Seasons, recorded live at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a collaboration between a rising guitarist-composer, three of his guitar-virtuoso colleagues and a master guitar maker. The guitar maker, John Monteleone, commissioned this work for a quartet of acoustic instruments he built, each designed with a particular season in mind. Likewise, the music commissioned to be performed on these instruments, like Vivaldi’s famous suite, was inspired by seasonal moods and climates. Composer Wilson is best known for taking the guitar from its traditional jazz roles into wider context. Here, he writes without regard to category, bringing lyrical finesse and the kind of harmonic depth available only to this unique string quartet. His fellow guitarists are equally distinguished:  Steve Cardenas, who’s worked with a broad swath of musicians including Norah Jones, Paul McCandless and the late Paul Motian; Brazilian Chico Pinheiro who teamed with Wilson on the excellent 2007 recoding Nova; and Julian Lage, a recent member of vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet. The four combine on Wilson’s expressive material for a harmonically rich, intuitively agile sound. Their play is so seamless it’s as if Monteleone had designed a 24-stringed instrument and bred a 40-fingered virtuosos to play it. Each guitarist’s style is showcased in a seasons-inspired solo turn. An accompanying DVD documents the suite’s live performance and serves as a meditation on guitars, guitarists, and the composer’s craft. Watch, listen, and marvel.   –Cabbage Rabbit

DAVID MURRAY CUBAN ENSEMBLE PLAYS NAT KING COLE EN ESPANOl;   Motema. Nothing like the original except the tunes. Murray, always adept at finding new ways to frame his music, works with a nine-piece ensemble and strings to do what he does best: cry, caterwaul, lose control (never; it only sounds like it) and get fresh during ballads. More to come on this outstanding recording.

FURTHER EXPLORATIONS, Chick Corea, Eddie Gomez, Paul Motian; Concord Jazz, release date: January 17,2012. Recorded live at the Blue Note in NYC and celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Bill Evans Explorations this two-disc set warms us with the sort of interplay that LaFaro and Motian attained on the original. Nobody would mistake Cora for Evans and that’s the beauty of it. For the late Motian, an extension, a perfect circle.

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY SOUNDTRACK  by Alberto Iglesias; Silva Screen Records. Pedro Almovodar’s favorite composer has strung together a variety of downbeat themes that sound as a continuous whole. We hear some John Adams, some Phillip Glass, even some Steve Reich in this moody music. More on this later as well.  

Writer Jim Harrison is to letters what Woody Allen is to film. If that seems a stretch, consider: both are prolific, releasing a new work (or more) yearly. Both were born during the Depression, two years apart, both in December. Both mix drama and comedy into something that’s entertaining as well as thought provoking. Both are fixed on the complications resulting from relationships and sex. Both are obsessed with mortality. Both have tried their hand at writing from a woman’s point-of-view. Both are connected to specific locations, Harrison to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Allen to Manhattan’s Upper Westside (and more recently, Barcelona and Paris). Both are revered in France.

Okay, it’s still a stretch. The grizzled, one-eyed novelist and poet who wrote Legends of the Fall and some 30 other volumes of prose and poetry is more at home in the outdoors than the bespectacled urbanite who wrote and directed Interiors (no matter how much  of A Midsummer’s Night Sex Comedy takes place outdoors) . And while Harrison’s characters, like Allen’s, often dwell on the fact that their days, as everyone’s, are numbered, they don’t all take it personally. They’re more stoical about it.

Take 65-year-old Detective Sunderson from Harrison latest novel The Great Leader. “He thought just because you’re older doesn’t mean that death is imminent every day. There’s generally a tip-off when it’s coming.” Tips, being the detective’s stock-and-trade, need to be acted on. And Sunderson’s been given more than a few.

If your hunch is that detective fiction is out of character for someone as literate as Harrison, you’d be half right.  Detective Sunderson doesn’t break from the manly Harrison mold. He’s burly, fond of brook trout, dogs and deer livers.  He has a frustration-inducing appreciation for female posteriors and is prone to use whiskey as a cure. Three years ago, his troubled lifestyle cost him “the world’s finest woman,” according to his niggling 85-year-old mother. It’s his down-home style of introspection, in light of his vices, that stands him apart from the usual sleuth.

Recently retired after a career policing familial abuse, small-time drug dealing, and bear poaching, our detective is hardboiled country-style. When asked why he continues to follow The Great Leader out of the hummocks of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to Arizona and the Sand Hills of Nebraska, he claims he’s investigating the evil connection between religion, money, and sex. A more accurate answer: he’s pursuing himself.

