Lying in bed, listening to music, the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” comes on, and I’m entranced anew. What a weird, wondrous thing it is, this John Lennon tune from 1967. Not quite rock, not quite orchestral, the four-minute track is something like psychedelic balladry meets woozy dreamscape. Yet it grooves and sways. Lennon’s cryptic poetry garlands the song’s kaleidoscopic effects — strings, horns, Mellotrons, tape loops — arranged by studio wiz George Martin. The result is marvelously sui generis. Listening in a nocturnal haze, it hits me that “Strawberry Fields,” a late-period masterpiece, may be my favorite Beatles song, a strong statement considering how many stone-cold gems the band produced in a mere seven and a half years together. I love so many Beatles songs — “Here Comes the Sun” to “Blackbird”; “I Am the Walrus” to “In My Life” — that I’d be here all day typing titles I can hardly live without. I’ll take “Lovely Rita” and “Norwegian Wood” over “Across the Universe” and “Come Together,” but that’s like saying I’ll take oxygen over water. Impossible. Their music is that gloriously essential.
The wonder boys.
In Berlin, where I’m headed this fall, I’ve signed up for a whack-sounding tour called Get in the Van! DIY & Subculture City Tour, in which you board a classic 1972 Ford Econoline van and “explore Berlin’s subculture and all things DIY, past and present, from the 1970’s until now: the bars, the squats, the venues, the backyards and the basements.” David Bowie’s heralded Berlin years, with pals Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and Brian Eno, are covered, as is the post-Wall cultural efflorescence of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The tour is run by the planet’s only legit Ramones Museum, a punk paradise bulging with artifacts and more from the fugliest band ever. The Ramones, who I saw live twice, were deep-dyed New Yorkers. A museum in Berlin? Besides the fact bassist Dee Dee Ramone grew up in Berlin, another reason for its existence there is that the so-called biggest Ramones fan resides in the city and opened the shrine to all things Ramones. I hear he shouts “Gabba gabba hey!” unprovoked. One can hope.
I recently wrapped Catherine Lacey’s transfixing novel “Biography of X,” and it still haunts me. Published last year, the book is pungent and persistent, banging around my brain, impressions springing up at random moments, all of it fragrant and strangely alluring.
“X” is a big book of ideas and feelings. It has a collage-like texture. It’s about art and the ravenous impulses of the artist; romantic love and its hazards; the fluidity of identity; the slipperiness of selfhood; and the rigors of creation.
And it’s about the relationship between X, who has died, and her widow CM, the so-called writer of this fictional biography, which of course was written by Lacey in a neat feat of authorial ventriloquism.
X — who went by a swarm of pseudonyms, depending on her setting — was a shape-shifting Zelig, insinuating her self into the realms of art, music and literature, finding creative success and romantic excess, much of it to CM’s dismay and heartbreak as she researches her ex-wife’s half-cloaked life.
In elegant, unfussy prose, Lacey conjures an alternative world in which X wrote the iconic David Bowie song “Heroes”; Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and other major artists are killed in a terrorist bombing; and Bernie Sanders is the President of the United States. Cameos by Patti Smith, Christopher Walken, Susan Sontag and other luminaries arrive with cheeky nonchalance.
Lacey’s command of her literary experiment and the constellation of personalities she so blithely courts sometimes makes you think you’re reading an actual biography of an actual person. It’s a good trick, deft and ambitious, and a delight to plunge into.
At 38, Lacey is a bona fide wunderkind, and her performance in “Biography of X” has me trusting her to lead me farther into her cerebral yet accessible oeuvre.
This week I got her slim gothic fable “Pew,” from 2020. It’s about an anonymous orphan who’s lacking crucial identifying components — age, name, sex, history — rattling and confounding a small, deeply religious community in the American South.
I’m half-through this mysterious novel, whose humanity almost blinds. I’m with it all the way, totally sold. Lacey’s virtuosity sings, loud and clear as a bell. I’ll just say it: She is one of the most interesting authors of her generation.
