The Fiddleback

This week's Shit We Like post is brought to you by food. Here are three foodie wonders we are into this week, one from each of our genres. 

As I Lay Frying

We suspect this blog is something Liz Lemon puts together in her spare time. Photos of fried sweets of every persuasion are paired with literary quotes. Under a towering cake made of assorted donuts is C.S. Lewis's declaration: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…” Under a photo of the much-maligned and infamous Krispy Kreme hamburger is Joseph Conrad: “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”  

Jennifer Rubell

What do you do with an art history degree, an uncle who owned Studio 54 and an internship with Mario Batali? You set up an art installation containing 36 Crock-pots of porridge and invite the art-going public to eat their fill, Goldilocks style. Among other things. 

The Recipe Project: A delectable extravaganza of food & music
And speaking of Mario Batali, lyricists is a line he can add to his resume if he's feeling thorough thanks to One Ring Zero's musical cookbook collaboration. According to the website: "Here, in one totally unnecessary collection, you get it all: the album of songs, the brilliant recipes, plus personal interviews with the famed chefs about everything from childhood violin lessons to teenage Van Halen haircuts."

Jens Lekman’s latest, I Know What Love Isn’t, his first full-length album in five years, is a break-up album. In case this isn’t obvious in the songwriting (it is), the album’s press materials make sure we know: “I Know What Love Isn't came out of a break up, something Jens didn't see as worth writing about at first.” While Lekman may have had his doubts about telling his story through song, it turns out those doubts were unfounded. I Know What Love Isn’t is a surprisingly subtle and endlessly confident rumination on lost love and the resulting attempts at healing.

Part of what makes I Know What Love Isn’t so effective is Lekman’s reliance on his own heavy stakes. Historically speaking, Lekman has never been private about putting his life into song, but while songs like “Waiting for Kirsten,” were playful and light, the songs on I Know What Love Isn’t are wet—but not soaked in—a low key sense of melancholy. Initially, I wanted to compare Lekman’s new songs to The Smiths, but Morrissey’s downtrodden eloquence is a little too self-obsessed and melodramatic for such a comparison to hold any water: where Morrisey sings, “To die by your side is a heavenly way to die,” Lekman sings, on “The World Moves On,” “You don’t get over a broken heart/You learn to live with it gracefully.” It is this smallness, this earnestness that drives Lekman’s vision and makes his songs so affecting.

Lekman has always written with a keen eye for detail, and this album is no exception. In “Become Someone Else’s,” Lekman describes bats “sucking on cherries, dangling from the trees,” then asks the bats, “hasn’t anyone told you what your fangs are for?” This moment, which at first reads as a lyrical non-sequitor, is quickly parlayed into a moment of emotional clarity as the speaker realizes he is so lonely that he is talking to bats: “That lonesome feeling, and what it tells us/Sleeping on my arm until it becomes someone else’s.” Such odd, but affecting turns are standard in Lekman’s work, and I Know What Love Isn’t finds Lekman using such moves more frequently and more effectively than on previous outings.

Perhaps the biggest surprise I Know What Love Isn’t has in store for those familiar with Lekman’s work is its understated production. When Lekman released his previous album, Night Falls Over Kortedala five years ago, critics and audiences marveled at the grandiose arrangements built up around Lekman’s fragile songs. On that album, Lekman employed a seemingly endless supply of swirling strings, wind instruments, and samples loaded with vinyl crackle. As a result, Night Falls Over Kortedala played like a spectacle, full of flash and larger-than-life gestures that heightened the desperate emotional pleas at the center of that album’s dramatic thrust. On I Know What Love Isn’t, the songs are smaller, quieter. When Lekman does employ one of his trademark flourishes—the sax solo on “Erica America” or the strings on “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love”—they are absorbed into their arrangements, become part of their songs’ textures instead of standing out as bold signifiers of Lekman’s ambitious design as in his previous work. In one of the album’s most impressive moments, Lekman ditches his studio obsession altogether, offering the stripped-down and fragile acoustic ballad, “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name.” I’m not sure Lekman has ever sounded so fragile or vulnerable, and the resulting sense of exposure lends the album a welcome earnestness.

Ultimately, I Know What Love Isn’t is a refreshing album. Lekman’s new sense of grounding makes for a slightly less exhilarating experience than his previous albums, but the maturity in Lekman’s songwriting and his willingness to strip his songs bare allows the album an unexpected freshness. Lekman’s songwriting has always been one of his strengths, but I’ve often wondered if such delicate songs could survive without the peculiar, almost defensive arrangements and production in which they were couched. I Know What Love Isn’t effectively obliterates this concern—these songs thrive on their scaled-back production.

