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March 13, 2013March 15, 2022

Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey

St. Patrick’s Day is days away, and what better way could there be of celebrating the conversion of the Gaels to Christianity than to meditate upon some Irish whiskies. Indeed, were it not for Irish Catholic angst (speaking from some experience) the whiskey industry might never have flourished in that country at all.

The very word whiskey (or whisky) in English is derived from the Gaelic term for the same substance, namely uisce beatha (pronounced ishka bah-ha), which is translated literally as “water of life.” Drop a mouse in a bowl of whiskey and you’ll see how long it lives; nevertheless, even poison has its place in God’s creation, as Proverbs 31:6-7 tells us:

Give strong drink to the one who is perishing,
and wine to those in bitter distress;
let them drink and forget their poverty
and remember their misery no more.
(ESV)

Indeed. It is not for yours truly to review any top-shelf whiskies; I am just not a top-shelf kind of guy, as my friends would readily attest. Instead I plan on looking at three of the old mainstays: Jameson, Bushmills and Tullamore Dew—the plain versions, not the new-fangled single malt variations and such.

I will begin with the latter of the three. Tullamore Dew is a blended Irish whiskey. It shares the most common characteristic of Irish whiskies, namely that it is triple distilled. (Rumors that St. Patrick used the process of triple distillation to explain the Holy Trinity seem unfounded, however.) And as opposed to most Scotch whiskies, peat is generally not featured in the Irish malting process, resulting in a smoother-rather-than-smoky finish. (I will not go further into all of the more tendentious distinctions between various types of whiskey.)

Tullamore Dew is certainly nothing if not smooth. It is so smooth that it is best appreciated neat, or with the merest splash of water, or poured fairly generously over a single ice-cube. You will hear it described by educated tasters as medium-to-full bodied, light-straw in color, featuring notes of wood and honeysuckle, with a long finish. I’d endorse all of these descriptions, emphasizing again that it needs to sipped nearly or entirely straight in order to bring its personality to the fore. Continue reading “Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey”

March 7, 2013July 14, 2014

Ron Sexsmith: Forever Endeavor

What is it about a great Ron Sexsmith song that can be so very pleasing and satisfying, right on the first hearing? I was trying to work that out while listening to one after another on his latest album, Forever Endeavor. For me at least I think it’s something like this: One has heard in one’s lifetime a whole lot of songs, by artists one likes a little or a lot, and there are so many instances where a song begins with promise but instead of fulfilling that promise it gets stuck, or reaches for a height it cannot attain. Sexsmith at his best can turn out a tune that is just so right, musically and lyrically, and seems to arrive and unfold effortlessly. He writes with an innate knowledge of so much of what’s come before him, and blends musical and lyrical references without strain.

Take just one song on this record. We’ve all heard of “Lonely Avenue,” but Ron Sexsmith gives us “If Only Avenue,” with a perfectly wistful and irresistible melody.

With the luxury of hindsight
The past becomes so clear
As I look out on the twilight
My days have become years
It’s strange, as people we’re prone to dwell
On things that we can’t undo
And we’re liable to wander down
If Only Avenue

Cue the wonderfully languid riff that anchors the tune, and basically there’s nothing you can say about this short, unpretentious pop song other than that it is flawless, and could easily be taken for a standard written forty years ago. As on a number of other tracks, producer Mitchell Froom has added string arrangements that are understated and apropos. The whole thing is just a sheer pleasure. Continue reading “Ron Sexsmith: Forever Endeavor“

February 27, 2013December 28, 2023

Too Many Cooks (a Nero Wolfe novel) by Rex Stout

A couple of chapters into Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout, a woman named Dina Laszio, the wife of famed chef Phillip Laszio, comes to Nero Wolfe to say that she is afraid someone is trying to poison her husband. She knows Wolfe doesn’t owe her anything and probably doesn’t hold her in high regard, but in seeking his help she says, “I count on your sense of justice … your humanity … .”

Wolfe’s brusque reply is: “Weak supports, madam.” He continues by offering this typically jaundiced aphorism: “Few of us have enough wisdom for justice, or enough leisure for humanity.”

Indeed, one of the gifts which Rex Stout imparted to his creation, Nero Wolfe, was the gift for aphorism. And the one delivered there is in its way a wonderful summary of how he looks at things. He is a great detective, but he doesn’t see his role as setting the world right or solving everyone’s problems. He has a pronounced sense of his own flaws and of those things which make him ill-suited to the society of others, but he is not out to fix himself either. Rather, he endeavors to accommodate his kind of misanthropy by arranging his life in such a particular way that he deals with others only on his own terms and timing. He uses his skill as a detective to make a lot of money, and, occasionally, for pursuing an end when his own sense of self-respect is offended. He does the job, but he doesn’t credit even himself with “enough wisdom for justice,” which is a much purer concept, and certainly he does not consider that he has “enough leisure for humanity.”

Rex Stout’s series of Nero Wolfe books are so deeply beloved, I think, not because of brain-teasing mysteries—though the crime and mystery are the pegs which hold the rest—but rather the pleasure of being immersed in Nero Wolfe’s beautifully constructed household and routine, and enjoying the interplay and competition between him and his assistant Archie Goodwin—the narrator—as well as the extended family of regulars, including Fritz the chef, Cramer the police inspector, and so on. Every day proceeds with its glorious routine of a superb breakfast, a trip to the plant rooms, a ride down the elevator to the office to read the mail and possibly conduct business, an invariably wonderful lunch, another trip to the plant rooms, another interval in the office for business, an always-remarkable dinner, and then one final possibility for interviewing suspects/witnesses/clients in the office before bed. Wolfe never leaves his house for business (at least that is his rule), and rarely for pleasure, as he has arranged all of his pleasures so close at hand: his food, his orchids, his books and his beer.

When such a structured way of life for one’s characters is established and made familiar, it then creates the opportunity to have fun with “fish-out-of-water” scenarios, and Rex Stout certainly did not shy away from that approach during the thirty-three odd novels (and even more novellas and shorts) in the series. Too Many Cooks is one of the greatest and most enjoyable of these stories where Wolfe leaves home. In this case, the trip is to North Carolina, and a gathering of great chefs to which he has been invited. Even in this, he has a more self-serving motive: he wants the recipe from one of the chefs—Berin—for a spectacular kind of sausage he tasted once as a young man and never forgot.

Naturally, the most dangerous place for anyone to be is in the vicinity of a great detective on vacation, and sure enough there is a murder, and sure enough Wolfe solves it and gets paid in his chosen manner.