Two songs from the early ‘80s are banging about my brain and I can’t purge, flush or exterminate them. I go to bed with them, and they alternate, like an A-side and a B-side. And I wake with them, wailing away while I brush my teeth, shower, get dressed, make coffee. Such are pesky earworms, those maddeningly sticky tunes that get jammed in your head like taffy to teeth.
I won’t name the songs, because they’re obscure hard rockers that long ago went poof in the annals of music history. They’re sort of embarrassing. (Heard of the defunct bands Violation or Vandenberg? Thought not.)
Yet somehow my teenage lizard brain fished out these tunes from the primordial goo of the ’80s and decided it would be nostalgic fun to hear them over and over again. The songs are notable for dynamic drums, which as a fledgling drummer I studiously emulated. (I still enjoy the drums on both tracks, but they don’t inspire me as they used to. Feh, I say now. I can do that.)
So my head burrowed into the random past and found these songs, and now I can’t shake them. It’s been a full week and they won’t go away. I finally listened to them on Apple Music, a grave mistake that merely branded them further into my brain.
Earworms can be joyful or torturous. Classic torments are the Chili’s “Baby Back Ribs Jingle” and anything by Barry Manilow. Happy ones are, say, the Chili Peppers or anything by Abba. I’m spit-balling here.
My vexing earworms fall between good and evil, the gray zone that’s almost worse than flat-out terrible. Earworms — that’s what they call ‘em. But these are more like ear boa constrictors. They suffocate you before they devour you. Whole.
1.Late summer rain, lusty breezes, 70 degrees — paradise. Fall is knocking and I’m tripping over myself to answer the door. Of course more heat is brewing — it will hit 86 on Saturday — but the wind and wet is a heartening preview of the best season of all. Autumn is when I travel. It’s when I look for clothes — jackets, long sleeve shirts, shoes maybe. I recently bought a new watch and new glasses, both of them a shimmering blue, though any color coordination was strictly fortuitous. I’m not that fashionable. I consider the items fall purchases, as the watch is largely a travel accessory and the glasses signify renewal and optimism, things, perhaps counterintuitively, I associate with fall. (Plus, my prior glasses needed a new prescription and I never did like those old frumpy frames.) So summer’s in retreat. Cooler climes and shorter days are coming. And I’m getting all celebratory.
2.The Little Rascals they’re not. But these kids have vim and spunk and initiative, an entrepreneurial spirit that fuels their gumption to holler at passing strangers who are easily a foot taller than them: “Lemonade! Get your lemonade right here!” These neighborhood urchins, some seven girls and boys, are tracing a wholesome tradition from way back — I’m thinking Tom Sawyer days. Times have changed: Their tangy beverage is displayed in bougie glass dispensers, from Ikea or West Elm. And they demand $2 per cup (in my day we charged a quarter!). It’s the last lap of summer, and here I come strolling under shade trees lining the hood’s main artery, a sitting duck. I’m buffeted by the blandishments of piping young voices touting their wares. But I am stuck. I’m carrying no cash, and evidently they don’t take Visa. All I can do is tell them this and walk on. It’s embarrassing, a little. But it beats what happened to me when I was hawking lemonade as a seven-year-old. “Lemonade!” I yelled at a passing car. The driver turned my way and flipped me off. Those were the days.
A stock photo, but look at that wad of cash!
3. Sometimes — no, almost always — a good, hard pop song is just the thing. I’ve been rediscovering two of the best power pop bands of the ‘90s, Jellyfish and The Posies, who prove a genius for the grooving, hair-tossing, sing-alongy pop hook. Plucking styles from a sequins rainbow of catchy, often ethereal influences — Bowie, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Queen, ELO, Supertramp, Cheap Trick, with a pinch of psychedelia and a pound of Phil Spector — Jellyfish and The Posies layered sweet melodies atop bombastic rhythms and throbbing drums: sugar-coated hand grenades. Their greatest albums, Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk” and The Posies’ “Frosting on the Beater,” rock as hard as they pop. Lush melodies and harmonies reign. And, especially in the case of Jellyfish, their sound and look is consciously sui generis; Day-Glo and dapper, the group seems right out of Sid & Marty Krofft. Even now, the bands crackle with a big bubblegum snap. Hear them here and here. (What happened to them? Grunge happened.)
