Pages tagged “issue 11”

I’m fried. That’s what Bonnaroo does to you. It’s like a huge Tennessee deep fryer. It immerses you in a massive vat of sizzling hot music for three days and you come out the other side extra crispy. How else do you explain the madness? You could try to extract some sense of logic from the numbers (3 days, 80 bands, 90,000 people, 700 acres, 7 stages, 1 million pounds of ice, over 6,500,000 watts of electrical power, three scattered hours of torrential thunder and lightning sprinkled with a couple of hail and tornado warnings), but like any good mind blowing, logic is useless. However, here are the tender deep-fried, greasy, morsels that encapsulate the spirit of such a blessed event as ingested by one overfed attendant.

• Randomly finding an old college buddy’s drivers license on a hotel lobby floor and then running into him 10 minutes later amidst 90k people after not having seen him in eons.

• A twisted Abbott and Costello routine being played out in a Lewis Carrol-designed theme park, as we navigate around the What Stage, the Which Stage, past This Tent and That Tent and the Other tent to see Papa Mail at Another tent.

• Watching Black Keys drummer (and Hanson Brothers doppelganger) Patrick Carney beat and whip his snare with the wingspan of a turkey buzzard while wearing a shirt that reads “Keep Your Emotions in Motion.”

• Seeing Wilco—in all their jean-jacket coolness—crank, twist, jolt and spank out a “War on War” that has a sober Tweedy playing over his head, literally. Jaws clank off the aluminum bleachers with a resounding din.

• Chris Robinson serenading the merciful sunset with a gut-ripping and salacious send up of “Ride,” while the audience convulses and contorts like a bunch of boneless chickens in a swirling sauna of backstage “dry-ice” smoke.

• Dylan challenging Madonna as the champ of revamp. Ditching the pencil-thin mustache, swingin’cowboy, bow-legged crooner from the carnival circuit for Mr. Piano Man on cough syrup, which of course bows to his enigmatic, contemptuous, impervious, poetic, sardonic and (at times) insufferable mystique. I miss the troubadour in the neo-Nudie suits already.

• Gillian Welch and David Rawlings pining for beautifully poor souls, like a lost Steinbeck book on tape.

• Watching a new friend weep openly at the poignancy and validity of Dave Matthews’ and Trey’s Anastasio’s acoustic version of “Waste,” just before most of the 90,000 people start softly clapping and humming to “Bathtub Gin” with intimate fervor, Trey gently rapping his guitar with a single knuckle, like a massive sing-along where no one wants to wake the baby.

(Photo at top right: Phish frontman Trey Anastasio condcuts a 40-piece orchestra through one of his self-composed fugues at Bonnaroo)

• Tim Reynolds releasing the parking brake on Sly and The Family Stone’s “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” savagely accosting his guitar by biting it, slapping it and twisting the tuning pegs until his amp seemingly gives birth to the Death Star. He delivers last rites by ripping off his shirt, throwing it over his convulsing guitar and leaving us and the band to wallow in the waves of screech owl feedback bleeding into our ears like the Emergency Broadcast System on steroids. No one moves; no one knows if it’s music or if it should simply be put out of its misery. Bravely, the band rides it out and the bad joke comes around again, but this time it’s dirty. Tony Hall bobs and weaves through its nastiness. Anastasio stands over drummer Brady Blade as both play the same drum kit, like some Hindu deity with countless appendages. Matthews dances as if being attacked by a tickling swarm of millipedes; pure joistless frothing as the bolts on the hinges slowly turn lefty-loosey.

• Waking up in a 120-degree tent at 8:00 a.m. the next morning , downing three quarts of water and a stack of blissful blueberry pancakes.

• Having a private acoustic show from My Morning Jacket’s Jim James in the press tent where you can actually see he’s human and not Cousin It from The Adam’s Family.

• Gomez, Mindy Smith, Grandaddy, Gov’t Mule and Del McCoury overlapping, leaving me wanting to speak with the manger of this establishment.

• My Morning Jacket preaching high on the mountaintop, conjuring up the souls of Duane, SRV and Ronnie Van Zant, complete with rolling thunderheads, lightening balls and tornado warnings.

• Warren Hayes encoring with Prince’s “When Doves Cry.”

• Chris Robinson mourning the death of Ray Charles in the food line, “It should be a catalyst to start recognizing Great American Musicians in their lifetime, before they’re gone.”

• Doc Watson telling everyone to “Keep it quiet or I’m out of here.”

• Watching riggers scale the monolithic What Stage, relieving the roof of the remnants of a two-hour rain delay, which fall in 60-gallon bursts on the patiently waiting people in the front row.

• All the people in the front row laughing.

• Steve Winwood playing bass for his entire set with his left foot.

• A soaking sea of people chanting “Rain or Shine” as sheets of spitting precipitation lash out. The PA answers them by blasting The Beatles—“Come Together, right now …”—and then kills the volume so the audience can answer… “OVER ME!”

• Jigging onstage, arm-in-arm with cyber genius, cattle rancher, Grateful Dead lyricist and Cognitive Dissident John Barlow as the Dead unleash the soundtrack for this bewitching primordial hootenanny.

• The Master of Ceremonies of the Mardi Gras parade—complete with beads, buskers and belly dancers—is the real American Idol, William Hung, in the flesh, belting out Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs” on a monstrous Mr. T float at the stroke of midnight.

• Triangulating myself to clearly hear Primus, Ween and Robert Randolph playing simultaneously on different stages depending on which way I cup my ears.

• Sunday with Taj Mahal after a long Saturday night.

• Robert Randolph and the boys from moe. glued to David Byrne singing a song in Italian, then in Spanish, before breaking into the “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody).” Goosebumps and throat lumps abound.

• Trey Anastasio conducting a 40-person orchestra through a self-composed fugue and ripping “Devil Went Down To Georgia” (both within an hour of each other—both for the first time, both in front of 90,000 deep fried, tender, crispy, happy people).

• Having the good fortune of interviewing, Los Lobos, Gomez, My Morning Jacket, Guster and Kings of Leon, but getting the best interview from Laurel Brown, a10-year-old from Knoxville, Tenn. “I saw reggae—not Britney Spears but Burning Spears—and on the stage their music would come up through my feet and shake my whole body.” Amen.