Another gift Stout gave to Nero Wolfe was the gift for making speeches: these are actually beautifully composed discourses of logic and persuasion, with, at times, the correct amount of intimidation thrown in. Since Wolfe doesn’t run around town pushing people against walls and pummeling them (though occasionally Archie has to expend physical energy on that level) it is his verbal dexterity which he must employ in order to get what he wants from the witnesses, the suspects and even at times the clients. Too Many Cooks contains more than its fair share of wonderful speeches and arguments from Wolfe, and features one classic example in particular. The book is set in the pre-WWII South (the time contemporary to its writing, as always with Rex Stout) and the resort where Wolfe and the motley crew of great chefs are staying is staffed by a large number of black employees. The straightforward racism of many of the whites who are running things there is made quite clear in the narrative. What we’re only allowed to characterize now as “the n-word” is liberally strewn around. Archie, for his part, doesn’t join in with that, but does take a pragmatic or cold-eyed approach when vital information related to the murder is needed from the black employees; he believes that the local sheriff is best prepared to deal with them (he alternately uses his seemingly self invented colloquialisms of “blackbirds” and “Africans”) and he thinks that Wolfe would be only wasting his time getting involved. Wolfe, unperturbed, proceeds in his own style. He invites all fourteen relevant staff to his hotel room, learns their names and details of their personal lives, serves them drinks, and then begins a process of speechifying, charming, persuading and interviewing that goes on for seventeen pages. In the end, his aim is to overcome what he thinks is a desire on their part to protect the identity of a fellow black man, but ironically he gets the information he wants when one of the waiters can no longer abide that (false) premise and interrupts to set the record straight. Yet, ultimately, whether Wolfe has enough “leisure for humanity” or not, the point he is actually establishing is that it’s more productive to treat people respectfully and as individuals than merely as “types” and through brutish tactics.

It is strange to laud the entertainment-value of a detective novel by lifting up the tendency of a character to give long speeches, but that’s how it is with Nero Wolfe: his speeches are delightfully constructed exercises in the English language, and his well-established personality injects ample humor to such scenes, abetted by Archie’s skepticism and—in his role of narrator—his sharp observance of the response coming from the audience Wolfe is addressing.

…

There’s more to Too Many Cooks than those speeches, of-course. There is the fun of Nero Wolfe engaging in travel and his behavior on the train. There are the relatively well-drawn and enjoyable personalities of the various eccentric chefs in this story, and there is even an occasion in the plot for Wolfe to get shot; this is for him an exceedingly rare bit of physical entanglement in the proceedings. And as always, there is the fun and tension of the relationship between Wolfe and Archie, and here is where Too Many Cooks is, I believe, fairly crucial to the whole series.

It is the fifth in the series, preceded by Fer-de-Lance, The League of Frightened Men, The Rubber Band and The Red Box. In those earlier books, the relationship between Wolfe and Archie was not precisely what it ended up being for the rest of the series. Specifically, Stout seemed unsure how impressive a person Archie Goodwin needed to be. Later there would always be a kind of rivalry, mutual tweaking, and attempts to one-up one another, but in those earlier novels there is a certain level of disrespect from Wolfe towards Archie, which can be jarring to encounter. Wolfe would always be the boss, but at times in those first few books it seemed Archie was being treated a little bit too much as the hired help. That dynamic changes for good with Too Many Cooks, and I think the change in geographic location had a lot to do with it. Wolfe, off-balance (literally and figuratively) due to the traveling, is more dependent on Archie in this story, and Archie thereby becomes a little more commanding and worthy of respect. Also, while Archie Goodwin’s back-story has him born in Ohio, it is ironically in leaving New York City on this excursion to the South with Wolfe that he grows a little bit more into the sophisticated New York private-eye that he ultimately is. I think Stout just went with these subtle changes as he was writing, but that he liked the new dynamics better, and this may also explain why in the very next novel (1939’s Some Buried Caesar) he once again takes Wolfe and Archie out of New York City.

It’s odd, I admit, to consider a single Rex Stout book in terms of its quality relative to others; there are strong enough commonalities to all the Nero Wolfe novels that we tend to think of the whole body of work rather than singling out particular books. However, I think Too Many Cooks would have to rate in the top five of the entire series, from the opening where Archie saunters with a cigarette on the platform at Penn Station while Wolfe yells from within the train, to the end when Wolfe finally manipulates and/or bullies his way to getting the precious recipe that he went all the way to North Carolina to obtain. Each page sparkles with the charm and verve of Rex Stout’s writing at its best. As Nero Wolfe novels go, it is as close to a masterpiece as one can get, and that’s saying quite a lot.

…

Rating: Nine and a half out of ten lead pipes.

…

February 17, 2013January 27, 2023

Tom Jones and a Towering “Tower of Song”

Scheduled for release on April 23rd in the U.S. (on Rounder Records) is a new album from Tom Jones, titled Spirit in the Room. It was released on the other side of the pond last year. I confess I’ve only just become aware of it, and that was through my encountering on YouTube the video for Tom Jones’ rendition of Leonard Cohen’s great old tune “Tower of Song,” which is the first track on the album.

This is one of those cases where yours truly tries not to come across too hyperbolic and breathless, but, frankly, hearing Tom Jones’ performance of this song left me simultanously devastated and delighted. It’s one of those musical moments I would compare to tripping over a bag in the street stuffed with two million dollars in unmarked bills, and making it all the way home with it safely. Those are the good days. If you have not heard it, do take a listen to it via the embedded YouTube clip here and I’ll say a few more words of my own about it below.

(A side-note: Many other artists ought to watch that clip and learn that there are ways to make videos that neither detract nor distract from the song. Kudos to the director, one Paul Caslin.)

The song was first recorded by Leonard Cohen on his great 1988 album I’m Your Man. Leonard’s version features a sparse kind of piano/synth arrangement, with backing singers, distinctly low-budget but witty. Yet Tom Jones’ stripped-down rendition makes Cohen’s seem exceedingly ornate by comparison.

To me, at least, Tom Jones’ version of “Tower of Song” is one of those revelatory performances where a singer takes a song to a place that the songwriter himself could not have envisioned, and lives in it and makes it his own.

When Cohen wrote the tune, it was the song and testament of a songwriter. He sounded pretty darned old in 1988, singing this song and looking back (and to a degree looking forward) on his life and the vocation of songwriting and meditating both profoundly and humorously upon it. He was in fact about fifty-four years of age. (Who knew that twenty-five years later he’d be experiencing a peak of popularity, undertaking huge concert tours and continuing to write some of the best songs of his career? Certainly he, of all people, did not know it.)

There is a couplet in the song that I think is crucial both to the original rendition and to this cover version:

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice

In Cohen’s version, this is an exquisite joke—a self-deprecating piece of irony. No one ever accused Leonard of having a golden voice, although many have accused him of having a voice comparable to considerably less precious substances. The couplet is both a gag and a metaphor: his gift, as we know, is actually that he is a writer. He is obliged by some ineffable commandment to write his songs, but he also finds that he must sing them himself, regardless of his voice, simply so that they will be heard.

