I've got wheels and you wanna go for a ride

Lately, I've been thinking about power-pop music. Not something I ever had much cause to do before. But then I saw Girlfriend at Berkeley Rep (prev. post), the new musical written around Matthew Sweet's 1991 power-pop album of the same name. And also, I'm slowly working my way through McSweeney's San Francisco Panorama, and just read Michael Chabon's essay about power pop and the 1970s band Big Star.

Chabon writes: "[Power pop] is happy music--eminently "poppy"--which depends for its power on the cryptic presence, in a lyric or a chord change or a bit of upside-down vocal harmony, of sadness, yearning, even despair. [...] True power pop is rueful and celebratory at the same time, glorifying desire and frustration, which is why so many power-pop songs concern themselves with the subject of Tonight, or Tomorrow Night, or Saturday Night, or some other night that will only be perfect for as long as it can be deferred. [...] All the clouds of power pop are worn inside out to show the silver lining."

When I read that, it made me think of my new favorite song, "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" by the Magnetic Fields. (69 Love Songs was one of the things that helped me cope with the busy season at my job.) If you don't know it, here's a fan-created music video:



I guess, strictly speaking, this is not "power pop"--there's no guitars or drums or vocal harmonies in the mix. But it fits Chabon's dictum of "eminently happy/poppy music that is haunted by despair." With its bouncy synthesizers, its wacky spring-like thing twanging away in the background, its sunny title, "Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" sounds like it ought to be a happy love song. But listen to the lyrics--and the purity of yearning contained in that last "wanna go for a riiide"--and it becomes one of the most poignant songs I have ever heard. It makes my heart hurt.

Kaddish for Cody's

In my recent post on The Yiddish Policemen's Union I mentioned that Cody's Books, in Berkeley CA, was asking people who they'd cast in the film adaptation (to be directed by the Coen Brothers).

Well, I guess that's called off, since Cody's Books has now closed after 52 years in business.

Darn. I'm always sad when a bookstore closes, and I feared something might be up--Cody's Books hadn't updated their blog in about a month. I know times are tough for independent bookstores, but I thought things might be better in the anti-corporate People's Republic of Berkeley. Guess not.

And I was curious, too, to see what kind of responses they'd get to their casting contest, because I was having trouble with my entry. For Meyer Landsman, it's hard to think of Jewish actors who are the right age (early/mid 40s) and can play a classic tough-but-vulnerable noir hero. (The most prominent Jewish actors in that age group are Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler--no thanks!) Meyer's partner, Berko Shemets, is a tall and husky man who is half Tlingit--can't think of many Native American actors off the top of my head either. And if the movie has any flashback sequences, it'll need to perform the impossible task of finding a guy who's believable as the potential Messiah.

If you've got any bright ideas for casting The Yiddish Policemen's Union, please leave them in the comments.

"Yiddish Policemen's Union": No Kvetching Here

I've written before about my love for classy detective novels, so when The Yiddish Policemen's Union came out last year, I thought "I should check this out." And then a couple of months ago I read Kavalier & Clay and realized that Michael Chabon is awesome in general, making Yiddish Policemen's a must-read.


The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a classic hardboiled mystery in an inspired alternate-history setting. We learn on Page 1 that a man using the alias Emanuel Lasker has been shot dead in a fleabag hotel--but this hotel is in the Yiddish-speaking metropolis of Sitka, Alaska, which was granted to the Jews for 60 years following the failure of the state of Israel in 1948. Now it is 2007 and Sitka is about to return to American control, throwing its residents into a muddle. And when detective Meyer Landsman, already down-on-his-luck, tries to solve Lasker's murder, he runs up against a complex conspiracy involving some obscure corners of Jewish lore.