The Renegade Reading series, with the help of its signature pastries, has gained a significant following since its small beginnings a year ago. Brain child of Caitlin Elizabeth Harper, the Crown Heights series seeks to offer lesser known writers a forum to share their work publicly. Many of the city’s existing literary clubs pride themselves on featuring professional poets and writers, leaving many of the amateur attendees looking for alternative outlets. Renegade meets again in September at Brooklyn’s Launchpad gallery. For a look at the anniversary celebration checkout DNAinfo.com’s full coverage of the festivities. —Darien Trujillo

Early in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, during a scene depicting a powerful hurricane, shots of ice tumbling from a glacier into the ocean are intercut with images of the storm. The crack of thunder is also the crack of many tons of ice shearing off and plummeting to the sea. It’s a jarring image, but one that feels integral to the design of the film. After all, Hushpuppy—the movie’s main character and occasional narrator, a girl who lives with her father in a destitute bayou known as the Bathtub—has already told us that everything is connected. “The whole universe,” she says, “depends on everything fitting together just right.” So the storm is the melting arctic ice. One cannot be understood without the other.

This linkage made me think of an article I read not long ago, in which Malcolm Bull argues that climate change “places unprecedented demands on our moral imagination.” No longer can we trust that our actions have only limited, local effects. Given the increasingly grim reality of a warming planet and the way in which its cause—the burning of fossil fuels for energy—permeates every aspect of our lives, Bull claims we must reckon with the difficult fact that our actions will affect everyone on the planet long into the foreseeable future. In other words, our moral universe extends much further, both in space and in time, than we’re equipped to imagine.

The shots of falling ice in Beasts are one way of bringing this fact to the foreground of the viewer’s imagination. Even more important (and more successful, I would argue) is the way the film is infused with a quality that’s in short supply in much contemporary narrative: myth. You see, all that melting ice has not just raised the sea level and increased the intensity of storms. It’s also released a pack of larger-than-life wild boars that were trapped in the ice. These mythic megafauna—the beasts of the film’s title, though not the only ones—descend on the Bathtub with fearsome speed. And despite all the abstract ideas they might evoke for the audience, the beasts are absolutely real to Hushpuppy and, therefore, to us. In many ways, they’re more real than the humans who live in sterilized safety “behind the levee.”

The problems of this world are mythic in scope. To meet them, the film’s characters must grow to similar proportions. The advantage of myth is that it’s designed to connect humans to the gods—to the most wondrous and terrible forces on the earth. What’s unique about our moment in history is that we’re finally coming to realize that the most powerful force in the world might very well be us.

So what do we do with this knowledge? As a fiction writer, my first impulse was to wonder what all this means for the stories we tell. For art more broadly, how can one address a psychic shift so large, so far beyond our instinctive way of seeing the world?

Well, I don’t doubt that much of the renewed interest in apocalyptic literature can be traced back to concerns about climate change. It seems noteworthy that whereas futuristic stories of the twentieth century tended to venture out to other planets, the futuristic stories of today are perhaps more interested in the ruination of this one. Many writers of speculative fiction have been plumbing these depths for decades, of course, but now these mythic anxieties seems to have migrated into some of the best-regarded literary novels of recent years. I would offer up David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, and even Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as examples of works that attempt to grapple with our new and troublesome moral landscape, an arena where history is indistinguishable from myth and human actions have consequences far beyond our understanding.

For now, what seems most important is that we don’t shrink from what we do understand. Near the end of Beasts, as the residents of the Bathtub return, resolute, to their doomed home, Hushpuppy says, “Everybody loses the thing that made them. The brave men stay and watch it happen. They don’t run.” Facing up to the changing nature of our world strikes me as a good first step. Hushpuppy’s declaration is one that’s worthy of the time we’re living in, which is to say, it’s a declaration worthy of myth.