Yet, sung by Tom Jones, the magical and beautiful thing is that Continue reading “Tom Jones and a Towering “Tower of Song””

January 25, 2013January 3, 2014

Eware (Wind Chaser) 1.4L Ultrasonic Humidifier

It’s just possible that I have recently stumbled upon the explanation for the age-old mystery of “spontaneous combustion.” That’s the alleged phenomenon whereby a living thing—including most notably a human being—suddenly bursts into flames for no apparent reason. I was in bed, and our small dog was lying near the bottom of the bed, atop the bedspread, as is her wont. Her precise position was less than ideal in relation to my feet and she needed to be shifted a little bit. I have become adept at sliding her over a few inches without unduly disturbing her; or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she has become adept at ignoring the fact that she is being slid over, thus allowing me to do it. It was completely dark in the room. I placed my hands on either side of her curled up body and gently began shifting her over. It was then that I noticed distinct if small flashes of light emanating from her body. It took me a few moments to take in what I was witnessing and to arrive at a conclusion as to what was taking place. I realized that these flashes of light could only be sparks, caused by static electricity. The heat had been on steadily in our apartment for some weeks, and I had already noticed that everything seemed pretty dried out. I’d gotten some static electric shocks myself, and the dry air was affecting my nasal passages and such. Still, this was another level of seriousness, surely; that is, the possibility that my dog might burst into flames upon my bed.

I took it as a signal that perhaps it was time to get a humidifier. Continue reading “Eware (Wind Chaser) 1.4L Ultrasonic Humidifier”

January 14, 2013January 23, 2013

Downton Abbey

I’d avoided this much-talked-about joint British ITV/American PBS Masterpiece Theatre television series until last night, when special circumstances conspired to compel me to view it (i.e. my better half wanted to watch it). I fully understood that the show was basically a soap opera for people who are too good to watch soap operas. And there’s nothing wrong with that, per se.

Last night’s episode (Season 3, Episode 2) had multiple plot-lines promising turbulent events. A young woman was due to marry an older man with a disability, to the disapproval of some. A middle-aged servant woman in the Downton Abbey edifice was awaiting test results that might confirm that she had cancer. Meanwhile, there was much angst circulating roundabout due to the fact that money was running out to keep the gigantic household running, and the family might soon have to move from their palatial Downton Abbey structure (which appears to have about 500 bedrooms) to another site that was merely a huge mansion (containing probably only about 50 bedrooms). This would also require laying off some of the army of household servants. Continue reading “Downton Abbey”

January 11, 2013April 28, 2015

David Bowie: “Where Are We Now?”

The new David Bowie song, “Where Are We Now?” (embedded via YouTube below) has been generating a frenzy of attention, given it’s his first record in ten years and many thought he’d never put out another one. (He’s 66 years-old, which somehow sounds so old for David Bowie, while, by contrast, I think 71 sounds just right for Bob Dylan.) I like some of Bowie’s stuff over the years, but am not a rabid devotee, so the mere appearance of the new song didn’t knock me off my chair. But I happen to think it is quite good and quite lovely: an impressionistic, bittersweet reflection on aging, evoking sadness at things lost, and a poignant longing to hold on. And maybe some other things. Bowie is nothing if not good at leaving space for the listener to paint his or her own picture, and that’s so even in this case where the things he’s singing about are quite personal and specific to him. Continue reading “David Bowie: “Where Are We Now?””

January 1, 2013November 27, 2022

Cerys Matthews – Baby, It’s Cold Outside (Christmas Classics)

Cerys Matthews Baby It's Cold Outside Christmas review

Before this Christmas season draws to an official close (there are twelve days of Christmas, y’know), I thought it worth noting one new addition to the already-gargantuan and ever-increasing library of Christmas albums. (I love great Christmas music and am known to listen to it in July.) It is a record titled Baby, It’s Cold Outside by a lady singer named Cerys Matthews, who emanates from the nation of Wales. She is little known west of the Atlantic Ocean, though she’s had quite an interesting and eclectic career, leading a rock/pop band by the name of Catatonia during the nineties, later going to live and work in Nashville for a few years and producing more folky/countrified kind of work, and in more recent times recording and releasing her renditions of traditional Welsh songs (and this album features one titled “Y Darlun”).

With a title like Baby, It’s Cold Outside, one might well assume that this was a swinging Dino kind of Xmas record, but that track is very much the exception, and in more ways than one; in fact, it’s probably best to circle back to it at the end of this little review. In actuality, this is an album of traditional and predominantly religious Christmas carols, performed in a sparse, folk-like context, albeit pretty far from any idea of folk purism. The central success of the album is in enlivening and refreshing these old tunes, like “Good King Wenceslas” and “We Three Kings Of Orient Are,” with live-in-the-studio performances that are just off-center enough to be interesting to the ear (with the odd exotic instrument thrown in), and which at the same time communicate an infectious sense of joy and mystery. Even “Jingle Bells,” which to me is probably the most annoying song to have to hear again and again during the holiday season, is performed winsomely enough here with banjo and sleigh-bells to raise a fresh smile. Similarly, “Go Tell It On the Mountains”—surely about as hackneyed a folk-hymn as one could name—is performed here as if it was composed yesterday, with a fairly overflowing spirit of gladness and urgency. That’s no small thing.

A full-length example—although it’s a more modern song than most of the others—is the rendition of “Little Donkey,” which can be heard via SoundCloud below. Although this tune can be dismissed as a “children’s song” (as if children’s songs aren’t crucial both to Christmas and to the universe-at-large) I think the performance here evokes the genuine poignancy at the heart of it. It is sung and played with great love and care, as if it all really matters. (Someday we’ll find out if it does.) Coconut shells are the featured exotic instrument. Cerys Matthews’ vocal on this track is at a whisper level.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/29875520″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

In the end, it is a Cerys Matthews album, and so her singing is the key color on the canvas. When I first heard her sing (not in the context of this album) I frankly didn’t like her style very much at all. Then, I happened across her in a different setting, and thought, well, that’s kinda something. Having now heard a lot more of what she’s done, including this current record, I would have to say that I’ve come to believe she’s a singer of quite remarkable nuance and range, although she comes across with deceptive simplicity. For one thing, she genuinely knows how to use a microphone. It was Sinatra who described the microphone as “the singer’s instrument,” and even in his day he mourned those singers who didn’t use it for all it was worth. Today, you only have to turn on one of those ubiquitous talent shows to see how many singers believe that they should basically plant the microphone on their lips and yell. And why not, when they get rewarded with huge applause for doing so? Matthews clearly understands how her use of the microphone helps manage the dynamics of the performance and the expression of the song. And when we’re talking about dynamics, the concept of restraint (or lack thereof) inevitably comes up. Matthews, as with the finest singers, seems to know as a matter of instinct and taste when and what to hold back, and when (which ought rightly to be rare) to let loose. She also seems wise about turning technical weaknesses of her voice to her advantage when it comes to emotional expressiveness. The variety of vocal tones and textures she applies just on this album are pretty impressive on their own merit. And, in the end, after all, she is Welsh; therefore a very special blessing of God is upon her vocal cords, and I think that she cannot be said in her use of them to squander that particular element.

