This Rabbit has never quite gotten Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero to equate. We read the book when it came out in 1985. We liked it for its take on the disillusioned youth of wealthy Los Angeles. We’d been around enough to know that rich kids always have the best drugs. While these spoiled brats weren’t part of any scene we knew, we knew they existed. And we couldn’t help identify with all the name dropping of locations and situations. After all, we lived in L.A., too.

Most of our confusion came a couple years later when the movie was released. We couldn’t keep the two straight. In the movie, drugs were a plague, in the book a symptom. Julian, an unlikable character in the book, gains a bit of sympathy as played by Robert Downey Jr. in the movie  (”a talented, sad-faced clown” according to Imperial Bedrooms). In the movie he dies. In the book, he only wishes he would.

So 25 years later, with the sequel Imperial Bedrooms, our confusion is complete. It’s 20 some years past and Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, tells us they had made a movie about the book about his life. “In the book, everything about me had happened. The book was something I couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.”

Clay, the narrator of Less Than Zero, but not the blond screenwriter who went on to marry Blair, the girl in the book that Clay did and didn’t love, returns from New York in the sequel and is immediately plunged into a middle-aged version of his disaffected youth. Some of the old friends are there — Blair, Julian, Rip Millar, the once and future drug dealer, Trent, who has married Blair but who is still probably getting some on the side (both sides, like Blair’s father–remember? — who has since died of AIDS) — and much of the old evil. It was hard to like any of the characters in the original book, what with the snuff films and gang rape of 12-year-olds.  In the movie, Clay is a crusader of sorts and shows a bit of moral compass. In the book, he’s cold and distant. In the sequel, he is as self-serving, evil and corrupt as anyone else.

Ellis takes his two-sided characters and plunges them into intrigue, paranoia and an overall promise of no-good. Though it’s not about struggling lower class types who’ll do anything to get ahead (excluding, of course, the aspiring actresses), the book still carries the scent of noir. It’s a mystery with lots of paranoia, much easy sex and a sense of impending doom. Existential questions come in the form of , “Why am I being followed?”  or “Am I losing my mind?” or “Has someone been in my refrigerator?” In this way, Imperial Bedrooms is a much more entertaining book than its predecessor. There’s a murky plot to try and second-guess, there are femme fatales and some not so fatale as well as the feeling that no one can be trusted.  And yes, there’s plenty of drugs and alcohol and late night rendezvous. Murder raises its head right from the beginning.

Imperial Bedrooms does have something in common with the original and that’s its take on women. Women weren’t just desirable  second-class citizens in the first book. They were meat. The same is true here but with one hitch. Why does Clay lust after the mysterious Rain, what makes her become an object of hope and desire? There’s no explanation. Even her uncommonly good looks aren’t so uncommon among the uncommonly good looking. What Clay sees in her is something of a last chance even though he’s a guy who likes to take chances. Despite his attachment, she’s still an object. He never leads her to the bedroom. He “pushes” her there.

Like its predecessor, Imperial Bedrooms is one-sided in its take on class. The Hollywood rich may be evil but they’re visible, unlike everyone else. The few doormen and limousine drivers here have sold their souls to someone who can afford to pay them. The only Mexicans are drug thugs. The broad mass of Los Angeles’ population doesn’t exist.  Any truly great Los Angeles novel will be focused on everyone. The rich will be the ones who move through the city invisibly, even if they are pulling the strings. The shock of Ellis’ first book was just how young these debauched privileged children were — some of middle-school age –  and how little their parents cared. It’s not so surprising that their paid-for self-absorption is still there at 40.  There’s little in the way of moral lesson to be learned in these bedrooms (yes, we’re still quoting Elvis Costello). We already know that they’re all no good. “History repeats the old conceits….”  The song Ellis’ title are pulled from — “Less Than Zero”– was inspired, Costello says, by a British fascist who “was unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s.” Sounds like Ellis’ characters at any point in either book (but not the movie). At end, we read it for the name-dropping and to see who’s left standing. Oh, and who was in the refrigerator.–Cabbage Rabbit

“I am the man who has best charted his inmost self.” Antonin Artaud quoted by Helen Weaver

Helen Weaver’s account of  her early days in Greenwich Village is misleadingly titled. Weaver, a new age author and translator nominated for a National Book Award in 1977 for her reading of Antonin Artaud, was a member of New York’s hip set in the 1950s and ’60s. She had affairs with Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce, a longstanding friendship with Allen Ginsberg and worked in the heart of the publishing scene for Harold Vursell and Roger W. Straus Jr. at Farrar, Straus and Cudhay, later Farrar, Straus and Giroux. So who’s the awakener in all this?