If this doesn’t exactly sound like Manhattan Murder Mystery that’s because it isn’t.  There are plenty of dark moments and intimations of mortality in The Great Leader, though balanced by comic action and witty asides. Plot? Only the barest, vulture-picked bones. Along the way, Sunderson is threatened with a sodomy charge, has a run-in with a Mexican drug kingpin, eats prodigiously and suffers gout. It’s not a thriller and there’s not a lot of suspense. But if you’re fond of existential puzzles, then The Great Leader is your rib steak.

In this age-of-anxiety sense, The Great Leader is reminiscent of Paul Auster’s1985 mystery City of Glass, an existential detective yarn in which the unraveling thread of the central charter’s psyche is more knotty than the mystery he’s trying to solve. While Auster’s tale is surreal, Harrison’s is well-grounded. Auster says, “nothing is real, except chance.” Harrison counters, “there is no truth, only stories. “ As a detective, Sunderson‘s heard plenty.

The real mystery here is Sunderson himself. Even as he plots the downfall of the cult leader for his taste in 12-year-olds, he ogles his 16-year-old neighbor girl, an exhibitionist whose bedroom window is just 30 feet from his. That and the excitement he feels almost every time a woman bends over cause him to curse “the distracting nuisance” of the biological imperative, like “carrying around a backpack full of cow manure.”

Harrison is skilled at straight-talking life’s big issues and the book is full of homily. “Crime did pay but usually very little,” Sunderson observes. Or, when marveling at the rejuvenating powers of time spent in the wild, “A creek is more powerful than despair.”

Not all such insight seems worthy: “Men would say they were as horny as a toad but who among them knew if a toad was horny?” Sometimes, Harrison’s dialog seems unnaturally smart, as when a tough plainclothes cop, describing religion as a drug, says, “you know, the Marxian opiate of the people.”

But by and large, Sunderland’s social and political one-liners give a jolt on almost every page. He’s outspoken on religion, Republicans, the FBI, American history (especially when it came to Native Americans), 9-11 and justice (“When a guy with four DUIs runs over a kid and receives less time than a college kid with a half-pound of pot…”); all tempered by his unruly self-doubt: “…what were his conclusions worth? Hadn’t he been put out to pasture?”

Sunderson eventually chases down a sort of religion of his own, one anchored in extended family and the natural world. Like Alvy Singer in Allen’s Annie Hall, he finds solace in his surroundings, a beauty and buzz of life that’s present no matter which landscape he’s in. It’s this revelation that helps him get his man. I won’t tell you which one.–Cabbage Rabbit

Poetry, in its way, seeks omniscience. And that, unless done without humbleness, is why some poetry, especially the academic sort, makes such dull company. Who wants to spend time with a know-it-all? That’s why the folksy, plain-spoken verse of Ted Kooser, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver and their comrades is so popular. They don’t pretend to know everything. Just this little bit.

Indeed, poetry may be more about breaking the small thing from the whole than about considering the big picture. The big picture, in other words, is best displayed by the small things. You know, no ideas but in things.

Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa knows how to take it all in. He snaps off little pieces of experience and then tries to make it all Humpty-Dumpty again. You don’t need to part the weed (see “no ideas” above) to find the metaphor, often extended, often leading quickly to another, in his lines. And, through cleverness, multiple meaning and sheer force of will he makes them bind.  “Each bud is a nose pressed against a windowpane,/a breast gazing through thin cotton. The cold stings,/& a shiver goes from crown to feet, leaf tip and taproot.”

This new volume proves Komunyakaa a traveler with an acute eye, an aroused imagination and interests as wide as a river’s flood. His compassion is deep and sometimes floating on anger. His insight is equal parts window and mirror. His dedication to music goes beyond swing; rhythmic, yes and harmonically audible. But seldom, except for a quatrain here and there, does it follow lyric form.

And the images, like the hits on Top 40 radio, just keep on comin’. The poems in The Chameleon Couch are dense with metaphor, a dripping, fecund jungle of ideas all tying vine and blossom. There’s nothing plastic, technical or two-dimensionally digital. They create a place where the natural world meets the urban, stretching the idea of environment. What moves through this landscape is at once alive and imagined. Take the opening lines from the poem that offers a single word of its title to the book’s, “Ode To the Chameleon”:

Little shape shifter, lingering

 

there on your quotidian twig

 

of indifference, you are a glimpse

 

of a rainbow, your eyes and iota

 

of amber. If nature is mind,

 

it knows you are always

 

true, daring the human eye

 

to see deeper. You are envy

 

& solace approaching green,

 

no more than an eyeblink

 

in a corner of the Old World.

