These Are, Uh, Four of My Favorite Things: Sixth Edition
It’s been a little while. Let’s do a shorter-form list as a little slumpbreaker. Four things. Here we go, people.
Tom Selleck + Conan. Here’s a video that I found hilarious when I originally watched it on live tv. And, for years, I would always tell people about it, explain the whole arc of the thing, but I couldn’t track it down on the internet. My friend/coworker tracked it down the other day and I found myself (internally) cackling all over again. Mustache humor!
Check it out and don’t tell me if you don’t laugh.Trust by Hernan Diaz and The Candy House by Jennifer Egan and Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
I’m gonna try to thread the needle here, inspired as I am by my three most-recent reads. They feel like they have a commonality. I’ll try to explain.
Maybe it’s actually precisely what I said: the threading of the needle, the sticking of a complicated and multi-timelined landing, the realization of an ambitious vision.
Starting with Trust, Diaz engages with the idea of truth and unreliable narrators via four different versions of the “same” story. Just when you think you’re getting a decent understanding of the characters and story, Diaz shifts the point-of-view and gets you questioning what you really understand. What is fact? What isn’t? “Slippery” is what NPR called the book’s central story and I couldn’t agree more. I loved the exploration of the idea of “history is written by the victors (or, in this case, the power)” in this one, the dynamics (fair or not) of power and narrative. In the first telling, Mildred is a melancholy hapless victim of a husband who subjects her to electro-therapy. In the second version, the husband “corrects” the first story, painting Mildred as a sort of regal saint whose health struggles cut her lief short, while also going heavy on the paint when it came to his own genius. The third version introduces even more question marks. And the fourth? Well, I don’t wanna ruin it for you. But I was all the way in. The end was brilliant while also heartbreaking. How Diaz weaved it all together was masterful.
Moving on to Sea of Tranquility. Emily St. John Mandel’s previous novel inspired one of my favorite Covid-era binge watches, HBO’s Station Eleven. Similar to that story, Sea of Tranquility addresses humanity and pandemics and family and the ripple effect and determinism and free will and the future in ways and from angles I adored. It’s got time travel and timelines ranging from 1912 to a future 500 years from now when there are moon colonies. Not to spoil anything, but I loved that the character that created one of the touchstone massive breaks (I won’t put a value judgment on whether it was for good or bad) in the so-called matrix was a pretty simple (if not outright dumb) guy who, while not intellectual by any means, was the most humane character in the story. He did what he felt was right. How Mandel was able to get all the disparate timelines to land was some real literary air traffic control, if air traffic controllers were also simultaneously conducting gorgeous symphonies on the same jetway.
Like Sea of Tranquility, my entry into The Candy House was inspired by the author’s previous work. I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad while traveling for work in the early 2010s. I remember sitting in my little hotel room in London late one night, lamenting the fact that I was reading the book’s last page. Goon Squad is where I got my love for the idea of multiple storylines and timelines1 that eventually weave together into a tapestry. In a risky move—which for some artists could signal no more gas in the tank and a creative well gone dry—Egan revisits the idea and even some of the characters. To illustrate the value of this book as a standalone work of literary art (rather than just a sequel), let me tell you this: I didn’t actually realize it was related to Goon Squad for awhile. Like, longer than I’d care to admit. But its exploration of intersecting lives got me again. Similar to Sea of Tranquility, this book speculates on some future technologies and their effects on people—as much on a global scale as on a very (very) personal level. It could be just a bunch of stories. Or it could be a stunning mural that shows you humanity in both the blurred wide view and in the focused zoom-in.
The common threads: creative/narrative ambition and the guts to try to pull it off.
Apropos of nothing, a short and amusing list of singers I’ve been told I sound like in 2023, none of which are even close to true:
-Chris Cornell!
-Bruce Springsteen!
-Don Henley!
-Stevie Nicks! (I wasn’t even singing “Leather & Lace”)
-Glen Hansard (I mean, with the sound off, we could probably pass as each other to someone with bad eyesight, though I am a notch or two down from his Irish handsomeness2)
-Bryan Adams!
-Rod Stewart!
A little rasp in your voice and suddenly you’re every singer who ever had a raspy voice. At least they’re not comparing me to the guy from Train3.I finally got a bona fide record player.
Some people impulse buy. They come home with a new tattoo or even (my mind and bank account cannot comprehend) a shiny new car. My little “impulse”/indulgent purchase took a whole seven months to commit to.
I had a handful of bills I’d gotten as tips4 back when I was playing my weekly hotel lobby gig. I’d had to grab a twenty here or a ten there from my stash, to pay babysitters or to send a kid to a movie or buy those useless discount books that the local high school swim team sells door-to-door or whatever. But the money—a literal chunk of change—sat, hidden poorly in my closet, squirreled away, waiting for its assignment.
There were a lot of options.
I could use a new pair of glasses. I’d like a new winter coat. There are a few guitar pedals I’ve been bookmarking for a long time.