My half-Jewish mom informs me that landsman is the Yiddish word for "countryman, comrade," and Meyer Landsman is kind of an Everyman figure...at least, an Every-detective. Chabon has fun drawing parallels between secular Jews and noir detectives, both trying to do right in a world that lacks a Messiah or a moral compass. Though cynical and faithless, they persevere. They both use self-deprecating wisecracks as a kind of armor. And not only does Landsman have personal angst (a failed marriage), he also carries the angst of his entire race. When an Indian doctor criticizes his alcohol habit, Landsman retorts: "Tell me, please, if the country of India were being canceled, and in two months, along with everyone you loved, you were going to be tossed into the jaws of the wolf with nowhere to go and no one to give a fuck, and half the world had just spent the past thousand years trying to kill Hindus, don't you think you might take up drinking?"

As shown by its willingness to play with Jewish stereotypes, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is refreshingly irreverent. Everyone calls one another "yid," and the murdered man was a heroin addict who tied off with the cord from his tefillin. Yet at the same time, the novel explores issues of contemporary Jewish identity--ones that resonate in our own world and not just in alternate history. For instance: is Judaism religious, ethnic, or something else? Can secular Jews and orthodox Jews get along? What does it mean to belong to a group that defines itself by its exile? Can the Jews ever find a place to accept them? (In the novel, the colonizing Jews of Sitka end up in a rather Israel-and-Palestine situation with the native Alaskan tribes.)

But The Yiddish Policemen's Union is also a real page-turner, told in present tense so the events come even more vividly to life. Sitka and its residents are wonderfully imagined--in fact, I wanted to see more of some characters. For instance, the American reporter Dennis Brennan, who speaks a hilariously mangled version of Yiddish, appears in only one scene. Yiddish slang peppers the book; my copy (Harper Perennial, paperback) had a helpful mini-glossary at the end.

What I love most about Chabon's writing is what I'd call his thematically appropriate similes. Many writers fill their pages with flashy similes, but if anything can be compared to any other random thing, where is the resonance, where is the weight? (E.g., this bugged me about Marisha Pessl's writing in Special Topics in Calamity Physics. A simile like "Houses slumped against the smooth lawns like dozing elephants on ice rinks" feels forced and unnecessary.) Chabon, however, usually draws comparisons that enhance his novel's themes and concerns. Similes that could only fit The Yiddish Policemen's Union and would seem inappropriate in any other book. For instance, during a funeral sequence, the fir trees in the cemetery "sway like grieving Chassids," and the voice of blues singer Robert Johnson "sounds as broken and reedy as a Jew saying kaddish in the rain." Because in this scene, along with the fir trees and the blues music, there are also grieving Chassids saying kaddish in the rain. The similes add detail and emotional resonance--they are not merely flashy.

Or see this dazzling passage, describing Landsman's sister Naomi, a bush pilot:

The wings of an airplane are engaged in a constant battle with the air that envelops them, denting and baffling and warping it, bending and staving it off. Fighting it the way a salmon fights against the current of the river in which it's going to die. Like a salmon--that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home--Naomi used up her strength and energy in every struggle.

So in three sentences, Chabon draws an intricate web of connections between Naomi's personality, what she does for a living (fly airplanes), the wildlife of the area where she lives (Alaskan salmon), and her religion (Judaism). Startlingly clever and illuminating.

The Coen Brothers are going to adapt Yiddish Policemen's Union as a movie, and I could not be happier. Is it a contradiction to say that the world of this book is sui generis and totally original; yet at the same time, it cries out to be a Coen film? It's noirish, it uses weird slang, it delights in language, it takes place in an odd corner of America, most of its roles are for "character actors," there's plenty of violence and dark humor and some seriously evil characters... all the typical Coen Brothers motifs. (And the brothers are Jewish, of course.) A Berkeley bookstore is having a "cast the Yiddish Policemen's movie contest" (scroll down)--I just might put together an entry!

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is now sitting comfortably on my shelf next to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It's just a coincidence due to alphabetical order. But it feels right.

Arms, men, supermen, superheroes

I don't think I'll get around to it this weekend, but I kind of want to see Iron Man. As I've said before, I like superhero movies if they're well-done, and Iron Man has gotten great reviews--plus my housemate, who saw it the day it came out, really enjoyed it.

One of the biggest Iron Man raves comes from Time magazine, but the review also contains an error that amuses me. What's wrong with this sentence: "Tony is an arms dealer, an occupation that has fascinated playwrights for ages (George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman, Arthur Miller in All My Sons)"?