It’s as if Komunyakaa has answered the chameleon’s call to see deeper. Follow the “glimpse” and the “eyes” and the “eye” and the ”eyeblink,” the “rainbow” colors of “amber” and “green” and how the green leads so easily to “envy.” If Komunyakaa wrote about Humpty Dumpty, surely there’d be egg shell fusion.

He’s also spans time with cultural references, bringing the past and the far past together in the space of a few lines. “Surrender” drops the names of Ma Rainey, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Ishtar and Caliban in it first verse.(Bud Powell and Sam Cooke show up later). There’s more than musical name-dropping going on here. “Ode To the Guitar” makes the instrument — and the act of playing it — something of the flesh, the notes calling up “blame/& beauty, into the scent of a garden…”

Even in the most technological setting, he can’t escape the past or the natural world. Encased inside an MRI cylinder he sees a galloping black horse and marching trees. Billie Holiday pays a visit, Marguerite Duras beckons and Ornette Coleman buzzes in his conscious sleep.

Political and racial scenarios play out in the same litany of color and culture. “I’ve known billy club, tear gas, & cattle prod,/but not Black Sheep killing White Sheep” begins “Green.” Before long, he he travels back to hear 14^th century Persian poet “Hafez’s litany balanced on Tamerlane’s saber” and then he returns, underground, to declare “no, let’s come back first to now,/to a surge of voices shouting,/Death to the government of potato!”

Komunyakaa is in the moment even when he is lost in time. He awakes to now, in his apartment, in “Gone”:

Somebody is screaming. I spring to my feet,

 

half stumbling out of the brain’s cloudy weather.

 

Where am I, what year of the Rat, Horse, Dragon,

 

or Snake is it. I’m out the door. In the hallway.

 

Damn. I’m pulling on my See No Evil T-shirt.

We can’t be sure, he seems to say. Am I here? Is someone in need? Or are they fulfilling a need? Is it sex? Or a beating?  What one hears on the other side of the wall is all things, good and bad. Eavesdropping is guilty pleasure or not pleasant at all.

…Where am I? What year of the Hare

 

or Ox is this? I walk through the city, hurting

 

for a clue, but I can’t find laughter because

 

I was listening to the wind when their baby

 

swallowed a little lead bird from China

 

& flew away.

It’s no surprise that Komunyakaa emphasizes listening, an act which comes of silence, and music which, in the form of language, generates its own ideas. His lines are all flow and ampersand, there’s not an “and” in the book. And that’s a musical thing, in shape and sound and image, a sign standing in for words.–Cabbage Rabbit

Just what the nemesis is in Philip Roth’s latest novel,  if there’s to be only one, isn’t clear. Polio? Certainly. But maybe it’s God. Or even our superstition and ignorance. Or life, as in mortal,  itself.

Or maybe it’s just playground instructor Bucky Cantor’s proclivity to take things too seriously, particularly when it comes to what his grandfather preached: “to stand up for himself as a man and to stand for himself as a Jew.” All this standing, complicates Bucky’s life. He cannot, like his friends, serve in the big European war because of his poor vision, a fact used later as metaphor for what Bucky can and can’t see. Standing up like a man means knowing better than those who love you, and doing things they would not have you do. Failing this once is a hard lesson. Failing it twice isn’t allowed, even when it precludes a better decision.

Nemesis is Roth’s The Plague. The inexplicable existentialism of the disease’s spread challenges the easy notion of standing up no matter the circumstances. Like Camus, Roth keeps his narrator hidden for a good part of the book, giving the story an omniscient depth that seems to sink and surface as the story progresses. Like Camus, Roth has Bucky pose questions, not to, but about God.  As in Camus, God comes up terribly cruel or missing altogether.

Bucky’s sense of duty is a source of guilt. But it is also the source of his pride. When Italian teenagers invade the playground from their neighborhood where the disease has taken up residence, Bucky stands up to their threats and washes away their spit. His need to pass on his Grandfather’s advice to the boys on the playground makes him a hero to the boys and a champion in the neighborhood. When his love seeks to draw him away to the safety of the country he first refuses.

