Category: Article

I’ve stopped idealizing world travel. Sure, I’d love to believe that some day I’ll set foot on every continent. I’ve even overcome an odd, inherited prejudice against the Deep South, and started fantasizing about a road trip through the cornbread belt. Still, more and more, lately, I realize the place for me is my own couch, nodding off with the Twins at home-run volume and a can of cheap local brew tipping into my lap. The sunsets are pretty, the folks are agreeable, the politics are relatively progressive. It’s not much, but it’s home.

I think we Midwesterners are predisposed to this inner struggle—a desire to travel to more glamorous places, but a suspicion that where we really belong is at home, right here among the cornfields and pig farms. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we have moved, years ago, like everyone else, to L.A. or New York? We may lust after the big city and the open road, but we have instincts for home. There is no shame in this. In fact, there may even be some art in it.

Two wonderful new disc sets illustrate this; they feature new albums by two of our very best singer-songwriters, along with a documentary film about each. Greg Brown’s If I Had Known: Essential Recordings 1980-1996 comes with a DVD of the 1993 documentary Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown. Paul Westerberg’s Come and Feel Me Tremble is both a new album and a separately sold DVD documentary of his most recent tour and studio sessions.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of Greg Brown, but time is beginning to confess it. If there’s an artist who needs no other explanation than his own recordings, it’s the Iowan musician. And yet this is precisely the kind of person you want to see at the center of a documentary. Brown would surely chafe to hear it, but he represents a modern romantic ideal—the poet philosopher as farmer and folkie.

Hacklebarney Tunes confirms most of what you know and believe about the artist. Greg Brown has a home, or at least a spiritual home base, and it’s everything you’d expect: a seedy little brush farm in the rolling driftless of Iowa, nestled next to a trout stream and a blackberry patch. His actual life is considerably more complicated than this suggests, of course; he collects art, he travels and tours incessantly, he hangs with folks like Garrison Keillor, he’s in Europe as often as Iowa, and he runs a record label, if not a new-folk revolution. Whether he likes it or not, though, his music and his person evince a simple American ideal: The love of a humble home in the heartland, and all that implies—baking bread, walking beans, singing along.

Brown may never be a rock star like Bob Dylan or Van Morrison—or even Paul Westerberg, for that matter. Even so, you can feel a slow process of grassroots lionization going on, almost in spite of him. It began, especially, with Going Driftless, last year’s album that was touted as “an artists’ tribute to the songs of Greg Brown.” That disc featured a dozen women from the A-list of folk and roots playing his greatest hits; Lucinda Williams, Ani DiFranco, Iris DeMent, and so on. (Yes, all women. Proceeds were donated to the Breast Cancer Fund.) To my mind, that CD left little doubt that a song like “The Train Carrying Jimmie Rodgers Home” will outlive its author as folk standards. And the documentary, though made a decade ago, has grown into its clothes as a biopic of Someone Who Really Matters.

Judged by his own standards, though, I’d guess the albums Brown himself loves best are Dream Café and Poet Game—his most personal, least folkie records from the latter period. These are urbane albums that get inside the head of a modern man who has played through the clichés of folk music long enough to get itchy for new turf. Yet he’s too smart to abandon his roots. Brown knows that the folk idiom is full of sleeping dogs, rusty trucks, and swimming holes because these homey icons point beyond themselves to transcendental things.

Still, I am convinced that the best recording of a Greg Brown song isn’t by Greg Brown. It’s by his three daughters, singing “Ella Mae” on Going Driftless. What a haunting, spare, and gorgeous tribute to their father’s grandmother. Dad’s only recorded version, included here on If I Had Known, and originally appearing on the 1983 album One Night, is oddly perfunctory. But in the mouths of his daughters, it is a thing of intense beauty that makes my throat catch every time I hear it. “Ella Mae” captures the essence of what makes Brown so compelling—a folkie modest and timeless. He’s a man whose music grounds generations in their common humanity. For reasons that I’m sure are connected to deep spiritual things, the daughters are the best evidence of what the father is.

Paul Westerberg doesn’t have a home, artistically speaking. He’s not even comfortable in his own skin. Which is, in its own way, fitting for his area of specialization. Midtempo garage rock never had a better agoraphobic champion, and fans of the older, trashier Replacements catalog have been gratified to learn that, even though you can’t go home again, you can dial up something new on your CD player that sounds pretty damn familiar.