I really want a new guitar. I’ve had my eye on a few for awhile. Probably an electric. Maybe even a bass. (Or both.) It might surprise you to know that the last time I bought a guitar was in 1999. It surprised me, when I thought about it the other day. I bought my Gibson EC-30 in the fall of ‘99 and had bought my red Rickenbacker the year before in Boston. But I’m still not sure which guitar I’d get, once I could justify the expenditure to myself and some choice others. And, as you can see from my guitar-buying history, I’m not likely to buy another one until I’m, like, 70 years old. So I don’t wanna bungle the purchase5.
And I’ve been hinting for years (and by hinting I mean “bringing it like a chump up every time we have to spend money on something else that feels even remotely optional”) to Holly about getting a good record player.
So, since I have guitar indecision but knew exactly which record player I was gonna get—a decent one, but not one of the ultra-audiophile ones that a) are way out of my price range and b) I’m not astute enough a listener to tell the difference—that’s what I got. I even made an appointment with the owner of 3Hive down in Provo, who’d helped me with all my record player + speaker combo homework. I drove down to Provo a bit early, before our set at the Buzzards & Bees festival, and pulled out an unruly wad of bills—a few $100s, a bunch of $20s, a couple $50s, and all kinds of $10s, plus some $1s just for good measure. It was laughable, though the millennial clerk was kind enough to act like it was normal. There was something very throwback about buying a record player in cash. What’s more vintage than that? Trading some of my cow’s milk for a typewriter?
I set it up the next day. Well, I tried to set it up. Suddenly, my very dense non-technical brain was beset by things like “counterweights” and “anti-skates” and other stuff that my brain just doesn’t process very well. My anxiety spiked as I started facing the possibility that I’d bought a nice turntable but was gonna blow it with how I set it up. Why don’t they just make it ready to go? (Don’t answer that, record nerds.) Anyway, I think I’ve set it up sub-optimally but oh well. It’s running.
The virgin voyage? Aretha’s Amazing Grace. The selling point of vinyl is the warmth and depth of the sound. And what is warmer and deeper than Aretha Franklin singing gospel tunes in a packed Los Angeles church? Nothing.
It felt as good as I could’ve hoped.
When that record was done, I put on Keith Jarrett’s Koln and Holly and I just sat and talked on the couch while it played in the background. Basically everything I’d ever hoped.
I came home last night, put on Ray Charles. Then The National and Wilco, like any self-respecting fortysomething white guy.
Record players and record collecting are a hipster cliche, sure. I get it. But there’s something grounding and visceral and real about putting a record on. From selecting it and committing to it, to sliding it from the record sleeve, to carefully placing it on the turntable and hearing the first crackle as you even-more-carefully put the tonearm in place6.
An entirely different experience from just shouting “Hey Siri, play Aretha Franklin.”
Just realized I recently read another novel of this ilk: Cloud Cuckoo Land. Loved that one too. Here’s the author’s map of that book’s time structure.
I guess I have a type.
Me and Glen Hansard, in the stark light of day:
I’m on record that Train is my least favorite band ever. But the guy actually has a good voice. I saw him on a Doors tribute once and had to admit it. Still, the words he voluntarily/deliberately sings in Train songs are crimes against humanity.
I got paid a base rate, of course. And then, on top of that, they allow the musicians to put a tip jar out in front. And some nights that jar did quite well.
After my eighth grade promotion (where you leave junior high and move on to high school; momentous!), my mom said she’d finally go halfsies with me on an electric guitar, like I’d been asking for forever. I’d been playing my mom’s acoustic guitars (a Gibson and Martin, to be fair…they were great) and was looking for something that could make a bit more…noise.
We went to the guitar store where I’d been taking guitar lessons, Holladay Music. I looked at their rather limited guitar selection and tried to find one that “spoke to me.” Which guitar would become an extension of my art? Which guitar would help me write my first mega-hit? Which guitar would sound best on U2 songs?
I tried a few out. I finally settled on a shiny, cherry red guitar. The fretboard felt decent under my fingers. It seemed to stay in tune. It sounded decent plugged into the little Crate amp that the shop owner let me use to test the guitar.
The guy threw in a soft case, a strap, and a set of strings and we were on our way. I couldn’t wait to get home and plug it in. My own guitar.
I plugged it in, turned it up, and wailed away. At some point, my older brother Ben walked in to take a look. His eyes got wide. He nodded with a look of skepticism on his face.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he tried deflecting.
“WHAT?”
“Well, I just kinda thought, knowing all the music you love, you would’ve gotten something, uh, different.”
I thought he was crazy. A guy who loves classic rock? The Strats of Clapton and Hendrix. The Teles of Keith Richards and Tom Petty. The Rickenbackers of the Beatles and Birds. The Les Pauls of Jimmy Page and Slash and Neil Young. I knew what I was doing. That’s why I got one of these, man:
(Shakes head.)
Honestly, it couldn’t look less classic. To make it worse/better, here’s the ad that was consistently running in the guitar magazines I read.
What’s better:
-the fact that they totally tried to mimic the Fender wordmark?
or
-the fact that Vester, with an ad like this, was made in EFFINGHAM, Illinois?
Worth noting: the speakers I got are also bluetooth-enabled. Meaning: after turning and swapping records every third song for some of these albums, I’ll go back to streaming from my phone. Besides, my record collection is still pretty humble.