And so, back around to the title track. It was in 1999, while Matthews was still the lead singer for the rock/pop band Catatonia, that fellow Welsh citizen and pop-music legend Tom Jones connected with her to record the old Frank Loesser classic, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” for a new Tom Jones album and as a Christmas single in Britain. They did the complete treatment, a total throwback, with the right kind of band. No great effort for ol’ Tom Jones, a truly old-school professional vocalist, you might well say, but how did the rock & roll chick figure into it? Well, she acquitted herself with aplomb. It was a relatively minor hit in the U.K. at the time, but, as with the best of these Christmas things, it has stuck around and people remember it year by year. Cerys Matthews had apparently planned to build a follow-up Christmas album around it herself, but the project has waited all the way until now. What she delivered in 2012 is of a rather dramatically different spirit to that track, although it could be said that the concepts of joy and of fun are common denominators. The song has been sung by many greats over the years, but rarely if ever has it been done with the kind of chemistry that Tom and Cerys put forth, especially in their live performances, one of which is embedded below via YouTube. Matthews hams up her half of the vocal to the nth degree, but that doesn’t prevent her from bringing it all home in the end.

As for the album as a whole, a record that evokes the joys and the mysteries of the true story of Christmas as charmingly as this one does deserves to be remembered for many Christmases to come.

…

Rating: Nine and a half out of ten lead pipes.

Baby It’s Cold Outside is available via Earthquake

Or via Amazon.com

Or via Amazon UK

…

December 3, 2012April 11, 2014

“Revisionist Art” by Bob Dylan at the Gagosian Gallery in New York

“Revisionist Art: Thirty Works by Bob Dylan” is on show at New York City’s Gagosian Gallery. It was unveiled last Wednesday and runs, God willing, until January 12th, 2013. I was slightly surprised to hear that Dylan was having another show at the Gagosian. It was little more than a year ago that they hosted his “Asia Series,” which visitors were led to believe had sprung from his time spent traveling in Asia, but turned out to be sourced directly from a bunch of old photographs (taken by other people). I thought at the time that this might be a little embarrassing for the gallery. But, I guess it’s true what they say: There’s no such thing as bad publicity. And, indeed, I think that old adage would make a pretty good subtitle for the current exhibition, a display of thirty re-imagined American magazine covers which is part burlesque show and part horror show, with the lines pretty blurry between the two.

In addition, it is quite comic. At least, the missus and I did our fair share of chuckling as we perused the thirty silkscreen-on-canvas creations. The handful of other visitors who were there at the time seemed considerably more somber and I hope we didn’t spoil their visit with our giggles.

The two images being used to promote the show—”BabyTalk” and “Playboy”—are quite typical of what you’ll see if you visit. Is it high art, or is it just humor somewhere on the level of “MAD” magazine? (That’s one magazine cover which is not featured, by the way.) I would say more the latter than the former, but I have neither the credentials nor the motivation to make a definite determination. One thing did occur to me: Whatever these things look like now, they will be quite a bit more interesting if they are exhibited one or two hundred years from now, as a visual commentary of sorts on America from about 1960 to 2012 by the late, great figure of that time, Bob Dylan. (Though that still doesn’t mean they are necessarily great art.)

And I’m not an art critic. Different people will take different things from looking at these works. (How often does an art critic say something like that?) But some of the things that struck me are as follows.

The photos of the women on these magazine covers run from lascivious to pornographic. Male faces and figures are usually battered and covered in blood. Sex and violence is the basic consumer product being highlighted. The porn-flick and the Colosseum. (Even the hoity-toity “Philosophy Today” features a nude woman, albeit a little more classical-looking.) The text of the various headlines then reads like a hierarchy of consumer interest: vanity, gossip, conflict, and a little something cultural or intellectual tossed in like salt and pepper. The names of politicians, celebrities and the references to events in the news (notably wars) are interchangeable and bear no relation to the dates on the magazine covers, conveying a sense of there being a continuum of all the same kinds of stuff repackaged and resold over and over again. Continue reading ““Revisionist Art” by Bob Dylan at the Gagosian Gallery in New York”

November 29, 2012May 24, 2024

Fleischmann’s Gin (and Some General Notes on Gin)

It was Kingsley Amis who introduced me properly to gin.

I would like to say that it was at some soirée hosted by that famous (late) English author, but no; it was instead in a collection of his writings on alcohol-related topics, titled Everyday Drinking, released in 2008, with an introduction by another well-known (and late) English drinker, Christopher Hitchens.

I say that Amis introduced me properly to gin because my first (most improper) introduction was of a character I’ve found to be all too common among my peers. As a young lad, I was in some social situation or other where the only available alcohol was gin. I drank it, mixed perhaps with tonic (or maybe with some kind of lemonade—I can’t remember), and found it went down easily and promoted cheerfulness on my part and that of my acquaintances. A little being good, it seemed a cinch that a lot would be better, and indeed it was. Until, that is, the morning, when I awoke with a kind and degree of hangover that I’ve never experienced before or since. Without ticking down through the more well-known symptoms, my overwhelming feeling was that I had drunk several pints of window cleaning solution (the blue kind, with ammonia, not the eco-friendly type you see around these days). The taste in my mouth, which would not leave, was such that I believe I could have licked clean all the windows of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and still had potency remaining.

I swore never to touch the stuff again, and kept to that faithfully for decades, during the course of which I’ve drunk almost everything else, but gravitated mainly towards spirits, especially the Irish and Scotch varieties.

I read the Kingsley Amis collection on drinking for enjoyment and general edification, the book containing some opinions I shared and some I didn’t, some information that was interesting and some of little relevance, but all written with the Amis verve. It was his reflections on gin, however, that surprised me most, and, you might even say, turned my life around (though the final destination remains unclear). In my circles, I’d never heard someone attest to actually liking the taste of gin, on its own. This however is what Amis stated, indicating that his favored way of imbibing the old spirit (invented in Holland but adopted most enthusiastically by the British) was merely by adding a little water, and savoring the taste of the juniper berry and other assorted infused botanicals. This was fascinating to me, and presented the challenge of confronting that old demon from my past head-on, without any buffer such as tonic or even vermouth. As one gets older, one realizes that acquired tastes are, after all, the ones truly worth acquiring, and I thought I would give this one a try. Amis had fairly catholic tastes in gin—speaking well of the readily available and reasonably-priced Gordon’s—but seemed to have some difficulty identifying water of sufficient quality so as not to ruin his drinks. This didn’t surprise me so much, considering his context of time and place in England. However, I live in New York City, where we are blessed to have the best water in the world running for free through our very faucets. (Fresh out of the faucet it can be uneven, but if you let the tap run a little while, then fill up a bottle and put it in the fridge overnight, in the morning you will have a liquid so wonderful and clear and refreshing as to make the product of those Polish springs seem by comparison something more akin to milk of magnesia).

Cutting to the chase, I found myself in agreement with Amis. Gin could indeed be a wonderful drink in and of itself, with delicate and undulating subtleties of flavor and aroma. What’s more, due to its relative purity as compared to whiskies, it is actually far less prone towards giving one that terrible hangover. It is in the mixing of gin with tonic and other beverages that the mischief is wrought (though naturally excessive consumption is inherently bad and be sure to consult your doctor before adopting any new diet or fitness regimen mentioned in these pages).

