McSweeneys is good. Sue Me.

People on the street are coming up to me all the time now and asking me if I have some weird McSweeney's fixation. The press are calling, Good Day Live wants me on the show to talk about it. 

I have been writing a lot about the publishing imprint lately, but it's only because they happen to be publishing a lot of provocative books.  I reviewed the Chabon book of essays, Maps and Legends, and It Was Good.  I just wrote this piece for the Weekly about their book designs, which are the best in the business.  They think hard about everything - form, content, ISBN number placement.  I like what they do. I'm not a groupie, but I am a fan.  

Larry Levine

Larry Levine is dead. Do you recognize? Levine was an engineer of genius, and he was behind the board when Phil Spector was making all of those amazing records at Gold Star and elsewhere in swinging L.A.  Not enough people know about Larry Levine, and that's just plain wrong. The auteur theory of all art must die! Those records weren't made in a vacuum - Spector was the visionary, yes, but perhaps more than other great records of that era, many folks had a hand in that  cannon-shot sound.  And Levine was key - Greg Toland to Spector's Orson Wells.  

You gots to recognize! 

That's Cold

Damn, that Coldplay band done stole our bestest producer ever, Eno, to do their new record, "Radiohead Is so 2003." Thing is, I heard the single, and brother, it's pretty, prett-ay, prett-ay good.  Is is possible that my least favorite band EVER will now grace us with something that we can all enjoy and respect? Has Eno done gone his magic, and given this band the musical gravitas to go with it's already inflated sense of self-importance? I for one am all for it. I mean, shit, I need some new CD's. 

Got any suggestions?

Hoop Displacia

We all love them technologies, right? I mean, I think TiVo is the bestest. Even if I don't have it, I still love it.  But here's what I don't like about it: It's screwing with my communal sports experience. 

In the olden days,  we would all tune into the Knicks game together and then we would all call each other and talk smack about the action we were witnessing as a group. Now, I have one friend, Jonesy, who is my call-in go-to guy. We can gab for hours about say, Pao Gasol's girlie running, or how Sasha fits into the triangle offense. Thing is, Jonesy is a lot busier than I am, and so he is forced to TiVo many of the games for late-night viewing. 

I HATE this, you see. Because I will call him while he's feeding his kids or some such, and he'll tell me to hold my peace.  "I haven't watched the game yet." It really puts a damper on things, lemme tell ya.

So I propose that TiVo only be used for you, Step It Up And Dance, or The Hills.  That stuff's on at all hours of the day anyway, it seems. Leave the sports for real-time.

The Spurs look old, but they're wily...I'm scared of the Hornets...Is Jared Weaver the real deal, or has the AL figured him out?....Joe Saunders is my hero.....next to Kobe....and Pao.....Celts are tougher than you think....Dwight Howard is like some man-child superhero....Cassell must be loving life right now....

Pile Driver

Whenever work is slow, or work is too much, or I don't feel like thinking about it, I turn to another kind of fake work. That's the business of shrinking down my magazine pile. Strangely, there are times when getting this pile down to a manageable size feels like an accomplishment, as if I've achieved something meaningful.  I can't even shake this feeling if I tried.  

Because the periodicals in question are always sitting in a haphazard pile on my coffee table, they are staring me down all time, mocking me, imploring me to do something about them.  But I would never - never! - just toss a magazine away just because it's been sitting there for, oh, six months or so.  It simply has to be read.  

So every once in a while, I will summon the courage to pull that pile in front of me and begin to wade through the Yangtze of print.  This will take me days, weeks sometimes.  But those New Yorkers will be read whether they like it or not. 

Soon,  the pile shrinks, like a bad tumor.  This makes me feel good about myself,  as if something meaningful has been accomplished. How silly of me.  There's the table top - it's been there all along, apparently - and the mags are in the recycle bin.  Then it starts all over again.  What's the point?  

Brooks and Done

Our passions are deeply personal things.  We love something because we love it; it might be a horrible TV sitcom, or a banal Japanese pop record. We don't have to justify it to anyone. It simply gets us off, and that's that. But sometimes one runs the risk of sharing a deeply-held passion with an outsider, and worlds collide.  Case in point: Albert Brook's Modern Romance.

Do you understand how much I love Modern Romance? Do you?! We had a friend staying at the house and there we were,  sans Netflix envelopes or anything decent on-demand. I mean, what...we're gonna talk or play games or what not? We needed a film! So I rifled through my very small but choice collection of DVD's and came up with Modern Romance. I only own films that I can watch on a yearly basis, you see, and I watch that film every ding-dong year. 

I was really excited. This friend - let's call him Jeff - is a wicked cynic with a sharp tongue.   And he was a Modern Romance virgin. He liked Albert Brooks but had somehow missed Modern Romance. Oh man! I threw the DVD into the player and let 'er rip.

Oh, wait till you see the scene when he gets all fucked-up on Valium, I said. You'll die! So we waited and watched. Nothing. OK, but what about the jogging scene ("1,2,3, I don't even miss her") Flatline. Crickets. It rocked me, reader.  Did I have rotten taste in films?  As I watched the film with the eyes of an intitiate, I began to realize: It really wasn't that good.  Flat in a lot of places. Falls apart entirely in the second hour.  

And this is why you must be careful to guard your passions and defend them to the death. Because sometimes they aren't really that good.  

There Are Problems

I was re-thinking my last post over the weekend, and I've come to the conclusion that blogs can be a healthy corrective to critical corruption (sorry about the alliteration) -but that's assuming blogs and print existed on a level playing field. Instead, blog monster is tipping over the game board and sending all the print players into the trash.    

Regardless: professional criticism does have its share of problems.  It's hardly a pure and virtuous pursuit as practiced by many of the critics that you read in your dying magazines and newspapers.  Speaking from experience, I can safely say that, during the last boom time of the music business in the mid-90's,  you had so many hacks wiping the salt lick clean, so many wimps and weaklings selling their bylines in exchange for good favor, that it became hard to distinguish criticism from publicity. Here are the worst offenses in order of odiousness: 

1) Critics who want free stuff and so therefore suck up to publicists.  This also includes getting free lunches, accepting junkets and writing in-house press releases. 

2) Critics who give everything a positive spin so they can continue to get work.

3) Critics who don't listen to the records they've been asked to critique. 

I'm too groggy and Monday-depressed to think anymore. More later....

Critics, Don't Die!

 What's to become of us? I'm hearing ominous things, and storm clouds are gathering. They are telling us our skills aren't needed anymore, that in a webocracy, every one's a critic.  Book publications are suffering and missing their publication deadlines.  Others are folding like a tent in a lashing wind (hear that giant sucking sound? It's all of those servers processing arm-chair bloviating from all points of the compass.)  We're all really feeling the heat, especially in a recessionary environment.  After all, when gas is four bucks, and we can't afford to go to the movies or buy a book, who cares what a critic has to say about these things?

Much ink has already been spilled on this subject, but I guess I just want to say:  It still matters to have an informed opinion and get paid to set it down.   Doesn't it?