The Throwback Special: The Diner Book Review

Soooo…. I like books.  I am somewhat passionate and obnoxious and pretentious about how much I like books.  I really don't even like to talk about books with people who don't really like books.  I will not say “literature” since I believe some of you might have heard or read of the unkind soul who said my shelves look like the “Remainder” section at the Barnes & Noble store.  Very unkind.  Anyway, a friend of my son, whose parents are also friends was kind enough to give me a book for Christmas.  I don't like receiving books.  I like to pick out my own books but this young man writes and teaches English and maybe literature and he dates a lovely woman who is editor of a top notch little literary Journal called “Boulevard”.  You should check it out and subscribe (I have),

http://www.boulevardmagazine.org/

Anyway, he gave me a book and I was reading another book and as my sad regular readers know...it takes me a month to finish a book now whether due to my need for more sleep or my drinking problem or the deteriorating plasticity of my brain.  It just takes a while but out of respect I wanted to read this book because a thoughtful person who reads gave it to me.  It was a finalist for The National Book Award and since my friend Rick Dooling did that (I think) with his great book “White Man’s Grave” I tend to pay attention to that award.

This was a short book (210 pages or so) which I like and I like the writers style.  His name Chris Bachelder (I don't how you pronounce it) and he writes with a nice sparse style.  I don't want to say a Hemingway like style but he uses words with economy to describe things in great detail.  The book's premise is this… a bunch (21 or 22) guys gather at a nameless one star hotel somewhere in a nondescript part of the country to reenact “The Play”.  Now many different people have many things they describe as “The Play” in several different sports.  If you Google it you get a plethora of hits relating to several things which are amazing and interesting to watch but in this case “The Play” was when Lawrence Taylor ended Joe Theismann's career on November 18, 1985… which I remember as my first year in law school.  It was a surreal and grizzly event on Monday night football and if you watch certain replays you can see Theisman’s bones sticking out of his leg from the compound fracture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mznBvAGScdg

In any case these guys get together each year and spend the weekend together, go through a lottery to get their positions (no one can ever be Theismann twice (or I think Lawrence Taylor either) and then suit up, go to a local middle school field and re-enact “The Play”.  I won't go into details about the play but it is historically remembered as a tragically stupid call (a flea flicker) where Theismann hands of to Riggins who then laterals back to Theismann who…. Is destroyed.

Bachelder gives nearly every guy a voice and a roll and they gather for this odd annual event in their lives, catch up with each other and slowly go through the weekend’s rituals.  It can be kind of numbing because the writing is such that you can picture how mundane and uninteresting the whole background is.  99% of the book takes place in the lobby and a few of the bedrooms of the hotel.  Normally they would at least meet in a conference room but that conference room has been commandeered by “Prestige Vista Solutions” for a sales meeting (and you can feel everything that “Prestige Vista SOlutions” means as they occasionally run into the re-enactors and one lucky, lucky guy gets to take part.  For me, the interesting thing is I just finished the book and could not tell you anything about any of the characters other than “Bald Michael” who I think stood out because he was Theismann and because I am bald and Michael.

You might think...uggghhh...you can't remember any of them and the answer is no, I cannot but it isn't because they are boring or uninteresting, it is because they were all so real.  Middle aged men with insecurities, triumphs, challenges, prejudices, failure, marital problems, kid problems… it is just a beautiful book about what it is to be a middle aged man in America and while that sounds less than sexy, the book is so well written and has such occasional moments of poignancy and brilliance that anyone could love it.

The payoff is of course in the last ten pages when they finally take to a rainy field with a handful of people (some from Prestige Vista Solutions) looking on and it is a great payoff, wind up and it turns out to be their last gathering and (I know you won't believe it) but it makes a great commentary on the tragedy and the beauty of the human condition and every day and the complicated lives of basically simple men and the rituals we revel in, hate, despise our self for, and need to organize and order how we view our lives.

“They sat in silence, staring up at the television, the muted anchors.  Each man was indignant.  Beneath the indignation there was an exotic and diverse world of feeling, as dark as an ocean trench.”

That is good shit.  It is a good book and you should read it.  Even if the story does not get you, the writing style and voice is good enough that you should take notice.  The author has a few other books out and I might take notice of those myself.

