Reading Today

In the subway, heading home after dropping off the rental, in the NYT review of the Rickie Lee Jones concert it would have been interesting to see, beginning by quoting her, "Songs are like rooms. We all go in and look around, and then we go out again." Her new music, songs based on themes of the teachings of Jesus makes for some very interesting rooms, but then hasn't most of her career?

Later tonight, the New Yorker, in a collective review of several of the anti-religion books that have appeared recently, discusses the Scot philosopher David Hume, who -- though at least a skeptic and most likely an atheist himself -- in his writings "had a horror of zealotry" and "(in) his writings on religion (had) a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work." Different times.

And finally a New Yorker critic very perceptive on Edward Hopper, in the context of his show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Hopper's "preoccupied people will neither confirm nor deny any fantasy they stir; their intensity of being defeats conjecture." Here comes the knockout --"Imputations, to them, of "loneliness" are sentimental projections by viewers who ought to look harder." And this stunning final half-paragraph about "New York Movie"-- "I comprehend the picture's economy when I imagine something that is necessarily absent from it: noise, the clamor of a soundtrack that...assaults the usherette's unwilling ears. Life goes on? No, it roars on, indifferent to all who have temporary shares in it. We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness."

Or as the great Zevon put it -- "Time marches on/Time stands still.../We contemplate eternity /Beneath the vast indifference of Heaven."

Waiting for Godot, or the Electrician...

or Someone Like Him, or, in this recent case, the Cable Guy, RCN to be exact. File it as one of life's inevitable little irritations. You get a three hour block of time, 11 AM - 2 PM. And you know, as sure as you know your name, that in that three hour block of time the service person will show up at two minutes before two. (Unless of course you choose to nip down to the corner deli for a quick purchase, in which case he will come and go in those five minutes, leaving you the "please call to reschedule" note.) Who are the people, where are they who actually get lucky enough to have him show up in the first hour of that window? Never known one. Never been one. They're as invisible as Tony Soprano's guys on a construction site. Except of course when you opt for the 8 AM - 11 AM block and he's there five minutes early, ringing the bell, wondering why it's taking you so long to let him in.

Modern Love

David Bowie's Modern Love, from 1983's Let's Dance, may not be the best pop song ever, but spun up on iPod shuffle on a glorious late spring day while biking along the Hudson and the Yankees on a six game winning streak and heading up to the stadium tonight with Dana Dee, it will do just fine. The lyrical ambivalence ("I catch the paper boy/but things don't really change") doesn't stand a prayer against the music's relentless energy, the wiry intro and drums, then guiter kicking into Bowie's spoken first lyrics. And then after the first verse and out of nowhere a minute ten or so into the song, a punching saxophone as Bowie and the chorus begin trading half-line lyrics:

Bowie: Never gonna fall for
Chorus: Modern Love
B: walks beside me
C. Modern Love
B. walks on by
C. Modern Love
B. gets me to the (chorus joins for) church on time.
C. Church on time
B. terrifies me.
C. Church on time
B. makes me party.
C. Church on time
B. puts my trust in (and again the chorus joins for) God and man.
C: God and man
B. no confessions
C: God and man
B: no religion
C: God and man
B: Don't believe in modern love.

From this peak, it just gets better, a saxophone bridge to the second verse, the chorus repeated twice, and a final 45 seconds of controlled vocal and instrumental chaos that might have happened if James Brown and Motown's finest studio musicians from the glory days had ever done an encore together. I only needed to pedal five miles up to CCNY, but with repeat play, I could have gone for a hundred.

Speaking of paper boys, I am reading the collected stories of William Maxwell (All the Days and Nights), the current one about a paper boy (certainly him in his 1922 youth) and called What Every Boy Should Know. Maxwell, more known as a long-time editor at the New Yorker than for his own writing, has more to say about things that matter and trying to just figure it out than a truckload of writers whose reliance on flash only underscores their lack of ideas or insight. He says it far better in his introduction to the stories, "...three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The cast of larger-than-life characters--affectionate aunts, friends of the family, neighbors white and black--that I was presented with when I came into the world. The look of things. The weather. Men and women long at rest in the cemetery but vividly remembered.... '