Well, it’s the guy whose name will sell the most books, thus the subtitle A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties.  But a large part of  the book deals in Weaver’s life without Kerouac. Equally interesting sections, some maybe more so,  deal in her relationship with Bruce and her own life in Greenwich Village, smoking pot, getting into jazz and generally pursuing a life of her own. If you’re thinking the book is strictly about Kerouac, you’ll be disappointed. Women also named Helen as well as guys named Tommy and Monty all help shake Weaver into consciousness.

But this is not  a disappointing book. Weaver’s story is a late coming-of-age tale in an era (and among a generation) that treated women with (mostly) quaint attitudes  (”Jack wouldn’t let me smoke dope; that was for the boys.”). She breaks away from a “middle-class” upbringing in Scarsdale, Pennsylvania and a dull first marriage. Weaver avidly pursues life, embracing hetro and homosexual relationships, indulging in drugs and following psychoanalysis. By the time you finish, you’ll think  Weaver awakened herself.

Weaver’s sexual awakening after undergraduate studies and while she was married has more affect on her development than the undependable, often drunk, brilliant writer who gave us On the Road.  “If women had suddenly been transformed from rivals to the objects of my desire,” she writes, ” then all my previous conditioning went out the window.”

This is also a story of privilege. Despite her claim to the middle-class, Weaver attended Oberlin, her father paid for her first Village apartment and much of her psychoanalysis and her career in publishing came from her connections.  She could afford to be different. When things don’t go well, the family is there to bail her out. Not every struggling artist or bohemian has that advantage.

Still, Weaver’s honesty about it all makes the book sincere and rewarding. She’s refreshingly disarming about her mistakes with men and women and her own youthful preoccupations, especially when viewed from her later years. And she’s particularly descriptive when it comes to her beloved Greenwich Village. Here are the clubs and coffee shops, the quaint streets and magical social scene that made the Village of the late ’50s and early ’60s a sort of Never Land for those avoiding the conformity of that era.

Weaver ends the book with Kerouac considerations, some pulled from reading, some from observation, some from astrology. These short chapters are the ones Kerouac devotees will be most interested in. Even when seeing “Pisces-Virgo contradictions” in the writer’s life, she’ll make insightful revelations: “Kerouac’s struggle with opposites was a rich source of creativity, the shifting ground on which he was able to arrive at symmetry or balance in his art.”   These same sort of contraditions, though less dramatic, make Weaver’s book  fascinating.–Cabbage Rabbit

Trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has always been celebrated for impressionism and atmospherics. But the point of his  moody, airy play was, like air itself, sometimes invisible. Not so on his latest recording Dark Eyes.  Stanko has framed his magnificently expressive play inside themes that give shape and weight to his music. Having not heard any where near all the Polish musician’s recordings, we can’t say that it’s his best. But it’s certainly best among the handful — all of them from the ECM label — we’ve heard.

For comparison, go back to Stanko’s quartet recording from 2002, Soul of Things I – XIII. There, Stanko is in good company –  the wonderful pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michael Miskiewicz (all three are heard on Wasilewski’s excellent trio date January from last year) — and he makes the most of his improvisational space. But the overall effect is one of misdirection, of moodiness for moodiness sake. Dark Eyes puts his emotional play in context. The trumpeter has found inspiration for his compositions in landscapes, art work and theater. The resulting works give form and direction to his pieces while making his solo work more meaningful.

“Terminal Seven,” a droning look skyward propelled by drummer Olavi Louhivuori’s  polyrhythmic swirl of toms, snare and cymbals, and “May Sun,” a tune lit by  Alexi Tuomarila’s  sparkling piano, were written for a production from Swedish playwright Lars Noren. “Samba Nova” is impressions of the quintet’s tour of Brazil. “Grand Central” and “Amsterdam Avenue” capture impressions from New York, the Polish trumpeter’s second home.  “Dirge For Europe,” a composition from composer-pianist Krzysztof Komeda with Stanko’s plaintive tones crying for something lost, speaks for itself.

