Love Is A Mix Tape

As noted, I’ve started listening to audiobooks on my way home from work – the nice thing about working for a company that deals in books is that there are a bunch of them lying around for us employees to grab. In the case of Love Is A Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, it was a book I’d had on my wishlist, albeit in paper form.

Read by the author Rob Sheffield, the book is a memoir – a painful one. Sheffield tells the reader quickly that this is a story about meeting and marrying the woman of his dreams, only to suddenly find himself alone when she died from a pulmonary embolism at the awful young age of 31. Sheffield and his wife, Renee Crist, are music writers and fanatical about their tunes. They were completely different people – he an Irish Catholic from Boston, she an Appalachian girl from West Virginia – but they were both passionate about music and fell in love through that connection.

On the positive side, Sheffield recalls the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time I feel very personally connected to musically. The two discovered Pavement together, and numerous other bands I cared and care about are part of this book, which is framed by the songs on a given mix tape. Sheffield writes for SPIN and Rolling Stone, and any reader (or, in my case, listener) should be aware that he has no shame in talking about the beautiful pop sensibility of George Michael or Hanson, while still talking about Pavement and Superchunk. And there’s a disconnect for me there in some ways – Sheffield talks about Yaz in a reverential way that I didn’t think a straight man could. (Yes, I’m a dick. But for that matter, he also talks about being obsessed with Jackie Kennedy and Liz Taylor, and I’d put them in that same category as Yaz.)

Sheffield’s loss when Renee suddenly dies is sharp and brutal, and the book does a very good job of making that clear and painful without being melodramatic or sappy. Sheffield not only obviously misses her, but he feels guilty for not protecting her, or for not dying before her. He is afraid to leave the house for fear she’ll suddenly return and get lost without his presence.

The book is about this loss, and how after Renee’s death, nothing stayed the same. Some songs they’d shared became unplayable; new songs he loved became somehow sad because he couldn’t share them with her. Sheffield shares his experience in relating to a line from a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I always had to butt my head up against that sentence: 'I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.' I was hoping that this was a lie. But it wasn't. Whatever I learn from this grief, none of it will take me any closer to what I want, which is Renée, who is gone forever. None of my tears will bring her closer to me. I can fit other things into the space she used to occupy, but whether I choose to do that, her absence from that space is permanent. No matter how good I get at being Renée's widower, I won't get promoted to being her husband again. The loss doesn't go away - it just gets bigger the longer you look at it."

There’s no denying that there are parts of this book that are awfully sad, and poignant, and it is a talented writer that can successfully evoke those emotions. But in other places, Sheffield misses. For one, as noted, this was an audiobook read by Sheffield himself. It IS a memoir – it would be awkward to hear these words read by, say, Willem DaFoe. But Sheffield’s voice is not altogether lovely – it is jerky and awkward at times, to the point that it is actually odd to hear him refer to a radio show he DJ’ed. Going more into the book itself, Sheffield flat out ignores some things any reader would want to know. What was dating like after Renee died? He never mentions this at all, despite talking about at least five years after the fact. If he didn’t date once, that’s worth mentioning – and if he did, how awkward was it? Instead, he talks about staying at home for a long time and watching awful movies on TV like Caged Heat (which he describes the plot of for far too long), or a news item about a nacho dwarf. These are amusing anecdotes, but they seem to mask a real pain with pop culture whimsy…which feels very out of place.

The homage to the actual mix tape is quite welcome, and I can’t imagine that I’m the first reader to start making a mix for his significant other as a result of the book. (Though, Abby will be getting a playlist for her iPod, a significant difference from an actual tape, which Sheffield does discuss.)

In the end, the book was interesting and I’m glad I had a chance to experience it. (I suspect that had I read the book itself, I would have liked it more because of my issues with Sheffield’s voice, which is worth noting.) But I do wish Sheffield had really opened up – in a book where he shares so much personal pain, it’s bizarre that I was left wanting more – but I was.

Rating: 6.5/10.0

Matt White, Billionaire

I'd say this is yet another reason to hate the Dodgers, but it's hard to really hate on Matt White, except out of jealousy. (See below).

FYI, this is the first attempt at a blog post using clipmarks, a Firefox extension I found yesterday. Let's see how easy it is to do this.

clipped from www.sfgate.com

Matt White, a journeyman pitcher trying to make the Los Angeles Dodgers, could become baseball's first billionaire player.

It has nothing to do with his arm. He owns a rock quarry in western Massachusetts.

White, who has appeared in seven big league games in nine professional seasons, paid $50,000 three years ago to buy 50 acres of land from an elderly aunt who needed the money to pay for a nursing home.