But not for long. His fear gets the better of him and he takes a job at an upstate summer camp away from the “equatorial” heat and disease of Newark.  The experience give him both a false sense of security and new reason for fear.  He’s bothered that his  girlfriend’s younger sisters cling to him and kiss him on the mouth.  When he and his beloved take a canoe and go to an island where they can be alone, storm clouds rumble in the distance. Despite this overplay, the moments of foreshadowing are chilling against the supposed blue-skies future.

Ethnic issues  — the Italian neighborhood that the disease first over runs while the Jewish neighborhood seems, as if by God, protected — are underplayed, serving as little more than setting to the action. Placed in a time when the Holocaust was reaching its horrific zenith in Europe, the  story seems designed to contrast human and natural suffering. But despite grandpa’s urging for Bucky to stand like a Jew, the comparisons are, like God, missing.

This is some of the genius of Roth’s story and keys to a short novel. He doesn’t need to connect the dots. The reader is entirely capable. Suggestion is more than enough to make the horrors of spreading death part of the tone, part of the setting.

In other ways, Roth seems to telegraph what’s coming. Bucky’s two buddies serving bravely in Europe? Don’t ask. His frequent declarations of happiness — that memory of eating a peach with his fiance’s father  –  suggest unhappiness looms. And don’t forget those thunder clouds advancing as the two make love.

Because of these clues, when the end comes Roth is largely able to skip over it and get right to the denouement. Now Grandpa’s advice works against Bucky. He can no longer stand like a man. His own strength and beauty gone, he relies on pride to carry him forward into a future he didn’t imagine. His narrator, during a chance encounter, hears the whole story. And he, like us, can’t quite figure it out.

Roth’s tale is at once a reminder of how our fears and superstitions color our most immediate reactions and important decisions. There’s hints that an ignorance of science,  in this case, how polio is transmitted, leads to misguided anger and judgment. The ethnic and racial prejudice of the time (not so unlike the prejudice of current time) clouds understanding. There are so many of these intervening factors in the book that it’s easy to believe its title should be plural if the series didn’t already carry that name.

Despite the obvious clues where all of it is leading, Nemesis is absorbing and propulsive reading, the kind of book you want to consume in a sitting (but it will take two). Much of this is due to Roth’s craft, the smoothly consumed rhythms and phrasing as natural as a jump-rope rhyme. It’s lesson isn’t so much not to get comfortable because life has something else in store for us but, instead,  not to be so forthright and resolute because, again, life has something else in store for us.–Cabbage Rabbit

For many of us, the 1960s never ended. Tom Hayden takes that belief a step further. The ’60s continue…for everyone.

Hayden’s book, The Long Sixties, takes the political history of the ’60s and finds its legacy alive today in the social movement that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. He sees Obama as a reflection of the movement politics of that decade. Movement politics –the actions of groups sharing similar visions or issue positions– can be found  in the emerging progressive- populist, anti-finance and anti-corporate movements and in the ignored but tangible anti-war movement. These movements, anchored in their correctness, grow in reaction to the resistance they meet. Without the ’60s, Hayden suggests, hope would go missing from our politics.

Despite the tired joke that memory of that special decade implies absence, Hayden was there. He was a founding member of the Students For a Democratic Society and led the drafting of the student manifesto The Port Huron Statement. He was indicted as a co-conspirator of the Chicago 8, charged with inciting riot at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 (his conviction was overturned in 1972).  He traveled to North Vietnam during the war with Jane Fonda (in 1973), an act that still inspires outrage from his adversaries, before going on to spend time in California politics in the 1980s and ’90s. He has not only been controversial among his enemies on the right, but with radical progressives who, at times, saw him compromising to join the political system.

Hayden describes his political and social beliefs with “the M/M model,” progressive movements in opposition to the Machiavellians “power technicians” who represent the various power institutions of government, business and the military. He places the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the anti-corporate movements of the ’60s in this model. The movements  grow, as he says, “when sufficient rage and frustration lead to a perception that all peaceful, legal means have been exhausted.”