Answer: Man and Superman isn't Shaw's play about an arms dealer--Major Barbara is. I wonder if the reviewer slipped up and wrote Man and Superman because he had superheroes on the brain? And I also wonder if it's possible not only to mix up Man and Superman and Major Barbara, but to add Arms and the Man to the confusion. Out of all these titles, Arms and the Man sounds like it really OUGHT to be about an arms dealer (and would make a good alternative title for Major Barbara), but it's not.

Speaking of superhero movies, in my post about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (linked above) I made a parenthetical remark about enjoying the first two Spider-Man movies. I didn't realize at the time that Michael Chabon actually helped write the story for Spider-Man 2 (which I like even better than the first movie)! So now it seems that I adore superhero books and movies only if they are written by Chabon. Or something. Because I really hope that I'll have fun at Iron Man too, when I get around to seeing it.

La bizarrerie de la jeune fille Francophile

I've decided it's my new goal in life to read only books that make me want to yell "Score!" when I find them in a bookstore, and the most recent book to make me do that was a sale copy of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon, at the airport Powell's. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, but I've already decided that the beginning of chapter 9 is my new favorite quote. Since I'm a French major, it absolutely tickles me:

I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public relations. She has been betrayed into the study of French, heedless of the terrible consequences, by her enchantment with this language, which has ruined more young American women than any other foreign tongue.

Second, if her studies were confined simply to grammar and vocabulary, then perhaps the French major would develop no differently from those who study Spanish or German, but the unlucky girl who pursues her studies past the second year comes inevitably and headlong into contact with French Literature, potentially one of the most destructive forces known to mankind; and she begins to relish such previously unglamorous elements of her vocabulary as langueur and funeste, and, speaking English, inverts her adjectives, to let one know that she sometimes even thinks in French. The writers she comes to appreciate--Breton, Baudelaire, Sartre, de Sade, Cocteau--have an alienating effect, especially on her attitude toward love, and her manner of expressing her emotions becomes difficult and theatrical; while those French writers whose influence might be healthy, such as Stendhal or Flaubert, she dislikes and takes to reading in translation, where their effect on her thought and speech is negligible; or she willfully misreads Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse, making dark romances of them. I gathered that Phlox, in particular, considered herself "linked by destiny" (liée par le destin) both to Nadja and to O. That is how a female French major thinks.

Hilarious. I love the image of the French language "ruining" American girls, as if the book had been written in the 1800s and not in 1988. And while nothing irritates me more than women who see Emma Bovary as a romantic heroine instead of a deluded fool, there's always Flaubert's Salammbô if you want sex, violence, luxury, and a naked chick with a snake coiled around her. I love No Exit, Baudelaire, Verlaine...and am proud to share a birthday with Jean Cocteau. I delight in saying dark and mysterious-sounding words like cartouche d'encre--so much more evocative than the English "ink cartridge." Bravo Mr. Chabon for this dissection of the female French major! We're not as common in universities as we used to be, but we certainly are a breed apart.

Amazing Adventures in Escapism

Spent today riding to the coast and reading The New Yorker's "Style Issue" (which is off the newsstands now, but oh well, I always seem to be a week or so behind). One of the articles finds Michael Chabon analyzing superhero costumes, which was especially interesting for me because I just finished--and loved--his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The New Yorker article even made me appreciate Chabon's achievement more. At one point, he writes about the various theories why Superman appeared at the end of the 1930s:

In the theories of origin put forward by fans, critics, and other origin-obsessives, the idea of Superman has been accounted the offspring or recapitulation, in no particular order, of Friedrich Nietzsche; of Philip Wylie (in his novel “Gladiator”); of the strengths, frailties, and neuroses of his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, of Cleveland, Ohio; of the aching wishfulness of the Great Depression; of the (Jewish) immigrant experience; of the mastermind stratagems of popular texts in their sinister quest for reader domination; of repressed Oedipal fantasies and homoerotic wishes; of fascism; of capitalism; of the production modes of mass culture (and not in a good way); of celebrated strongmen and proponents of physical culture like Eugen Sandow; and of a host of literary not-quite-Superman precursors, chief among them Doc Savage.