The most illustrative of the pieces is “The Dark Eyes of Martha Hirsh,” a pieceinspired by a painting from Oskar Kokoschka , the 20th century Austrian poet, painter and playwright. Bassist Anders Christensen and pianist Tuomarila establish the deepness of those eyes  (number of these tunes begin with deep piano-bass unisons) before Stanko enters with what comes across as a psychological study. As the rhythm accelerates, Stanko twice unleashes something of a primal scream to express what goes on behind the portrait’s wide eyes.

Guitarist Bro, pulling from the John Abercrombie book of accompaniment, makes strong statements on “Terminal 7″ and “The Dark Eyes…” He veers between the harmonically perfect and not-so, giving us little sparks of excitement that occasionally make hair stand on end. His improvisational style –  cool, calm and collected even when off beat — contrast with Tuomarila’s insistent scurry.

Stanko, always a thoughtful soloist, has found new inspiration in these themes drawn from art and architecture. He coos, cries and whispers, inserting lyricism just as he seems to abandon it. What stands for composition in today’s jazz is often  based on derivative and over-hashed melodicism or completely meaningless narrative. More artists should take a cue from Stanko and find form, purpose and meaning in what other artists are doing.–Cabbage Rabbit

“…what exactly is produced as a difference attesting to the specific work of artistic images on the forms of social imagery?” Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image

The Rabbit found the first several stories in  The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ fiction collection to be self-absorbed and lacking in political and social context, important criteria in judging fiction’s worth as far as this hopped-up reader determined. But finally, the collection has made good in Karen Russell’s “The Dredgeman’s Revelation” that appears in the July 26 issue.

Set during the depression, the story is something of an allegory that addresses alienation and belonging, family ties and identity questions, as do most of the tales in the so-far shallow collection.  But it frames these issues in the larger context of poverty and labor, exploitation and development, jobs and environmental destruction. In that, it’s twice the story than those that preceded it, better even than Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s excellent “The Headstrong Historian,” one of the few relevant pieces — despite its  unique setting and circumstance — in the collection so far.

Russell adds a layer of meaning by setting her story of a homeless young man in the context of solidarity with his fellow workers, real or imagined, among demanding, difficult and relatively unrewarding working conditions. There’s a contrast between government and corporate exploitation. And the story’s shiver-producing conclusion, the consequences of dangerous, unregulated conditions in which squeezing work and dollars from expendable employees results in tragedy, weaves both the personal and circumstantial into a single, eye-opening slap.  Yet, for a while , Louis, a “miracle baby” who survives a “stillborn” birth from a dead mother, enjoys the new life he has found clearing Florida swamps for development:

“In sunlight and moonlight, everybody on the barge had to work under veils of mosquito netting — and the weave of that finely stitched protection was what the word ‘dredgeman’ felt like to Louis. Like soft armour, like a flexible screen. As a dredgeman, Louis was no different from anyone on the deck. And on the dredge, in this strange and humid swamp, every yellow morning was like a new skin that he could slip into.”

As chilling as the story’s final scenes are, they take Russell’s symbolism to a new level. “They’re just filthy buzzards,” says one of Louis’ fellow dredgeman, “They shouldn’t hurt us at all…”–Cabbage Rabbit

–“I saw the best minds of my generation….” Allen Ginsberg

According to Beat archivist Bill Morgan, the poet Gregory Corso — or maybe it was poet Gary Snyder as claimed by Beat chronicler Ann Charters — once said that three people (three or four, in Snyder’s quote) do not make a generation. For that matter, neither do 30. Writer Hettie Jones noted back in 1959 that the Beat Generation was “really a misnomer because at one point everyone identified with it could fit into my living room, and I didn’t think that a whole generation could fit into my living room.”

Despite the consideration both writers level towards “generation,” the word appears in the subtitles to both their Beat accounts; Charters’ Beat Down To Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? and Morgan’s recentThe Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.  What we’re really talking about when referencing the Beats is a gathering of writers like the Bloomsbury Group, or  school of writers like the Transcendentalists, small elite circles that through their interrelationships distinguish themselves by influence and shared direction. There may have been a generation’s worth of Beatniks, the commercially co-opted crowd that claimed, like the Beats, to reject the post-War civility of America. But looking for artistic accomplishment among that group of pretenders is like looking for work experience on the resume of Maynard G. Krebs.

