Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! It’s been a big week for MAR. First of all, we now offer a paid subscription level! That’s right, for five dollars a month or fifty a year, you can become a Melendy Avenue Review Citizen, which allows you to vote on what I read next! We had our first election already this week and it was super fun. I might add further benefits, like a chat server, if there’s demand or if I come up with good ones. Please consider upgrading! It’ll make a big difference in terms of how much content I can deliver. I am also introducing a new, MAR exclusive feature this week: Discographies! That’s where I listen to the discography of a given artist and write about it. In keeping with the musical theme, our Friend Link this week is a rad band. We also have fresh video content, my longest and I think most fun video yet. There’s also a review of a crime novel, and a fresh Observed Life, with Peter! Basically, this is a good-ass Review and you should share it with your friends!
CONTENTS
Friend Link-
The Leafies You Gave Me
Video Content-
Rebuking Tom Bissell’s Hackjob On A Confederacy of Dunces
Discographies-
Beck
Reviews-
George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown
Lagniappe-
The Observed Life, with Peter
FRIEND LINK
I know “some friends of mine are in a band and it’s great” isn’t the most promising pitch in the world, but hear me out. I’ve known Matt and Caroline since they were young kids. I knew they were talented. But for a while, after they formed a band with a bunch of other folks called The Leafies You Gave Me, I sort of avoided it. I didn’t go to their shows and didn’t listen to the album. I was worried that if I didn’t like it things would be weird. Well, I did listen to the album recently- and then listened to it again, because it was great. I regret not having seen them live and plan on doing so post-covid. In terms of sound, think “Mr. Bungle, But (mostly) Nice,” or “Titus Andronicus But Weirder.” It’s theatrical, which I normally don’t like in music, but it works. It’s sincere and funny and you can tap your foot to it. Give it a listen!
VIDEO CONTENT
Continuing my video career, I made a doozy, with the video editing help of MAR Citizen Ben. Some prick at the New Yorker put out an article attacking A Confederacy of Dunces, which readers of the Review know is near and dear to my heart. I don’t think everyone needs to like the book. People close to me don’t. But when I read this hackjob, I knew I had to say something, because it was sleazy, disingenuous, and poorly written. So I go at it, bit by bit, in this video, and try to say something about the state of contemporary literary criticism, not just one dude’s crummy article. It’s a little less than an hour long, so get comfy. If you like seeing me tear into things that suck, you should find it fun.
DISCOGRAPHIES
I do not think of myself as a “cool music dude.” I don’t understand musical concepts, even with the help of friend of the Review 12Tone. I was never part of a musical subculture, though some part of me wishes I got into punk or something as a teen, for the social aspect if nothing else. But I do enjoy music. I just got Spotify premium and have been enjoying listening to albums, like in the old music piracy days before my laptop became something I needed for work and couldn’t afford to risk viruses on. So I thought I’d write something about it. I don’t plan on doing discographies of all of my favorites. Among other things, I like a lot of long-lived rock acts with very long and very mixed-quality discographies- The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Slayer, Van Morrison all come to mind. So I’ll do some favorites, some newer stuff I’m discovering, etc. I plan on limiting myself to studio releases, not b-side collections or live compilations or greatest hits, yadda yadda. This may not turn out to be weekly- depends how much listening I need to do and can do in a given week. Anyway, without further ado:
Beck! Beck is a bit of a weird one to do a discography on, especially for a non-music-expert like me. His albums present radically different sounds, to my ear, from album to album and even from song to song within albums. His genre-bending has gone from seeming innovative to seeming trite to basically being de rigeur for pop musicians everywhere. Do I like Beck because I like a lot of different genres or do I like Beck because I like the — idea — of liking a lot of different genres and prefer them done by a white dude who leaches the authenticity out of hip hop, country, tropicalia, etc.? Well, I like to think the former is closer to the truth, and at this point have enjoyed enough “real” representatives of these genres to back that up, but who knows?
Either way, listening to this discography represented a fun stroll down memory lane, both to the times the albums in question came out and the times I listened to them. I remember “Loser” and “Devil’s Haircut” being on MTV when I was a kid, and then on my shitty computer speakers as downloading albums became practical when I was in college and my dorm friends and I would listen. Midnite Vultures was one of the first albums I ever bought when it came out, a path-not-followed for a few years, as I took my long long detour into the cul-de-sac of classic rock fandom. I listened a lot to Beck’s early anti-folk recordings when I was depressed a few years back. I remember hearing Sea Change while sitting at a Borders and my non-relationship-having self wondering what Beck was getting at, with something so different from Midnite Vultures. Morning Phase came out during a romantic relationship that didn’t last but which I remember fondly, and we listened to it in her breakfast nook.