But the one defining moment was sharing a beer with the baritone sax player from Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra as he offered, “everyone is music; we all listening carefully and dancing wisely, for music can break the chains of violence and bad hatred.” Thirty seconds later Femi Kuti’s baritone sax player comes over with wet eyes and shows us his sax, which has been severely damaged during its trip from Africa. With a few hand gestures and no interpretable words spoken between them, the man from Japan handed the one working baritone sax at the entire festival over to the African with a shy smile. Ten minutes later we stand on the side of the stage watching Femi’s horn section rip a hole in the sky. “You see my friend?” Fully converted, I nod bewildered.

Digesting the weekend I realize Bonnaroo is simply music with heart, soul and foresight—with some mud wrestling thrown in for good measure.

It amazes me that I still have the J.J. Cale conversation. You know, the one that occurs after the neophyte says they’ve never heard of him and as soon as you mention “After Midnight,” “Cocaine,” “Travelin’ Light,” “Call Me The Breeze” and “Magnolia,” their eyes focus and they say, “I thought those were Clapton/Widespread Panic/Lynyrd Skynyrd/The Band/Santana/Bryan Ferry tunes.” While the constant edification annoys those in the know, it’s been a blessing to the man himself. As he explains when mourning the passing of his friend Johnny Cash, a man who also covered Cale, “Johnny, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Sun Records, that was the high point for music, but by the end, Johnny became more famous for being Johnny, and I never wanted that burden.”

This aversion to fame has been a constant with Cale. After “Crazy Mama” went big on the charts he found himself opening for Traffic on a nationwide tour at the height of the band’s popularity. On his off days he flew all the way back to Tulsa to keep himself centered. It’s no wonder, then, that Cale’s latest is titled, To Tulsa and Back, for he’s once again returned home to find his muse. Eight years since his last studio album, the record is a tumbleweed trek from his present stoop on the water-starved outskirts of the California desert to his Oklahoma birthplace. While the album was recorded in Tulsa with a revolving group of old friends, his new song “Stone River” centers on the arid nature of his new environs and for the first time he uses his mic as a bully pulpit for environmental change. “Water is scarcer than oil out here,” Cale says, “and with the way things are going down, all the rivers are drying up. Tempers start to flare when the water goes.”

His concern with the human state continues in a locomotive shuffle called “The Problem,” a not-so-subtle wake-up call to the “man in charge.” As it says in the song, “The man in charge has got to go, / ’cause he dances around the problem, boy, / and the problem is the man in charge, you know.”

When asked about his newer subject matter Cale offers, “You write what you know, and all my early albums were about love, sex, cars and a lot of songs about drugs. That’s what I knew as a 30-year-old man, but hell, I’m 65 now. I try not to preach, but this is what I know about in my old age. But I still like to write songs about women, too. You know I like that song by Juvenile, ‘Back That Azz Up’; Great production.”

It’s clear Cale is not one to rush things, but he also believes you can’t dwell on trying to make something perfect or else you lose the scent. As a producer, he’s like a molting coydog, tame enough to shed his tough demeanor while sunning on the porch, but still half wild. This is clearly epitomized by his trademark loping guitar leads, behind-the-beat hang-jaw drawl, and his one-or-two-take philosophy when it comes to recording. When I chide him about his feeling long in the tooth, he quickly counters, “I did my share of young livin’, but at one point you have to slow up and join the spit and whittle club, so you can keep playin’ and hangin’ with the band.”

To prove the point, Cale now finds himself on a worldwide tour, including a stop at Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas where he shared the stage with the likes of B.B. King, Jimmie Vaughn, Roger Cray, Buddy Guy, Robert Randolph and Mr. Slowhand himself. Finally, when asked if he’s still happy being J.J. Cale, he mutters, “My music may be laid back, but after 40 years in the business, if I’m not playing a guitar watching the sun go down… I feel frayed, itchy and a bit ornery. But my ideal day is still being alive.” With that another edifying J.J. Cale conversation comes to an end.

“I seem incapable of writing a story in which people do not babble philosophically,” the late John Gardner once joked. But it’s his characters’ need to understand that gives them their vitality. From fat, nerdy Henry Soames ruminating about mortality in the back of his rural truck stop (Nickel Mountain) to James Page issuing polemics in his kitchen (October Light), Gardner was uniquely skilled in creating rich mental lives for non-intellectual characters. But even his subtlest backyard metaphysicians would have trouble explaining how Gardner’s wondrous, variegated body of work has fallen out of print since his death in 1983.

The eclipse of Gardner’s reputation is inexplicable, just the kind of absurdity with which he wrestled mightily in novel after novel. How, Gardner often wondered, do we affirm value and goodness in a universe that seems at least partially disordered—where entropy and decay, not virtue and craft, apparently have the last word? These questions are central to The Sunlight Dialogues, Gardner’s masterpiece, in which a decent, by-the-book cop must confront the enigmatic Sunlight Man, a wizard whose anarchic philosophy and acts of violence embody the Void—the seeming irrationality of existence. Fred Clumly, with the help of his wife, Esther, must overreach the limits of his law-and-order belief system, imagining and even empathizing with the Sunlight Man’s mental world in order to defeat him.

The novel is typical of Gardner’s works for its clear, musical sentences, its compelling cast of characters, and its mixture of conventional realism with a tinge of the supernatural, as well as a penchant for caricature borrowed from Dickens. It’s typical, most of all, in its depiction of what critic George Gaudette calls Gardner’s “moral artists,” characters who through creativity and imagination learn to accept the jarring realities—like social upheaval and death—that seem to undermine life’s structure. In John Gardner: Literary Outlaw (Algonquin), Barry Silesky attempts to be such a moral artist, rescuing Gardner’s reputation from oblivion and injecting some justice into the world of letters. Does it work? Not entirely. Silesky provides a rough sketch of Gardner’s life—his accidental killing of his younger brother at age 12, his tempestuous marriages and literary success, his drinking habits and fights with other writers. But the biographer barely allows the novelist himself to speak, and nowhere explains how a man so obviously imbalanced wrote novels of such luminous sanity.