Whatever you call them — “The Beats,” a term of their own making, seems best to this bunny — a few of the few dozen writers that orbited around Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were exceptional in their lifestyles and literary achievement. Their rebellion against the social norms of the 1950s (and beyond) and its capture in their writing still influence and inspire those who resist conformity and embrace all-American  alienation. The picture one derives from Morgan’s book is not so much the effects of alienation but the effect of brotherhood.

Morgan, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and archivist for a comprehensive list of Beat Writers– Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, Snyder and Corso included — places Ginsberg at the center of the Beat circle and builds a narrative account of the movement’s history around him. Most Beat accounts are centered around Kerouac, if only because he’s the most widely read and romanticized of the group. Morgan justifies his focus on Ginsberg with a comparison to the Trancendentalists. “The history of the Transcendentalists seems to be a spaghetti bowl of personalities, each strand nearly equal in importance to the finished dish. In contrast, I would compare the story of the Beats to a freight train, with Allen Ginsberg as the locomotive that pulled the others along like so many boxcars.”

Ginsberg is portrayed as the motivational force behind much of what the Beats accomplished, urging its members to write and write more, encouraging their attempts to establish voice and the most expert among them at promotion, either self or on behalf of others. “Allen would be the adhesive that held it all together, for he became proselytizer, the networker, the agitator, and the driving force who brought the group to the public’s attention more than a decade later,” writes Morgan.

Morgan’s Ginsberg-centric account, more time line than narrative, is still a spaghetti bowl of a story. If you want to know where in the world Corso was shooting heroin while Ginsberg was first experimenting with LSD, this is your book. We learn how Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes and Carl Solomon (to whom Howl is dedicated) worked for market-research fims while Kerouac was writing the manuscript to On the Road. These kinds of details promise more than they deliver. Morgan himself suggests he writes his book for “readers who have little or no idea about who the Beat writers were or why their books remain important to us today.”

It’s on this second goal that Morgan falls short. While he makes general statements about a writer’s craft or achievement, he seldom draws worthwhile conclusions about their literary quality. Kerouac’s great discovery, we’re told, is to write as people spoke. Ginsberg is impressed with poet William Carlos Williams “down-to-earth, gutsy language.”  Morgan tells us that Kerouac’s “scroll” method had a major influence on Ginsberg who wanted his own work to be as freely formed.  Allen “treasured” Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and looked for ways to apply it to his own poetry. But how this all manifested in his work is left as mystery. Freedom, rebellion, spiritual aspirations and selfishness (coupled with self-destruction)  may have defined their lifestyles but not necessarily their literature.

While there are worthy considerations available of  the literary merits of individual Beat members (see John Leland’s Why Kerouac Matters or Charters and Ginsberg’s biography of Kerouac), this Beat-loving bunny has yet to find a history that makes the work of its various members as important as their lives. Maybe that’s because there’s little common ground between writers as diverse as Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso and the others, despite their shared experience and motivations.

What’s valuable  — and remarkable — about Morgan’s book is its detail and honesty. While there are other Beat histories that provide a simpler introduction to the lives of its members, Morgan doesn’t shy from the criticism gleaned by the movement or what generated it. He acknowledges the criticism of Norman Podhoretz, Robert Brustein and others even as he condemns it in his introduction. But he doesn’t hide the events that prompted Robert Kimball to write, “They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists…”, nor does he readily excuse these actions as easily as other biographers.  Morgan seems to challenge us to address the question of how we separate art from the indulged, compromised artist (think Picasso or Mile Davis) and to acknowledge the fact that its difficult to pull them apart. We’re told how Burrough’s drunken, accidental killing of his wife “‘motivated and formulated’ his writing.” Neal Cassady has part of his thumb amputated after he uses it to strike his wife on the head.  Morgan outlines the irony of gay men exploiting prejudice against homosexuals in defending Lucien Carr’s murder of David Kammerer, the act that first cemented the relationship between Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg.

These men — generation or not — were no angels, despite what Kerouac and Ginsberg claimed. Their stories are less about attainment than struggle. But they were visionaries of a sort, who knew hell as well as heaven.   Morgan, without much nod to the result, thoroughly charts their journeys through both.–Cabbage Rabbit

Harvey Pekar,  a regular guy with extraordinary talents, dead this morning at 70. Okay, not so regular. His obsessions, his cynicism, his politics, his love of the comic form, will be missed.

