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#FridayReads, April 27–“The Inferno” and “Mickey Cohen”

April 27, 2012 /2 Comments/in /by

May 28, 2012 Update: I was delighted to see this new, modern translation of the Inferno received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. They write, “This will be the Dante for the next generation.”#FridayReads, Mary Jo Bang’s splendid modern translation of Dante’s Inferno, with diabolical drawings by Henrik Drescher and fascinating, context-lending notes by Ms. Bang, being published by Graywolf this coming August.  Also, Mickey Cohen: The Life & Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster by Tere Tereba–what a nasty killer.

Happy to Be a Good NY Google Neighbor

April 26, 2012 /0 Comments/in , , /by

I posted earlier this week that I’d had a heads-up from Google Places NYC informing me that this blog and I are being featured in their Meet Your Google Neighbor program, which gives denizens of Gotham an opportunity to share online reviews of favorite restaurants, taverns, merchants, music venues, and bookstores, as well as educated comments about the best bike paths, picnic spots, urban beauty spots, and all manner of urban entertainments.

This afternoon I received the email blast that Google Places NYC sends out to all their subscribers with the announcement of each week’s new Neighbor, and it’s fun to see how they promote the fact that we New Yorkers relish sharing our favorite places with one another, and will give you a piece of our mind about them, given the chance. Below are screen shots of that email, which I’ve begun to share with the venues I’ve recommended on my Google Places page.

I’ve sent the email to The Living Room, the excellent club on the Lower East Side, with my write-up of a show I attended there last November–when Amy Helm, who sang with her father Levon on his Grammy-winning albums–sat in with the super alt-country Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. The Living Room’s longtime owner Jennifer Gilson quickly replied that she was delighted I was on the record saying of her business “Excellent vibe to this mostly acoustic room, though they also know how to rock out here. . . . I love this mellow listening room.” She asked me to say hello the next time I’m in the club and continue sharing reviews of shows I attend there.

I first learned about Google Places NYC last December when I attended an audacious event in the sumptuous lobby of the Jane Hotel in the West Village, where they–along with The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine, ForYourArt, and New Directions Publishing–organized a public reading of the entirety of author Frederic Tuten’s influential 1971 novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March. After the nearly four-hour long reading, The New Inquiry‘s Rachel Rosenfelt introduced me to Google’s Esther Brown, who told me about the mission of Google Places NYC. When I wrote my blog essay about the reading I shared it with Esther, and we’ve been in touch since, with her encouraging me to start a Google Places page and begin writing reviews. This initiative of Google’s is an excellent example of the creative sort of community building that can be done with cool tools on the Web.

From the time I began conceiving The Great Gray Bridge I envisioned the site becoming a virtual water cooler for the appreciation of urban life, books, music, and culture so it’s really gratifying to see the blog gaining more recognition via Google’s promotion. Happily, the Web feature includes a photo my wife Kyle Gallup recently took of our son Ewan and me on a boat ride around Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty as backdrop. It’d hard to be more New York than that! // click through ‘share’ link below to see Statue of Liberty photograph . . .

Blogging the PEN World Voices Festival April 30-May 6

April 26, 2012 /0 Comments/in , , /by

As a member of the estimable literary advocacy organization the PEN American Center I attended a number of events during the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature last May and reported on some of them for the PEN blog*. More  than two dozen PEN members have accepted the invitation to become Festival Correspondents this spring and I’m excited I’ll again be one of them. We’ll be posting to a friendly new tumblr platform** and fanning out all over the city to participate in and cover the fifty-event literary smorgasbord with nearly 100 novelists, poets, playwrights, translators, critics, and editors from dozens of countries. There are many highlights on the program, including two with women writers that I’ll be covering on Thursday, May 3. In the first, Margaret Atwood will be discussing The Writer’s Mind and the Digital Otherworld with longtime editor and friend Amy Grace Lloyd. In 2005, I published a book with Margaret, Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005, a collection of fifty-eight pieces of her criticism and literary journalism, so it should be fascinating to hear her examine such questions as “What does it mean to write with the Web? and “How does our constant access to information and ideas affect the landscape of imagination?” The second program will be Understanding Egypt with the courageous Mona Eltahawy who I wrote about on this blog, in The Broken Bones of Mona Eltahawy, after she was beaten by Egyptian security forces, later re-gaining her freedom in in part because of global online protests, especially on Twitter.