While clearing out a couple acres to build a home, he discovered stone ledges in the ground, prompting him to have the property surveyed.

A geologist estimated there were 24 million tons of the stone on his land. The stone is being sold for upward of $100 per ton, meaning there's well over $2 billion worth of material used for sidewalks, patios and the like.

The Nasty Bits

I think it’s fair to say that I have a little bit of a worship complex about Tony Bourdain. I’ve written before that he has the single best job on earth, to travel the world and eat great, interesting food. He also has a great perspective on life, whether it’s the sadness of what happened in Lebanon, or the Food Network’s darker sides, or simply how to behave as an responsible tourist and guest.

Of course, this has taken a toll on his life – his marriage didn’t last and that had to be a crushing event. For someone who has recovered from both heroin and cocaine addiction, Bourdain should be a poster child not only for recovery but for being your own person. Of course, he’s an insanely talented chef and writer, as well as being incredibly personable and charismatic, so it’s not like he’s starting with an empty hand of cards.

Nonetheless, I am a devoted fan of No Reservations and his sadly infrequent posts on Michael Ruhlman’s blog and of course, anything he publishes. That’s why I was not only willing to break a personal rule in terms of reading The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones but excited about it.

That rule is – never pay someone for a collection of stories they’ve already been paid for. The problem with collections of random pieces of writings is that they’re unconnected, and that dissonance gets distracting. Especially when they are artificially repackaged in collections that purport to have an overall theme. (I’m thinking specifically about Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift, but this is a transgression many authors make.) I’m not sure why most authors pretend to do this, but I guarantee Bourdain would be open and honest about it – the money or a contractual obligation, he’d say.

Like Bill Simmons’ Now I Can Rest In Peace, Bourdain adds to his reprinted columns with updated commentary about the articles in question. Simmons peppered the margins with this commentary which was fantastic, but Bourdain stays a bit traditional by holding back his commentary until an appendix.

Almost all of the articles span just a few pages, as they originally appeared in magazines. (Apparently none of these were for The New Yorker.) And most of them are highly entertaining, and genuinely fun to read.

They are divided into categories that generally reflect the tone of the essays in those sections – Salty, Sweet, Sour, Bitter and Umami (apparently, the fifth basic taste we could recognize as Savory.) And he includes a somewhat sweet bit of fiction at the very end. I’m a fan of everything in the Sour and Bitter sections (with a notable exception if Sleaze Gone By, discussed later in this post.)

Who else but Bourdain could write something like this, from his essay “A Drinking Problem”

Vegetarians in a pub? For their own good, vegetarians should never be allowed near fine beers and ales. It will only make them loud and belligerent, and they lack the physical strength and aggressive nature to back up any drunken assertions.

Or this, from Woody Harrelson: Culinary Muse:

First of all, why would anyone listen to Woody Harrelson about anything more important than how to be a working Hollywood actor or how to make a bong out of a toilet-paper roll and tinfoil?

And who would listen to anyone who can visit Thailand -- a country with one of the most vibrant, varied, exciting culinary cultures on the planet (including a rich tradition of tasty vegetarian fare) – and refuse to sample its proudly served and absolutely incredible bounty? What kind of cramped, narrow, and arrogant worldview could excuse shutting oneself off totally from the greater part of an ancient and beautiful culture?

To my mind, there’s no difference between Woody, the New Age gourmet, ensuring a clean colon by eating the same thing every day, and the classic worst-case, xenophobic tourist – the one who whether in Singapore, Rome, Hanoi or Mexico City insists on eating every meal in the hotel restaurant. One fears “dirty” water, “unsafe” vegetables, “ooky,” “weird,” and unrecognizable local specialities. The other fears “toxins” and “impurities.”

You have to love this. And in his epilogue, Bourdain rectifies his biggest transgression, Sleaze Gone By – an essay devoted to the old New York City, where he basically laments the fact that it’s now a safe place to walk around. (He sums it up by saying, “What a twat I was when I wrote this.”)

He also stands by some of the better pieces (regarding the Woody Harrelson piece – “I meant every word of this and still do.”) and provides context to some of the others, talking about what he was going through when he wrote it. In all, it’s a nice addition to pieces that in general are strong enough to stand on their own.

This turned out to be a much longer post than I’d expected, but it was a great book and as always, Bourdain rocks.

Rating: 8.5/10.0

The Ruins

There might not be a better psychological thriller than Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, and the movie version of it was almost as good. The way Smith weaved a great story with characters losing trust in their loved ones, justifying ways to screw over their loved ones in the pursuit of money, was nothing short of fantastic.