Bright Precious Days

 

"I try so hard, just to fill your cup.  I try so hard just to fill it up."-Del Fuegos "I Still Want You" (1985)

Soooo...summer reading.  You never know how much you are going to get read.  You never know the quality of what you will get read and you never know how it is going end… until Labor day.  So it was a pretty good summer. Sweetbitter, The Fixers, Nobody's Fool… all had their merits but I ended with Jay Mc Inerney’s “Bright Precious Days”.  

Mc Inerney is like an old annoying friend. ”Bright Lights Big City” and “Ransom” grabbed me 30 years ago and I was fascinated. Here was the new brilliance.  Along with Bret Easton Ellis here were the cool young talents that should carry my generation.  Our Faulkner, our Hemingway, our...disappointment.  Because that is what they kind of ended up as.  Easton Ellis burned out fabulously and literally “shot his wad” with “American Psycho” and Easton Ellis, like an unprofitable John Grisham, just kept writing the same book, with the same cadence and the same “look no hands” writing style.

Mc Inerney is a great writer but his “Bright Lights” tale has been done and following the career of an aging, editor, failed author, book/wine/food snob got really annoying with this book. Every character was deeply and uninterestingly flawed.  Each character was and is relentlessly unfaithful to their spouses, their partners and ultimately themselves and it is all justified because they were the movers and shakers brave enough to go to Manhattan and burn bright, and burn out.  But unfortunately in “Bright Precious Days” some of these people, most of them in fact have now lived to middle age. And that is too bad.

The book is set in a period prior to the “Great Recession” as we like to think of it, and culminates in the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  Russell and Corinne… bright, promising and full of energy and intelligence are exhausted, raising two privileged id sweet kids, whose actual mother is Corrine’s sister.  There are parties and fundraisers filled with drama and betrayal and always booze and sometimes drug.  There is a literary bad boy whose death is telegraphed so painfully that half way through I told my daughter, “there is something sad about seeing a character marked for death halfway into the book,  and then continuing to read about their exploits know it will end poorly for them.”

A strong message of the book...not everyone handles success and money well… and drugs are bad.  About marital infidelity… I would like to say the book is more nuanced but that is too kind to the book.  Cheating on your wife is just something which happens and it is ok and it is ok doing it many times, sometimes in long term relationships, sometimes one and done… but it seems to always be OK.  It seems off putting being at the same age as the characters in the book and taking this as the “lesson” of life.

The book was difficult to complete because none of the characters are likable.  You can root for no one.  They all live in gilded cages of their own making and Mc Inerney cannot resist hitting tonelessly, every trope of NYC literati/money/vacuous bullshit along the way.  I know he writes about wine (although I have not read his wine books) but I really don't need to be bopped on the nose with great labels that they are sucking down...I get it.  I was grateful that apparently no one had invented the Sous Vide method at that time or we would have seen Russell cooking something for a dinner party with it or preparing for one of their annual parties up at their rental in the Hamptons.  I mean, seriously… I love reading The New Yorker but you cannot necessarily write a book for the best seller lists based on living The New Yorker for 30 plus years.  But perhaps that is the point.  The book is written for those who have gone there and lived “the dream” and for those in flyover country who still dream of it.

Once again, we get it, Manhattan is awesome….

And hard…

And it tests you…

And sucks the life out of you….

And is too expensive to be survivable…

But there is no simply no other way a seriously creative person could live their life.  For God’s sake Russell and Corrine met at Brown.

Reading the book as these people stumble through their alternately brilliant and horrible lives the only thing i could think of is that they needed to get to church and reflect a little on their lives.  Even when they are doing good in their charities it tends to be to serve their egos or to fill the vast holes created in the tragedies of their lives.

In the end they pull up from everyone dying in the crash preceding the great recession, but not by much.  Dreams have been reigned in, relationships recalibrated and in the end the book ends up being about the resiliency of imperfect marriages and imperfect people.  I look forward to all of their retirements in south Florida in “The Bright Twilight of Their Days”.  I pray that he doesn't serve up these people living another 20 years.

My Documents: Alejandro Zambra

A Beautifully written, perfect book of longish stories. All connected by nothing other than Chile and a male narrator. I could travel to Chile and in fact hope to, and never will experience the depth of the culture Zambra paints of a beautiful and historically rich culture with a serious politics problem.