Most American punk rock was disingenuous, and it remains so. To the extent that punk was an urban form of folk music, produced by and for regular people who happened to live in flophouses instead of farmhouses, its American version has come mostly from artless, well-off suburban kids whose idea of alienation was no more complicated than it ever was for the leisure class: Dad worked too much, Mom was imperious, and there were never enough ski trips to Colorado. In other words, the overwhelming injustice of life in these privileged precincts could only be that it’s so frickin’ boring.

Luckily, we bumpkins in flyover country were chronically, genetically earnest when we got punk. The Suburbs were prep-school new-wavers who never pretended to be anything else, and they rocked the harder for it. The ’Mats, though, were as close to the genuine homegrown article as we’d ever have—city kids, working class if you like, smart enough to know they weren’t that smart, and they didn’t mind. Tommy Stinson will still tell anyone who’ll listen: They honestly were never aiming any higher than the next show, never more forward-looking than last week’s City Pages. In a sense, they accidentally embodied the bleeding edge of what became a whole argot and morality of “the genuine”—jeans and flannel shirts, Converse high-tops, bed-heads, too drunk to play, I hate music, got too many notes. Some people say that’s what killed Kurt Cobain. But punk-rock credibility doesn’t kill people. Guns kill people.

Like Westerberg’s previous record, Tremble is willfully ragged, presumably recorded live off the studio floor. For the better part of this album, he’s turned the amps up and the vocals down. It’s “Answering Machine” guitars with “Hootenanny” vocals; he’s mixed himself, self-effacingly, almost off the record—and where you can hear him, he sounds astonishingly unconfident and vulnerable, for all his accolades as a “critics’ darling.” There is plenty of succor, though: Other tunes are cut from the melancholy fabric of “Here Comes a Regular” (“Meet Me Down the Alley”) and the twisted, Brill Building chintz of “Swinging Party” (“Knockin’ Em Back”).

Over the years, Westerberg has sounded as if he believes what’s written about him. This may be why he prudently stopped talking to people. And it may have given him the space and the perspective to give it up a little bit with this new DVD. I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s said to be a real revelation, a doorway into the headspace he’s been occupying for the last five or six years, which about ten thousand rabid fans are dying to see. If the last thing he read was that he didn’t rock hard enough, and that he worried too much about getting his hall-of-fame reservations
right next to Alex Chilton’s, and that he should just be himself, then we hope he’s still not reading. If he is reading, though, we hope he skipped to the end: You used to live at home, Paul, and now you stay at the house. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

I got it from my dad, this strange and incongruent entrepreneurial drive, this thirst to sell. It makes no sense for a quiet introvert like me, whose hands shake in front of groups and who cancels more social engagements than is appropriate in polite society, but it’s true nonetheless: I have a knack for sales. I debuted in fifth grade with a poetry machine made of an appliance box. The machine (with me cramped inside it with a flashlight and a pencil) spit out five-, ten-, and fifteen-line poems for a penny a line. I coasted rapidly downhill from that lofty debut, and have since sold everything from French fries to advertising to magazine subscriptions to vitamins and laundry soap to affordable health care and clean water. Most recently, I’ve sold multimillion-dollar improvement plans to state and federal review panels in order to score grants for public schools. I’ve sold over the counter, in the office, on the phone, and with a knock at the front door.

Speaking of knocks at the front door, we get a lot of them in the academic hotbed of liberal generosity that is Prospect Park. So yesterday when I was upstairs in my attic sanctuary, lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon because I’d been sucker-punched by my annual back-to-school cold, my stepdaughter Lily pounded up the stairs to tell me there was someone at the door who insisted he had to speak to someone eighteen years or older. “Tell him to go away,” I rasped. She said, “That’s the problem. He won’t. I think you’d better come down.”

Uh-oh. This guy got persistent with the wrong sick lady. I climbed slowly down two flights of stairs, walked to the front door, and glared at the widely smiling man who awaited me there. “I do not appreciate being dragged out of bed,” I whispered dramatically, since my voice had gone out the day before. The salesman blew past my complaint and started his spiel, saying that he hadn’t meant to get me out of bed, but that he just needed to talk to someone eighteen years old. “My stepdaughter told you I was sick in bed,” I croaked, “and you should have respected that.” A cloud passed over his eyes. I saw it just as if it had happened to the sun in the sky. Then he apologized and left.

And I immediately felt guilty. Poor guy. He probably thought Lily was just making excuses, like people always do when you go door to door. Would my scolding throw him off for the evening, make him miss his quota? Did he have a family to support? I should have heard him out.