Discovering a way of appreciating this heretofore-shunned spirit opened up a new world. There are lots of gins, at just about every price-point. I quickly found that I preferred what I perceived to be the ginnier gins; that is, those still most loyal to the distinctive flavor of the juniper, as opposed to those that lean far towards very citrusy and orangey flavors and seem instead to be gins for people who don’t like gin. That includes some quite expensive and fashionable brands.

This piece, however, is in the end intended as a review of just one: Fleischmann’s gin. Amis certainly didn’t deal with it in his book, as it is not even an English gin. It was, in fact, the first American gin to be distilled, beginning in 1870. And much of its marketing and claim-to-fame during the hey-day of cocktails, sixty years ago and more, seems to have been that as an American gin it was well-suited to gin cocktails which originated in America, notably the martini and Tom Collins. The ads proclaimed it as being more mixable.

In the glass, both straight and with a little water, my first impression of Fleischmann’s (which I have not had reason to revise since) was that it possessed about the same flavor balance as Gordon’s (surely about as uncontroversial and plain an English-type-gin as you can find) but was distinctly milder and smoother. That might be a pro or con for some. Sipped in a glass with a splash of cold water and/or a nice clean ice-cube, it’s quite easy to forget you’re drinking much of anything at all. However, since it is 80 proof you will eventually realize it (although it should be noted that it and a number of other currently-80-proof-gins were once sold at 90 proof and more, so they are not precisely the same spirits they were decades ago). Another perspective would be that its mild flavor demands that you savor it all the more carefully. Continue reading “Fleischmann’s Gin (and Some General Notes on Gin)”

September 10, 2012March 22, 2022

Tempest by Bob Dylan: Is it an unreviewable album?

I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan’s new album, Tempest (the iTunes version until my LPs arrive) over the past week and I’ve also been looking at some of the reviews. My impression at the moment is of a vast gulf between what the album contains versus what even the best reviewers have been able to say about it. I don’t think this is because the reviewers are stupid but rather that there really is so much going on in the songs on this album that a review of standard length and breadth is bound to come up short; this is true I think even more than to the usual degree. I mean, it’s always essentially impossible to write adequately about music, when only listening to it will communicate its nature, but Tempest is a special case, even when compared to many other Bob Dylan albums. I think we’re used to a Bob Dylan album having one or two or even three of the kinds of songs that blow one’s mind and take over one’s imagination. But Tempest, with ten songs, has I think at least eight that reach that level (though I’m not even going to say which two don’t).

On one level perhaps it’s just a question of fecundity. The album is highly populated with long songs, and even the songs that aren’t dramatically long contain lots and lots of words. Dylan’s never been one to record many instrumentals, but I think it’s been a long time since the lyrics have spilled out of him with this kind of volume and force. And not chaotically either: the lyrics are intricate and filled with terrific rhymes, and burst forth in his torn-up voice yet highly nuanced singing with confidence and purpose.

Now, I fully understand why all the people invited to those “listening sessions” earlier in the year were so wowed. An appreciative listener arrives at the end of this album somewhat breathless and slack-jawed in amazement (and not just on the first spin either).

Of-course, all of the above makes me sound like someone who worships everything Dylan does completely uncritically, but I’m long past apologizing for my affection and regard for Bob Dylan’s body of work. Check back in three hundred years and we’ll find out whether those who thought Dylan was very special have been vindicated or whether those who thought he was merely another purveyor of late-20th-century-type rock/pop songs were proven right.

It’s true that not everyone has been bowled over by Tempest. That’s fair enough—no one’s obliged to like it at all—but merely as a student of human nature I’m curious as to why some people who like what we can loosely call “this kind of music” and who attest to loving much of what Bob Dylan has done before would not be nearly as wildly-enamored of this album as others.

The review in the LA Times was not technically a bad review (3 stars), but included substantial caveats. Perhaps reflecting on some of the reservations can be illustrative of where the differences in perception lie.

The reviewer appears to be least-impressed by the title track, which is a fourteen-minute song based around the sinking of the Titanic.

[Bob Dylan] is officially an antique, a relic and the last of his kind in a world that has little time or patience to focus on a 14-minute song about the sinking of the Titanic when everybody already knows how it ends. This is the big, grand miscue on the record. In an Irish-tinged tune that repeats virtually the same 16-bar melody throughout its quarter-hour, Dylan in poetic verse recounts the sinking and the fate of its passengers with a singsong phrasing that grows tiresome.

Well, if “everybody already knows how it ends,” what is the point, indeed?

It’s not beyond the capacity of Bob Dylan to write and record a dull or monotonous track, but I admit it does beggar my own empathetic capacity to understand how someone who generally enjoys Dylan’s music could find this to be such a track. It requires some kind of imperviousness. The folky melody is certainly repetitive, but if you want symphonies, you’re in the wrong place, my friend. For me, the counterpoint of the lilting waltz with the subject matter of the song amounts to something very affecting. And Bob’s singing throughout is so filled with variations in tone and character that monotony is for me very far from the situation. Dylan is really proving on this album how someone with a voice that is so shot can nonetheless be a a singer of great expression and subtlety (at least in the studio).

Ah, but we know how the story ends! Well, to think that this song is intended to inform us of how the story of the Titanic ends strikes me as maybe a slight failure of imagination, or attentiveness, or both. The title of the song, “Tempest,” is the initial tip-off that we are not in literal-ville. The historical Titanic was not sunk in a storm, after all, but by an iceberg (of which there is not a single mention in the forty-five[?] verses). So one might begin to suspect there could be something metaphorical going on. How about the story of the Titanic as a metaphor for life and death—for all of our lives and deaths? In any case, for this longstanding fan of Dylan’s work, it is pretty darned difficult not to be galvanized by the driving parade of verses, some of which include:

The passageway was narrow
There was blackness in the air
He saw every kind of sorrow
Heard voices everywhere

The veil was torn asunder
Between the hours of twelve and one
No change no sudden wonder
Could undo what had been done

The ship was going under
The universe had opened wide
The roll was called up yonder
The angels turned aside

They battened down the hatches
But the hatches wouldn’t hold
They drowned upon the staircase
Of brass and polished gold

The watchman he lay dreaming
The damage had been done
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
And he tried to tell someone

Ah, shucks, if only we didn’t know how it all ends! Oddly enough, despite knowing it all, I find myself coming to the end of this song only wide-eyed and dazed.

Literal-ville doesn’t seem to me like it would be the most interesting place to live, especially if all you’ve got to listen to are Bob Dylan songs. The same LA Times reviewer says he likes the song “Long and Wasted Years,” but sums it up blandly as “a bitter song about a dead marriage.” Oh! I hadn’t realized that’s all it was. Foolishly, I’d felt all kinds of deep vibrations and resonances in this song. But somehow, there must be a way to bang all those verses into shape as just another bitter song about a dead marriage.