These ticketed events will be held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, beginning at 6 PM and 8 PM respectively. I invite you to attend one or both of these talks. Make an evening of it! If you do choose to attend, or end up at another event during the week, please say hello. PEN encourages active literary citizenship so if you are a writing or publishing professional, and have been considering getting involved, I suggest you do so. The international and domestic work PEN does on behalf of free expression is extremely effective and important.

For my readers’ convenience, here again is a link to the Festival program.

*My coverage from PEN World Voices in 2011: 1) Getting Real with Superheroes (which was also published with PW Comics World on the Publishers Weekly website) and 2) Summoning Ghosts at The Standard 

**To read the PEN World Voices Festival tumblr please use this link. The Twitter hashtag for the festival will be #PENFest12. As soon as my full schedule for the week is available I will share it here. Meantime, here is my newly updated PEN member profile page.
// click through on share link below to see photo of Mona Eltahaway . . . //

The NY Times Leaves out Levon, Twice

April 25, 2012 /5 Comments/in , , , /by

It often takes me a few days to catch up to the weekend papers, so today, on glancing at the New York Times of Saturday, April 21, I was glad to see they’d featured Bob Dylan’s eulogy for Levon Helm that I also cited on this blog in Reflecting on The Band’s Break-up and Levon’s Death. Oddly, with the benefit of time passing, I often discover mistakes in the paper days after publication, as happened some months ago with Times coverage of the Romneys’ horses.  Sure enough, as I began to read last Saturday’s story I was surprised to see that the photograph of Dylan and The Band they used with their item didn’t actually include Levon in it. Clearly, others had noticed the error before me, because on the Times website I’ve found this correction accompanying the article where the erroneous photo has been removed.

Because of an editing error, a report in the “Arts, Briefly” column on Saturday about Bob Dylan’s recollections of collaborating with Levon Helm, the drummer and singer who died last week at 71, erroneously included Mr. Helm among the musicians pictured at a 1974 performance. Another drummer, who was not identified, was shown with the group; Mr. Helm was not pictured.

As corrections too often do, this one piles error on top of error, with the reference to “another drummer” an additional mistake. First, the bearded person seated in a hat, who the Times wanted readers at first to incorrectly assume was Levon, is not some anonymous walk-on, but actually Richard Manuel, member of The Band going back to their earliest days when they were called The Hawks. Manuel ordinarily played piano (the instrument he is actually seated at in the Times photo), but would slide over to drums when Levon played mandolin or guitar. Unfortunately, as can be seen in my photos of the item, it had no caption at all, and the Times didn’t ID any of the musicians, apparently content to let readers infer that Levon Helm was in the shot. Had the brief carried a caption this error-riddled series of cascading confusions might’ve never been set in motion, or maybe it would have anyway, since it’s obvious that whoever was editing this section of the paper knew little about The Band. To sum it up, the person vaguely implied in the Times brief to be Levon was not him, and the person described in the correction was not at the drums in the photo, but at the piano. Presumably, Levon was on stage, seated at his drum kit, out of the frame of Times photographer Larry Morris’s lens, or was cropped out of the image at some point.

As journalist and author Craig Silverman points out in his fine book, Regret the Error, which I edited and published with him in 2008, media errors are often quite avoidable, and the Times‘ multiple failures here surely fall into that category. As shown in the extensive coverage of Levon’s terminal illness and death, it is clear that there are scores of photos of Bob Dylan and The Band that include him, such as the one shown below from the Los Angeles Times. It’s a pity they couldn’t have found one like it that included Levon, either in the print edition, or at worst, even later, online where no photo now appears. An error in an obituary or a eulogy is one of the most serious mistakes a media outfit can make, and the Times royally messed up here. They owe their readers better, both in print, and online.
// click through to see all photos and captions . . .