That’s why, when I heard Smith had a new book out called The Ruins, I got pretty excited about it. And when I landed a free copy of it – hey, even better.

Turns out the fact that the book was free was one of the better aspects of it. (Zing!) Seriously, though – it’s a major disappointment in almost every conceivable way for me.

First and foremost, this is a horror novel. Which is a genre I barely ever read, with the only exception I can think of being Stephen King. And perhaps, therefore, I came in with unreasonable expectations – I was looking for a psychological thriller, and I got a horror story instead.

But in the end, a story is a story is a story, right? It should be compelling no matter what – it’s why I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy even though the fantasy genre sort of gives me hives. It’s why I didn’t mind Ender’s Game, even though I absolutely never read science fiction.

At the end, The Ruins just didn’t work at all for me. Unlike a lot of other books on my list which I didn’t like, though, I did finish this book – mostly because I wanted to see if there was a clever way Smith was going to wrap it up.

Presumptively, The Ruins is about four friends (two couples) on a trip in Mexico. They meet several people, including a German named Mathias, who they soon learn is distraught because his brother Heinrich left the hotel to find a girl he met on the beach. She’s drawn a hand-written map to some ruins that she and her fellow archeologists are working on, and Heinrich copied it down for Mathias. The group, which includes a guy named Pablo who speaks no English, travels out the ruins on a daytrip.

And of course, that’s where everything goes wrong. The setup here is actually pretty good, and Smith does a good job of showing us that this gang is walking into a disaster and doesn’t see it. He teases around showing us the source of the evil – the villain, if you will – without pulling the curtain back too much, until the story truly requires it. But then…the story sort of goes nowhere. Not only is the source of evil pretty silly, but none of the characters are very likeable. In fact, most of them are pretty unlikable…which is a problem if the reader wants to care about their present situation. And the conclusion of the book is pretty much the obvious ending to a story like this – which was a disappointing capstone to a disappointing book. A shame.

Rating: 4.5/10.0

Convergence.

Folks who know me know that there are a few things I'm afraid of - or pretend to be afraid of for fun, anyhow:

1) Mama's Family. Yes, that stupid TV show
2) People singing on TV
3) The Snuggle Bear (hence the icon on this website - confront your fears!)

And most of all, Carol Channing.
Which is why it's sort of refreshing to see the apparently insane Britney Spears looking like this:
I mean. Obviously, she's lost it and that is sad. And it's also been clear for awhile that the girl needs help. Frankly, she looks a LOT better on the right than the left. Bald, she's at least halfway to a Natalie Portman in "V for Vendetta" with a touch of Sinead.

But on the left? In the wig and giant glasses? Tell me that's not Carol F-in Channing right there. Just terrifying.

Is it just me?

Shanks for Nothing

Commuting to work has cut down a lot on my leisure reading, a fact made slightly humorous by the fact that I now work for an online media exchange that predominately sells books. I used to read books on the way to and from work, which provided about 90 minutes of reading every work day.

These days, my mornings are pretty much given over to Adam Carolla, but on the ride home, which inevitably takes a lot longer, I have started listening to a book. It started with Hour Game, a David Baldacci mystery. My thoughts were that a mindless thriller type would be the best type of book because it wouldn’t matter if the story was somewhat weak. That is, I could pay attention to the road and the story without losing focus on either.

While I realized quickly that Hour Game was barely an adequate story, it was also clear that my commute seemed a lot quicker when someone was, in essence, telling me a story during the ride.

So I went back to our in-office library and found a few other titles I could grab, deciding to take something I’d enjoy for its own sake. I was thrilled to see Rick Reilly’s Shanks For Nothing.

The book is a sequel to his seminal hysterical golf novel Missing Links. I first ‘discovered’ that book by sitting next to someone on an airplane who couldn’t stop laughing out loud at the book while he read. After devouring it myself, I gave it as a gift to many of my friends, at least those who golfed. While I don’t always love Rick Reilly’s Sports Illustrated columns, Missing Links was a truly funny tale of a bunch of hacks on Ponky, “the world’s worst golf course.”

Shanks for Nothing meets up with them years later, and the audio CD (narrated by Nick Stevens) tells us that Ray “Stick” Hart has gotten married and had a kid. The premise of the book, primarily, is that Ponky is going to be sold. The group – including characters like Cementhead, Two-Down and Hoover from the first novel – scheme in their own pathetic ways on how to raise the money they’d need to buy the course.