My enemy crashed into the dust
Stopped dead in his tracks and he lost his lust
He was run down hard and he broke apart
He died in shame, he had an iron heart

We cried on a cold and frosty morn
We cried because our souls were torn
So much for tears
So much for these long and wasted years

Hmm. If I didn’t know it was only a bitter song about a dead marriage, I’d say the track fairly explodes with emotional echoes and reflections on things like love, loyalty, memory, forgiveness, and regret. In addition, in terms of the sound and vocal performance, it evokes Dylan’s great song from 1986, “Brownsville Girl,” suggesting however vaguely some kind of picking-up of that story many years later. I admit that the track downright makes my eyes well up from the very first verse onwards. Maybe I’ll be able to correct that by keeping in mind the words “bitter” and “dead” from now on (but I wouldn’t count on it).

The same reviewer helpfully points out that the song “Early Roman Kings” is “a blues that directs its wrath at the selfish rich in the same way that ‘Masters of War’ indicted the military-industrial complex in 1963.” Alright. Without reopening stale discussions of “Masters of War,” is slamming the selfish rich—like some “Occupy Wall Street” slogan—really what “Early Roman Kings” is all about?

I can dress up your wounds
With a blood-clotted rag
I ain’t afraid to make love
To a bitch or a hag

If you see me comin’
And you’re standing there
Wave your handkerchief
In the air

I ain’t dead yet
My bell still rings
I keep my fingers crossed
Like them early Roman kings

The LA Times reviewer appears to be way more savvy than yours truly, when it comes to hammering the latest Bob Dylan songs into some pre-ordained mold of meaning. For me, up until this point, I was just digging the attitude on this track. I hadn’t picked up on any political or social manifesto. I’ll keep trying, though. Continue reading “Tempest by Bob Dylan: Is it an unreviewable album?”

August 21, 2012December 2, 2013

Acer Aspire Laptop Computer

This is a review of (and a meditation inspired by) the Acer Aspire 5733Z-4816notebook computer.

I like to tell myself that I make my computers earn their purchase price, and then some. My chief working computer for nearly the past six years has been a Dell Vostro laptop. When I bought it (if I’m not mistaken) George W. Bush was in the White House and Dennis Hastert was still Speaker of the House. (“You don’t say, Grandpa! And the wolves in Wales?”) I never upgraded the operating system from XP or even boosted the 1 GB RAM with which it came. The machine served me very well, frankly. Any significant problems I had while using it were always software-based. Until, that is, the most recent problem, when it abruptly shut off while I was doing nothing in particular. It just went “pfft,” like an old TV set being turned off. It wouldn’t go back on, then, but it did some hours later, as if nothing had happened. Still, I had to believe that the old boy was telling me to prepare for the day when he just wouldn’t be able to spin that hard disk anymore. It was clearly time.

I’ve used Dell personal computers for a long, long time, and similarly have never had a major complaint about the hardware. That’s why I’ve kept using them. If it works, why mess around? (You might call it the essence of the conservative ethos.) However, times and circumstances change no matter how you might try to keep them static. Money being an issue, it seemed like a wise juncture at which to see if more could be had at my preferred-price-point from a different manufacturer.

I eventually concluded that this was indeed the case. Looking at the lowest priced 15.6″ laptops, Acer seemed to be offering the most bang for the buck, and getting (generally) favorable reviews while doing it. I could get a 2.13 GHz (Pentium) machine with 4 GB of RAM from Acer for significantly less than a machine with those same properties would cost from Dell. So, in the end, that is what I did. Continue reading “Acer Aspire Laptop Computer”

August 8, 2012November 12, 2015

Defiant Requiem

At New York’s IFC Center I recently watched the film “Defiant Requiem,” which is a new feature-length telling of a remarkable and moving story from the Holocaust. I am not going to try and provide the whole narrative here, as you can find that kind of thing elsewhere, but briefly it is the story of how a group of prisoners—almost all Jews—led by a talented young Czech conductor named Rafael Schächter, practiced and learned Verdi’s “Requiem,” a very stirring and enormously challenging choral work, eventually performing it sixteen times for their fellow prisoners (recruiting new singers as many were deported to Auschwitz in the meanwhile). This was in a concentration camp at Terezín, near Prague.

The idea of Jewish prisoners working so hard to perform something based on the text of a Roman Catholic funeral mass seems strange, and indeed some rabbis at the camp objected. However, Schächter would not be dissuaded, and found 150 singers who volunteered to descend to a cellar (where Schächter had a broken down piano he had found) and go through hours and ultimately months of exacting lessons and rehearsal.

Some years ago, the American conductor Murry Sidlin came across a mention of how Verdi’s Requiem was performed at this concentration camp, and, understanding what was involved, was flabbergasted at the thought of how it could have been done. He found out all he could about the story, and ultimately dedicated himself to bringing the Requiem back to the abandoned Terezín in a performance to honor those who had performed and heard it then, most of whom were murdered at Auschwitz or other camps. The new documentary, “Defiant Requiem,” portrays this (including a performance in the very basement where Schächter and his singers practiced) and tells the original story by means of reenactments and interviews with a few surviving members of the choir.

Schächter’s passion for putting on Verdi’s Requiem in the camp had everything to do with the Latin text, which, accompanied by the sublime music, he saw as being capable of making a defiant and inspiriting statement which the prisoners could not otherwise have publicly made. He made sure the singers knew the meaning of each word they sang, including these verses which speak of God’s judgment: Continue reading “Defiant Requiem”

April 3, 2012August 12, 2023

All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett by David Evanier

I’ve recently read David Evanier’s All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett, and it seems to me that it will stand as the essential written reference point for anyone interested in this great American singer’s life and music. Of-course, being about the only proper biography written of Bennett (excluding his 1998 autobio The Good Life in collaboration with music-writer Will Friedwald) it lacks obvious competition. Nevertheless, this book is no knockoff, but an assiduously researched work by a writer completely engaged with his subject matter. It is far from an official biography and proceeds with that freedom; the aggressively private Bennett himself did not grant an interview and neither did some figures whom one could rate as key intimates of the singer, but out of a number of in-depth conversations with those individuals who did grant interviews, and a thorough marshaling of what is already public record, David Evanier has constructed an estimably credible and robust account of Bennett’s life and career.

When it comes to books on major figures in the entertainment world, you often have a dichotomy between those which focus on the famous individual’s personal life versus those which look at their art and life’s work with an appreciative eye. Evanier combines both approaches here, and, in addition to being the best way, objectively-speaking, of approaching the task, in Bennett’s case it also must be seen as the absolutely obligatory way. There could be no way of telling Tony Bennett’s life story in a meaningful way without getting to grips with his passionate devotion to his chosen musical form, and the full range of struggles and successes he has experienced in that realm. Continue reading “All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett by David Evanier”

November 12, 2011June 26, 2023

(Review) The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams

Review of The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
Hank Williams’s voice is a unique and a gigantic one in American culture, which means that it is also one familiar to those who listen to popular music all across the world. Hank Williams is recognizable singing, say, “I Saw The Light,” or “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” even by people who couldn’t remotely be described as fans, in the same way as Bing Crosby is instantly recognizable singing “White Christmas,” or John Wayne is instantly recognizable in a cowboy hat saying, “The hell I won’t!” Hank Williams is just there as a reference point like the pyramids of Egypt or the Grand Canyon.