Pianist,composer and bandleader Chick Corea is one of the jazz genre’s most unique and diverse artists. One of his earliest recordings, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, is a landmark piano trio recording. His stint with Miles Davis, who encouraged him to explore the electric piano, changed the sound of jazz accompaniment. His groundbreaking experiments with Return To Forever, first in a mixed electric-acoustic Latin-Brazilian format and then in pure electric jazz rock, showed a restless ambition.  He challenged the avant garde with Anthony Braxton and Barry Altschul in Circle and performed duets with Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck and Hiromi. At one time, he worked with both Acoustic and Elektric bands. In recent years, he’s toured with his bandmate from the Miles Bitches Brew period, guitarist John McLaughlin and synthesized directions with his Freedom Band. In short, there’s no direction or combination of musicians that Corea hasn’t felt a need to explore.

For his feature article in the 2010 Playboy Jazz Festival program, “Pop and Sizzle: Plugging Into Jazz Fusion,” the Rabbit had an email exchange with the always busy Corea about his early Miles experiences, his interest in all kinds of music and how his diverse past affects his equally diverse present. Here’s the complete exchange.

–As Stanley Clarke says in the “Chick Corea” documentary, “Chick has no problems with changing.” You’ve explored and developed so many styles of music—no need for me to list them—what has driven you? Why have you been (and continue to be) open to so many styles and genres? Is your father’s influence a key? And how does it relate to your own composing?

I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, but most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and the artists that create within them. Often, rather than seeing another way of music as only a “curiosity”, I want to understand it more intimately – and that leads me to studying the music of and participating with the musicians of that culture.
–When you look back on the period in 1969 when In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew were recorded, how do you view what was going on then? How would you characterize the musical times? Were you aware that what you were doing with Miles would be thought to be so innovative and different? That it reflected the shifting cultural and social  times?

From present time looking back on the 60’s, it seems that there was more agreement and acceptance in society of experiment and change. There certainly was in the arts. If I compare it to what’s happening now, it seems “The Media” and “big business” has the flow of art locked up and tightened down. The public has gotten used to it. The result is, less individuality and thus everything else that goes along with that negative direction.

Of course at the time we were recording In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, none of us were talking about what “impact” it might have on the future. Miles was in a constant mode of search and change; it all seemed perfectly natural. And, for me, still does.

–It would be great to have an anecdote from those days, some unique memory that reflects the spirit of those times. In his biography, Jack Chambers quotes Miles saying that after you first joined the group, you and he would “talk about music until late every night.” Is there anything that stands out from those discussions that you recall? What was the setting?

The first gig the Miles Davis Quintet played after Tony Williams left the band was a week’s engagement at a club in Rochester (Duffy’s Tavern?). Jack DeJohnette joined the band and we just finished the first set. As we were walking off stage, I was following Miles off to the left, he muttered to me: “Change again.” in his familiar cryptic way. I took it to mean that he had scanned his whole musical life in an instant and seen the constant change. Maybe he was resisting it at that moment – - I’ll never know.

–When you did the Five Peace Band Project, did you feel it to be part of a fusion legacy? Or was it something that stood apart, reflecting the current times? Both? How does the spirit of what you did then affect what you do now (ie, The Freedom Band)?

Working with John and the gang in the Five Peace Band felt fresh as a daisy to me. Not much talk about the past during the tours. But there was an unspoken (sometimes spoken) reverence expressed for Miles and “the day” – delivered in a manner not wanting to dwell on the past but with real feeling.
–Fusion can also suggest a combining of personalities, something you’re very familiar with especially considering the wide array of duo performances –Hiromi, Gary Burton, Herbie Hancock, Bela Fleck, Bobby McFerrin, et al—you’ve done over the years. Can you address the dynamic of fusing musical personalities in performance, how it affects those involved and what they create?

Making music with other musicians is an ultimate joy. To be a part of a group creation when there is complete giving amongst the group is my pay for being a musician. And each musician is a unique world unto himself. This is the subtle and high level challenge of communication between free spirits. Unencumbered by any particular protocol, and with a desire to make the other sound the best he can sound, soulful and satisfying music can be made. I’m fortunate to have these kind of associations with my musician friends.

I remember a wonderful incident when Herbie Hancock and I were first beginning to play 2 pianos together. At first we were careful about “not getting in each other’s way”. The playing moved cautiously and slowly. Then we both discovered that we could play whatever we wanted and never get in the other’s way because there was no offering from the other that wasn’t fully accepted and enjoyed. We were both trying to make the other sound good. We had a good laugh over that.