Dean Haspiel on Drawing (and Remembering) Harvey Pekar

April 24, 2012 /0 Comments/in , , /by

Here’s a neat visual feature by comics artist Dean Haspiel on the Trip City website detailing the different approaches and multiple takes he experimented with before settling on a final version for the cover of a 2008 Harvey Pekar “American Splendor” comic. Haspiel was one of thirty comics creators who participated in Comic New York–A Symposium that was held at Columbia in March and which I covered for PW Comics World and cross-posted about on this blog. Speaking of the late Pekar, I’ve recently received a copy of Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland from Zip Comics with art by Joseph Remnant and edited by Jeff Newelt and it’s a terrific posthumous edition of the great comic writer’s work.

And if you’re a Pekar fan–I’ve loved his work ever since he used to shop in Undercover Books, my Cleveland bookstore, in the 80s–you’ll enjoy this podcast on the Trip City website, with the voices of Haspiel, Remnant, Newelt, Zip Comics publisher Josh Frankel, and Harvey’s widow, Joyce Brabner.

Remembering Nick Webb, a Bright Light in British Publishing

April 23, 2012 /0 Comments/in , , /by

Via the Guardian comes a lovely memorial by longtime British publisher Ion Trewin bearing the sad news that the sparkling, smart Nick Webb–who as science fiction editor of Pan Books commissioned Douglas Adams to turn his BBC radio drama “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” into an international bestselling book–has died at age 63. According to Trewin’s obit, the first book of what would become the multi-volume science fiction series sold 250,000 copies within three months of publication in 1979 and a million copies by 1984, in the U.K. alone. Meantime, in the U.S., where I was then running Undercover Books, my bookstore in Cleveland, we stacked up and sold the well-priced little hardcover from Crown Publishers, reordering it repeatedly for months.

Trewin, who now works as literary director of the Man Booker Prize, clearly knew and liked Webb, the voluble son of an Irish pop and a Jewish mom. “He had a vivid sense of humour, often word-based, and delighted in mixed metaphors, once relating hearing someone say: ‘I smelled a rat and nipped it in the bud.’ Many years later the memory would still make him chortle. In conversation he used words and phrases that were inimitably his own. The acquisition of the first Hitchhiker novel was hardly considered a big deal, he recalled, or as he put it: ‘I was not proposing that we spend serious sponduliks.'” I met Nick Webb once, at a Frankfurt Book Fair when I was with Kodansha America, and enjoyed telling him I’d sold Adams’ novels in my bookstores. I liked him instantly.

Sadly, Douglas Adams also died, in 2001 at fifty-one. Happily, he and Webb left a remarkable legacy–one of the funniest, most brilliant pieces of science fiction published in the second half of the twentieth century.

Being a Good New York Neighbor

April 23, 2012 /1 Comment/in , , /by

I’m pleased to be featured this week in Google’s interesting Meet Your Google Neighbor program, which gives denizens of New York City and other locales an opportunity to share their enthusiasms for restaurants, merchants, music venues, bookstores, and urban activities. From the outset of this blog I’ve designed the site to span “urban life, books, music, culture, current events” so it’s very gratifying to see this blog gain more recognition via Google’s promotion. Happily, the feature includes this neat photo my wife Kyle Gallup recently took of our son Ewan and me on a boat ride around Manhattan with the Statue of Liberty as backdrop, a trip I blogged about in A Spring Sailing Around Manhattan.

 

Reflecting on The Band’s Break-up and Levon’s Death

April 22, 2012 /16 Comments/in , /by

Among the pieces of journalism and commentary I’ve read about Levon Helm since word of his terminal condition was released by his family last week, and then since his death on Thursday, this one by Mark Guarino is the best yet. I recommend you read it, for it captures the injustice that accompanied The Band’s dissolution, and how Robbie Robertson and the businesspeople around him really did treat his four bandmates inequitably. According to Levon, in his memoir This Wheel’s on Fire, Robbie claimed all the publishing royalties on most of their songs, compositions that had famously been workshopped by all five of them, beginning at the Big Pink house, and in later sessions. For the sake of argument, even if Robbie believed he was genuinely responsible for most of the songwriting, why not assert a claim on a larger share of the royalties and then split the remaining percentage four ways? Instead, he just walked away with it all on most of their repertoire and by the time Levon received his cancer diagnosis in 1998, he had to declare personal bankruptcy and nearly lost his house. I know Robbie came to his bedside this week, and if Levon really reconciled with him that’s great, but it’s hard not to see Robbie’s visit as some self-serving absolution. It certainly adds to the sadness of Levon’s passing to say this, but I believe it’s true.