He paints beautiful pictures with each story of a place that has confused Orwellian juxtapositions of meaning, without all the other aspects of an obvious police state. Most of these political aspects are background noise related to the fall and return of Pinochet. 11 stories in 5 sections and translated by Megan Mc Dowell.  The narrator is inevitably either a boy or a young man negotiating the complexity of family, school, computers, smoking, sex, soccer migraines, writing and relationships sometimes with a feeling similar to the lead character in the novel "Being There".  His story of a writer quitting smoking made me want to take it up myself. He does the math on the cash outlays for cigarettes in his life and determines that he is the type of person who chose to smoke, rather than to buy a house.

The writing is just... perfect and the lines resonate as do the confused processes of adolescence when one of his characters insists on classifying everything in his life as "true" or "false".  The narrator is at once involved from all the action and removed from it. He creates worlds inside and outside of his characters' heads and allows us to... Fall in.

A great vacation book. I found it on Mc Sweeneys. Always a great filter for the new and the bold. Your welcome.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net

Between The World And Me

I have read the most glorious books so far this year that I am hesitant to keep reading for fear of breaking the streak.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Between the World and Me

My Documents

David Benem Excerpts

All very different and all written by people different than me (other than Benem, who is only bigger than I am and drinks Bud Select in I unfathomable volumes. But all brilliant.

I love to travel because it opens my eyes to the beauty and suffering in the world and helps me appreciate my easy (albeit hectic) life. But reading is almost better because writers can take us to places with depth and forethought that my scattershot "travels" often lack. I can observe the poverty of the Deep South but I cannot experience the lack of opportunity for someone born there without reading about it from someone who has lived it. I can visit Ferguson but not experience the loss of a mother who invested he love and 18 years of time and treasure in a son, only to see this asset gunned down and gone forever. But writing takes you there.  

The book "Between The World and Me" is Coates letter to his son. Toni Morrison called it "required reading" and while initially suspicious, I can only echo that sentiment. Coates refers to people like me (and probably you) as "dreamers" who have had an entire reality system constructed around us to keep us from waking up and having to confront the the obvious truth and ugliness of what we have created and profited from. He derides me for my obliviousness and pushes me, but not to action. He makes very clear that what has been done by our country in regard to the black race cannot be "fixed”, at least not quickly and by half measures.  Instead he shoves me to thought and conversation, intolerant of denial and remaining in the comfortable sleep of a dreamer.

He starts the letter when his 15 year old son retires to his room to be alone after hearing that the killer of Michael Brown will not be charged… with anything.

To begin,  he outlines his own life to his son, negotiating violence in his home, in his school and on the street. Never having the luxury of being asleep but always awake to the possibilities of harm should he ever not be alert, afraid, paying attention. To always be awake to the taking of his body and the bodies of others.  Then he recounts how he went to Howard University (the Mecca) and first experienced the depth of black culture and community. How he had to be awoken from that by a fellow student, unarmed and gunned down outside of his suburban home by an undercover police officer.

He displays the lessons for his son not to call his son to anger and violence but to incite awareness and understanding that he will not, cannot and should not ever be a dreamer but by the necessities of our societies plunder of his race and his body must instead be vigilant, and appreciative and also... most importantly to find joy.

This is a humbling letter and many of us don't want to read it but we should. We cannot "fix" our nations history of enslavement, rape, and systemic, organized, relentless exploitation and marginalizing of black people in America. We can seek to understand it amd discuss it and OWN it.

It is a sad book to have to write to ones own son. But it is a beautiful picture of a father urging a son, his son, his joy, towards a life of understanding, meaning and appreciation of his own beauty and the beauty of an ugly, broken sinful world.

Not for the squeamish but an important book never the less.  To read it is to be humbled and perhaps to be called to greater understanding, a non-dismissive understanding iof what it is like to e called “equal” and yet find over and over again that you are “other”.