Jellyfish, working hard at being psycho-delic.
4.My trip to Budapest and Kraków is precisely two months away. I know, it seems like I’ve been gabbing about it for an eternity. That’s because I have. Vacations are like that: you plan them, book them, then hurry up and wait. For months. Two months left. Grueling, but at least summer (*#$&!) is almost over. I’m still fussing with some fine points of the trip, like booking an overnight sleeper train from Budapest to Kraków (they told me to wait till the end of the month). And netting a spot at a coveted restaurant in Budapest (they told me to wait till mid-September). See, I’m ahead of myself. I booked hotels and dinners and tours four months in advance. Question: Should I really pop 30 bucks for a 45-minute tour of the Hungarian Parliament, which is beautiful and jewel-encrusted? I’m chewing over that one. But I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
1. Even through my teens, my two grandmas, bless their long-dead hearts, called me Chrissy, and I didn’t mind a bit (unless it was in front of my friends, then I turned a scorching shade of fuck me). Today, one of my best friends, an unassailable lady in Texas, occasionally calls me Chrissy or even Chrissy Poo in endearing texts. Born Christopher, I’ve always gone by Chris, but that’s a unisex name, and for those of you with monikers like Jamie, Terry, Jessie, Charlie, etc., you know it can get sticky. Sometimes at my newspaper gigs, I’d get hate mail addressed “Dear Sir or Madam.” But that was rare. Readers could pretty much tell I was a guy, because my reviews often had an acid tang, a little banner that said: dick. Two of my favorite names for girls are Samantha and Alexis, which of course become Sam and Alex. I almost named a pet rat Samantha. When my sister-in-law calls the dog my way, she’ll chirp, “Go see Chrissy!” I don’t blush. I kind of like it. If it’s good enough for old Cubby, it’s good enough for me.
2.If I got a bunch of dogs, these are some of the names I would give them: Bongo, Mamet, Alvy, Corn Pop, Gatsby, Heddy, Akira, Brando, Phoebe, Takeshi, Willa, Uncle Johnny, J.D. and, my favorite, Kaboom. I don’t think a single one of the dogs would be pleased with me. Too bad. That’s just for starters. (Growing up we had a little black poodle named Itai, which is Japanese for “ouch.” Just think how he felt.)
Corn Pop and Bongo going at it.
3.I just retired my 2-year-old Apple AirPods — the first generation earbuds that pop out of your head when you sneeze — and replaced them with snuggier AirPods Pro: 2nd Generation, and I made a vital sonic discovery. It’s one that many of you probably already know (this Luddite lags in the world of aural ecstasy). And that’s that the pods furnish remarkablybetter sound quality when used for movies and videos than plain Apple Music tunes. I do my listening on a MacBook Air, be it music, podcasts, YouTube or films. I’ve watched three movies with the new pods (including the enthralling if baffling “Arrival,” a film that pushes me even closer to hating sci-fi) and the audio excellence — sumptuous, immersive, surround-soundy — has me giddy. Even a 1950s Billy Wilder flick cranked out sound like I was in a fine, classic movie theater that actually gave a spit about its presentation. Power to the pods.
4.I once worked with a masterly, natural-born writer named Michael Corcoran, who was the newsroom’s resident curmudgeon, bristling maverick and trenchant culture critic. Now retired, the award-winning scribe, who’s also a friend, maintains a beguiling blog whose lead entry is as incisive as it is infamous, a biting takedown of his hometown Austin, TX, titled “Welcome to Mediocre, Texas.”