Now, the "amazing" thing about Kavalier & Clay is that it puts forth evidence for about two-thirds of these theories, while describing how its young protagonists create superhero "The Escapist." Joe Kavalier, the artist, has just escaped Nazi-occupied Prague (the Nazis, of course, were inspired by Nietzsche) and wishes to create a character who can smash evildoers in a way that he himself is powerless to do. Sammy Clay, the writer, is a devoted reader of pulp fiction, a keen believer in American capitalism, and a repressed homosexual whose father works as a strongman. Yet it never feels like Chabon is laboring to prove, or disprove, these theories--but rather to dramatize this complicated stew of influences on the development of superhero comics, and make it interesting to people who haven't read comic books for their whole life.

Despite this, I suppose that both Joe and Sammy both have stereotypical, schematic elements to their characters--Joe the quiet, brooding Czech immigrant, Sammy the short, wise-guy Brooklyn kid. But they eventually gain depth as well. It is just heartbreaking to see Joe draw comic-book stories where the Escapist vanquishes thinly disguised Nazis, while in the real world he despairs that he can do nothing more to help the Jews of Europe. So, too, to see the compromises that Sammy must make because of his sexuality.

Kavalier & Clay uses superhero comics to get at a lot of themes--striving, success, entertainment, freedom, America--and one of the cleverest things Chabon does is to name Kavalier and Clay's trademark superhero "The Escapist." He is a Harry Houdini-inspired escape artist whose mission is to "free all who are bound by the Iron Chain, using his Golden Key!" First, the theme of escape resonates with both Joe and Sammy, two somewhat frustrated young men who want to escape to a world of limitless possibility. Second, "escapist" is like "escapism"--the most frequent charge leveled against superhero comics, that they are mindless entertainment with no redeeming value. But Chabon proves that they are a deadly serious matter, especially for a certain kind of young person. As he writes in the New Yorker article: "It was not about escape [...] It was about transformation."

Indeed, when I bought Kavalier & Clay, my mother dismissed it with a "Why'd you want to read about comic books?" but truth be told, I learned a lot from it, not just about the early years of the superhero comics industry, but from Chabon's detailed early-1940s setting (coincidentally, he said he picked up many of his flourishes from old New Yorker magazines). Besides, I used to be a devoted reader of fantasy books, and I'm not averse to a dose of whiz-bam-pow sci-fi on occasion. (I once went on a date with a guy who seemed amused to learn that I enjoyed the first two Spider-Man movies. I think he had pegged me as too "intellectual" for that. Pshaw!)

My copy of Kavalier & Clay is back in Poughkeepsie, otherwise I'd quote some examples of Chabon's gorgeous prose, which--like everything about his book--is expansive and intricate and a fresh perspective. Two metaphors in particular stick out: one where he compares the Manhattan skyline to a bridge--the way that there are high-rises in midtown and the Financial District, and a dip between them at Greenwich Village, like a swooping suspension bridge. And another where he compares the bridges of New York City to various other things: I especially remember his description of the Queensboro Bridge, "two tsarinas dancing, holding hands."

But what I love most about Chabon is his huge imagination--unafraid of kitsch and unafraid of grandeur. Sammy Clay has his first kiss atop the empty Empire State Building at two AM, with a handsome radio actor, during a thunderstorm--and Chabon makes you believe it. Or rather: even if you suspect it's too good to be true, the atmosphere, the slow-burn sexual tension, the sheer audacity of it is so compelling that you want to believe it. You want to shout, "Whoever said that books had to be about dull everyday people doing dull everyday things? Dammit, what are novels for, if not to make out-of-the-ordinary events feel vivid to the reader?" Back when I subscribed to McSweeney's, the first issue I received was the Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, guest-edited by Michael Chabon, prefaced by his manifesto attacking "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." If that short-story collection was a minor skirmish, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a major salvo in the quest to meld "literary" and "popular" genres. Chabon is a Maximalist, an Optimist, and probably a Great American Novelist. Hey, that sounds like the description of a new superhero...