The majority of the book frames many of the seminal radical events of the decade inside the model. In the process, Hayden paints a history of the times that counters attempts at whitewash and demonization.  His “Promoting Amnesia” section warns, “The general approach is to reduce the whole sixties to a blurred story of violence, sex drugs, and rock-and-roll signifying nothing. This requires a difficult removal of civil rights, feminist and farmworker movements…” The most visible example of rewriting history from the era, he says,  is the effort to “wrap Vietnam in triumphalism…”

Hayden declares that while the political successes of the era were compromised in the following decades, the ’60s counterculture revolution succeeded in taking over the culture at large. “Sixties music and artists still retain a dominant influence. The general public is supportive of the decriminalization of marijuana and a treatment-centered approach to drugs. Things organic, foods and medicines, hold vast sway. Above all, environmental programs  such as renewable energy and conservation derive from approaches that were considered part of the extreme fringe thirty years ago.”

Hayden is quick to point out that the sixties did not hold onto its political victories. War, repression, racisim and exploitation of workers continues and, indeed expands. The movement was absorbed and co-opted, he states, and parts of it were separated from the whole. “Green politics still remain white politics,” he says, echoing Van Jones. The Machiavellians, ascendant during the first several years of the new century firmly control the agenda.

It’s when Hayden ties the movement lessons of the ’60s to more recent events that his book speaks the loudest. And nowhere is this most apparent than on sections devoted to Obama. Hayden, along with Barbara Ehrenreich and others, famously endorsed Obama in a March, 2007 piece for The Huffington Post (published in the book). Yet Hayden has not relented any of his positions to support the president, taking him to task for his extension  of the war in Afghanistan and calling out the media as well as the White House for ignoring its casualties.  “…one hard lesson has become clear to me from experience:” he writes with added emphasis, Domestic progress has been continually derailed by dubious wars.” Though he has not addressed class struggle and the financial crisis as thoroughly, he has, in true Hayden style, linked the two to the actions and philosophies of the Obama administration.

“Obama is trying to navigate between Machivavellians he has either inherited or appointed–the generals, military contractors, national security elites, Wall Street bankers, and hedge fund speculators–and a public opinion of high hopes and growing anger…” he writes in the book, which was published in 2009. “To permanently shift the American balance of power in a progressive direction, the Obama administration needs to encourage both structural shifts and cultural ones, not policy change alone…” But even some of Obama’s recent policy, despite its achievements, must unsettle Hayden.

The book’s last sentence addresses both the president and ourselves. “What he needs, then, and what we need is a New Left.” In other words, what’s needed is a return to the movement politics of the sixties, founded on unclouded understanding of the issues, cast in current terms and propelled by contemporary technology. We’ll be looking to see if Hayden’s take on Obama and the current state of America has changed in the last two years when the paperback edition of The Long Sixties, hopefully updated, is published in April.–Cabbage Rabbit

In the beginning, Robert Crumb’s work was all parody and cartoonish variation. Over the decades, he has breathed form into his illustration, bringing detail and something, at times, approaching realism while maintaining his characteristic style prickly-male legs and ponderous female thighs. The Book of Genesis Illustrated is his longest, most ambitious creation and, despite the subject matter, his most real, though realism is relative to his style (see “A Short History of America“). As the cover declares, it contains “ALL 50 CHAPTERS” and “NOTHING LEFT OUT!” Indeed, not only does Crumb include, as he declares in his introduction “every word of the original text” (derived from “several sources”, mostly Robert Alter’s 2004 translation The Five Books of Moses and the King James Version) but something of his own interpretation, no matter how innocent, via his drawing.

Something of Crumb’s approach to the project can be found in Todd Hignite’s interview from his 2006 publication In the Studio: Visits With Contemporary Cartoonists. At the time of the interview, Crumb had finished all of  four pages but much of his thinking on how he would approach it was complete. Commenting on an old 1946 EC comic Picture Stories From the Bible, with its blond Eve and red-headed Adam, he complains about its sloppy drawing and the fact that, “they just make shit up to gloss over and fill in whole passages. They have Eve  saying, ‘Mmm, this apple tastes really good.’ If I’m going to be doing this and don’t want some fucking Christian fanatics to kill me, I’ve got to say, ‘Look, it’s all there, I didn’t change a single word, I just illustrated it as it’s told.’”

No doubt, some fanatical Christians will want to kill him anyway simply because he does illustrate what’s told. We’re shown Onan spilling his seed on the ground when “he would come to bed with his brother’s wife” as well as the cruel consequence of the act. We see a drunken Lot having sex with his daughters, the older in missionary position, the younger girl-on-top. Crumb does not shy away from the murder, incest, adultery, lies and God-driven war that make the Old Testament the more human of the two scriptures. Nor does he exaggerate or parody the acts as he might have in the days of Zap. That’s Genesis‘ greatest accomplishment: bringing humanity and reality to the cruelties and taboos that are so often glossed over.