But the attempt, imperfect as it is, remains commendable. Something of Gardner’s personal energy and ethical vision comes through—his wish for all of us to become moral artists, comprehending the incomprehensible through empathy and imagination.

Finishing the book, I recalled Clumly’s speech at the end of The Sunlight Dialogues, when his encounter with anarchy in the person of the Sunlight Man has clearly shaken even his most rooted beliefs: “Blessed are the meek, by which I mean all of us, including the Sunlight Man.” There is silence, then thunderous applause, which Gardner describes as “bearing him up like music or like a storm of pigeons … The Mayor was there at his side, surging upward … And Clumly, in a pitch of seasickness, caught him in his arms and said ‘Correct!’ and then more wildly, shocked to wisdom, he cried, ‘Correct!’”

Collecting tales of skateparks, underground movements, memoirs, poems and more, Life and Limb presents various writings about and by skateboarders. Some pieces focus on skating, while others simply sketch life from the perspective of inveterate skaters. The best offerings, like Jeff Parker’s “Ovenman,” Michael Burnett’s “Get Radical,” and Justin Hocking’s “Whaling,” reveal skaters struggling with an anomie that seemingly characterizes skateboarding: the subtle awareness of a life purpose mislaid or traded away for the pleasures of grinding rail. Or, sometimes, the sense that others perceive one’s purpose as having been missed. As unsettled and uncertain as Holden Caulfield on wheels, they nevertheless cling with fatalistic tenacity to this thing—not a sport, not merely an activity—they love. It’s no accident that Hocking’s character compares himself to Ahab.

Though I wish I could identify with these guys, unfortunately my brief tenure on wheels was spent posing: I was a terrible skater. But while I couldn’t ollie over a termite, I was into skate culture as hardcore as a $5/week allowance allowed. I spent every cent on cool stickers, putting them in exactly the right place on my deck, meticulously arranging my grip tape design, choosing my slide rails to color-coordinate with my trucks.

What a dork, right? But one lesson of Life and Limb is that skating is full of unapologetic dorks. And two of them wrote a book about possibly the dorkiest skater activity of all: collecting skateboard stickers. That is, Mark Munson and Steve Cardwell decided to make a coffee-table book about stickers that go on skate decks (which are, of course, not allowed near Mom’s coffee table). That book is titled—wait for it—Skateboard Stickers. Mostly devoted to full-color prints of selected stickers, it contains interpolated vignettes about the history of skate stickers and the famous skaters who love them. The sticker phenomenon is variously characterized as cultural statement, as vehicle for political action, as a means of self-expression, and as obligatory product placement.

If you ever skated or have even a grudging liking for the culture, you’ll recognize at least some of the designs—probably not all, because skateboard stickers have always been adhesive ephemera. But this book can quickly transport you—I stopped cold when I saw Jim Phillips’ Rob Roskopp glaring-eye sticker, much like my 13-year-old self in the skate shop. The VCJ artwork from the halcyon days of Powell-Peralta is here, as are stickers for old-school skaters like Mark Gonzales and Christian Hosoi. I wanted to tear pages out of the book and pin them to the wall.

The demands of domesticity will keep me from redecorating the house with Santa Cruz ‘Screaming Hand and Slimeballs, but at least I now have a respectable alternative. I can reminisce about the good old days of shredding, live vicariously through the stories in Life and Limb, and thumb through Skateboard Stickers while sipping my latte. Yeah, I know. Poser.

Since Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s movie The Son played in theaters last year, I’ve thought about it more than any other movie in recent memory, which seems appropriate for a work relying so heavily on the viewer’s imagination.

Much of the film’s magic is in how its story unfolds, so the less said about the plot, the better. It starts simply. A man named Olivier teaches carpentry to teenage boys. He examines their work. He demonstrates proper technique. He’s quiet and meticulous. Maybe this is a training program for kids who’ve had some trouble in their lives, but the Dardennes are far too subtle to spell that out. Instead they follow Olivier as he helps the boys measure, cut, and hammer. The camera goes where he goes and sees what he sees.

One boy in particular draws his attention. The boy has just arrived at the school, but Olivier seems to know him or know who he is, and he seems unsure about what to do when the boy wants to join his carpentry class. As the story develops, without knowing exactly why, I began to fear violence. Olivier watches the boy with a curious stare that’s hard to read, and the workshop is filled with tools and heavy machines, a potentially disastrous place to be if something ugly lurks.

And that’s one of the keys to The Son’s power: it harnesses our own understanding—and fear—of human nature. An astounding number of movies, especially Hollywood movies, are driven by a mindless and unquestioned thirst for vengeance, but The Son looks squarely in the face of that thirst by observing complex human beings. It’s a clear-eyed style of filmmaking reminiscent of Kieslowski’s Decalogue or de Sica’s neo-realist classic The Bicycle Thief, movies that adopt a raw, bare-bones aesthetic to capture the difficult morality of everyday life, where people must submit not only to the consequences of their actions but sometimes to cruel coincidence as well.

In The Son, the boy and his teacher have histories that they bring with them to this point, but rather than explain all of that, the film merely observes what they’re doing now, plunging into what feels like a very real world, knowing these people are today the sum of all of their days. In a characteristic scene, the boy finds pleasure in measuring parking spaces with his new ruler while admiring Olivier’s ability to eyeball distances with remarkable accuracy. In another scene, a quick shot of the boy clutching his head after nearly causing an accident on a ladder says more about his mental state than 10,000 words on the subject. Simple scenes like these leave an after-image in the mind even while the movie is still going, hanging over the remainder like a canopy of leaves that layer on top of one another, giving detail to an initially barren picture. The blurry past slowly comes into focus, and yet the future remains unknown and has as much chance of being heartbreaking as it does triumphant.