In speaking of Hank Williams’s voice, however, I very much mean it both in the sense of the instantly-recognizable product of his vocal cords and in the sense of what that voice has to say: that is, how Hank Williams in singing a song describes the world, captures an emotion, issues a plea.

Although he died at the age of 29, Hank Williams is a patriarch of country music (if it’s legal to use the term patriarch anymore) but he is also much more than that: he is both patriarch and patron saint to songwriters everywhere, and to discerning aficionados of the art of song across all genres. No one lays it out there quite like Hank Williams did over and over again in his short songwriting career, with such a devastating combination of depth, honesty and economy. Even his more light and humorous songs are models of how to write a tune that’s instantly accessible, unpretentious and utterly timeless.

This album, The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, is drawn from lyrics found in Hank Williams’s notebooks after his death, and offered fifty years later to this selection of songwriters and performers to put to music and finish. (Initially, all of the lyrics were offered to Bob Dylan, but after long consideration he decided that “the task is too mighty” and finished just one song himself, that one being “The Love That Faded.”) After living with the album for a little while, my own feeling is that this collection is nothing less than a gift.

These new recordings also offer a chance to ponder the question of where exactly Hank Williams’s voice resides, after all. Is it in the words that he wrote, or does it require his own actual voice and his own melodies in order to be heard? The answer isn’t simple, and maybe it’s not graspable at all by us humans, but reflecting upon it does shed a kind of light.

What would you or I think if we came across these words scribbled in a random notebook?

Blue is my heart, blue as the sky
Memories of you, they’re making me cry
Longing for you in days all gone by
Blue is my heart, blue as the sky

Honestly, for myself, I would think that they were pretty darned banal, and I’d likely think nothing more of it. Saying that your heart is as blue as the sky, that memories are making you cry … what could be more bland, more ordinary and unremarkable? On the page, it’s difficult to spot any particular voice there, let alone that of a towering songwriter.

Holly Williams with harmony by her father Hank Jr.

Yet, the transformation that takes place when these words are put to a simple, plaintive melody and sung with a heartfelt ache is utterly astounding. That “Blue is my heart, blue as the sky” line goes from seeming offhand to being truly heartwrenching; it’s a line that to my ears now plumbs the soul. The blueness of the singer’s poor broken heart is now juxtaposed so poignantly with that beautiful blue sky, making the sadness there so much more unbearably sad. And then, again, the blueness of that poor broken heart is just like the blueness of the sky: broad, deep, infinite—never to be filled.

Tracklist: The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams
1. You’ve Been Lonesome, Too – Alan Jackson
2. The Love That Faded – Bob Dylan
3. How Many Times Have You Broken My Heart? – Norah
Jones
4. You Know That I Know – Jack White
5. I’m So Happy I Found You – Lucinda Williams
6. I Hope You Shed a Million Tears – Vince Gill
and Rodney Crowell
7. You’re Through Fooling Me – Patty Loveless
8. You’ll Never Again Be Mine – Levon Helm
9. Blue Is My Heart – Holly Williams
10. Oh, Mama, Come Home – Jakob Dylan
11. Angel Mine – Sheryl Crow
12. The Sermon on the Mount – Merle Haggard

Hank Williams’ little lines might have seemed like nothing on paper, but in the hands of another songwriter and singer (in this case his granddaughter Holly Williams) tuning into the same channel Hank heard, and handling his words with love, they become yet another great song, and one that can stand beside the ones he himself sang. His voice is indeed there and is quite unmistakable. It took a kind of alchemy and magic to bring it out of those words, alive and tangible, but it had been preserved within them somehow.

I’m not going to go down the tracks on this album one by one and rank or rate them. As said, I do think that the album as a whole constitutes a gift: great new songs from the well spring that was Hank Williams, now 58 years after his death. There’s nothing resembling a clunker. I think that each performer does a loving and beautiful job with the lyrics they were given. Some lean more towards a melody that sounds like Hank, while others make music that sounds more like what they’d do themselves, but both approaches bear fruit, and Hank’s voice never disappears; it’s persistent and true.

An album like this is not by its nature a cohesive whole, although these 12 tracks over 37 minutes do make for good listening at a sitting. However, it’s a collection of individual songs that will live on in the repertoires of these performers, and likely spawn some great cover versions in a similar way in which Hank’s originals did and continue to do. Kudos to producer Mary Martin, to Bob Dylan, and to all involved.

…

That said: When I write about music releases, I tend to consider their audio quality in relation to the lamentable loudness war (although I’m wouldn’t want to present myself as the final arbiter of these things). In this case, my own perception is that the CD does suffer from some excessive compression of dynamic range—which is a crying shame as always—but it is not on the extreme level of many other releases of modern times. (I have not myself heard the vinyl version.)

But I do factor this into the rating of the CD itself. (Music industry take note.)

Rating: Nine out of ten lead pipes.
9 out of 10 lead pipes

…

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams on Egyptian/CMF Records/Columbia

July 19, 2011March 7, 2024

Tony Bennett Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook

Tony Bennett isn’t very well known for whispering. He’s a big singer—not in the sense that he over sings, but he certainly is known for the power to belt it out above muscular backing bands, and through his career he’s done plenty of that, and to good effect. And even in the plethora of latter day albums he made with the Ralph Sharon Trio, there’s a sense of grandeur to the backing that belies the actual simplicity of piano, bass and drums, and Tony often sings on those albums as if in front of a big orchestra. And that’s something in itself. But for true flat-out intimacy, there’s nothing he’s ever done that exceeds the Rodgers and Hart Songbook.

In 1973, Bennett saw trumpeter Ruby Braff and guitarist George Barnes leading a quartet in New York, with Wayne Wright on another guitar and John Giuffrida on bass. He sat in with them live, it went well, and one thing led to another. They went into the studio and over the course of a few days recorded twenty songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.

The combination of musicians, material and singer proved fortuitous if not magical. The end result, and a gift for posterity, is an album of supremely tasteful and truly adult popular music.

The greatest Rodgers and Hart songs are remarkable concoctions of wit, melody, insouciance and poignancy. Richard Rodgers is always rated as one of the greatest melodists of American popular song. Although he is probably better known today for his later and grander-sounding work with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, his melodies on the songs he wrote with Hart possess intimacy, beauty and playfulness in keeping with the lyrics. Larry Hart was, we are led to believe, a rather tortured and lonely soul (who died aged 48 shortly after one of his not uncommon alcohol binges) but his mastery of rhyme and his ability to mix sly and urbane humor with soul-baring sensitivity make him one of the very finest wordsmiths of the past century of popular music.

