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X is playing at the Belly Up Tavern in Solano Beach on Wednesday night. I'll be there, will you? Some day I'll tell the story of how I opened for X at the Knitting Factory. Until that day comes, you'll have to settle for this. My favorite X song is "Johnny Hit and Run Paulene." The picture above shows X at The Masque.
Hobart's annual baseball edition is up and its filled with great pieces about America's favorite past-time, including a series of baseball-related haikus. Check out Not Just Another Day at the Ball Park about my visit to Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with my daughter last Sunday for a record-setting exhibition between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the world champion Boston Red Sox.
Thanks to Reed Johnson's article in the Los Angeles Times last month, I learned that the title No Country for Old Men comes from the opening line of William Butler Yeats's poem Sailing to Byzantium. You can learn more about the poem's composition in a brief video masterclass available at the National Library of Ireland's website, which has a wonderful exhibition titled The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats that I'm going to have to see during my visit to Dublin this summer. The video makes use of images of Yeats's original draft and is a must for those interested in the genesis of a poem that continues to resonate.
Spoke with a friend of mine in Belfast last week who sent me this lovely cell phone image from the front door of the nightclub in Lisburn where he works. He's getting married this summer and my wife and I, along with other members of the family, will be traveling to Northern Ireland to witness the union.
For the last few years, I've been working on a novel about America's first sports celebrity, John L. Sullivan. I'm inching closer to completing a draft that I'm very happy with, which makes the news that Oxford American has just released their Sports Issue, which includes a short essay about my search for the site of the greatest bare knuckle boxing match in American history. Here's an excerpt:
He was the Mike Tyson of the Gilded Age, more Paul Bunyan than Babe Ruth, but his legend might have faded if it wasn’t for an epic seventy-five-round, bare-knuckle brawl with Jake Kilrain, staged in the summer of 1889 on a Mississippisaw mill. A hundred and seventeen years later, the spot is nearly lost to the murk of history.
This issue of Oxford American also includes a personal essay by Pia Ehrhardt and a fantastic short story by Mary Miller.
Actually, it's a zine, not a book, and one that I made with the help of a colleague at the Happy Ad Factory where I used to work in Los Angeles. Someone is charging $20 for it on Amazon like it's a freaking collector's item or something. It's not. I've got a whole box full of them.
What is it? It's a collection of three short stories. One of the stories made it into the collection, another is an autobiographical tale from my sailor days during the Reagan regime, and the cover story is available online.
If you're going to spend $20 on a stripper, you ought to get more than a crappy zine. So if you want it, I'd be happy to send it to you free of charge.
Last weekend I visited the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park with my wife and daughter. We were exploring the not-as-kid-friendly-as-one-might-expect exhibit animated painting when we stumbled upon Jeremy Blake's Sodium Fox. Blake, you might remember, died last year in an apparrent suicide shortly after his long-time partner Theresa Duncan died as a result of an intentional overdose.
Sodium Fox is a whimsical mix of neon, low-brow art and pop culture kitsch. Blake collaborated with Silver Jews frontman David Berman and the result is a film that kinda sort of coheres like a narrative. Berman's prose is both plucky and poignant. Visitors can follow the narration (through January 13) with transcriptions of the voice over in both English in Spanish. Given the circumstances of Blake's death, the opening line is particularly spooky:
I'm definitely the kind of man who knows when it's over.
Or, as they say in Mexico:
Definitivamente soy el tipo de hombre que sabe cuando se acabo.
"People involved in creative work, if they're lucky, they feel they hand themselves over to the course of something else, to the creation of something they're not entirely responsible for. We look back upon it as if it's an experience had almost by someone else."
--Daniel Day Lewis
The L.A. Weekly heroically champions books that, for whatever reason, did not receive the attention they deserved. Hence, the term "undernourished." It's a knock on the culture that couldn't sustain them, not the books themselves. They could just as easily be called the Blame it on the Britney Awards.
I chose Michael A. FitzGerald's Radiant Days, a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing of a novel that knocked my socks off. True story: Radiant Days had been sitting on my shelf for weeks until I read an interview with its author in New West. FitzGerald struck me as such an earnest, intelligent guy that I felt compelled to read the book, and when I did, it kind of blew me away. During the climax of the novel, I actually shouted, "Oh no!" like some kind of 19th century hayseed at a nickleodeon. It was a great feeling to be moved by a book like that.
Of course, FitzGerald's novel wasn't the only deserving book, so I thought I'd add a few more, in no particular order:
Roy Kesey's short-story collection All Over (Dzanc)
Pamela Erens novel The Understory (Ironweed Press)
Pia Ehrhardt's collection Famous Fathers (MacAdam/Cage)
Jack Pendarvis's collection Your Body Is Changing (MacAdam/Cage)
Antoine Wilson's The Interloper (Handsel Books/Other Press)