Book Review: Said Sayrafiezadeh: "Brief Encounters With The Enemy"

Soooooo…...we are taking a brief break from “The Irish Blatherings” for a standard Diner Review, Book Review.  I am reading more books this year in an effort to be a better person.  I mean, you got to try something, right?  Anyway… I really like a good short story.  But frankly, the New Yorker prints a good one every week and a great one about once a month and I cannot keep up with those so it is rare that I buy a collection of short stories.  This one popped up in a nice review in The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/books/review/said-sayrafiezadehs-brief-encounters-with-the-enemy.html?_r=0

Like it or not, the times still has the best consistent book coverage.  Everything Amazon does is by algorithm now and I really like a good book review.  Anyway, I bought it and it sat on my shelf but in my new, reading disciplined mode I finally go to it and I was pleased to do so.  While writing this I am slightly distracted as my Billikens are down by 7 with 8 minutes left against Duquesne.  They keep turning the ball over… now down 9.  But I digress.

This was a really good book.  It is a series of 8 short stories, all from the perspective of 20 something males.  They are all in urban or suburban environments in a country…

Preparing for war,

At War,

Post War.

A country where it is unnaturally cold in the summer and unnaturally hot in the winter and unnaturally hot in the summer.

Where even in the midst of war on the other side of the world… there appear to be no great jobs, even as factories reopen.

A country where everyone “supports our troops” and flies the flag… though no one appears certain about where the battle is or what it is for.

The men are struggling to find their place and they all run into old associates from high school and there is much comparing of notes and taking stock.  There are frustrated relationships and undercurrents of possible violence but… every story is so tightly written that they all seem kind of like page turners with you wondering what is going to happen next.

This guy… this Said Sayrafiezadeh (there is an umlaut in the first name...over the i, I think.  Why would I read a book by this guy?  because he has an unstoppable control of the language and excellent timing and pacing in his stories… which tend be sedentary… but…(hard to explain)...beautiful.  I would like to say the stories are about winners and losers but it is more a series which instead of being about winners and losers, is about people who are barely holding on...and losers.
Spend the money and get out and buy this one.  He teaches in New York and I think he is going to write a lot of good things.  I will go pick up his first book “When Skateboards Will Be Free” and I will report.

Book Review: Hyperbole and a Half

Soooo...A lot of people are depressed.  A lot of people have stupid dogs.  A lot of people cannot draw.  But not a lot of people are depressed, with stupid dogs, cannot draw AND ARE FUNNY.  Allie Bosch is funny.  Scary, poignant, funny. Think of this book as a “Where The Wild Things Are” for adults.  And it turns out all the really scary shit is in your head.

I think I got turned onto this through Terry Groos and her NPR fanzine “Fresh Air”.  That is probably unfair to Terry and the show but I do respect that on her show, at every break (and there are at least 5 of them in one of her typical hourly shows will say something like:

“I am here with Allie Bosch, author of the blog “Hyperbole and a Half” which has just been released in paperback”.

Terry really shills for her guests.  I don’t know, maybe it’s nice.  In any case Terry Gross bats about .400 in putting on interesting people and a .400 average will (I am told) keep you in the majors for quite a while.  Anyway, Bosch started her blog while mired in depression and the things she writes about it are true, and frightening and if damaged enough, funny.  Most of the drawings have her in them.  I learned from Gross’ show that the yellow thing on her head was her attempt to draw a pony tail.

Anyway, crude drawing of her, her dogs, her mom and occasionally objects.  The art adds to the damaged quality of the prose but her narration of her plight, or her dogs plight, or her mothers mental illness are all spot on and leave simple people like me humbled both by the writings quality, it’s honesty and it’s humor.  I mean, if you cannot laugh about severe and clinical depression, what can you laugh about?

This is a book to put by your toilet.  Easily chopped up chapters time out excellently for the task you are poerfomring there.  Sometimes it is good to read a really easy book with a lot of pictures but this book made me laugh out loud at least a dozen times and… I need that.  Buy this book, give it to a friend, but not if it is the copy you kept by the toilet.

Peace, and your welcome.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com

Diner Book Review of "The Circle" by Dave Eggers

Soooo...Dave Eggers has been writing some of the better modern American prose for several years along with running his brilliant literary site Mc Sweeneys. This from Wikipedia:

Nonfiction

• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)
• Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers (co-authored with Daniel Moulthrop and Nínive Clements Calegari) (2005)
• Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated (co-compiled with Lola Vollen; with an introduction by Scott Turow) (2005)
• Zeitoun (2009)
• Visitants (2014)