“Only the mediocre are always at their best, someone said, which could be why Austin is so damn proud of itself,” Corcoran begins, and continues:
“There are two cities in the U.S. that truly matter: New York and L.A. Everywhere else is bullshit. Austin is cool and fun and artistic and — most importantly, easy — but that doesn’t make it a great city. The things that make a town a city — rapid transit, a great art museum, Chinatown, pro sports — Austin is without. We’ve got L.A.’s traffic, but no one who can greenlight a project bigger than a Chili’s commercial.”
Read the full rant HERE, especially if you’re reflexively enamored with Central Texas’ ego-tropolis, which a visitor I know once compared to Sacramento and Stockton.
1.One of my least favorite things in the world, after e-scooters and ravers, is sweating. Which means I am not a happy fellow. Why? Right. Because I am sweating. And rather a lot, swamp-ass and all. Somehow I thought it’d be a swell idea to take a brisk walk in the 92-degree blech of midsummer. The light sweat I produced outside — a mere film — quickly metastasized into a profuse drenching once inside. Forty minutes later, in powerful AC, it has yet to subside. How bad is it? The dog is licking me avidly, like I’m a giant piece of beef jerky.
2.House of Terror — how kicky is that for the name of a major tourist attraction? It’s real, and it’s not a ride at your local carnival. This daunting museum is in Budapest, where I head this fall, and it isn’t about ghouls and goblins. Or, well, it sort of is. Per its description: “It contains exhibits related to the fascist and communist regimes in 20th-century Hungary and is also a memorial to the victims of these regimes, including those detained, interrogated, tortured or killed in the building.” History writ large. And horrible. I’m so there, with solemn intentions, despite the thrilling name.
3.Just finished Paul Harding’s newish novel “This Other Eden” on the dazzling strength of his first book, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Tinkers,” which is uniquely mesmerizing. “Eden” limns Black American history in its many facets, including, troublingly, eugenics. Harding is an uncompromising stylist, forging gorgeous, gem-cut prose that’s sometimes too infatuated with itself, yet nevertheless tells a fascinating story. Harding writes like few others — Cormac McCarthy and Faulkner come to mind — but he can stumble on his own lush verbiage. He is a flawed master.
4.The new documentary about massive but short-lived Brit pop duo Wham! — aptly titled “Wham!” — is out on Netflix, and the trailer promises a bubbly, bubblegummy, bing-bang time (“Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” anyone?). The movie, a giddy romp directed by crack documentarian Chris Smith, isn’t, alas, as brawny as frontman George Michael’s uncrackable Aqua Net helmet. It’s strictly for googly-eyed fans who can’t be bothered with pop music history, laser-focusing on bandmates’ Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s frolicsome BFF status and their improbable rise from cheesy teen wannabes to slick arena-fillers. Critically missing in this narrow nostalgia trip is cultural context, as if Wham! exploded in an ‘80s vacuum, with little competition and no help from juggernauts like MTV. And it doesn’t even footnote Michael’s untimely, and seismic, death as a solo artist. Wham! Bam! Thud.
5. Speaking of the dog (see #1), Cubby was recently shorn like a poor gray sheep, which I documented here. The good news: his hair is growing back in the summer swelter. He no longer resembles a fuzzy Pringles can — he’s not so tubular — and he’s stopped nipping the parts that were so short, pink flesh was exposed. He’s returning to his bushy self, and his attitude is boinging back — a little cocky, vain with a scruffy bedhead sheen, and as fierce around the UPS folk as one can be behind a closed door. His yawps and barks still shatter glassware, but that’s OK. Pretty soon he’s going to look like Slash again and the process will start all over. Our little lamb chop.
6.Then there’s this: I was strolling in the summer heat (see #1 again) and some shitty beat-up compact sedan roared past me, easily doing 50 to 60 in a residential 25 zone. Startled (and pissed), I yelled, “Slow down!” The driver flipped me off and I reflexively returned the gesture. He barreled into oblivion. Then I thought: Smart. That’s a good way to get yourself killed. Jackass might have a gun, might want to turn around and use it. Sweating like a madman, I kept walking, ruffled, looking at the world in a slightly different shade.