This may also be the text’s one weakness (though we Crumb fans will see it as a plus). In humanizing the events, Crumb draws in his own interpretation of his subjects’ reactions and feelings. Did Issac actually sit by dejectedly when Esau took Hittite wives? We can imagine that Noah’s reaction to hearing of the Lord’s plan to kill every living thing on earth is as bug-eyed as portrayed but would his eyes bulge again when there’s a hint of the end? There’s a touch of homo-eroticism when Jacob wrestles “until the break of dawn” with a nameless divine being. Would the handmaid look so sleepily satisfied after sex with the elderly Abram? Occasionally, character expression adds comedic touches as when Abraham takes all the males among his household to be circumcised. The looks on their faces shows they know what awaits!

Most interpretively expressive is God himself. The look of  satisfaction when He smells the aroma of Noah’s burnt offering of cattle and fowl after the flood is divinely human. But mostly He’s shown in various stages of anger (Crumb modeled the Lord after his father), allowing only his messengers to appear relaxed and serene.  Crumb’s is an angry God indeed.

One of the greatest achievements here are the dozens of thumb-sized portraits of all the begotten and begatters, the minor sons and daughters, all meticulously drawn. No Aryan looking Middle-Eastern ancients for Crumb! We can  see the different tribal characteristics as the sons of Abraham spread out to fill the known corners of the world. Where Crumb found all these faces can only be guessed. Scholars may take exception with Crumb’s models for the architecture and costumes of the time, many derived from Hollywood. But there’s no arguing against the fact that Crumb has made one of the world’s greatest archetypal and symbolic sagas, from Adam to Joseph, enjoyable in its humanly purest form.–Cabbage Rabbit

Disfarmer is Bill Frisell’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of 26 short, impressionistic pieces inspired by the photos of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), an Arkansas photographer who captured both place and time in his starkly-lit portraits.  Disfarmer’s revealing black-and-white portraits of country and small-town folk, posed without background, are perfectly reflected in the Frisell quartet’s fuzz and twang. Much like the timeless statements made by Disfarmer’s  70-some-year-old photos, Frisell’s music sounds both period and contemporary.

The Rabbit has previously compared Frisell’s brand of plugged-in Americana to the rolling impressionism of  Grant Wood’s paintings and that sound is played to maximum effect here.  The sound is reminiscent of Frisell’s Music For the Films of Buster Keaton done some 15 years ago, with horse-and-buggy rhythms sharing space with country waltzes and laments. Not only does Frisell’s own compositions mirror the moods and faces in the portraits, he’s chosen a handful of classics that fit the bill: Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still In Love with You)” and a giddy-up version of Arthur Crudup‘s “That’s Alright, Mama.” Greg Leisz ‘ steel guitars and mandolin color the music with backwoods sweetness,  and the omnipresent Jenny Scheinman makes both melancholy and whoopie with her violin. Who know what it was like to live in rural Arkansas in the 1930 and ’40s? Disfarmers photos–and Frisell’s music–gives us a dusty sense of hardscrabble life and small joys. –Cabbage Rabbit

There’s a comic quality and grounds for parody in even the most classic literature. In Masterpiece Comics, R. Sikoryak proves himself  adept at discovering and exploiting these  cartoonish characteristics. But while the laughs in his collection are literate, what he parodies are the comics, everything from  Peanuts to Superman.

Masterpiece Comics would be a one-joke wonder if it weren’t so clever. Sikoryak has taken works from Shakespeare, Emily Bronte, Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka and a host of others and fitted them with familiar comic characters (or in the case of Bronte, familiar comic formats). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne becomes Little Lulu’s mother. Batman becomes Crime and Punishment‘s  Raskolnikov.  Ziggy is Candide. This, of course, is something different than the Classics Illustrated comics we all suffered when young.

Sikoryak’s method isn’t so much about presenting literary classics in comic form. Instead, he takes comic characters and inserts them into classic literature. So instead of illustrating the Genesis creation as a cartoon (as has Robert Crumb), he’s plopped Dagwood and Blondie into Eden as Mr. Dithers takes on the role of God. There’s no (or little) attempt at quoting or being absolutely true to the original. Dialogue and character traits are drawn with the emphasis on comic content rather than any literary consistency. Past and present high school students who’ve used the Illustrated Classics series as an easy way to bone up on MacBeth or Wuthering Heights would flunk the pop quiz after reading the condensations here.