Fiction

• You Shall Know Our Velocity (novel) (2002)
• Sacrament (revised and expanded version of You Shall Know Our Velocity) (2003)
• The Unforbidden is Compulsory; or, Optimism (novella) (2004)
• How We Are Hungry (short stories) (2004)
• Short Short Stories (short stories, part of the Pocket Penguin series) (2005)
• What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (novel) (2006)
• How the Water Feels to the Fishes (short stories; part of One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box) (2007)
• The Wild Things – novel inspired by Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
• A Hologram for the King (2012)
• The Circle (2013)

So lets call him “prolific”. I have always liked his stuff but he seems to write so elegantly that it sometimes seems to easy that it has the dreaded “look no hands” quality.  From the above I could whole heartedly recomend “Zeitoun”, his take on “The Wild Things”, “You Shgall Know Our Velocity” and “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”. His newest book, “The Circle” is a gem and extremely topical in the Google/Snowden/NSA world that we seem to live in now.  

The books narrator and main character is a young women who leaves college, works a little bit with her liberal arts degree at a local water company and lives with her parents who have health problems in her old home town.  But she gets hold of her best friend who is on the rise at “The Circle” which seems to be a thinly disguised substitute for Google (“Don’t Be Evil”).

She arrives on their campus and takes her entry level job but is soon swept up in the culture and the relentless nature of her job.  Clearly jobs at The Circle become much more like a life or a religion.  It is all in a veneer of “goodness”.  The greater good.  The good of the community.  Your own good.

But outliers become apparent even as The Circle extends health care to her ailing father and promotes her and entertains her.  The one thing never mentioned is actual compensation but that definitely seems secondary. A few men enter the picture.  her old boyfriend and two new love interests within The Circle, one of whom is very mysterious and might be a spy..for someone.  The Circle is relentlessly developing new products for the greater good.  Cheap, high resolution blue tooth cameras with audio for one and wrist monitors which monitor your vitals so you can track them and ultimately a plan to implant chips in all children so they will never be “lost”.  Soon there is a quest for everyone, espcially politicians to be “transparent” and have cameras on them all the time so that we, the public can know there are no backroom deals.  When our heroine has a minor abherant incidient with a kayak she comes to Jesus and becomes a transparency experiment and immediately has millions of people following her every word and actvity other than in the bathroom.  “Privacy is theft” and other concepts are introduced and adopted in a creepily believable way.

The Circle also among it’s many products develops a micro submarine allowing them to recover sea creatures from the Marianas Trench which they bring back to their own aquarium and it serves as a brilliant metaphor as novel develops with a particularly sinister shark.  The Circle moves towards its ultimate goal of “completion” wherein we are all connected for our own good and for the good of the community with the final act making it mandatory for all citizens of the US to have Circle accounts so that they can participate in mandatory voting for the ultimate participatory democracy.

He weaves and excellent but obviously evil spell and as the book itself moves towards “completion” there is a chance that are narrator could come to the rescue and… you really should read it.  Dystopia does not just happen, it starts with us voluntarily giving up freedoms for covenience.  A slippery slope indeed and Eggers really did a nice job here.  Buy it.

We Are Coming To The End: The Book Of Drugs/Mike Doughty

Soooo... I love it when I can get a bunch of thoughts swimming and swirling in my head all at once.  I am up in beautiful Michigan (and if you have never done Michigan in summer I feel sad for you).  It is "vacation" which means I am away from work which means I think about work at a low hum in my head all day long which after the first day becomes a drum beat.  My client problems, how I can clean up my paperwork, how I can do what I do better, my client problems, research I need to do, how to do more pro bono, my client problems... on and on.  I also have the specter of vacation.  We go to this town called Arcadia and we have a house and there is a Lutheran Family Camp there and between the house and camp we have a constant parade of friends and family which is...nice and that vacation is thumping along like a bass line with the buzz of the work thing and then... we go to "Program" at the camp.  They bring in these speakers each week and they talk for an hour and a half each morning about God, life, the Bible, ministry, beauty, truth, how to live your life and that is this nice melodic keyboard... against the work... against the vacation and then if I am reading something good, if I happened to bring a good book to read and not just a throw away Jonathan Grisham book.  This week I am reading Mike Doughty's "The Book of Drugs" and it is great for someone like me (an asshole) who really likes indie music and stories about damaged people and redemption and that is like a fine guitar line going through all the rest... and it 70 and sunny with a breeze and I am laying on a couch typing and thinking about the death of this blog and the start of my new project and work, and family and vacation and god and art and nature and how absurdly kind God has been to me and my family and...well, I just love it when I get a bunch of thoughts swimming and swirling in my head.