The poorly illustrated Damon Gaugh has proven himself a masterful arranger on each of his past three records, deftly weaving vignettes, tangents, instrumental interludes and miniature movements into the space of three-to-five-minute pop songs. His fourth release—a much sparer, acoustic creation—is no less carefully arranged. Nearly all of the 16 songs on One Plus One Is One feature ADD-accomodating instrumental and dynamic shifts. Children’s choirs, café chatter, hand claps, ticking clocks and ambient noise liven the mix and dispel the feeling of gimmickry. The instrumentation is often so subtle as the muted banjo running through “Logic of a Friend” or the soft accordion buried in the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot-ish outro of the album’s closer, “Holy Grail.” Less subtle is the shrill, ubiquitous flute contribution on several tracks, possibly inspired by the over-the-top prog rock leanings of “Summertime in Wintertime.” Still, for a collection of heartfelt, affirming and coolly optimistic songs, the intricate production is usually careful enough to propel the songs along, rather than bog them down in a mire of overzealous meddling.

With a name like Kill Henry Sugar, it’s no big surprise that the duo of Dean Sharenow and Erik Della Penna make room in their repertoire for both the bitter and the sweet. Their third disc takes a darkly serious look at comical ideas, and the lo-fi recordings prove surprisingly nuanced and evocative, providing the sonic ballast for songs exploring the lighter side of one’s darker feelings without sliding into farce or novelty. These are really sad songs, disguised as something else entirely.

True to their plain-vanilla moniker, The Clarks produce pleasant, nondescript no-frills rock with a pop sheen. In the musical world, they’re the smiling neighbors down the street whose names you can never quite recall. Granted, they’ve packed 10,000-seat amphitheaters in their hometown of Pittsburgh, but the band’s regional popularity has yet to translate to broader success. A depressing trend that’s not likely to change with Fast Moving Cars, the most recent installment in a series of garage-rock efforts with all the grease stains removed. On the plus side, most of these 12 songs feature solid hooks, and both the infectious first single “Hell on Wheels” and the soaring guitar anthem “Shimmy Low” demonstrate the band’s strong melodic abilities. They’re undoubtedly fine pop craftsmen but somebody should take these guys aside and explain that garage rock and studio trickery don’t mix well, and if they’re going for the rowdy bar-band vibe, then sounding like consummate Pro Tools aficionados may not be the smartest approach. Only near the end of the album, on “You Know Everything,” do they finally let it rip.

The Clarks ultimately fall into that tier of polite ’90s power popsters like Toad the Wet Sprocket and The Rembrandts whose melodic gifts foundered beneath the weight of such oppressive studio slickness and the unavoidable fact that they didn’t have all that much to say. Fast Moving Cars is bright and shiny, there’s just not much going on beneath the hood.

Budding soul sensation Ricky Fanté sounds like the second coming of Otis Redding, but don’t try the comparison with him.

“To tell you the truth,” Fanté says, “I didn’t really listen much to Otis when I was growing up, and I still don’t.” Protests aside, the 26-year-old Washington, D.C. native’s debut, Rewind, plays like a sonic encyclopedia of classic ’60s soul music, particularly the raw southern soul perfected by Atlantic/Stax/Volt Records. And Fanté’s uncanny ability to channel past greats is the album’s most appealing and distinctive quality. “It Ain’t Easy,” the first single, is pure Memphis/Muscle Shoals gold, with Fanté backed by a gospel choir, and with a glorious horn chart arranged by Earth, Wind & Fire-vet Jerry Hey. “Drive” captures the infectious, handclapping party music of Sam Cooke, while “Why” offers a gritty take on senseless urban violence that would fit seamlessly on Curtis Mayfield’s early-’70s albums. “It’s Over Now” and “A Woman’s Touch” showcase an over-the-top, pleading approach to soul ballads that would make Otis and Percy Sledge proud.

Fanté wrote and recorded the album’s 12 tracks with the help of Grammy-winning songwriter Jesse Harris, who wrote or co-wrote several songs on Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me. But the genesis of Fanté’s songs dates back to a childhood spent listening to his parents’ classic-soul collection and singing in the church choir. “I’m not going to do the hip-hop gangsta pose,” Fanté says. “I appreciate some of that music, but it’s not my story. It’s not who I am. My father was an engineer and my mother was a lawyer and a teacher. My parents were huge music fans, and I grew up listening to Stevie Wonder and Al Green and Marvin Gaye. That’s bound to come out in what I do.” But not Otis Redding, the soul icon he most closely resembles? “Not really,” Ricky says. “I knew ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,’ and a couple of the other hits. But I don’t know that much about his music. I just heard the song ‘Tramp’ for the first time recently. I really like that one.” Okay. And the critical reaction to the music? “It’s so old it’s new,” Fanté says, laughing. “I have people in their ’50s asking for my autograph, and teenagers telling me that I’m their favorite new singer.” No kidding. When you try a little tenderness, some folks remember the past and others hear it as a balm for the first time. Either way, it’s a voice for the ages.

And you thought your adolescence was rocky. Chun Sue’s was deemed too hot to handle by her own government. Chinese native Chun, now nearly 21, channeled her coming-of-age energies into Beijing Doll, a punk-rock novel based on her own diaries from her teenage years. “I began writing when I was in secondary school, which is like American high school, out of self-preservation,” the author says via email from China’s capital city.

Once published in 2002, Beijing Doll quickly sold well over 100,000 copies—Chun explains that it’s hard to calculate true figures, given the active pirated book market in China—but then the government yanked her literary debut from the shelves.

If being widely read is the best revenge, Chun is about to come out on top: Beijing Doll is now being published in 13 countries outside China, including a Riverhead paperback English translation in the United States in August.

Chun’s novel is part of what has been termed the “cruel youth” movement in China—a cultural wave identified by sometimes harsh realism. The heroine of Beijing Doll, also named Chun Sue (although Chun insists the book is completely fictional), careens through the underground music culture of Beijing, writing for music magazines, befriending band members and listening to both Chinese and Western bands. “I said I liked U2, Xu Wei, Nirvana, Kafka and computers,” the narrator recalls. “At the time, mentioning Nirvana showed you were hip. Not impossibly passé, like now.”

The character also engages in casual sex, and presumably the combination of that freewheeling attitude—especially on the part of a young woman—and the book’s general nihilism led to the prohibition. But the government’s exact reasons for censorship remain unclear, even to the author.

“No one told me the real reason my book was banned,” Chun says. “I was told, ‘It is in a gray area. It is not positive enough.’”