The story itself isn’t overly complicated, and a casual reader (or, actually, listener) can see a few things coming from a solid par-4 away. (See what I did there? Oh, so clever.) And perhaps it’s Stevens narration, but the jokes seem forced at times as do some of the pop culture references. There’s also a secondary story about Resource Jones, an inmate and former Ponky hack, scheming a breakout from his prison (which also has a golf course.) Both those elements deter from the overall story, but for fans of Missing Links, it’s still well worth the quick read. It certainly made the commute home amusing over the last week or so.

Rating: 7.0/10.0

Happy V Day

It’s funny – I blinked and two weeks went by since the last time I posted. I’d been really good about regular posting, but it’s amazing what a short vacation and a huge workload will do to that schedule.

So, let’s see….

The Super Bowl

A lot of people decried this as one of the worst in recent memory – and certainly it wasn’t pretty. I actually enjoyed it, not just because the rain was a new factor but because Peyton had to work for his ring. Had the Bears been even worse, there would have been a lot of people talking about how he backed into a ring or some such nonsense. It’s hard not to be glad for the guy, even though it takes away some of the fun of poking fun at him and Dungy. I will say this – before the season started, I stated that I wouldn’t bet on the Colts to win an important game again until they actually won one of them. That alone should have been the signal that this was their year to shine. (Though, that being said I did win on them anyhow through a Super Bowl grid bet. Luck favors the idiot, I suppose.)

And then there are the Chargers, who have somehow messed up their head coach position even worse than the Cowboys who (stifling a laugh here) hired Wade Phillips. After the Chargers announced Marty would be back next year...then then fired him this week. There's no way to pretty that up - it's a clusterfuck. Most of the good candidates have been snapped up, and San Diego goes from being the prohibitive favorite to win the Super Bowl to a team in disarray. Sure, Schottenheimer would have been the reason they didn't win next year...but now who is going to lead this team? It's rudderless and the entire league knows that. This is not a good thing for Chargers fans.

Legally Blonde…er, legally dead.

Then, of course, Anna Nicole Smith died and apparently the world stopped turning on its axis. I don’t know why I continually get surprised that the news media loves nothing so much as a non-news story to obsess upon for hours and hours and hours on end. Look – the woman was a walking joke, and known in recent years not just for being a big-busted blonde who enjoyed taking her clothes off, nor as the heiress to a buttload of money, but as someone who was falling down wasted almost always. Anna Nicole Smith dying young is about as suprising as Paris Hilton getting a venereal disease. Neither are funny, neither are news, both are totally predictable.

News? What news?

Of course, why should the news focus on this when the only other thing going on is the White House trying to gear up for another war in the Middle East, again based on what appears to be shoddy evidence at best? Some of the things I truly enjoy is an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, with the added bonus of President Bush being dumbfounded as to why people might not believe the evidence they are presenting. Well, numbnuts, for one – it’s far from conclusive. And for two, I refer you to a book called Chicken Little. It’s probably within your reading level.

The word is: Sigh.

Vidiot Report

In brighter news, we’ve been watching “our shows” fairly regularly, even if that phrase gives me the heebies a bit. 24 just got good again with the two-parter this week finally getting the urgency back that had waned in recent weeks. There’s nothing like watching Jack Bauer kick some serious butt. Battlestar Galactica hasn’t been stellar this season but it’s still a phenomenal show and I’m glad it has been officially renewed for next season. Heroes is still compelling – even though I can’t quite figure out how this season will end, nor how it will continue into a second year. But I’m willing to watch and see. Veronica Mars despite being on the verge of going on an idiotic hiatus, is great. Just a great, witty and intelligent show that seems destined for the “I can’t believe no one ever watched that” bin. Friday Night Lights is terrific, and now Abby wants to watch it as well, which can only be good. We’re finishing up with Beauty and the Geek tonight, and the season has been…decent. I really don’t want CeCe to win because she’s loathsome, and sadly there is some rich stupid guy who is eager to make her his trophy wife, even if she does look like she’s been hit in the face with a frying pan too many times. Survivor is back with a vengeance – last week’s debut show rocked, and it should be a great season. I’m especially happy that it seems to be the most ethnically diverse cast ever (with no mention of this) and the ugliest. That latter part is actually important to me because the show did start becoming a place full of pretty boys and girls…and no one who really knows how to play the game. You can have good looking people play well – see Yul, Ozzy and Stefanie of the prior two seasons – but it’s far from a requirement. (I’m also very curious about the person who apparently quit just before filming began, hence only 19 survivors starting the season instead of 20. There’s got to be a good story there.)

OK, that’s it…but Happy Valentines Day, y’all.