Soooo... this Mike Doughty book.  He was the singer, songwriter, guitarist front man of a band called "Soul Coughing".  They were an indie rock band of some acclaim back in the day.  All of my music snob friends recommended them to me and I bought all three albums.  Hated them.  It was not music I could pigeon hole and had sampling and "beats" and for God's sake he was WHITE!. 

He describes his drug life as he grows up and becomes a musician and has some success and tours and eventually, as they all do, discovers heroin. Sadly it did not kill him or he might have been huge.  Seriously, it is a really good book.  He is clearly and fairly unrepentantly a huge ass.  He speaks of his band mates in ways my friends don't speak of their first ex wife.  They seriously sound like awful people who were getting noticed on his back and taking credit for making something of him.  The sound like pricks.  But nearly everyone in the book sounds like a prick. He clearly was going through life as the worst kind of smug, talented, insecure tool and the most striking thing about the parade displayed in the book is that it is a parade.  No one stays.  He is too much.

Before I read this book I had already become a fan of his solo work.  Brilliant, edgy singer songwriter with good guitar chops a great sense of melody.  I strongly recommend it.  Anyway, it is a very good read and a story really of the grace of God, bravery, luck and redemption and ultimately, and very unlikely, a source of hope.  And it is well written.  Buy it.

So that having been said, The Diner Review is in it's death throes. I would like someone to edit it, throw out the shit (of which there is a great deal) keep the diner reviews and keep the better (more readable) pieces and edit the shit out of them and then I would like to let it stand.  If edited it is not the worst body of work.  I am willing to pay for this service and if interested please email me at mab@mabeckerlaw.com.  I will not pay a lot but for someone who has a reasonable facility with grammar and the language (sadly I do not) it should not be that big a project and it is worth a couple hundred to me at least.  If you have an unemployed college graduate at home it might be perfect.

I will be rolling out my new project in the next few weeks if not sooner.  I am going to try and keep it smaller in scope and it is much more of a focused effort.  I might need to do two new blogs.  One for all the background noise in my head and one for this new jag.  It will be no surprise to most of my compatriots and I have touched on here as of late.  It is my hope that my next post in these pages will be my last.  On to more swimming and swirling.

"Waging heavy Peace" The STL Diner Book Review

Sooo...I think Neil Young is kind of a God.  This is reasonably well documented in these pages.  If not a God, than a demi god at worst.  Neil... burst onto my conscious self with the seminal “Rust Never Sleeps”.  It was 1979 and I was a senior in high school.  I had been dismissive of Neil because my sisters boyfriend, then her husband, had taken her to see his concert in 72 or 73 and it was right after “Harvest” and “After the Goldrush” and everyone was expecting a nice melodic show of hits.  But Neil was suffering from the deaths of friends Danny Whitten (original Crazy Horse Guitarist) and Bruce Berry (Roadie) and he was in a dark place.  He was out with Nils Lofgren and he took them all to Miami Beach in angry booze soaked, short shows where he was famous for yelling at the crowd “WAKE UP”.  I had read about it a few years before in a great Cameron Crowe article in Rolling Stone which I read (then) like other people read their text books.  Neil was very deep and soulful and interesting but, he had not grabbed me... until “Rust Never Sleeps”.

The album (yes kids, there were things called albums) moved me hard and fast and it moved me right in time to go away to college.  I had been a singer, songwriter geek in high school.  It was fine for being sensitive and trying to be a particular type of poser.  Jackson Browne, Dan Fogelberg..blah, blah, blah.  Neil was that as well.  Harvest was about as singer, songwritery as anyone could be but Neil also had an edge.  An electric guitar which he tore up and which, just as importantly every guitar playing friend I had ever known was tremendously dismissive of his style.  He was an anti-hero, an iconoclast.  There was not a trace of disco, it was all Neil and when he sand, “My, my, hey, hey”... whether it was out of the blue, or into the black, it was the real thing.  That caused me to go back an explore the portfolio.  Decade was a primer but eventually you needed all of his albums.  He reinvented himself... a lot.  He put out some tremendous crap but was always following the muse and he became an integral “godfather” of grunge and inspired much of the ethos and lets face it...grunge was awesome.