Maybe only a former door-to-door canvasser can fully appreciate the rugged, desolate terrain of one front step after another; I, for one, will never forget it. The strap of the leather satchel across my shoulder, the weight of the clipboard in my hand, summer sun waning as the evening careened toward nine, kids voices ringing out from backyards, and the trembling tension of suspense between the push of the doorbell and the opening of the door. And finally, the rush of success with every check collected. I never once missed quota.

That’s a salesman’s daughter for you. My dad has been around a few blocks himself, dabbling in everything from mopeds (yeah, you probably remember his old shop on Central Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis, don’t you?) to soap (until the EPA got interested, but I never really understood that story) to real estate (which somehow fell through because of a licensing hitch) to used cars (but the neighborhood was bad and wore him down) to boats, which aren’t exactly flying off the lot in this economy. Just recently, though, he told me he’s gotten into buying timeshares, which just might be the ticket.

For all the years I’ve known him, my dad has never worked a traditional nine-to-five job for somebody else, and I can see how that rebellious streak rubbed off on me. The act of showing up for work at the same place at the same time five days out of the week for my teaching job still takes me by surprise. Me? Keep a schedule? How amusing.

In a weird way, my dad made a schemer out of me, by example or genetics or some stirring of the two. Why not fly risk up the flagpole and see if it salutes? I like the thrill of the chase, even though I don’t like skinning my knees. Yet the scabs give me empathy for all the rest of us out there. Go ahead. Give me your spiel and I’ll do what I can. Just don’t drag me out of bed next time.

You know, I’m sad because Ben got promoted. Now he works across town, at headquarters. He’s one of those buddies you develop out of necessity in the workplace. I suppose it’s some whacked-out version of the Stockholm syndrome. You love the one you’re with, right? But I have to admit that I’m a little relieved, too. Once Ben and I got comfortable with each other, we were always meeting at the water cooler. We sat together in the cafeteria almost every day. We were “work spouses.” And Ben made his preferences in women known to me. More specifically, he made known to me his preferences for a certain part of the anatomy of women. You’ve heard the clichés: Some guys are into butts, some are into breasts. Let me tell you that Ben is a breast man, in the same way that, say, Bill Clinton used to be a federal employee.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate a nice bustline. I like breasts too, although I tend to be afflicted by what I’ve come to call “alien plumber” syndrome. Sometimes you have these flashes of objectivity—as if you were an alien just landing on the planet, and you see human anatomy for what it is: bizarre plumbing, to say the least. Anyway, I like boobs fine. I tend to appreciate a nicely endowed feminine chest not so much for size, but for shape. I find most boob jobs highly disturbing because they tend to be unimaginative, balloon-like enhancements. It’s like shopping for tires based on tire pressure, as if the best tires were simply the ones that held the most air. Why don’t more women actually have boob jobs that make them look more shapely, instead of just bigger in all directions? Listen, ladies: Bigger is not better. Better is better, and plenty of men are really turned on by small and natural. My precious has a lovely B-cup, and I think she’s just about perfect. I’m no cosmetic surgeon, but if I were, I’d say ninety percent of all augmentations should actually be reductions, reshapings.

Back to my friend Ben. I need to tell you that Ben cannot stop talking about breasts. Although it’s pretty tough to make me uncomfortable, and I can talk sexy smack with the best of them, I’m afraid Ben is pathologically obsessed. Now Ben is a super-nice guy, with a great marriage. The idea of ever getting caught staring at a woman’s prerogative—well, it would horrify him, of course. Few things shame him more than getting casually busted by a woman who shoots him the evil eye for checking her out. Like most of my buddies, and like me, he’s a big puppy dog who wouldn’t hurt a flea. Perhaps we’re all depraved lechers. Perhaps we’re the only Gen X guys on the planet who act one way, and talk another way. We sneak our peeks, but we’re horrified of getting caught. Sunglasses are key. (If we’re not supposed to look, then why do they dress that way?)

This touches on another subject: Is it fair or right to talk about coworkers in a sexual way, privately and harmlessly? Is it OK to talk with workplace friends about sex? Is it OK for Ben to constantly talk to me about breasts? Well, most workplace manuals now explicitly forbid this kind of thing, in a prudent effort to nip sexual harassment in the bud. (More to the point, to nip litigation in the bud.) But here’s a problem: Everybody does it anyway. They’re just not making “unwelcome advances” or abusing their position for “sexual favors.” My friend Emily tells me the same is true among her girlfriends, although maybe the talk is a little less explicit. But they definitely talk about their male coworkers. (Funny how we seem to separate by gender, even in the office—where we’re supposed to be equals. It’s like we never graduated from third grade.) We men are pretty much relentlessly talking about or thinking about sex, even when we’re in perfect marriages, like me and my precious. So to cut out the sex talk at work, where we spend most of our waking hours, takes an honest, daily effort.