Late last month The Washington Post published a story on a three day work-shop that sought to revamp the structure of America’s nearly obsolete independent bookstores. Kepler’s Books, an indie that closed in 2005 was the event’s exhibit A. It stood to represent hundreds of other private book retailers that have closed in light of the recent Amazon e-book & publishing juggernaut. In order to save Kepler’s and the rest of America’s independent bookstores the three day effort focused on highlighting the timeless aspects of these establishments and how to integrate them with technology. The ideal result will be bookstores that once again serve as community centers and retain their individuality through the readings they host, inventories they curate, and services they offer. For the whole WP article click here. —Darien Trujillo

VIDA

Our friend Melissa Faliveno wrote a great article about VIDA: Women in Literary Arts in the latest issue of Poets & Writers. As an organization, VIDA "seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities." They also publish The Count, which tracks and reports the gender breakdown of various literary giants such as The Atlantic and Poetry. As a watchdog and advocacy organization for women in literary culture, VIDA is where the shit gets real. —Jeff Simpson

Ian Bennett's Wine Reviews

Not that this video needs an introduction, but back when I lived in OKC, Ludivine was my favorite restaurant, and it's one of the things I miss most about home. Besides their food, I love their video marketing campaign, in which they document their efforts to locally source their menu and provide customers with amazing cocktails and wines. Ian Bennett, Ludivine's sommelier, is the Leon Russell of wine reviewers: 100% aficionado minus the ascot and snobbery. If you can't make it to Ludivine for the full experience, at least let Ian help you pick the right bottle the next time you throw a party or do something really adventurous like cook at home. —Jeff Simpson

We like badass book reviews, and if you think you fall into the badass book review category, we want to see your stuff.

First, read our Guidelines. Believe it or not, we actually don't like reading and/or editing 1,500 word book reviews—save those for your intro to grad studies course. If after reading said guidelines you still think we're a match, it's time to Submit. (Make sure you select "reviews" under category type.)

Love,
The Editors

Starting here, I’ll be working my way through reviews of books from Continuum’s 33 1/3 series. I’m not going to go through the series in chronological order, but I do hope to eventually work my way through the full series. In this, our first installment, we’ll read about a couple of novelists, a couple of critics, and a musician taking on some classic (and not so classic) albums.

#86 | Talking Heads’ Fear of Music | Jonathan Lethem

I had high expectations for Lethem’s volume on Fear of Music. I was not disappointed. The volume alternates its chapters between questions about the overarching nature of the album (“Is Fear of Music a David Byrne Album?” “Is Fear of Music a Science Fiction Record?” “Is Fear of Music an Asperger’s Record?”) and dense readings of the album’s songs. Though the book feels disjointed in terms of structure, the rapidity of the sections and abrupt changes in direction all somehow lead us down three focused paths: Lethem’s changing relationship with Fear of Music over time, the album’s place as a turning point in the life of Talking Heads, and the album’s obsessive thematic variations on fear. Lethem maintains and grows these themes through tight prose and a plethora of cultural reference that makes this slim (140 pages) volume feel almost encyclopedic, not unlike Fear of Music, itself. Lethem’s narrative skills are on display as well—all of his critical hand-wringing and philosophical detours come together in a climax that melds the personal with the analytical in a way I’m not sure any of the other 33 1/3 books have managed. With Fear of Music, Lethem has written one of the series’ finest volumes.

#41 | Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II | Eric Weisbard

Weisbard’s study of G n’R’s classic trainwreck of a “double album” (or two separate albums, whatever) tries to cover a lot of ground, and is largely successful. The volume is part cultural study of the late eighties and early nineties, part history and analysis comparing Axl Rose the character with Axl Rose the man, part listening guide to both volumes of Use Your Illusion, and part personal narrative of how Weisbard has approached the albums over time. One might think that by attempting to cover all of that in 125 pages, Weisbard’s book would be an unfocused mess—well, it kind of is, but that’s part of its charm. Like the albums it sets out to explore, Weisbard’s book strays wherever it pleases, but his sharp ear and mostly tight prose keep the proceedings on track far better than G n’R managed.

#83 | Televisions’ Marquee Moon | Bryan Waterman

There might not be much new information in Waterman’s take on Marquee Moon, but the book serves as a fairly thorough history of the 70’s New York punk scene with regards to the key players and events leading up to Television’s seminal album. I appreciate Waterman’s scholarly approach to New York punk’s history and his penchant to, by and large, avoid sensationalizing the interpersonal drama surrounding Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, and Richard Hell. This volume definitely plays it safe, but it’s also one of the smarter, more effective books in the 33 1/3 series.

#19 | The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds | Jim Fusilli

Man, I’m pretty sick of Baby Boomers, and their insistence on the greatness of their generation’s popular culture. Because of that, I’m pretty sure I should hate Fusilli’s personal love letter to Pet Sounds. But dammit, Fusilli’s blending of album-lore and Beach Boys history with his personal enthusiasm for the album makes this volume damn near infectious. By bringing these threads together, Fusilli makes a strong case for Pet Sounds as not just a great coming of age album, but as an album for outsiders who feel too much, trying to come to terms with a cold, hurtful world.