One of the pleasures of reading Beijing Doll comes with the realization that music is music, no matter what language the lyrics. At one point, attending a show that includes Chinese bands called Underbabies and Cold Blooded Animals, the narrator is shocked by an exorbitant door charge of 50 /RMB (about $6.25 U.S.), then comments in typically stream-of-consciousness fashion, “Like all bars, it was common for shows there to begin as much as an hour late. Ziyu bought two soft drinks. Thankfully not Pepsi, which damn near makes me puke.”

Chun describes those days as a high point for homegrown bands. “Nowadays Chinese rock music is not well developed,” she notes. “Recently I listen to a lot of revolutionary songs by some U.S. groups that are very popular in China today: Anti-Flag, US Boom, Rancid, Distiller, the Ramones, etc.”

Her novel also offers a fascinating glimpse into the strict educational system in China. She explains that “secondary school is three years long, and it’s a time when students must study very hard in order to pass the necessary examinations so they can be promoted and attend University. There is huge pressure and stress … and a lot of competition [because whether or not and where a student attends school depends on his or her performance on the exams]. The pressure of society makes every student feel that [his or her] self-worth is based on going to University.” She slyly adds, however, that “neither Mr. Bruce Lee nor Mr. Mao Ze Dong studied in University.”

Rather than going to University herself, Chun is a dropout. She has published a second book, Fun and Games, that was quickly banned in China and that she hopes to see published elsewhere a la Beijing Doll. She describes Fun and Games as “more an exploration of the entire society than Beijing Doll, which is a more personal work.” In the coming months she’ll travel to Norway for that country’s publication of Beijing Doll and to attend a literary festival; she’s working on a third novel, as well as a collection of poetry.

So there’s a positive ending to the turmoil of Chun’s adolescence after all, or maybe she’s just made the same progression most people do growing up, no matter the culture. When asked how she’s different today from the 17-year-old who first began writing Beijing Doll, Chun answers, “The major change in me is a psychological one. I grew up a lot. I understand now that being revolutionary is a feeling that comes from my heart, not dependent on how I look and what color my hair is.”

Lorenz Hart could do it. Stephin Merritt can, too. But rare is the lyricist so skillful he or she can stitch a word last seen on a high school vocabulary quiz into a couplet, making it sound natural as the familiar Moon/June standbys. Neil Hannon — a.k.a. The Divine Comedy — is one of them.

Take “My Imaginary Friend,” a ditty equal parts Harvey and Huck Finn, found on The Divine Comedy’s seventh album, Absent Friends. Egged on by a plucky banjo riff, Hannon rhymes “library” and “peripatetically” with deceptive ease. “Well, that’s the art of songwriting,” says the Irish denizen slyly. “To make it sound like it’s the only word I could have possibly used.”

For Hannon, who’s been winning devotees since his 1993 debut Liberation — not only with his literary finesse, but also with his theatrical baritone, sumptuous orchestrations and impeccable dress — the first pop song to send him scurrying for the dictionary was “Exhuming McCarthy,” from R.E.M.’s Document. “At 17, I didn’t know what ‘exhuming’ meant,” he recalls. “More to the point, I didn’t know who McCarthy was. But I worked it out. And now they’re exhuming him again.”

But while the title track of Absent Friends gives a nod to the trials of Oscar Wilde, Hannon says he hasn’t been following the current media censorship brouhaha. “I’m not a man with his finger on the pulse,” he confesses, preferring the company of his two-year-old daughter to the Internet. “I’m quite happy with a glass of sherry and a good book.”

1970s dance culture—i.e., disco—persistently occupies the summit of what’s considered tacky, false and elitist, the slickly gleaming antithesis of punk and rap. Despite eloquent defenses from writers as skilled as Vince Aletti and Dave Marsh, it can be a hard genre to take seriously; to some, a respectful history of disco may seem as perverse as a paean to strip malls. Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day boldly overturns that story. He focuses not on “the better known celebrity version of disco” (represented by the glittering excesses of Studio 54) but on “an alternative web of house parties and discotheques,” a “clandestine party network” that was the understructure for the preppier uptown clubs.

The hero of Lawrence’s narrative is one David Mancuso, a well-traveled music fan whose rent parties gave birth to modern DJ-ing. Mancuso’s parties, in Lawrence’s telling, were the site of almost mystical interactions: “There was neither the DJ nor the dancer. Someone would approach me to play a record and I would already have it in my hand or it would already be on the turntable. We would look at each other in recognition. … It reflected what I thought the world was supposed to be about,” he quotes Mancuso. Though predictably gossipy, the book’s underlying tone is serious—Lawrence writes out of a conviction that what happened at Mancuso’s Loft parties mattered more than who wore what and who slept with whom. A new kind of music, he suggests—“collective, improvised, and participatory,” like the postmodern self—was born.

Love Saves has its limits. One admires Lawrence’s research skills, but a mass of undigested quotes obscures his storyline. The players in his history are introduced with the undifferentiating rapidity of a Russian novel. His analysis frequently verges on New Age dippiness (he writes seriously at one point about an experience that “raised Mancuso’s life energy”), and he shares with all culture-studies professors an attachment to stupid puns. But I, for one, won’t again be able to dismiss dance culture so quickly, and his book should become a fixture in the libraries of serious students of American pop.

In Shaolin Soccer, writer, director and star Stephen Chow plays a down-on-his-luck kung fu master who wishes people would make martial arts a bigger part of their daily lives. For example, it could be used to park cars or avoid slipping on a banana peel. But he can’t manage to get the word out. He’s tried singing about it, but music is too subjective. Then he hits upon a brilliant idea: he rounds up a bunch of other failed masters and places them, along with their gravity-defying skills, on a soccer field. Together they form a ragtag team of underdogs who have to use their shaolin arts to defeat the reigning champions who are also—need it be said?—evil. It’s silly, and the digital effects enhancing the slapstick are primitive, but Shaolin Soccer so deliriously riffs on everything—from The Bad News Bears and Jurassic Park to super heroes and break dancing—that it’s hard not to get caught up in the goofy fun. Just when you think it’s going to get bogged down with plot or sentimentality, it moves on to the next joke, quick and funny throughout.

