very least, it's certainly the one book among 21 whose title will make a lot of readers say, "Huh?" I'm very pleased and excited that the editors of the series have decided to take a chance on my idea.

The Inarticulate Narrator

2007-03-20T10:14:00.000-04:00

I got in an argument recently with a friend about lyric-writing. That friend is an actual musician and songwriter, so it was a pretty one-sided argument, but I remain convinced I made a valid point.

The argument focused on a song by the band Fountains of Wayne called "Hackensack." The song is sung from the point of view of a sad sack stuck in his hometown in New Jersey, remembering the beautiful girl from high school who went on to become a star in Hollywood.

My friend was annoyed by the song, because he felt as though the lyrics were hokey and inarticulate, particularly this verse:

I used to work in a record store
Now I work for my Dad
Stripping the paint off of hardwood floors
The hours are pretty bad

"That's the rhyme they came up with?" my friend asked indignantly. He was particularly upset because Fountains of Wayne songs often have quite clever lyrics, and he felt as though the band wasn't even trying on this one -- that they'd come up with a nice melody and that the band's lyric-writer had spent maybe five minutes on the words.

I disagreed, and tried inarticulately to make a case for the use of the inarticulate narrator in first-person songwriting. Most songs are written in the first person, though in many cases the character narrating the song isn't a character at all -- he or she is the singer, or someone just like the singer, or perhaps a personification of teenage angst or lust. But certain songwriters write songs in the voices of characters quite different from themselves -- Bruce Springsteen comes to mind, or John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

Like those writers, Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger writes a lot of songs in which he adopts a narrative voice different from his own. Sometimes that character is clever, overly so in fact, as in the somewhat fussy lyrics for the band's song "No Better Place," in which a lovelorn Mahattanite describes himself as being "Awake and trying not to be, wrapped around my pillow like a prawn." But sometimes that character is kind of dull-witted. The narrator of "Hackensack" isn't exactly stupid, but he is self-deluding and beaten-down. The plaintive chorus, delivered, remember, by a random dude in Jersey to a TV star who surely doesn't even remember his name, a girl he only knew from sitting together with her in one high-school class, goes:

And I will wait for you
As long as I need to
And if you ever get back to Hackensack
I'll be here for you

In light of how badly this character's been trampled by his life, I argued to my friend, it makes perfect sense that his description of his current job -- refinishing hardwood floors for his dad's company -- would be halting and half-assed. If you were that guy, what would you be able to find to say about that job while singing to the girl of your dreams?

My friend disagreed. If I read his argument correctly, he felt that a songwriter has an obligation to put great care into his lyrics and make them worthwhile regardless of the level of articulation his narrator possesses. It's up to a songwriter to take a character's feelings and make them artful, whether the character would relate them artfully or not.

To me, the pleasures of "Hackensack" lie in the tension between the gorgeous melody and the clumsiness of the narrator's voice. To my friend, the gorgeous melody is undercut by the clumsiness of the narrator's voice. Who is right? Listen and decide for yourself.

Another song that uses inarticulate narration in an interesting way is by a band called the Hold Steady. It's called "Chillout Tent," and tells the story of a guy and a girl who meet cute while coming down from bad drug trips in a music festival's recovery tent. The majority of the song is told by a third-person limited-omniscient narrator, whose voice is pretty similar to the voice in almost all of the songs written by the Hold Steady's Craig Finn. Finn, like fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, has an instantly recognizable narrative voice, as well as a set of recurring images and tropes marking nearly every song he's written (as memorably spoofed on the music blog Idolator).

The third-person narration in this song is a little different than most Hold Steady songs, though. Mostly lacking Finn's typical verbosity, the narrator tells the story of how the girl got into the chillout tent:

She drove down from Bowdoin with a carload of girlfriends
To meet some boys and maybe eat some mushrooms
And she did and she got sick
Now she's feeling way too shaky
She doesn't want to tell the doctor
Everything she's taking...

The narrator explains, similarly straightforwardly, the story of the boy:

It was his first day off in forever, man
And the festival seemed like a pretty good plan --
Cruise some chicks and get a suntan.

Bored, the guy takes more hits of acid than recommended, and with a wry bit of affection for his foolhardy character, the narrator tells what happens next:

So now my man he ain't that bored anyways
When the paramedics found him he was shaking on the side of the stage.

This narration is interrupted periodically by two different voices -- those of the boy and girl themselves, sung not by Finn but by a male and female singer, who sing in perfectly plain English their own versions of the story. "I got really high and then I came to in the chillout tent," she sings. "Everything was spinning and I came to in the chillout tent," he sings. They both add an observant detail: "They gave me oranges and cigarettes."

Finn's third-person narrator explains that the couple hooks up. The song ends with the two lovers singing the stories they'll tell their friends later. "He was kind of cute, we kinda kicked it in the chillout tent," she sings. "And I never saw that boy again." He sings, "She was pretty cool, we kinda kicked it in the chillout tent. And I never saw that girl again."

Unlike the narrator of "Hackensack," you get the feeling that these kids might have the words to express how they truly feel, but they choose not to use them -- they're inarticulate by choice. Instead, they downplay the day's significance, but the grandeur of the music and the echoes of each one's words in the other's give their offhand explanations an unexpected sadness.