Who else has ever written as delightfully disrespectful a discourse on love as “I Wish I Were In Love Again” (from the 1937 show “Babes In Arms”)?

When love congeals
it soon reveals
the faint aroma
of performing seals
The double-crossing
of a pair of heels
I wish I were in love again

And who else has ever written as romantic a dismissal of romantic cliché as the beguiling “My Romance” (from the 1935 show “Jumbo”)?

My romance
doesn’t have to have a moon
in the sky
My romance
doesn’t need a blue lagoon
standing by

No month of May,
no twinkling stars
no hideaway
no soft guitars

Wide awake
I can make my most fantastic dreams come true
My romance doesn’t need a thing but you

On this album, the voice of Tony Bennett, the cornet of Ruby Braff and the guitar of George Barnes do not simply play through the songs, but rather engage with each other in a friendly, bantering and often sensual trialogue, illuminating the textures of music and words with exquisite nuance.

Tony Bennett was far from experiencing a commercial peak at this stage of his career, but there’s no reaching for the pop-charts here; the singer and the musicians seem to be doing just exactly what they want to do, their approach dictated solely by their own taste and ability. I suspect this happens even more rarely than one might think.

It makes for a timeless masterpiece, and, in my belief, a quite singular monument to the art of American popular song. All it took was three days in 1973, a set of great songs, a singer and a few musicians who understood and loved the material and comprehended the way in which their own talents could best shine alongside it. Nice work, guys.

…

Rating: Ten out of ten lead pipes.

It’s a lead-pipe cinch!

…

Originally, these recordings were released as two separate LPs of ten songs each, but at the time of writing they’re available together on one CD, augmented by six alternate takes: Tony Bennett Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook

In addition, the Rodgers and Hart recordings are available as part of a very fine boxed set called Tony Bennett: The Complete Improv Recordings

April 11, 2011April 23, 2022

Ron Sexsmith: Long Player Late Bloomer

Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being,
and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. (Psalms 51:6)

I remember when I first heard Ron Sexsmith; not in a JFK-getting-shot sense, but generally that it was in the first half of the 1990s and the song was Secret Heart. It seemed like a good song, and the singer of it seemed likely to be a solid sort. Some people were saying that he was “the new Bob Dylan.” Well, just like all the other new Bob Dylans, he was nothing of the kind and that manner of talk didn’t help him; he was, instead, the current Ron Sexsmith. And that wasn’t such a bad thing at all. Sexsmith is a (Canadian) songwriter with a gift for an instantly seductive pop/folk/rock melody, a facile way with a lyrical narrative and the ability to produce really charming and sometimes deeply poignant turns-of-phrase. Better yet, he can combine all those elements into a whole that seems utterly unforced. (That seamless combination may be the toughest trick for would-be pop songwriters — not to mention some practicing ones.) He’s essentially a confessional-type songwriter, but one who generally avoids tripping into the excessively lugubrious or precious. Continue reading “Ron Sexsmith: Long Player Late Bloomer“

March 30, 2011December 25, 2018

Lou Reed – New York

Former mayor of New York City Ed Koch must have been feelin’ pretty groovy when the 59th St. Bridge was renamed in honor of Hizzoner. Koch is a big, likeable personality and a quintessential New Yorker without any doubt. Yet, it’s a little bit funny, this renaming of a bridge for him. Were the Koch years (1977 – 1989) such great ones for the city of New York, honestly? There were 2,246 murders in New York City in 1989 – the final year of Koch’s third and final term as mayor. By comparison, in 2009, there were 778 (the source I’m referencing doesn’t have figures for 2010 yet). Crime isn’t everything, but in New York City, it’s a helluva lot. The insecurity that rising crime gave to the city, from the mid-1960s on, fostered a sense of decay and futility, which fed itself and led to more crime. It ate at the city economically and spiritually; how could it not? It wasn’t all Koch’s fault, by any means, but he had three terms to make a dent in it. He didn’t. The annual murder rate remained well over 2,000 during the term of Koch’s successor, David Dinkins, but then started dropping dramatically under Rudolph Giuliani and his revamped policing strategies, beginning in 1994. Continue reading “Lou Reed – New York“

March 10, 2011March 14, 2023

Bing (Crosby) Sings Whilst Bregman Swings

Bing Sings Whilst Bregman Swings~ Bing Crosby (Polygram Records)

It’s 1956, and you’re Bing Crosby. (Would I lie to you? And isn’t life better this way?) You’ve been a recording artist for more than twenty-five years. You are one of the originators of popular singing in the age of the microphone and the gramophone record. In your day, you defined hip, and the name Der Bingle struck terror into squares everywhere. But it’s not quite your day anymore. Sinatra is wowing the world (in the third stage of his career, no less) with his lush and/or swinging long-playing concept records, arranged by brash young geniuses like Nelson Riddle and Billy May. Ella Fitzgerald just recorded her first songbook album (Cole Porter) with the barely pubescent arranger Buddy Bregman. It’s doing well. You are given the chance to do an album with Buddy Bregman yourself, on the Verve label. What do you say? Continue reading “Bing (Crosby) Sings Whilst Bregman Swings”

February 9, 2011June 30, 2021

Rumsfeld Rules: Known and Unknown

I haven’t finished reading the book, so this is not a proper review, as such. But, based on leafing through this 815 page tome, and having now begun reading it properly from the beginning, it’s safe to say a few things about it right off the bat. It is a monumental work, quite unlike your average book from a political figure, memoir or otherwise.

I expect it will be characterized in the near term by critics based largely on political bias: Rumsfeld’s many enemies, both on the left and right, will give it short shrift. His friends — a subset of the political right in America — will laud it. Continue reading “Rumsfeld Rules: Known and Unknown“

November 12, 2010December 23, 2022

The Hilliker Curse, by James Ellroy

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women by James Ellroy. (Knopf, 224 pages)

I like James Ellroy. My favorite book of his — and I think his greatest — is American Tabloid,which is a take like no other on American history from 1958 to the end of 1963. Unlike the JFK conspiracy tracts and movies which beg you to accept their veracity but can’t escape their puerile phantasm, American Tabloid — while not pretending to be anything other than complete fiction — can leave a reader wondering how in hell it could not be the truth. It’s so real, so perfect, so true to human nature. It is dirtier than any conspiracy theory, and messier and far more believable than any politicized take could be. As a literary achievement, it’s hard to argue that it is not Ellroy’s finest hour; all the darkness, madness and obsession is kept just enough in rein with a narrative that burns high-octane all the way yet somehow keeps driving within the lines of a crazy whiplash highway.

This new book is a memoir, with the pointed subtitle: “My Pursuit of Women.” The “Hilliker” of the curse named in the main title is Jean Hilliker, which is the maiden name of Ellroy’s mother. She was murdered in 1958, when James Ellroy was ten years old. Months previously Continue reading “The Hilliker Curse, by James Ellroy”

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