Canadian troubadour Hayden may have arrived on the musical scene, seemingly fully formed, a decade ago, but his subsequent output suggests that even the most mature beginner never stops growing. Case-in-point: Elk Lake Serenade, Hayden’s lovingly crafted new release is a simple, wise and melancholic wonder whose overall composition impresses just as much as each of its 15 memorable songs. The lifelines of Hayden’s first records can surely be traced to ELS, but this release suggests an artist completely at home in his musical skin—something you couldn’t say about his earlier material.

His hoarse, quavering voice and compelling, minor-key stories combine the quiet, emotional immediacy of a Neil Young, Nick Drake or Damien Jurado, with universal themes indelibly colored by Hayden’s Northern roots. And, like those songwriting touchstones, his subject matter is more for the broken- than faint-hearted.

Two separate-but-related themes course through Elk Lake Serenade—the transitory nature of love and the death of those whose love might otherwise endure. ELS opens with the plaintive, piano-driven chamber piece, “Wide Eyes,” a treatise on the uncomfortable notion that our deepest-felt loves are more haphazard than pre-ordained. The same morose tenor echoes through songs like “Starting Over,” an adult look at how men and women resolve conflict in seemingly irreconcilable fashions, and “Robbed Blind,” about the emotional distances that typically accompany geographical ones.

On the corporeal front, “This Summer” is an intimate, personal meditation on death; “Looking Back at Me” concerns a grisly car crash and its not-quite-anonymous victims; and “Killbear” recounts a mauling that results in an ex-girlfriend’s death. But just when the weight of the world—or the record—might become insupportable, the emotionally pitch-perfect sequencing kicks in with an upbeat number like the giddy, trumpet-burnished “Hollywood Ending” or the moog-rich rocker “My Wife,” and balance is restored.

Hayden’s palette may not include as many colors these days, but with age comes the wisdom and ability to do more with the ones you already possess.

New Jersey’s Railroad Earth is a bluegrass band the way Nickel Creek is a bluegrass band. That is, they use traditional bluegrass instrumentation as a launching pad for genre-bending exercises that are impossible to categorize and equally impossible to ignore. With a bevy of banjos, fiddles and mandolins, The Good Life mixes elements of folk, rock, Celtic and country music with the introspective lyrical reach of a great singer/songwriter album. Up-tempo Celtic-tinged tracks like “Storms” and “Long Way to Go” would’ve fit seamlessly on The Waterboys’ great Fisherman’s Blues, with lead singer/songwriter Todd Sheaffer doing his best Mike Scott impression. “Mourning Flies” is the kind of mid-tempo poetic excursion Adam Duritz of Counting Crows writes several times per album, while “In the Basement” is a sepia-tinged, surprisingly sweet ballad about a father and son building model airplanes together. Although the band’s pop tendencies come more to the forefront with this album, they most assuredly know how to jam, and “Water Fountain Quicksand” offers ample evidence of their instrumental prowess. For Railroad Earth, life is good and getting better.

Joe Rathbone projects a tempered hopefulness in his songs. In the opening tune, “Learning to Fly,” he establishes the album’s low-key, gently self-deprecating mood, intoning, “I’ve been waiting for you / You’ve been waiting for me / Let’s go for a walk / Forget about terrible things.” There’s something simple and eminently real about understated sentiments such as these. Echoes of Tom Petty, Marshall Crenshaw and the Finn Brothers permeate the disc, and an Elvis Costello influence occasionally surfaces. Rathbone, however, carefully shuns Costello’s tendency toward verbosity and vitriol. The moving small-town portrait “Hometown Queen” reveals another of the album’s strengths: Rathbone’s and co-producer David Henry’s (Guster, Josh Rouse) attention to musical detail. The subtle use of strings deepens the tune’s inherent melancholia. And while Rathbone hasn’t yet come up something as memorable as his mentors’ classics, he’s fashioned a thoroughly winning pop album filled with strong melodies and well-turned lyrics.

It’s hard to know where to start with a slick platter of true-blue newgrass (and to be fair, pure modern Nashville country) when the first thing you find out is that the twangified percussive banjo on the album apparently comes from a banjo player with no fingers on his left hand! Extra digits or not, producer and guest instrumentalist Ricky Skaggs harnesses and directs Mountainheart’s ample instrumental skill to its fullest, particularly on rolling bluegrass numbers like “Born on the Wind,” or “Heart Like a Roadsign, Head Like a Wheel.” Given these strengths, even the inevitable Lester Flatt cover is a welcome addition. Less compelling are Mountainheart’s rather undistinguished attempts at ballads—all of them undoubtedly heartfelt but clichéd in execution, awash in the usual interpersonal wistfulness. Equally distracting are the visible-from-a-mile-away chord changes and quasi-religious and/or patriotic sentiments imbuing so many modern country songs with all the flavor of a refrigerator postcard of a Norman Rockwell painting—quaint, loving and painfully generic by sheer virtue of Hallmark-card ubiquity. Only “Man in the Mirror” is redeemed by a particularly intense vocal performance, a striking counterpoint to Mountainheart’s general tendency to under-sing. Nonetheless, if the formula occasionally wears thin and the voices are occasionally over-soft, Mountainheart powers through on cheerful heart and incontrovertible musical skill, rendering Force of Nature an easily-digested, skylit amble through the bubbly confluence of modern bluegrass and country at its most polished and accessible.