Fountains of Wayne: Hackensack"
from Welcome Interstate Managers (2003)

The Hold Steady: "Chillout Tent"
from Boys and Girls in America (2006)

Opting Out?

2007-03-19T14:38:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post's Leslie Morgan Steiner's blog today led me to an excellent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, which in turn led me to this even more excellent research study (PDF) from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC-Hastings. All these items deal specifically with an issue our family has talked about quite a bit: the "Opt-Out" story so popular in newspapers, especially the New York Times.

This kind of story frames the charged issue that so many families face -- how to balance a family's economic needs, childcare needs, and career needs -- as a matter of whether working women choose to "opt out" of their careers in favor of staying home with their children. In recent years, the highest-profile such story was Lisa Belkin's 2003 cover story for the Times Magazine, "The Opt Out Revolution." Another Times piece that garnered a lot of attention was Louise Story's front-page piece in 2005, "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood."

These kinds of stories drive my wife completely crazy. And it was my wife who forwarded me Steiner's blog this morning, with the subject line "Yay!", because finally someone had written about why these stories are so odious. It's not just that, as Jack Shafer noted about Story's piece in 2005, these kinds of trend pieces rarely reflect actual trends but are instead mishmashes of anecdote and assumption -- one could say the same about almost any trend piece written in the past ten years.

No, what makes "Opt-Out" stories so infuriating is the simple fact that for most women, whether or not to leave the workplace is not and will never be a "choice." Financial realities force my wife to work, not her refusal to make the "choice" to stay at home with our daughter. She has a job she likes and is good at and that pays well enough for us to have a small apartment in New York. Notably, it pays far better than, say, any job her husband has ever had. And like millions of mothers out there -- mothers whose husbands make less than them, or single mothers, or mothers who live in expensive cities -- the "choice" between working and staying at home is a false one, and every article that frames the debate that way bears little resemblance to reality.

The UC-Hastings research behind both the Post blog and the CJR piece covers a number of fascinating topics and really drives home how totally insane the environment for workers is in the United States. In a recent survey of 168 countries, the US was one of only five that does not require companies to offer paid maternity leave; the other four hotbeds of socially responsible corporate policy were Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea and Swaziland. While the Family and Medical Leave Act requires companies to offer parental leave to its employees, such leave is unpaid -- and anyways, companies with under 50 employees are exempt from the law. (When my wife was pregnant, I had to argue with my previous employer for four months in order to secure a generous two weeks of unpaid leave.)

We all work longer hours at more inflexible jobs than ever before. Mothers whose family life interferes in any way with their work life are frequently resented, mocked, or passed over for promotion. Fathers who express a desire to lessen their workload in order to participate more fully in their children's lives are viewed with suspicion. Women who leave the workplace to raise children find their career and earnings potentials severely limited upon their return. It's in this environment that articles about wealthy, married women who can quit their jobs to hang out with their kids grate on the nerves, to say the least.

As E.J. Graff at the CJR so adroitly puts it:

Here’s why this matters: if journalism repeatedly frames the wrong problem, then the folks who make public policy may very well deliver the wrong solution. If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But it’s a public policy issue if most women (and men) need to work to support their families, and if the economy needs women’s skills to remain competitive. It’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs, and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.

Does my wife wish she could quit her job and take care of our daughter full-time? I don't think she knows the answer, because it's never been a reasonable question for our family, just as it isn't for many, many families. My guess is that she enjoys the important work she does enough -- at a company that, for the record, is exceptional in its field for its family-friendliness -- that she would want to continue to work. But what does it matter? The only way such an idea would ever be possible for our family is if I wrote a buzzy novel that sold for a lot of money. Or, you know, if American culture evolved (or was legislatively forced into) a conscience about allowing its employees to balance work and family.

Guess I better start buying those lottery tickets!

33 1/3

2007-03-16T17:47:00.000-04:00

I am a big fan of the 33 1/3 series of books, and I'm especially a fan of the extremely public submissions procedure the series has maintained. Run by Continuum Press in New York, the series consists of 50+ short, smart paperbacks, each on a single seminal album. The series has ranged from straightforward histories of an album's recording (Springsteen's Born in the USA, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea) to in-depth interviews with artists (DJ Shadow's Endtroducing...) to fanciful compendia of detail and data (The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs) to fiction inspired by an album (PJ Harvey's Rid of Me).

Over on their blog, the editors of the 33 1/3 series recently issued a call for submissions for the next two years' worth of titles. About 450 writers answered the call, swamping the editors with proposals on albums by 276 different artists, from AC/DC to the Osmonds to ZZ Top.

As the editors make their decisions, a bunch of writers have posted their proposals, and it's a fascinating look at what makes a person a fan of an album, and what makes them want to write on it. They're all very interesting, and they make me feel as if you could write a really good book on, seriously, any album at all. They also make me feel as though the editors at Continuum must have had a pretty fucking tough month.

Psychocandy by the Jesus & Mary Chain

I See a Darkness by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Live at the Star Club, Hamburg by Jerry Lee Lewis

Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by Soft Cell

Buffalo Springfield Again by Buffalo Springfield

Fevers and Mirrors by Bright Eyes

Shaft by Isaac Hayes

Chips From the Chocolate Fireball by the Dukes of Stratosphear