Tag Archives: review

Destroy the Mood: Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ Reduced to a Google Maps Trip

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Photo of Jack Kerouac via Flavorwire.

And so it has come to this.

The mythic travels of Sal Paradise reduced to a Google Maps trip.

Gregor Weichbrodt’s “On the Road for 17527 Miles” removes all the poetry from Kerouac’s journey.

The Guardian says of the book:

Going through On the Road with a fine toothcomb, Weichbrodt took the “exact and approximate” spots to which the author – via his alter ego Sal Paradise – travelled, and entered them into Google’s Direction Service. “The result is a huge direction instruction of 55 pages,” says the German student. “All in all, as Google shows, the journey takes 272.26 hours (for 17,527 miles).”

Weichbrodt’s chapters match those of Kerouac’s original. He has now self-published the book, which is also part of the current exhibition Poetry Will Be Made By All! in Zurich, and has, he says, sold six copies so far.

“To me it’s a concept, an idea. It’s odd in which rational ways we discover, travel the world,” he said. “If Kerouac had a GPS system, he would have probably felt less free. I find it rather discouraging to go on self-discovery with a bunch of route directions.” On the Road, he added, “fitted the idea of the concept I had in mind, but I’m not a beatnik groupie”.

Read the full review here.

The book is self-published and thus far Weichbrodt says he’s sold six copies.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Waiting for the End of the World: Al Gore Reviews Elizabeth Kolbert’s ‘The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History’

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As Al Gore notes in his New York Times review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest dispatch from the first row of’ Man Vs. Planet Earth,’ “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” Kolbert has been documenting our continuing assault on our environment and all who live here for some time now.

Gore writes:

Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.

Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.

In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.

Read the rest of this review here, then weep.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Black Flag: Damaged Beyond Repair?

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One of the great versions of Black Flag in the band’s heyday.

Geeta Dayal is very disappointed by the new Black Flag album and explains why in an essay that was posted at The Guardian today.

The piece begins:

In the early 1980s, Black Flag were one of the best bands in the world. Black Flag weren’t just a band – they were an art project, a movement, an ethos, a way of being. But Black Flag are no longer Black Flag. The storied hardcore punk group are now just a bitter parody. What the … is its first full-length album since the band’s break-up in 1986. Everything about it, from the lame album cover art to the pro forma lyrics to the generic riffs, screams of desperation.

Read the rest at The Guardian.

“Rise Above” from back in the day.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

The Parallels of Bob Dylan & The Coen Brothers

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In a terrific review of “Inside Llewyn Davis” that ran in today’s New York Times, A. O. Scott concludes by quoting on of Dylan’s most obtuse lines as he compares the Coen Brothers approach to making films to Dylan’s creative strategy.

Scott writes:

One of the insights of “Inside Llewyn Davis” is that hard work and talent do not always triumph in the end. Like most of the Coens’ movies, this one sidesteps the political turmoil of its period, partly because it is a fable, not a work of history. (The public affairs of the time get a shout-out in the form of a goofy novelty song called “Please Mr. Kennedy,” a barely topical sendup of the space race and the New Frontier.) But there is nonetheless a strong, hidden current of social criticism in the brothers’ work, which casts a consistently skeptical eye on the American mythology of success.

Winners do not interest them. There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all. That observation was made by Bob Dylan, like Joel and Ethan Coen, a Jewish kid from Minnesota and, like them, possessed of a knack for conscripting the American popular art of the past for his own idiosyncratic genius. His art, like theirs, upends easy distinctions between sincerity and cynicism, between the authentic and the artificial, and both invites and resists interpretation.

So I won’t speculate further on what “Inside Llewyn Davis” might mean. But at least one of its lessons seems to me, after several viewings, as clear and bright as a G major chord. We are, as a species, ridiculous: vain, ugly, selfish and self-deluding. But somehow, some of our attempts to take stock of this condition — our songs and stories and moving pictures, old and new — manage to be beautiful, even sublime.

For the entire review, which I hope you’ll read, head over to the Times.

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals, opinions and/or news —

Rediscovering the Great ’70s Folk-Rocker John Martyn

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John Martyn’s Solid Air, released in 1973, is one of those timeless albums, an album that stands outside of time but also brings me back to those free-spirited years when I was a college student living at UC Santa Cruz.

I saw Martyn once, opening for Traffic, but that tour didn’t launch a career for him in the U.S.

Now a mammoth multi-CD box, The Island Years, has been released and Rob Young has written an informative review that provides a great overview of the late folk-rocker’s music.

Check it out at Uncut.