So I read articles and interviews (the Cameron Crowe Interview referenced above really is tremendously interesting and well written) and somewhat essential though in reading his new book, he seemed to lie a lot, especially about the drugs.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-rebellious-neil-young-cameron-crowes-1975-rolling-stone-interview-20110601

I have read several biographies of Young including “Shakey” by Jimmy Mc Donnough and “Neil Young” by Steve Simmins.  I think “Shakey” was an authorized biography.  Personally I would have been happier to have Crowe do it but my guess is he that he is too busy with other projects and that Neil might have just told him other lies this time.

So now we get Neil in Neil’s voice and the one thing I would like to assure you is that there is no ghost writer for this Autobiography.  If there is I would like to meet him and I would like to find out where he too grade school composition and burn down the school.  I love Neil Young.  I love his songs.  I would say he is a “brilliant” pop songwriter who has compiled a body of work that puts him in the top 5 for lifetime achievement in rock.  Dylan is of course Dylan but then there is Neil and then maybe Elvis Costello and then... I don't know.  But for all those great songs, the man cannot write worth shit.  His paragraphs amble around and he repeats himself incessantly throughout the book and as I said he just cannot write.  A typical paragraph will describe an incident with... Ben Keith, the awesome Nashville pedal steel guitarist that held up all Neils epic country work with the session band he put together for Neil called “The Stray Gators”.  About Keith he would recite a road trip and then end the section, and the paragraph with something like the following.  Ben Keith was one of a kind.  That guy really moved me.  He was a righteous dude.  I really miss him.  I seriously do.  You can only read so many things like that about people.  I acknowledge that he has met and is likely friends with everyone but get an editor!

The book clocks in at 500 pages but it reads more like 300.  There are a lot of chapters with blank pages between and there are a lot of cool pics from over the years.  His relationship with his wife Pegi is sweet and says a lot about getting let you get old enough and mature enough to handle a real relationship and his passion for his kids and especially his son Ben is heartbreaking and beautiful  That is really one of the hallmarks of the book is how Ben’s conditions changed Neils life and viewpoint and art.  

His passions run through the book though.  Neil is a sound Nazi.  A hater of the CD format (I remember he was one of those guys drawing green lines on their CD’s to improve sound) to the much reviled MP3 format that we all enjoy now.  Apparently it sucks.  According to Neil you get like 16% of the spectrum on an MP3.  he has been working on something he called PureTone to bring better sound to our listening devices but has run into an obstacle with Apple.  That is where the title comes from when he explains that he was asked if he was waging war with Apple and he replied, “More like waging heavy peace”.  He does know how to turn a phrase.  

He talks about hi “Geffen Years” and he talks about his producers and managers and backup musicians and of course he talks about Crazy Horse.  he loves the Horse in both of it’s incarnations with Danny Whitten early and Frank “Pancho” Sanpedro later.  it is amazing how many  people have sang with and backed Neil from James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to Eddy Vedder.  It is quite a resume’.   He speaks of the early days in Canada with the Squires and takes us through Buffalo Springfield, Solo, CSNY, Crazy Horse, Stray Gators, Solo, Nils Lofgren, Solo, CSNY... it seems to never stop but it hammers home how long the guy has been brilliant and sought after.

He loves cars and the legendary story about driving down illegally from Canada in an old hearse is a classic but shit, he names more cars than he names bands.  He did not spend a lot of time on his Lionel debacle or the model trains and for that I was grateful but you can say one thing for sure, the man has passions.  As I said in the 75 and 79 interviews he was pretty categorical that he did not use drugs.  Kind of obnoxious about it (thing Lance Armstron and Roger Clemens) but that is all out the windows here.  It is also clear he settled on weed as his drug of choice and used pretty religiously until recently.  He is now trying to write songs without it and the results of that remain to be seen.

While this is a book for fans it is also a book for the pop music historian.  Neil has been on the scene for almost all of it and took us from “Sugar Mountain” to “Rockin in the Free World, and in between he might of slopped a few chords but he has never missed a beat.  Generally I feel about old rockers like I do about old athletes.  Why don't you just retire with some grace and class.  but with Young, I am happy that he is still thrashing around.  “It is better to burn out, than it is to rust.”  True dat.