#18 | The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. | Bill Janovitz

To Janovitz’s credit, there are a number of compelling ideas scattered throughout this volume. He touches on the importance of soul and gospel music to the Stones’ seminal album, briefly explores cultural myths about rock stars and America, and touches on Altamont and the end of the sixties. Unfortunately, these compelling ideas are more asides and afterthoughts in a volume that is largely given over to detailed descriptions of the sounds that comprise Exile, and the who/what/where/when/why/how of their recording. Fans interested in a thoroughly researched, musically literate (Janovitz was a key member of Buffalo Tom) description and history of Exile on Main St. won’t be disappointed. Readers looking for more of a focused reading of the album, however, might want to look elsewhere. Janovitz loses a few additional points for making reference to Raymond Carver’s novels. Oops.

If you don’t recognize the name Jayson Musson, it doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t as hip to the memes as you thought you were. However, if Musson’s online pseudonym rings a bell—it may be because it was cleverly comprised to: Hennessy Youngman is an amalgamation of the names of a beverage popular among the hip-hop celebrities he cartoonishly embodies as well as the stand-up comic “King of One-liners.” Musson has created a household name, which young artists and art skeptics alike turn to get a bullshit-free take on commonly bullshit-filled art topics. As the self proclaimed Pharoah Hennessy, Musson has made big splash with his YouTube series “Art Thoughtz,” garnering in excess of one million views.

An emerging artist himself, Musson’s vantage point on the art world is all too common. Musson has been interviewed numerous times as himself and as Hennessy. With or without the gaudy Elmo cap, he always delivers a clear, concise assessment of the shallow art climate. His videos cast a direly needed dose of sardonic reality to the naïve, the jaded and anyone content enough in their creative practice to laugh at the absurd notion of artistic success. He waxes on subjects such as relational aesthetics, post-structuralism, making it as a black artist, and graduate school—all with such a cool cadence that you might only pick up on the latent anger if you share it. Musson himself is not nearly as self-assuming as his projected identity, and he even uses the character to give scathing critiques of art celebrities such as Damien Hirst, focusing not on Hirst’s process or products but simply the role he plays in perpetuating notions of what so many people hate about art. But the disconnect between the artist and his creation defines the phenomenon of Hennessy Youngman, and his diatribes are nothing if not self-aware. Whether it will be a problem for Musson as he traverses the art world with Youngman on his back remains to be seen.

For now, the alter ego stands as a remarkable artistic achievement, and, most importantly, Musson is not afraid to share the stage. In 2011 he posted a video with an open call to artists for a gallery show he had acquired at Family Business in Chelsea—which resulted in an overflowing exhibition with absolutely no restrictions on size, media, scale or quality. The art world needs both of these voices—Musson’s and Youngman’s—and it’s a step in the right direction to dissolving the prohibitive elitism that keeps the majority of the world thinking that art is not something they can be a part of.

Artist or not, check the following links and let the Pharoah enlighten you: YouTube, Vimeo (less censored), Twitter, Tumblr, and his website. Be sure to also check out Musson’s personal site here.

Bayard Godsave | Lesser Apocalypses 
This collection of five stories—and a prophetic sixth narrative woven between them—avoids all the clichés of apocalyptic storytelling. There are no government scientists or sadistic warlords to be found here. But these apocalypses are only “lesser” in the sense that Godsave is interested in how people incorporate their understanding of the end into their daily lives. The stories span time and place, but they’re linked by a pervasive anxiety about the meaning of calamity—both general and individual. A boy’s fascination with a gas mask is transmitted to his mother. A pregnant teenager in a post-nuclear Paris sees pictures of a bright, thriving city and is repulsed. And in the collection’s first story, “Predictable Trajectories,” a soldier in a missile silo follows an order to launch and only later discovers the whole thing was a drill. Fifteen years and one divorce later, his girlfriend tries to understand what the experience did to him: “I began to think of Barrett, and the day he returned to his wife and children, after turning his key, after all he must have seen in his head. And I could see them just then through his eyes: lifeless, limpid, unmoving as he opens the door." —Brian Gebhart

Monkeybicycle 9
The latest issue of Monkeybicycle is a doozy. You like space shuttles? They've got one. Poems about supermarkets and napping? Done. Or what about this lovely bit from J.P. Dancing Bear: "you pull a lever / and hold on: as it bounces and pogos: you’ve fallen in love with / the shadow of your creation: just like so many other creators: / you lovingly: dutifully adjust the footing:"? In their own words, "Our latest issue is filled with stories and poems from 29 of the most amazing authors we’ve had the pleasure to publish." We agree. —Jeff Simpson