Nick Cave — Australian musician, composer, filmmaker, writer, artist, actor, all-around Renaissance man, with slick black hair and natty suits hanging off a long, pencil-thin frame — runs a sage, funny and heartbreakingly sincere advice column on his website The Red Hand Files. His counsel is so sharp and impassioned, you wonder: What can’t the guy do? I bet he can fly.
Recently, a precocious 13-year-old boy wrote in, asking this: “How do I live life to its absolute fullest, and not waste my potential? Especially as a creative. Also, what is a great way to spiritually enrich myself, in general, and in my creative work?”
I relished Cave’s response so much, I am excerpting a chunk of it here.
These are, to me, words to live by:
“Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”
Recently, while sifting through thousands of old photos left behind at my late mother’s home, I came across a shot of me on Halloween, age 11. At that time, I was a fanatical follower of rockers KISS — lustily, irretrievably, hoarding trading cards, t-shirts, records, temporary tattoos, magazines, posters, all of it.
For shits and giggles, I present to you my tween attempt to be KISS frontman/demon Gene Simmons:
Some years ago my brother and I took a road trip through the Deep South, a six-day vacation doubling as a brush-up on American history and twangy regionalism. Civil rights, the Civil War, Graceland, Sun Records, the Lorraine Motel — we squeezed in a lot. Much of it moved us, spiritually, morally and musically.
But there was one stop that did its own crazy thing. It awed, confounded and regaled. There were history, banjos and biscuits. There were rollercoasters, glass-blowers and fiddlin’ fools. There were fried catfish and frilly cowboy boots. There were lots of overalls.
We had found ourselves deep in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee in a gilded wonderland made of corn dogs and mascara. We were at … Dollywood.
That is, of course, Dolly Parton’s personal theme park, 160 acres of thrill rides, country cooking, burly craftsmen, glitzy shows, nostalgic displays, Dolly shrines, all with a pinch of Christianity and patriotism. At opening hour, the National Anthem is blared before patrons, hands on hearts, can enter.
And there’s ole Dolly, her rhinestone-studded likeness beaming around every corner — that shiny blonde bouffant, dimply red-wax smile and those famous Frankenboobs — in all its campy resplendence. Luckily she’s in on the joke or the place would be unbearable in its lack of self-awareness. It would be a cruel punchline, not a family paradise.
But for us wiseacre city boys it was something else. Like an anthropological artifact unearthed in the soft southern soil to be puzzled over. It was our duty to stifle our snickers and suss out what makes this deeply red (politically), aggressively white (racially), boot-kicking (musically) environment tick.
Well, we never did get to the bottom of it, not surprisingly. We got too swept up in the nine rollercoasters and the luxuriantly bearded dudes doing woodwork and the beans and brisket and the dewy video presentations about Dolly’s fabulous rags-to-riches life.
Dolly’s no dip. Self-aggrandizement is her kryptonite; she never pulls a Kardashian, despite being something of a glam ham. She’s a giver, not a taker. Indeed, she pays full college tuition for all the park’s employees. That’s on top of her other well-documented, deep-pocket altruism.
Dollywood’s no joke, either. It’s the number one theme park in the country, according to TripAdvisor (really?). Along with the nine rollercoasters (nine!) there’s a water park, wads of wholesome live shows, 25 dining spots and a trillion shops (I bought a gaudy Dollywood coffee mug with my name on it). Go when the fall leaves turn in the scenic Smokies, or now when light snow falls. I’m starting to sound like a Parton pitchman.
Condescension is too easy, and Dollywood is too big a target. Have your fun — we did — then surrender to the facile charms of another bombastically artificial playland that at least offers a different theme than the formulaic movie characters of Disneyland and Six Flags. It’s rustic, it’s corny, it’s unassuming. (A spokesman recently told The Times that they’re working on the park’s lack of diversity. So there’s that.)