The casting of  comic characters as literary characters (Mary Worth as Lady MacBeth?) is a big part of Masterpiece‘s genius. Little Nemo is a brilliant Dorian Gray and who better to visit Dante’s hell than Bazooka Joe? Sikoryak mixes up his approach, using the Bazooka Bubble Gum, three panel comic for “Inferno Joe,” complete with special offer (“Ice scraper…ideal for when hell freezes over…”) and fortune (“A winged beast will take you for a ride.”) Garfield stands in for Mephistopheles with Jon as Faustus in three-panel comic strip construction. A series of “Action Camus” covers portray Superman in various stages of Camus’ The Stranger (“So much for the harmony of the day!”).The Bronte chapter is told, cover and all, in the style of Tales From the Crypt. Throughout, Sikoryak is true to style and format of the original comics, whether it be Bob Kane’s early Batman orJerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman circa 1942. He adds familiar comic book touches like letters pages and parodies of special offers …”Lit” as “Grit.” Reading these parodies is as much an education in comic history as it is in literature. And the final installment featuring Beavis and Butthead as Estragon and Vladimir from Beckett’s  Waiting For Godot, well, we just had to laugh…heh.–Cabbage Rabbit

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Radiolarians III is out and I haven’t even finished with II? These guys are killing me.

No, really. They always have, ever since Boston’s Accurate Records sent me a copy of Notes From the Underground back in the early ‘90s. The coming together of groove and free improvisational directions—with the emphasis on the latter—gave me hope that jazz had found new, contemporary life. Even as the emphasis changed to the former (thanks, Phish heads) the Rabbit still got his thumper on with MMW. After all, it was never one thing or another but all things together. Weird. And they always mixed it up. For every Shack-mack they put out there was a Tonic.

That seems to be the thing with MMW fans. They tend to classify their recordings as groove or not so groove. Like I said before, I always favored the not-so-groove. And also like I said before, it was never really one thing or another. Everything was strong. In all ways. The beat, the bop, the moody grooves.

Radiolarians II is the smartest blend of all of the above. You’ll recognize the feel of some of these numbers from MMW’s previous work. But it’s not been done quite this well. Grooves, sonic diversity, free-thinking improvs, smart, multi-tiered percussion and mood, plenty of mood, swap places faster than comics on open-mic night. Just when you get hooked on a riff, it deconstructs, turns a thematic corner,  flips like a coin and lands on edge. Sure, it’s still money but it’s done something amazing.

Billy Martin gets a lot of credit for being tight and driving—in the old parlance, “deep in the groove” (don’t let us use that word again)—but the Rabbit thinks his attractiveness comes from a certain slap-dash feel to his rhythms, his ability to push and pull and sound devil-may-care sloppy even as he promulgates detailed poly-rhythms. A sound-wise drummer with a sense of color, Martin brings it all together here on the unpredictable “ijiji.” Nice! Then there’s “Chasen vs. Suribachi” in which rhythms downshift or hit overdrive backed by a plethora of noise including radio static. Sound, indeed.

Same thing with bassist Chris Wood. He can give you greasy, deep-fat-fried electric or astute acoustic, as called for. He plucks, he bows, he strums. He’s as clean as a white shirt one moment, down-and-dirty the next. When playing upright, with Medeski on piano (“Padrecito”), they come up with a tango-like dexterity that even jazz purists will dig.

Medeski’s ability to apply just the right sound from his keyboards adds to the attraction. Dig the bluesy lounge feel he puts to “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”—the title seems a ready-made lead line to a lyric—and how he pulls the history of balladeer lament from the acoustic piano before getting all whiney on wah-wah synthesizer. The echoing clavinet of “Junkyard” gives the tune mystic airs.

And yes, they rock. ”Amber Gris” (check out the black-and-white video that Martin put together for the tune) shows their propensity to break off a piece of riff and beat us silly with it. And just when you’re crying for more, the tune takes a turn, like a pirouette, dancing on Wood’s delicate bass and acoustic piano tinkle before rising up to beat us some more.

The Radiolarians reverse method of creation—taking and making tunes on the road before recording them in the studio—seems to bring out the best in these guys. Which means we have to go out and get III even before the promised check-in-the-mail arrives. –Cabbage Rabbit

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