Salvage Heart

Feels good on a day like today to wake up and realize that I own an entire page of The Oregonian. Well, along with advertisers. And, the page being E4.

Nevertheless, a couple of pieces in today's paper, one that was a lot of fun to write (as much fun as you can have writing about a stanza [I think that is the term] of poets), as the Wave Books-sponsored Poetry Bus wheezed in to Portland on October 24 for a final stop before circling back to Seattle, closing out the 50 readings in 50 days pledge. This week's Talk of the Book Town, and here is the link:
http://tinyurl.com/y7wdbg.


Also today, and less feel-good: my debut as a music critic for The Oregonian, writing about a show that the Heartless Bastards of Cincinnati headlined on Friday night (October 27, 2006). A link:
http://tinyurl.com/yl75ew.

Sufficed to say, I didn't set out to pan this...if anything I was fired up to deliver a fired-up testimonial about the greatness of this gem trio. Instead, I may get my fan club permissions revoked. I've been to plenty of great shows where the performers were inebriated. And, although the piece doesn't reflect this, I would imagine that E.W. was not the only not-sober individual on stage. But on the hook, with a day to turn the piece around, I wasn't going to beg off simply because the band took the night off.

Here's a set list, for posterity:
Doug Fir, Portland Oregon, 10/27/06
Set list
1. No Pointing Arrows
2. New Resolution
3. Brazen
4. Done Got Old (singalong)
5. All This Time
6. Blue Day
7. Came a Long Way
8. Into the Open
9. Valley of Debris
10. My Maker
11. I Swallowed a Dragonfly (with violinist)
12. Searching for the Ghost
13. The Will Song
14. Gray

Encore
1. (new song, untitled)
2. Swamp Song
3. Runnin

Here is a link to my write-up (at Salvage Heart) of their show last November:
http://salvageheart.blogspot.com/2005/11/heartless-bastards-v-reigning-sound.html.

Here's a piece that ran late last week in The Oregonian about Portland writer and rider Joe Kurmaskie. I'm struck by seeing the piece in print what all didn't get in: this is a story about a guy that bikes his kids (ages 7 and 5) across the country. Joe is one of those guys who talks to everybody, and when you talk to everybody, you get good stories. Also, if you are an extreme athlete constantly accomplishing what others dream of/have nightmares about, you have good stories. Consequently, Kurmaskie has a ton of them.

By the way, he's starting a camp for kids and adults next summer, out in the Columbia River Gorge. Sounds like fun. No excuses, no flat tires.

Notice is served that one of the links here now directs followers to a dead end, a cul-de-sac of rock writing. Maybe an apt metaphor for a writer/zinester who at once championed Clawhammer and Dead C in the pages of his Superdope, then later reeled it back around to a briefly existing pre-podcast Antenna radio show, "No Count Dance Party," that heralded the dead-ends of 50s RnR, beforing fumbling into the technoratisphere.

The blog itself, Agony Shorthand, was in many ways circling the drain of his earlier works, reprinting old reviews and articles, living in the past of living in the past. It was fanzine once removed, a retake on the best of the best, a derivative that often found early finds lacking upon further review.

Jay Hinman? We Hardly Knew Ye.

Hinman, like fellow zine scrawler Eric Oblivian (nee Friedl), whose Wipeout! spanned sounds from To Live and Shave in LA (blech) to NRBQ to garage-rock-a-go-go to various Shrimper label cassettes, could take you into some good music, and down some blind alleys. Hinman had more focus, and while Friedl delved (and eventually disappeared) into Record Moguldom, Hinman flared out with a Night Kings LP 7" by the Demolition Doll Rods (marginal post-Gories ensemble) and Monoshock and then nearly nothing else (I'm going from memory here...).

The radio show came out of Seattle; it was really an assembly once a week that you could stream. There was a strong free jazz show as well (Cat Austin's "Nubian Roots"). For those of us already fading into family and jobs and square lives, No Count was a pull back in, seeing some zine punk figure out a next step. It was short-lived.

I found Hinman's blog late in its run. Re-reading some of the old pieces (and new) was good enough...like discovering old Siltbreeze 7"s, once hopelessly rare, now dumped on the eBay $1 rack like so many Mark McGwire rookie cards. It felt good to get them, but time had moved on. (The Siltbreeze blog, ten years too late, feels about the same: both flared like Red Giants with the release of a record by Times New Viking...almost worth getting it all together again for.)