Here’s what might be his best song, “May You Never.” A live version from 1973:

Here’s the album version:

Books: New Collection of Short Stories From Lost Russian Writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

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“Autobiography of a Corpse” is the third collection of short stories by the late Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky to be published in the U.S.

Krzhizhanovsky’s stories are surreal and often existential. A favorite of mine from an earlier collection, the wonderfully titled “Memories of the Future,” is about a man who is given a potion that, when it’s spread around his tiny studio apartment, makes the room grow. He becomes lost in the immense darkness.

Only nine of his stories were published in Russia during Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. His stories did not overtly challenge communism, but were subtle and subversive.

There’s a review of the new collection in today’s New York Times.

Palma Violets Rock Treasure Island Fest

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The Palma Violets are a scruffy bunch, but their reverby guitar heavy garage punk more than makes up for it.

It was sunny out on the island but a cool wind dimmed the heat. That didn’t stop a good-sized crowd from moving to the beat as the London-based quartet filled the air with a sound more fitting for an indoors venue near the midnight hour.

Samuel Fryer has a sandblasting guitar sound, and he comes through with most of the lead vocals, but it’s bassist Alex Jesson who’s got the rock star moves.

Ripping through their terrific debt album, including their hit “Best of Friends,” in about 35 minutes, the group delivered one high octane blast of pleasure after another. They did fine on the big stage but now is the time to catch them in a club if you can.

Books: Early Reviews Are In On Morrissey’s “Autobiography”

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morrissey auto

Morrissey’s much awaited autobiography, “Autobiography,” published by Penguin Classics, appeared in bookstores today in the UK and Europe. It has not yet been published in the U.S.

The first reviews are in. In the English paper, The Telegraph, Neil McCormick writes:

“With typical pretension, Morrissey’s first book has been published as a Penguin Classic. It justifies such presentation with a beautifully measured prose style that combines a lilting, poetic turn of phrase and acute quality of observation, revelling in a kind of morbid glee at life’s injustice with arch, understated humour, a laughter that is a shadow away from depression or anger. As such, it is recognisably the voice of the most distinctive British pop lyricist of his era. It is certainly the best written musical autobiography since Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, and like that book it evokes a sense of what it must be like to dwell within such an extraordinary mind.”

Over at iJamming!, Tony Fletcher praises Morrissey’s writing ability. Fletcher says Morrissey’s description of his childhood has:

“…such vivid detail and such literary prowess that it competes amongst the very best writings on 1960s and 1970s Manchester.”

Over at Consequence Of Sound they’ve put together a list of all the most important revelations that are in book, based on what reviewers have written so far.

Here’s a few:

“Morrissey was upset to discover that The Smiths’ debut album was released in different configurations around the world (via Telegraph). He writes, ‘I vomit profusely when I discover that the album has been pressed in Japan with Sandie Shaw’s version of “Hand in Glove” included. I am so disgusted by this that I beg people to kill me.'”

And:

“Morrissey received a letter from Johnny Marr years after The Smiths’ broke up, which he reproduces in the book (via The Daily Beast): ‘I’ve only recently come to realize that you genuinely don’t know all the reasons for my leaving. To get into it would be horrible, but I will say that I honestly hated the sort of people we had become.'”

For more: Consequence Of Sound 

 

Books: Beatles Expert Delivers Vol. 1 Of Epic Bio

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beatles

Beatles authority Mark Lewisohn’s 800-plus page biography of the Fab Four will be published on October 29, 2013. The first volume of a three-volume set ends at 1962, the year the group scored their first UK hit with “Love Me Do.”

According to British music journalist David Hepworth, a self-described Beatles expert, “I can open this book on almost any page and find something I didn’t know, hae never had confirmed or have never realised the full significance of before.”

For more, read Hepworth’s blog post on the book, which is currently reading.

 

Books: ‘100 Works Of Art That Will Define Our Age’

Art, Review, , , ,

art book

 

Expat Kelly Grovier, who contributes to the Times Literary Supplement, has attempted in this book to predict the future — not as risky as it might seem at first, since neither us nor Grovier are likely to be around by the time it’s possible to judge the success or failure of his endeavor.

“We lack the necessary perspective when it comes to judging what it is about our time that is most important or representative culture-wise, for which reason the work of drawing up grand lists – the creation of a canon of the moment – is best left to those who come after,” Rachel Cooke writes in a review published today (Sept. 21, 2013) in The Guardian. “The art world, moreover, moves so fast these days that such a volume will doubtless seem out of date even before it makes it to paperback (the earliest piece included is Marc Quinn’ Self, from 1991; the most recent is  Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds from 2010).”

For the rest of this review head to The Guardian.