So nostalgia’s a part of it, I guess. I think there’s more to it. I did enjoy these songs while they were new (or new-to-me). Beck seems like a great musical craftsman, to my ears, excelling at arrangements both simple and complex. He said before he got famous he was just into anti-folk and Rimbaud, and I think there are worse Symbolist poets than Beck. I don’t care that he might be a Scientologist (he was raised in the church) or arguably one of the definitional Gen X hipsters. He’s doing his thing. I’ll admit his last two albums, which I only caught up with for this discography-listen, aren’t really my cup of tea. Colors in particular seems like a collection of songs for Target commercials. None of his albums are awful, but the last two and Guero are pretty forgettable. In terms of a best album, it’s hard to say due to the many different moods they invoke. I’m going to be a little weird and say Mutations. It doesn’t include any hits. It includes Beck being “problematic” and doing his white guy spin on “Tropicalia” (not a bad little ditty, for all that). But it also contains some of Beck at his best. It “speaks to me” in various ways. Helpful music criticism? Who knows, but it’s what I got.
NEXT UP: my favorite contemporary rock band!
REVIEWS
George Pelecanos, “The Big Blowdown” (1996) - George Pelecanos appears to be one of the big crime writing dudes of the last few decades. I first heard of him as a writer for “The Wire.” Or, rather, I heard of him because Ishmael Reed (a “problematic fave” of mine) tore him a new one when Reed was “on one” about “The Wire” being racist and chumpy a few years back. Pelecanos was a secondary target for Reed’s wrath, after Richard Price, but it did call attention to the gallery of big time crime writers who worked on “The Wire,” including Pelecanos (also including Reed’s fellow birthday lecture subject Dennis Lehane, who Reed did not name check in his diss, for whatever reason). So I figured I’d give Pelecanos a read. Sorry, Mr. Reed.
“The Big Blowdown” takes place in Washington DC mostly during the late forties. The soldiers are back home from the war, the dames are sexy, no one leaves home without their “deck” of filterless smokes, and even low-level crooks like the characters in this book dress sharp (the main character is a clothes horse with an interest in women’s shoes- I wonder if Pelecanos is into historical lady footwear? A charming personal detail if so). Pete Karras is a local boy, son of Greek immigrants and combat veteran, who drifts into organized crime with his childhood bestie Joe. He gets into trouble because he’s too nice to working-class immigrants who owe his boss money (the boss and his flunkies all have “old stock” Yankee or German names- wonder if there were many mobs like that running around?). Joe judas-goats Pete into a crippling ass-whooping. Pete leaves the life and becomes a cook at a diner. Joe stays.
This is a crime novel but not a mystery. There is a whodunit of sorts in the background that becomes important to the plot — someone is cutting up sex workers — but it’s pretty obvious quite soon who is doing it and it’s not the point of the book. The point mostly lies with Pete’s relationships and with the historical background/mood. Pete shows what was cool about forties manhood — the dames love him and he can kick ass even when limping — but Pelecanos isn’t shy about what all that cost. Dames love him but he can’t keep a good relationship. He’s married, routinely cheats, can’t connect with his toddler son. He’s something of a loser. When Joe and the mob he still works for come around to shake down the diner where Pete works, Pete and his hardass Greek immigrant employers prepare for a showdown with the mob. “Closure” for Pete and Joe’s relationship — in classic tough-guy fiction fashion, men’s relationships with women (mother excepted) are chapters but relationships with other men are books — and survival for the defiant diner become intertwined. There’s a side plot with a kid from a Pennsylvania steel town trying to find his addict sister in the big city that gets tied in, too.
The main peculiarity here is that the first forty pages or so of the book involve Pete’s childhood and then his service in the war. It establishes Pete’s relationship with Joe, I suppose, and the immigrant milieu in which they live. The war stuff makes clear Pete is a badass. But it seems to me other detective fiction does similar stuff without making such a big thing out of it. I was never especially curious about the childhood of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, I have to say. Part of it seems to be Pelecanos’s devotion to immersing the reader in his world. He draws Balzac comparisons from critics, and you can see why that would have attracted the producers of “The Wire.” He doesn’t do a half-bad job with it, either, but I’m not sure it’s the best thing for a crime story, compared to a lighter touch on the characterization and world building. The novel does tighten up considerably towards the end, when the pacing really comes on line, where it counts. All told, not a bad book.
I am developing a thesis that the nineties/early 2000s were an interesting time for crime writing for a few weird reasons. There’s some funny negotiations with sex and race, white tough guy writers dealing with earlier iterations of the “anti-oppression” ideas we see today, taking angles where they can. One of the best crime writers of that era, Eddie Little, a real life ex-con who literary fraud James Frey ripped off, had his characters spool out whole theories of how people of different races should talk to each other (with such rules as “if someone of a given race isn’t there, you can shit talk them all you like”) in between scores. Little wrote two books full of grit and jailhouse braggadocio-turned-flight-of-fancy, then relapsed into heroin use and died, leaving American crime fiction the poorer. As for Pelecanos, his characters, mostly Greeks, interact with black people in ways that make me wonder if they were meant to be rebukes to “political correctness”- a sort of rough and ready equality where both sides interact and rib each other (slurs included) and nobody’s keeping score… Pelecanos has a helpful black gangster give a speech about how he doesn’t want to be integrated, he wants to be on top of his own thing… I don’t think that’s the point of the book at all but it does make me wonder about the genre and the time. ****
LAGNIAPPE-
The Observed Life, with Peter
I am trying to get out of Watertown more often. On my way to Allston one day, I espied this peculiar tree-
What was going on here? Adaptation to climate change? Frustrated project manager tired of such boards? Mithra neither knows nor cares. She is chilling in her little yurt.