Jack Kerouac – “The Sea Is My Brother: The Lost Novel” (2011)
A Dec. 1, 2011 review of this lost Kerouac novel (his first), taken from The Telegraph. Written by Nicholas Blincoe…
The publication of a lost first novel by Jack Kerouac prompts two questions: “How good is it?” and “How lost was it?” Last month, the Anthony Burgess Foundation announced the discovery of Burgess’s lost opera on the life and death of Leon Trotsky. And where was this treasure exactly? Apparently, lying among Burgess’s stuff – so not so very lost, after all.
The publication of The Sea Is My Brother, a novel Kerouac wrote when he was just 20, appears after a similar feat of literary detective work. Which is to say, someone opened a suitcase and found it lying there. One half suspects that the suitcase had been opened before, but on those occasions the person responsible read Kerouac’s title and quickly slammed the lid shut again.
Kerouac seemed to spring from nowhere with On the Road (1957), the definitive “beatnik” novel. He caught the imagination of a generation with an intensely Read the rest of this entry »
Ted Berrigan Interviews Jack Kerouac – “The Art of Fiction No. 41” (1968)
In the summer of 1968, poet Ted Berrgian interviewed Jack Kerouac at his house. This was published in The Paris Review...
The Kerouacs have no telephone. Ted Berrigan had contacted Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview. When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place, he simply showed up at the Kerouacs’s house. Two friends, poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him. Kerouac answered his ring; Berrigan quickly told him his name and the visit’s purpose. Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.
“Jack and I began talking simultaneously, saying ‘Paris Review!’ ‘Interview!’ etc.,” Berrigan recalls, “while Duncan and Aram began to slink back toward the car. All seemed lost, but I kept talking in what I hoped was a civilized, reasonable, calming, and friendly tone of voice, and soon Mrs. Kerouac agreed to let us in for twenty minutes, on the condition that there be no drinking.
“Once inside, as it became evident that we actually were in pursuit of a serious purpose, Mrs. Kerouac became more friendly, and we were able to commence the interview. It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs’s looking for the author of On the Road, and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations. Read the rest of this entry »
Pauline Oliveros – “Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 (2012)
A review of this 12-CD box set of the pioneering electronic composer by Brian Howe, from the Pitchfork website, June 5th…
With about 10 other people, mostly strangers, I reclined on the floor of an international hand-drum emporium and closed my eyes. We were all trying to cross the internal divide between “the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening,” which seemed like it could mean a lot of different things. To me, it was about trying to experience sounds for what they were, not what they meant. The hum of a refrigerator and the whoosh of traffic gradually drifted away from their mundane contexts, revealing the variety and interconnection of what I was conditioned to hear as generic and separate. It was harder to detach the clock’s tick from turning gears and passing time. In the moments when I could, I felt very free.
The occasion was a Deep Listening session with certified instructor Shannon Morrow. Deep Listening is less of a thing you do than a way to do all kinds of things – perform, meditate, communicate, compose, or just be in the world. It’s hard to summarize but easy to grasp: a set of broadly accessible philosophies and practices for heightening your awareness of total sound. Read the rest of this entry »
Can – “The Lost Tapes” (2012)
A June 19th review by Paula Mejia from the Prefix website of Can’s new 3-CD collection of unreleased songs, outtakes and jams from their archives. As with anything concerning Can, it’s brilliant stuff…
Reviewing a Can album is like trying to describe the very first time you heard the Velvet Underground, or explaining what a truly superb pizza tastes like as it dissolves onto your tongue — attempting to verbalize it just feels straight up contrived. The sole way to understand it is to experience it for yourself.
Even more astounding about the legendary German band’s unprecedented release, The Lost Tapes, is that these pieces of music were abandoned in the recesses of the Spoon archive for decades, unearthed accidentally when the band’s studio was sold to the German Rock N Pop museum. What’s more, the three hour-long collection only represents a mere ten percent of the thirty hours of unreleased live, soundtrack and studio material discovered within the archives.
Compiled by founder Irmin Schmidt and longtime collaborator Jono Podmore, The Lost Tapes is essentially a time capsule documenting the band’s progression, collectively constructed into something altogether eerie, awe-inspiring and innovative. The inevitable influence of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay both studied under) seeps into the immeasurable tapestry of sounds, blending everything from Southeast Asian-influenced instrumentation to atmospheric scores of films never released. Read the rest of this entry »
Gay Telese – “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966)
This famous article was taken from Esquire magazine, April 1966, by famous writer Gay Telese…
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.
Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra — A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begiin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold. Read the rest of this entry »
Rush – “Clockwork Angels” (2012)
Another take on Rush’s new album by Adrien Begrand, dated June 8th, from his MSN Headbang column…
The 20th album by the Canadian legends is one of their most ambitious.
When you’re a fan of a band that’s carried on for decades, churning out album after album, the later they get into their career, the more you’re left hoping that they end their run with a little dignity. “We’re not asking for another classic album; just don’t embarrass yourselves.” But a funny thing happened since a fella named Neil Young first sang about how it’s better to burn out than to fade away back in 1978, as a few veteran bands have managed to reignite their creative fire. Iron Maiden has most famously been enjoying a triumphant late chapter in their legendary run, and in recent years, so has Rush.
Yeah, you can call me a Rush fan, but I’m a picky Rush fan. In fact, prior to 2007 I hadn’t liked a new Rush album since 1989’s Presto. Five years ago, however, Snakes & Arrows floored me with the strength of the songwriting and the energy in the performances of bassist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer Neil Peart. Here was an old band, probably very set in their ways, who decided to challenge themselves with an ambitious, younger producer in Nick Raskulinecz, and emerged with a modest triumph of a record, one that has aged very well since. Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 