First review of Nate Patrin’s “Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop” is a Winner

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Due to the pandemic, University of Minnesota Press pushed the publication date of my agency client Nate Patrin’s new book, Bring That Beat Back: How Sampling Built Hip-Hop, from April 28 to May 26. Evidently, not everyone got the message, but that’s just fine because the book’s first review in a consumer publication has already appeared, and critic Adam Ellsworth, writing for the Boston-area outlet The Arts Fuse, enjoyed the book very much. The headline is “Bring That Beat Back”—A Stellar History Of The Art Of Sampling, and the first line below that tells readers, “Nate Patrin’s magnificently written and wildly informative new book argues for the artistry of sampling, its potential for beauty.”  I invite you to read the whole review, but for a quick hit, please see the screenshots below with two key sections of the piece. I’m optimistic there will be much more coverage of the book in weeks to come, but until that I’m very excited for my author, and offer him hearty congratulations! To have the first review of one’s debut book be such a positive and thoughtful essay is very heartening indeed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a postscript for this good news blog post, you’ll also find here a lengthy Spotify playlist of all the music associated with the book.

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A Raucous Salute to Doctors, Nurses, Frontline Workers

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Over the past seven weeks, most nights of the lockdown imposed during the pandemic, when 7pm rolls around—the time when New Yorkers have been saluting essential workers—I’ve been in my apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan, where I ring a small bell I have, or bang a letter opener on my metal travel mug. However, tonight I had gone out for a walk around 6:40, and stayed outside to experience tonight’s clamor at the top of the hour from ground level. It’s an enjoyable release when everyone gets to share their appreciation of people who can’t stay locked in, who go to work, save lives, drive public transit, and make sure we can buy food. When this is over, there won’t be much to miss about it, but I’ll be happy to remember the raucous celebrations.

 

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A Tribute to the Old Man of the Mountain, Franconia Notch, White Mountains—RIP

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I was extremely lucky to spend a good chunk of my young adult years as a student at Franconia College, in Franconia, New Hampshire, located in the White Mountains, near the dramatic topographical feature called Franconia Notch. I made many close friends while a student at the college from 1973-77, like the late Robert Henry Adams and Karl Petrovich, with whom I formed a troika (the power trio’s pictured below), both of them lost to me along the way, sadly, and other good friends whom I still know and appreciate today. Franconia College was an experimental institution, part of the ferment of the times, an educational environment I relished, and am still grateful I experienced. The scenery that I saw everyday in the area and from a small cabin where I lived with my black Lab Noah was majestic, as pictures here will show.
I often photographed the jut-jawed Old Man of the Mountain, aka The Great Stone Face and The Profile, a historic feature of the landscape that humans began marveling at centuries long before New Hampshire was settled by descendants of European colonists. In later decades, the craggy rock face was held together by cables and guy wires, all of which collapsed in 2003.


Going back to the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published “The Great Stone Face” in 1850, a tale about the denizens of the region, and the legendary profile that towered above them. He wrote, “It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, withs long bridge, and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other.” 

Click here for more pictures.

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On Spring Evenings During the 2020 Pandemic

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The unfolding virus crisis, officially a pandemic since March 11, has now stretched on for more than three months, if one goes back to the first known case in the US, reported by ABC News, from Jan. 21  in Washington state. The first news report from Wuhan was even before that, the last day of 2019, Dec. 31.

There are many aspects of this situation, and the experience of living through it, that I ponder every day, beginning with the terrible suffering and sickness so many are enduring, and their families and friends, and the heroic efforts of doctors, nurses, medical techs, aides, cleaners, plus essential workers like bus drivers, cabbies, and grocery store checkers. After the grief and the solidarity I feel on a regular basis, there’s another experiential element that hits me every day in the late afternoons and early evenings. The time now being 7pm on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—where we just held our daily raucous salute to essential workers—I’m particularly mindful of it right now.

As shown above, when the crisis began building it was still late Winter. Though we didn’t have much snow this winter, it was very cold in February, in the 20s. I got a taxing dry cough then, which worried me. I thought I might’ve acquired it, or worsened it, during a cold bike ride I took one late afternoon in February, when I imbibed too much cold air, deep in to my lungs. This can happen while cycling, I’ve found, because when you’re pedaling and pumping hard, standing up on the pedals, out of the saddle going up hill, as I do in Riverside Park, I’m really breathing hard. That’s what had happened to me, I figured, though with word of the virus intensifying, I worried, too. (The cough persisted for weeks, and I later saw a nurse practitioner at my doctor’s office. We discussed if it might be Covid-19, but I didn’t have enough other symptoms so she thought not.) Then on March 6, the annual change back to Daylight Saving Time arrived, filling the second half of every day with much more daylight. Soon it became early Spring, with fruit trees in the park breaking out in blossoms, and now on April 25, it’s mid-Spring. Each day, even when it’s cloudy, runs for more hours full of daylight, stretching longer into the evening before dark finally falls.

Most years I greatly appreciate the longer days of sunlight, but now with the quarantining, necessary though it is, I feel oppressed by the long days. Now, time lays heavy on my hands. This is especially true because, as alluded to above, it’s a personal routine established over many years for me—after a work day editing and doing my job as a literary agent— to be out late in the day taking rides on my bike riding along the Hudson River on the Cherry Walk in the hours approaching sunset, taking pictures with my iPhone, soaking in the last rays of the day.

And yet, the last time I was out on my bike? Early February, around the time I took in too much cold air on a ride. Of course it’s warmer now, but I don’t fancy riding with a mask on, nor do I even relish being out under the circumstances. And I would invariably jostle the mask with my helmet, and my glasses would fog, especially inconvenient as bright daylight often makes it necessary to wear my sunglasses. These past weeks I have been out for some walks down to the river, but my range doesn’t stretch nearly as far as I can ramble on my bike. And, I do want to observe Gov Cuomo’s default recommendation to stay home as much as possible.

To round out this personal post, I’ll share two photos I took in late 2019, during bike rides, before the crisis, and a picture I took last week, while on a walk along the Hudson River.

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