In his liner notes to Miles Davis’ post-Bitches Brew recording At Fillmore: Live At the Fillmore East, Morgan Ames quotes J.J. Johnson on Miles’ new direction. “If you put Miles and his new group in the studio and recorded them on spearate mikes, and then you cut the band track and just played the trumpet track, you know what you’d have? The same old Miles. What’s new is his frame of reference. ”

Musicians reinvent themselves not so much by changing their personal style but by putting themselves in new contexts. David Murray, a prodigious recorder has done that times over since the mid-1970s. Whether in small groups or large, the World Saxophone Quartet, avant-garde or ballad programs, Murray’s voice, a unique blend of swing, bop and free expression, is instantly recognizable.

His best playing, certainly currently (and it’s all great), can be heard on his Afro-Caribbean projects.  Murray’s connection to the  French possession, Lesser Antilles island Guadeloupe, heard on 1998’s Creole, and 2004’s Gwotet, has given him new life. His brother-in-law, Klod Kiavue and a group of Guadeloupe Creole musicians known as the Gwo Ka Masters contribute to this Africa-America connection. To make The Devil Tried To Kill Me an overarching fusion hybrid, Murray brings in Californian funk drummer Renzel Merrit. To make it a fusion of arts as well as styles he integrates the poetry of Ishmael Reed  and brings in folk-blues interpreter Taj Mahal to sing them.

Despite all this stirring –and the Rabbit, no stranger to stews, promises to use no more food imagery– the one ingredient (sorry) that stands out here is Murray. His ability to catapult an improvisation into a squeaky, high-register and just as gracefully fall back is familiar to those of us who’ve been following his work since his early recordings on the Italian Black Saint label.   Murray’s willingness to combine elements of classic swing and bop, to recall masters from Ben Webster to Albert Ayler, and to do so in fresh, invigorating ways, is unique among tenor players. Then there’s his tone: rich, robust and razor sharp. The purity of his sound, even at its most wild, even when he somersaults through those previously mentioned upper- register squeaks or caterwauls deep in the low, makes his every solo, especially in these Afro-Caribbean rhythms, a thing of marvel. Yet there’s no doubt, no matter how different the frame of reference, who the saxophonist is.

The lyrics and background chanting provide much of Murray’s motivation to overachieve. Surprisingly, they’re a mixed bag.  Reed’s poem that gives the recording its name is a driving story of recovery, powered by interwoven percussion and vocalizations. Singer Sista Kee makes the lyric flow against the rambunctiousness of her piano and the JuJu paced rhythm guitar of Christian Laviso. But even Taj Mahal can’t make Reed’s “Africa” fit the music in a meaningful way. The poem’s imagery of illness and recovery (a theme on the recording– “Africa, if I were a hospice worker…”–on lyrics by Kito Gamble as well as Reed) are apt and moving as spoken word. Setting them to music — this music — seems to dilute their message. Much more meaningful to the song: Murray’s heart-felt, flowing bass clarinet solo.

The rhythm section is the heart of this recording and it beats best when it is driving a bloodline of chanting that gives way to solos from Murray and trumpeter Rasul Sikkik. Bassist Jaribu Shahid provides just enough support and none of it overly repetitious, even as it grooves. Murray seems particularly responsive to the bass — or is it the other way around — and the effect is one of a single voice coming from eight different musicians. Lovers of both African pop and American jazz will find things to like, even love, here. What comes together on the Island won’t stay on the Island. And lucky for us.–Cabbage Rabbit

The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40″ short story issue has generated lots of comment, much of it in the why-wasn’t-so-and-so included? category, some of it in the why-wasn’t-I included? category, the best of it in the (sorta) latter category and self-deprecating in a satiric way. And, of course, there was some that made no sense at all.

While we loved and marveled at most of the stories — okay, we saw Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” as a gimmick built on two pronouns and  misleading in its intent to impart double meaning (and we love Foer’s novels) — we couldn’t help notice that none of them addressed the day’s biggest issue: the economic downturn and its effect on the lives of everyday, let alone well-off Americans. Sure, Salvatore Scibona’s “The Kid” gives us an American soldier who orphans his foreign-born  child after an ill-advised marriage. And ZZ Packer’s “Dayward”  uses Reconstruction-era black children to suggest modern-day lessons. There’s certainly poverty and displacement there. But where are the stories of a struggling middle-class? Where are the stories of homes lost, incomes destroyed, the frustrations of futile job searching, the loss of love and respect and the psychology of imposed failure? Where are this generation’s Steinbecks, Orwells, Algrens, Zolas, Lewises, Faulkners? Are we so afraid of class distinction in this country, of making someone who’s still comfortably positioned uncomfortable, that we can’t even acknowledge what’s going on right before our very eyes?