Frank Sinatra, Chairman of the Bored to my barely adolescent ears, was mangling The Beatles’ “Something” on a late-’60s TV special. “You stick around, Jack, and it may show,” Frank sang, and snapped his fingers in his swinging, ring-a-ding way, and I wanted to strangle him. It was blasphemous. Along with Herb Alpert, Ferrante and Teicher, Robert Goulet, and other insipidly unhip representatives of my parents’ record collection, Frank made strictly Old Fogey music, and he had desecrated one of the most beloved works of the sacred rock ’n’ roll canon. In those Generation Gap days, I wasn’t about to offer my grudging admiration. So let me do it now. I believe Frank Sinatra was an arrogant, overbearing blowhard who for years didn’t have a clue about the seismic musical changes that were taking place all around him. I believe that the Rat Pack were a bunch of lecherous lushes. And I believe that “My Way” is still the single biggest piece of self-congratulatory twaddle ever recorded. It’s OK, Sinatra family; please don’t send in the goon squad. I also believe Frank Sinatra is the greatest popular singer who ever lived. My transformation began many years later as an adult, predictably enough in the wee small hours of the morning. It was the heart of winter, cold and icy. My girlfriend had dumped me, and I couldn’t sleep. On a whim I had picked up Sinatra’s 1954 album In the Wee Small Hours from the library. It seemed as appropriate a time as any to rediscover a musical legend, so I cued up the first track and settled back to commiserate with another jilted lover. And I’ve never been the same. This wasn’t the brash, finger-snapping Sinatra of “Come Fly With Me” or “Fly Me to the Moon.” This was Sinatra as brooding torch singer, backed by Nelson Riddle’s superb string arrangements, and he had tapped into the deepest of late-night blues. On the title track, the altogether lovely “It Never Entered My Mind,” and the quietly devastating “When Your Lover Has Gone,” Sinatra’s singing took on a resigned, world-weary magnificence, battered and bruised and bathed in searing pain. The Old Fogey could sing, really sing. And I’ve been a huge fan ever since. It’s impossible to summarize a career so protean and prolific. The three great “Best of” boxed sets from Frank’s Columbia, Capitol, and Reprise years, respectively, span more than 30 years and barely scratch the surface. Together they encompass a massive 11 CDs and more than 250 tracks, and yet they still offer only a tantalizing sampling of the greatness of Sinatra’s music. Sinatra specialized in concept albums, tightly integrated song cycles that formed a cohesive whole, and that’s exactly what is missing in the compilations. But the alternative is to pick and choose from more than 100 officially released albums. It’s a daunting task.

For me, and for many others, Sinatra was at the peak of his interpretive powers during the Capitol Years, 1953-1959, and the 3-CD boxed set that chronicles the highlights from those years is as essential as American music gets. Frank’s voice had weathered and toughened by the mid-’50s, and he’d lost the boyish croon and Bobby Soxer appeal that typified many of his Columbia recordings from the ’40s and early ’50s. What he found, instead, was a masterful way of phrasing, a completely natural and original way of elongating key lyrical phrases that accentuated the beat. It also happened to swing like crazy. Sinatra wasn’t a jazz singer in the classic sense of that term, but he certainly brought a jazz-like sensibility to the songs he covered. And what songs they were. Frank was wrong in thinking that the creative wellspring had run dry with the advent of rock ’n’ roll, but he was right to champion the greatness of the Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, and he recorded the definitive versions of the best songs from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. Sinatra’s standards are among the high points of American music, and nowhere are they on better display than the recordings he made for Capitol. I’m long over my Generation Gap prejudices. My household seems to live in more eclectic, less divisive musical times, and that’s a good thing. My children have no qualms about sandwiching a Sinatra song between Death Cab for Cutie and Van Morrison on compilation CDs, and I’m happy to note that three different musical generations can peacefully coexist. I’m not sure I would have liked Frank Sinatra, the man. But year after year, song after song, he sang like nobody else and better than anybody else. He left a staggering legacy: 60 years of recordings, most of them spent in the musical penthouse suite. He was, and is, the Chairman of the Board.

"Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘Maybe I should take the civil services gig and work at the Post Office like Faulkner did, hang out in the back and write.’ On the other hand, realistically, I would drive them crazy and they would drive me crazy. I hate having to tour and be away from my wife and family, but that’s what you do. Truck drivers hate it too. It doesn’t always get to be glamorous."—Pierce Pettis

Strolling past the narrow, brightly colored storefronts lining the grassy square in downtown Decatur, Ga., leaves you with that breezy sense of well-being only a small town can provide. Merely six miles from the heart of Atlanta, these humble establishments—peddling fresh sushi, Thai food, primitive art, even knitting supplies—won’t offer the monotonous familiarity of towering mustard-yellow arches but they’ll gladly provide something increasingly rare in our franchise-cluttered landscape: singularity. The owners of these shops don’t oversee business from the 37th floor of some cloud-impaling skyscraper; they work behind the counter, greet you with a neighborly “hey there” when you walk in the door, and suggest items that may suit their customers’ unique tastes.

The opening of the 2004 Decatur Arts Festival has brought an unusual volume of foot traffic to the square on this humid late-May evening. But unlike the hand-holding, leash-gripping folks hurrying down the sidewalk (15 minutes behind schedule, according to their determined grimaces), I’m here for another reason: to catch a Pierce Pettis concert at Eddie’s Attic, one of the nation’s foremost acoustic music venues. The club itself is housed in the upstairs portion of a comfortably worn brick building (formerly the lingerie department of a Belk-Galant department store), situated right around the corner from the aforementioned bevy of shops. In the darkness, the rubicund glow of the Attic’s neon sign casts a faint reflection on the rain-soaked walk.

Eddie Owen, who founded the Attic in the early ’90s, wanted to provide a listening room in which singer/songwriters could share their art without having to compete with the inebriated clamor endemic to most other bars. The intimate, oak-furnished listening room (which feels more akin to a living room) is split into two discrete areas. A dimly illumined bar and walkway along one side of the room, on the other a general seating area full of tables and chairs, most of which sit vacant on this Sunday night. Once the opening act concludes his lackluster set and beats a hasty retreat to the bar, Pettis replaces him on the same thinly carpeted stage that helped launch the careers of John Mayer, Shawn Mullins and the Indigo Girls.

If Pettis is disappointed with the abysmal turn-out, you wouldn’t reckon it from his altogether genial disposition, greeting the crowd warmly—but with a noticeable rasp—before launching into an inspired, romping cover of Mark Heard’s “Another Day in Limbo.” Slapping the strings of his Lowden S25J with feverish determination, he reaches the chorus with shoulders heaving for the breath to belt out, “Blinking away the sunrise / Listening to the wind blow / Angels with dirty faces face another day in limbo.” His dusky voice cracks, faltering slightly on many of the song’s higher notes, but he presses on toward the finish, betraying no hint of frustration.

Pettis, a veteran troubadour who’s been touring almost incessantly since he finished school at Florida State University in 1980, is hardly one to let a head full of yellow pollen get the better of him. Leaving the capo clipped to his guitar’s headstock and keeping the songs in a manageable register, he steers the set into a more subdued cadence, opting for tunes less vocally ambitious but just as emotionally charged. From a slightly ragged voice—one that might have threatened to handicap his performance—emerges a fragile, broken fervor. I’m reminded that transcendence often requires a measure of joyful incapacity.