Hinman recently posted a top-100 records list that shows about where he ended up. It's worth copying to take with you, like sunglasses worn for that egregious walk of shame through the racks of a record shop, staring blankly at barely familiar names, looking to see whether there are any used Eleventh Dream Day albums or Pavement singles or uh, Charles Mingus? It's not exactly the Modern American Library, but it's an extraction of paramount taste, aged, with the mold scraped off, readvised, reconsidered, and scrawled again. Early punk, New Zealand, 80s/90s indie, No Wave, and the greatest Giant Sand record of them all, coming in at #76, "Glum."

Now we're left with movies about those wilted salad music days, food-writing-as-rebellion, and boxes of singles we're too lazy to stand over and play one at a time. Red wine and jazzzzzz....are the kids asleep?

Goodbye Agony Shorthand. Good luck.

Post-script reads: not dead yet? Goddamnit--stop moving, I'm throwing dirt here.

Regular readers (don't you kid yourselves--there's nothing regular about reading) will note some minor additions to this site, namely a new sidebar (at left) with links to pieces that I've written for various publications in addition to existing links to other people's sites.

Ideally there would be links to my own site. I don't have one though. Ideally there would be more articles to link to (and there are, actually, but I'm having some issues getting the Google cache to sniff a few strays out). Instead, the links are a hodgepodge of the unfortunately designed OregonLive Books page (overhaul coming soon, we are promised), "printer-friendly" pages that encourage you to print the article (feel free), and in the worst instances, links to cached versions no longer freely available.

In the coming weeks, look for more "Talk of the Book Town" pieces, as well as past reviews and features and maybe even some fairly inoccuous articles written for trade publicationzzzzzzzz. Or then again, maybe I won't.

Thanks.

Budd Schulberg is one of those authors that you might know of, but chances are have not read. Recently at a Powell's at the Portland International Airport, I saw two separate, aged paperback copies of What Makes Sammy Run? for a dollar each (I helped my self, for a few dollars more, to a remaindered edition of Barry Gifford's Port Tropique, not reviewed here but recommended nonetheless). Sammy is likely Schulberg's best known work; it continues at the fringes of contemporary awareness for having spawned the character Sammy Glick, now shorthand for a bootstrapping, throat-coating self-serving mercenary or agent type. At least, that's what I remember from my reading, a few years ago, tipped off by B.R. Myers' mention in his "A Reader's Manifesto," Atlantic Monthly version (and after Gogol's Dead Souls). (Schulberg, it should be noted, is still alive, and is also author of screenplays for On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd.)

"I may on occasion, for dramatic emphasis, fib. But I never lie. A lie is a thief, sir, and will steal from anybody. A fib just borrows a little from people who can afford it and forgets to pay them back." --Charles the Bartender, The Harder They Fall

The Harder They Fall (1947) is not, as the cover blurb brays, equal to Hemingway's "The Killers." Maybe nothing is. But it does involve boxers. It casts boxing in a miserable, shady milieu, crooked and miserable, and entertainment of the lowest lifeform. You can almost here Bob Dylan thumbing through it while working out the chord progressions on "Who Killed Davey Moore?"

The novel reads like pulp, or at least high-class pulp. It's hard-boiled, and features doomed characters living out the burnt ends of broken dreams, and it's dandy for culling great one-liners and passages from.

The Harder They Fall is grimier than What Makes Sammy Run?, but features men struggling to make right, or make themselves something out of nothing. Protagonist Eddie Lewis, a writer on hiatus from the draft of a play, works as a press agent for a shady boxing promoter when he isn't in the bottle. It's hard to tell who comes out looking worse--the p.r. types or the hacks at the typewriters, as Eddie begins to inflate a man-child Argentine fighter with no fight in him into a heavyweight contender.

"In America, a knock is just a plug that lets itself in the backdoor." --Eddie Lewis

The film came out nearly ten years later, and was (according to IMDB) Bogart's last picture. I haven't seen it.

"One ponch and he goes boom." -- El Toro

The Harder They Fall serves well as a puglist period piece and a crime drama. You can draw a line from Hemingway to Runyon to Thom Jones, and nick The Harder They Fall along the way. Does it stand up well today? Sure, as well as boxing, anyway.

"...[A]lthough I had the natural curiosity of anybody working in an atmosphere of big, quick, hushed money, I didn't let myself get too anxious to nose into subterranean affairs of the syndicate....First you get curious, then you try to find out, then you know too much, then you get paid off, then you get knocked off. It happens." --Eddie Lewis