Now, as many articles have pointed out, Levon did mount a great second act with the Midnight Ramble, the Grammy-winning albums, and playing and singing with his daughter Amy. But that happiness stands in sharp contrast to the fact that nothing like that happened for Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, and this is where Guarino’s Christian Science Monitor, “Levon Helm and The Band: a rock parable of fame, betrayal, and redemption” is most valuable.

Manuel’s post-breakup troubles ended with his 1986 suicide, during a revival tour of The Band sans Robbie. Guarino tells us that Levon is the one who found him after he’d hanged himself. As for Danko, he died at fifty-one from complications of heart disease. Guarino, quoting from the memoir, reminds us of Levon’s words: “If Rick’s money wasn’t in their pockets, I don’t think Rick would have died because Rick worked himself to death.… He wasn’t that old and he wasn’t that sick. He just worked himself to death. And the reason Rick had to work all the time was because he’d been [expletive] out of his money.” To be fair, it should be admitted too that a hard-partying lifestyle would have contributed to Manuel’s and Danko’s early demise (see Danko’s stoned moments with Janis Joplin in the rolling concert film “Festival Express,” if you have any doubt how much Rick loved getting high), but it doesn’t change the fact that playing half-empty dives to keep making a living, for a musician who once played to 600,000 at Watkins Glen with the Allmans and The Dead in ’73 (which I personally attended*), had to have depressed him and Manuel to a point where continued substance abuse was, if not inevitable, unsurprising.

All this sadness acknowledged, it is comforting to see how sadness brings us all together, bridging intervening years. After posting on Facebook and Twitter over the past week, I’ve heard from high school friends, such as Seth Foldy of Friends School and hometown Cleveland pals, like Eric Broder. Eric referred me to the Drive-by-Truckers’ Danko-Manuel song, with its haunted lyrics, “Got to sinking in the place where I once stood/Now I ain’t living like I should . . . Richard Manuel is dead”.

It was fitting to me that the family’s first message about Levon’s illness, while originating with his wife and Amy (who I had the privilege of hearing sing a few months ago with Blackie and the Rodeo Kings**, a performance I wrote about here), was immediately passed along on social media by “Bob Dylan and The Band.” And then, after Levon died, this appeared on bobdylan.com: “He was my bosom buddy friend to the end, one of the last true great spirits of my or any other generation. This is just so sad to talk about. I still can remember the first day I met him and the last day I saw him. We go back pretty far and had been through some trials together. I’m going to miss him, as I’m sure a whole lot of others will too.”

In honor of The Band and Bob Dylan, and yesterday’s Record Store Day, I’ve taken photos of all my LPs and CDs coming from their great musical enterprise, even Robbie’s first solo album. (click on thumbnails for full panorama of album images

* From that great weekend, I recall that a heavy thunderstorm with distant bolts of lightning let loose on the Saturday night, and The Band, then playing, had to flee the stage out of safety concerns. When the downpour had ebbed, Garth Hudson came out first and sat at his organ beneath a protective little canopy, launching into an unforgettable rendition of the solo that opens “Chest Fever, a song on “Music From Big Pink,” “Chest Fever.” These moments are forever captured on one of the CDs photographed below, “The Band- Live at Watkins Glen.”

**From Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Colin Linden, who knew and had played music with Levon, was interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on the CBC Radio program ‘Q’ the day after his friend’s death, as was Garth Hudson, conversations that can be heard via this link.  // see more . . . for footnotes and photos. . .