But tongues will wag, no matter what the employee handbook says. Generally, there is a widespread “grass is always greener” syndrome among the married men I know. If their wives have big busts, they develop an eye for itty-bitties. Buddies who have no more than a mouthful tend to wonder what it would be like to have some more flesh to play in. Personally, I don’t want what I haven’t got. Maybe that’s because I’m a butt guy, and my precious has the finest caboose on the tracks.

It’s not like we sit around holding our breath waiting for whatever’s next from the desk of David Foster Wallace, but we do take notice. In a way, we’re gratified that it appears to be dense work of nonfiction dedicated to hard science—that way we won’t feel guilty about keeping our nose to the grindstone with Infinite Jest, his 1997 masterpiece that we still haven’t finished (but we’re loving every sentence of it). It was probably inevitable that Wallace waded into the incredibly complicated world of higher mathematics—a kind of precise language about intellectual abstractions that has always been his argot. Here he explores the whole idea of mathematical infinities, relying on a competent interpretation of Georg Cantor’s groundbreaking theories (or so our mathematically inclined friends tell us) and, yes, reams of playful footnotes.

If the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons picked up a genie’s lamp with three wishes, he might turn himself into Richard Dawkins: Celebrity scientist, bestselling Oxford evolutionist and atheist, inventor of the concept of memes, close personal friend of author Douglas Adams and husband of an ex-Doctor Who actress. He is one highly evolved geek. This collection of short essays is often insightful, but as a grab bag of book reviews, opinion pieces, and other miscellany, it’s not the best introduction to his work—begin with The Blind Watchmaker instead. Good moments here include his jabs at the pretensions of academic postmodernism, eulogies for the late Adams, and a few selections from Dawkins’s longtime battles with colleague Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins has his faults—the harshness of his antireligious stance is offputting to some, and his prose can be somewhat stiff. But he’s earned his position as our century’s equivalent of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley for his take-no-prisoners defense of science against the forces of ignorance.

Most of Jonathan Lethem’s early writing career consisted of science fiction novels that leaned toward the Philip K. Dick side of the genre—experimental, unorthodox and pounding on the door of literary respectability. When he finally got that door open, though, it was with a postmodern take on a different genre, Motherless Brooklyn, a detective noir full of sadness and ruin, narrated by a Tourette’s-plagued loner struggling to make sense of his world. Lethem stays in that New York borough for Fortress of Solitude, a semiautobiographical novel about two boys growing up in the 1970s, one a nerdy white kid, the other the black son of an embittered, alcoholic soul singer. It’s a sprawling story—at 500 pages, longer than any of his previous books, encompassing race, friendship, comic books and graffiti artists, childhood alienation and the slow gentrification of Lethem’s boyhood neighborhood, rendered a nearly foreign land in just a couple of decades.
Ruminator, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com

Now that Neal Pollack is past the indignity of being widely suspected to be Dave Eggers’s pseudonym, he’s been able to get down to the business of being his own pseudonym. As fans of his 2002 Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and his consistently funny weblog know, in “Neal Pollack,” the real Pollack has engineered a pitch-perfect parodic voice–a pompous, wildly egocentric buffoon of celebrity journalism. He wields that voice like an oaken club of comedy in his debut novel, Never Mind the Pollacks—a rolling-thunder revue through rock history like Forrest Gump with Hunter S. Thompson as the main character. The novel runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages, one problem being that music mytholology becomes more depressing and less fun the more you move from Elvis to Kurt Cobain. That said, Never Mind contains some terrifically funny stuff, especially the mystical old bluesman Clambone Jefferson. (If you’re one of those crazy types who likes listening to rock as well as reading about it, know that the Neal Pollack Invasion has released a CD and plays at the 400 Bar October 20.)

A very impressive first novel, Sebold’s The Lovely Bones deals with the grief, self-destruction, and eventual healing of a suburban family after daughter Susie is brutally raped and murdered. What saves the book from drowning in its grim premise is her deft choice of narrator—the murdered girl herself, who watches from the afterlife with sadness, love, and pity for those she left behind. If you haven’t yet sampled Sebold’s artfully constructed prose, do so now before the movie version coming next year inevitably colors any future discovery of the book.
Adath Jeshurun, 10500 Hillside Ln., Minnetonka, (866) 468-3401, www.hclib.org