Almost all of these tales are about difficulties in relationships. Nothing is more damaging to relationship stability than economic failure and displacement. Can the most common story of our time also be the most ignored?

It’s true that this New Yorker issue included only eight of the 20 stories. We’ll be looking closely through the others for a contemporary realism that deals with more than the frustrations of party anxiety among the Hollywood wannabe set or the professional-class’ social climbing and the Porsche mechanics they left behind. Great literature, literature that changes culture and political direction, has always portrayed the struggles of common people in difficult times. The characters –and subjects — in the contemporary stories here may be what we’ve come to accept as common people. But there is no sense of what the greatest recession since the depression  is doing –specifically and in detail — to their lives. Certainly there are writers out there adressing these subjects (and no, I’m not one of them…shame). Where are the publishers with the guts to get them in print?–Cabbage Rabbit

Those of us who are not fathers or husbands understand Father’s Day through memories and envy. Neither of  those mental activities are exclusively positive, at least in the case of fathers. Even as fatherhood has evolved, its old stereotypes haunt our relationship to and understanding of the title: fathers are macho, missing and manly in all the worst sense of the world.  I remember my father, a man whose favorite pet name for me was “stupe”  second only to “dumb shit.” As Leonard Cohen sings, “It’s Father’s Day and everybody’s wounded.”

So it seemed a good time to pour quickly through Michael Chabon’s Manhood For Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son to get some insight on the profession. We know Chabon to be a smart,  entertaining writer, one who understands the tribulations of male coming of age (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)   and who has a detail-oriented eye for truth (The Final Solution: A Story of Detection). Chabon, a twice-married man with four children, also has a knack for expressing a thoroughly modern view of cultural issues.

What you’ll find in Manhood are expressions of Chabon’s own fathering in light of his childhood. (Mostly missing is Chabon’s own father — the writer’s parents divorced when he was 11 — other than a mention that dad was an obsessive collector; Chabon’s ex-father-in-law is discussed in terms of his acceptance of his son-in-law into something of a man’s club) . Much of what Chabon says is based on a kind of personal nostalgia and how some of the things he enjoyed, namely freedom, have been taken –  by him — from his kids. His essay “The Wilderness of Childhood” recalls a small patch of woods that held mystery and escape in his childhood, the kind of place that doesn’t exist or would be otherwise denied if it did exist, to his children. He laments the evolution of Legos from simple building blocks to “a strange geometry of irregular polygons, a vast bestiary of hybrid pieces, custom pieces, blanks and inverts, clears and pearlescents” that seem more about marketing than creativity. He feels badly for his children and the amount of commercial “crap” they have to put up with, some of which he saw in his own childhood.

He defines his role simply. “I’m a father. Being a hypocrite is my job,” and he proves it by using everything from marijuana to Wacky Packages. In the chapter “A Textbook Father,” one that chronicles his reaction when observing boys staring at his twelve -year-old daughter walking down a hallway, he acknowledges how difficult it is to be exceptional. “It turns nout there are only nine different ways of being a father, and eight of them are distinguishable from one another only by trained experts from Switzerland, and the ninth is exactly like the others, only more so.”

He also acknowledges that being a man sometimes means putting your children at risk. In a chapter called “The Binding of Issac,” he describes that seemingly now-forgotten November night when Barack Obama walked onto the stage at Grant Park with his family and we all began to wonder at the meaning of his victory. He sees Obama’s children as everyone’s children and the realization that their perfect innocence of pain misfortune and sorrow will someday be betrayed. (How difficult this is for the President and his children is being made abundantly clear now by shameless attacks from the right.) Betrayal is a father’s fate and something of his duty. A certain kind of honesty is required to realize this. “I have abandoned my children a thousand times,” Chabon writes, “failed them, left their care and comfort to others … or neglected their needs in the name of something I told myself merited the sacrifice. All that was in the very nature of fatherhood; it came with the territory.” It’s for this kind of insight we read great  writers. While much of what Chabon says in this volume has been said well before, it’s these exceptional moments that make Manhood worth reading, on Father’s Day or any other.–Cabbage Rabbit