I’ve been fortunate to see Pettis play this room several times over the past few years and have grown accustomed to the levity in his stage presence, the fitful charisma with which he stirs his audience into a cackling frenzy by spouting whatever giddy nonsense enters his head. I’ve seen him take a healthy swig from a brimming pint of Guinness, only to smack his lips together and quip into the microphone, “Mmm … rich chocolaty Ovaltine!” Or introducing “Georgia Moon,” a song inspired by the “dark, creepy parts of Georgia like you see in the movies, where there’s stuff hanging in the trees,” only to chase this statement with, “I lived in Atlanta for 10 years and we had stuff hanging in the trees … but that was toilet paper.” Then before the laughter subsided he’d launch into yet another song so lovely, so painfully true that it made me want to find a vacant bathroom stall in which I might discreetly bawl my eyes out.

Tonight, all Pettis has the energy to offer is his earnest best, a tender heart, packaged in one three-and-a-half minute song after another. And it’s enough to hold this meager audience hostage, no one subtly collecting personal effects and slipping out early, every last person murmuring hearty approval when asked politely in the night’s waning hours, “I know it’s getting late, but would you mind if I just play for a while?” This is no longer just a performance—we’ve been permitted to eavesdrop on a very personal expression, one songwriter’s faith in the healing properties of a well-crafted melody. And not “healing” in the sense of Chicken Soup for the Shat-Upon Soul. I mean the guy’s voice cleared up entirely by the time he finally walked offstage shortly after midnight.

Three days after the Eddie’s Attic gig, I’m braving the last gasp of Wednesday morning commuter traffic on I-24, heading west into Nashville. I have a date with Pettis in The Parlor Studio, a lavishly renovated bungalow-turned-studio on Music Row where he and producer Garry West are applying the finishing touches to his fourth Compass Records release, Great Big World. Eventually, I pull into the studio’s dirt parking lot out back and head indoors to enjoy a Krispy Kreme doughnut in the studio’s kitchen while waiting for everyone else to arrive.

One hour later I’m sitting on a couch adjacent to Pettis in the studio’s control room. Dan Dugmore, renowned multi-instrumentalist and Nashville session player is perched behind his pedal steel, punctuating the nostalgic “You’re Gonna Need This Memory” with gently swelling accents. After the first couple takes, Pettis informs him demurely that he wants to leave plenty of breathing room in the tune, that he mainly wants the steel to provide understated “emotional cues.”

Dugmore picks up a pencil, scribbles a few notations on his chart before beginning another take. While the steel virtuoso runs through it once more from the top, Pettis closes his eyes and rocks back and forth on the edge of the couch, focusing intently on the performance. Eventually work on the song is complete and Pettis mock-chastises Dugmore for putting him and West in the uncomfortable position of having to choose which one of his amazing takes to use in the final mix. Dugmore stretches out a bit on “Love Will Find You Again,” which calls for a more involved, sweeping steel part, before moving on to one last tune, “Cracker Jack Ring,” to which he adds some gritty lap steel and a mandolin part to accent Pettis’ rollicking acoustic guitar strut.

This part of the work done, we break for lunch and I’m able to steal a few minutes with Pettis alone in the kitchen after we scarf down some Southwestern salads West has kindly had delivered to the studio. The conversation begins with Pettis lighting on one of the afternoon’s recurring topics—airlines and their utter disregard for the traveling musician: “I hate airline baggage handlers, I mean they’re really the enemy. It’s all about what you go through as a traveling musician, what they do to your stuff. I’ve had three guitars destroyed, and I can’t afford to be replacing guitars.”

Nefarious baggage handlers aside, you’d expect Pettis to be well-calloused at this point to the myriad vexations involved in earning one’s living as a traveling bard. After all, his musical career has been fraught with innumerable obstacles, both personal and professional. Not long after starting out as an unpaid staff songwriter for Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Ala., (during this time Pettis landed his first cut, “Song at the End of the Movie,” on a Joan Baez record), he set out on the road, playing any hole-in-the-wall dive or fern bar that would accept the type of songs he was rabidly determined to play: his own, of course.

“We were coming off the end of the disco years and people didn’t even know what live music was, and here I am up there singing whatever and they’re yelling at me to do Jimmy Buffett songs. And I refused. I played all my own songs and they hated me for that … I played for years in some places that would really kick the life out of you.”

It wasn’t until the mid-’80s, when he finally made his way up the East Coast and began performing regularly around the Village in New York City, that he finally discovered an audience for the folk music he was writing.

“I was shocked that people up there actually listened to your songs. I mean, I had never experienced that. I thought people’s job was just to boo you. That was all I had known in the Southeast. For so many years I was conditioned to this wall of noise and really, in a way, I could say or do anything I wanted.

“I had a friend, we did a duo for a while in Florida, and we played all these places and we would change the words to all the songs, making them dirty or silly. Like we did ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ all the way through and changed the line to ‘holding her dead body next to mine.’ People didn’t even notice. You’d be in some lounge and there’d be like nobody there except for one poor ol’ drunk in the corner, and you’d do that line and he’d look up like he wasn’t sure. You’d do anything to keep yourself from going insane.”

While Greenwich Village didn’t prove to be everything he’d dreamed (“I figured Dylan was gonna be hanging out. Of course he was long gone. It was all Andy Warhol skinny-tie bands or whatever that was.”), Pettis released his independent debut, Moments, in 1987 and joined the city’s thriving acoustic music scene—the Fast Folk movement—alongside talented songwriters such as Shawn Colvin, Cliff Eberhardt, Suzanne Vega and John Gorka.

“There were all these super-talented people who had so much confidence and poise because they had been swimming with a real fast group of fish for a while. So when you’re there you had to swim faster. It also helped me separate what was genuinely good and what wasn’t because all the cheap shots you can get away with in bars, like ‘yeah, I can do a Buffett’—that doesn’t fly in New York.”

Pettis spent the rest of the ’80s and early ’90s honi