Soul Track of the Day:
"Natural High," by Bloodstone, off the group's 1973 album of the same name. I fist heard this startlingly affecting, gorgeous, mood-setting song in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Formed in the early 1960s in Kansas City, the band was a funky soul band with inflections of gossip and (evidenced here) doo-wop. The song, which got to high as #10 on the U.S. pop charts, was their highest-charting pop hit. They were a nice bridge between classic soul and the funky, rock-influenced (read: Hendrix) black music of the 1970s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0KzLo0-6Ro
Book Reviews
As good a compilation of stories by an American author that you'll read (one reviewer called it our country's version of Joyce's The Dubliners, although I think that's somewhat short thrift), The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001) is a breathtaking achievement. The opus consists of two previously published short-story collections by the author (1962's Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, 1981's Liars in Love and nine previously uncollected stories); there are 27 stories in all. Each one is a poignant, sensitive, never heavy-handed, detail-rich riff on frustration, loneliness, displacement, unhappiness, self-absorption and yet Yates never swathes us in gloom or hopelessness. The same themes and characters tend to appear - lonely soldiers abroad, empty NYC businessman, adrift single mothers, self-destruction - but that's Yates's world: The time and place rarely changes in any of his work - New England/New York and its suburbs, post-WWII Europe - but what's remarkable, what grabs your attention over the trajectory of his ouevre, is the specificity and freshness he brings to characters you thought you've already read about. No one evinces the American dream gone sour and futile quite like this. He's funny too, and his dialogue is ridiculously spot-on; it's not good dialogue, let me make that clear, it's better than that: it's how distracted, confused, nasty, beleaguered, snippy, confused people actually talk.
Standouts:
from Eleven Kinds of Loneliness:
- "Doctor Jack-'O-Lantern": an orphaned boy is the new kid in school and finds it hard to get along with any of his classmates unless he starts telling fibs
- "No Pain Whatsoever": a woman is taken by her boozy friends to visit her satisfied, preoccupied husband at a tuberculosis hospital
- "Fun With a Stranger": a stern, humorless elementary school teacher tries to reach out to her students in the days before Christmas break and ends up disappointing them
from Liars in Love:
- "Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired": a divorced mother/untalented sculptor gets the chance to do a "bust" of FDR
- ""Trying Out For the Race": two divorced mothers pool their resources and decide to live together (along with their kids) in a small home in Scarsdale during the Depression
from the previously uncollected stories:
- "The Comptroller and the Wild Wind": a dissatisfied office worker tries to ask a nice waitress out on a date, unaware that he is pushing the boundaries.
There are great writers who surprise us and tell great stories. And then there are the writers who do more than even that, who present us, with fullness and clarity (ugly or not), a vision of the world. Yates is the latter.
(****1/2)
And now for a strange one. Evan S. Connell's (Mr. Bridge, Mrs. Bridge) peculiar, short novel lays out the successive stages of obsession. Muhlbach, an insurance man from NYC, purchases a clay Aztec figure in a Taos curio shop. He desires to know as much about it as he possibly can, consulting a professor in Santa Fe, buying books on pre-Colombian art. Back in New York, he continues to read up on the object, on the history of the Aztecs and Olmecs and Mayans, attends an auction, purchases a jade Olmec mask that turns out to be a fake, and then spends the rest of the book talking with other dealers and sellers and trying to think what he wants to buy next.
A most unusual character study, with pages and pages given over to information on pre-Colombian art, it's a frustrating book for a reader to get into (but it's not heard to read, by any means) because Muhlbach is so immersed in his obsession. But Connell conveys his drive and need to know very well. Connell obviously knows much about the world of art auctions, art dealers, the question of provenance, the eccentric individuals in the business of collecting. Not much happens plot-wise, but it's an intelligent, lucid book that is hinged upon the question: If we buy something because we are aesthetically drawn to it and we later find out that it is fake or not entirely what we thought it was be, does that in any way dilute or diminish our initial flushed impressions, and, if so, why? What does it mean to be fake? By the end, we may even relate to Mulhbach's thirst for knowledge, his need to possess. Haven't we all wanted something really bad?
(***)
It is common knowledge that Howard Carter was the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of King Tut 90 years ago. I had no idea that he was an artist too:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Howard-Carter-Famous-Archaeologist-Not-So-Famous-Painter.html
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