It’s not unlike Kenny Rogers Roasters (where we actually ate in Nashville), Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo (where I will never eat), Reba McEntire’s Reba’s Place or Billy Cyrus’ Car Wash and Detailing (now I’m making stuff up). Branding is hot, but Dolly — who smartly took a moment to invent a clever name for her venture — started Dollywood in the ‘80s. Ahead of the curve as always, working way more than 9 to 5.
So there we were, part-way through our whirlwind tour of the American South. Dollywood was on our list. We made it. At first we chuckled, assuming the camp quotient would be too delicious. We weren’t Dolly diehards — I did like “Jolene,” “Here You Come Again” and “9 to 5” — but our respect for the country icon was true.
Hokum is what we sought. But we were wrong. The craftsmen stuff was mildly interesting — whoa, he just carved out a birdhouse in like five minutes! — the Dolly stuff was tasteful if sometimes maudlin, and the overall setting was handsome and top-tier.
I spotted one of the bigger, meaner rollercoasters and we ran for it. I noticed that water sprayed up on some of the turns and curves. I hate that. I don’t like getting drenched at theme parks, not even on those splashy log-ride thingies.
We got on. It was a corker, a great, rumbling ride. I was having a blast. Until the end, the final corkscrew. The goddam thing soaked me good. The joke, at last, was on me.
I own a Dollywood mug just like this gorgeous thing.
1. Way behind on the cult British crime saga, I’m discovering the gritty and gruesome pleasures of “Peaky Blinders,” an uncompromising gangster epic bristling with politics, razor blades, gamblers, guns, and unvarnished thuggery.
Set in Birmingham, England, just after World War I, the Netflix series is a fearsomely atmospheric blood opera starring a rogue’s gallery of dapper gangsters with deep family roots and a hunger to stay in power. It openly, inevitably recalls “The Godfather,” “The Sopranos” and, on a knife and knuckle street level, “Gangs of New York,” with perhaps more thematic tentacles.
The show is fronted by Cillian Murphy as crime boss Thomas Shelby, whose smoldering menace can burn a hole like a bullet. One website has voted him the Greatest TV Character of All Time, a testament to Murphy’s pit bull commitment and conviction. He unnerves every time he’s onscreen, makes you shift in your seat. Pepper the grimy period setting with tunes by Nick Cave, PJ Harvey and White Stripes and you get more than anachronistic friction; you get gang-banging with a boogie beat.
2. Listening to Nirvana’s short, punchy songs, it struck me again why the band is so good and lasting: Almost lick for lick, Nirvana is as infectiously hooky as the Beatles.
And on the Beatles — my favorite band, and I’m not a hundred years old — I liked this line from “The Idiot,” Elif Batuman’s riotous novel of the head and heart: “The Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death.”
3. You also can’t avoid Marvel and its muddleheaded mayhem in the current cinema, a soul-battering bummer. But there do exist little oases floating past the aesthetic carnage, attractive indie films like the raunchy, uproarious “Zola” and my latest favorite, “The Worst Person in the World.”
The grabby title is slyly misleading in this dark rom-com drama about a young woman who skitters between jobs and lovers while surfing life’s foibles. Joachim Trier’s prickly Norwegian charmer, ablaze with insinuating characters and sexy anecdote, is told in 12 fluid chapters, led by endearing star Renate Reinsve, who won best actress at Cannes for her intricate portrayal of a woman in flux. Hardly the worst person in the world, she’s a millennial supernova.
4. Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel “Lapvona” is grossing out reviewers with its blithe violence and panoramic depravity. (Is Moshfegh the worst person in the world?) The medieval fable, set in a village rife with plague and other misfortunes, is earning wildly mixed reviews, many of them lashing in their displeasure, even from fans of Moshfegh’s previous dark fictions (“Eileen,” “Homesick for Another World”).
I’m a fan as well, and I’m steeling for a rough ride. I’m only on page nine, and here’s a verbal taste: “disemboweled” “heads of the dead,” “a bone sticking out through the flesh,” “animal excrement.” (Page nine.) The book, in all its gloppy mucus and viscera, came out this week — which makes it the perfect summer beach read. You heard it here first.
GNASHING. 