Rick Schindler's Blog, page 2
December 31, 2016
My Top 10 Albums of 2016
None of these 10 albums is just a collection of songs: Each one tells a story, and each story is a chapter of 2016. That’s why I’ve listed them not in order of preference or alphabetically, but chronologically.
They have symmetries too, patterns I am still discovering. There are the valedictions, of course: David Bowie and Leonard Cohen (even the titles of their final albums, Blackstar and You Want It Darker, echo each other) and Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest. There are reunions: A Tribe Called Quest and Underworld. There are pairs of art rockers (Bowie and Jenny Hval), indie rockers (Parquet Courts and Car Seat Headrest), New York groups (Parquet Courts and A Tribe Called Quest), jazz combos (Kneebody and Mary Halvorson Octet), chamber ensembles (Calidore String Quartet and Mary Halvorson Octet), electronic producers (Underworld and Daedalus) and poets (Cohen and A Tribe Called Quest).
More broadly, there are themes of death and resurrection (Blackstar, Hval’s Blood Bitch, You Want It Darker). But most of all, on nearly every album there is experimentation, exploration, the impetus to bend boundaries and blend genres (with the possible exception of Cohen, who lets simple, spare arrangements carry his words). Ironically, this may be clearest in the century-old chamber music played by the Calidore String Quartet.
David Bowie: Blackstar (1/8)
“I can’t give everything away,” the dying artist cries, yet he tries, one last time, to peel off all the masks he’s donned over the decades, to bare his face to us as well as to the pitiless eyes of eternity. And when the guises fall away, what remains? In the most haunting image from the searing title track’s eerie video, it is the desiccated skull of Major Tom, still sealed in his spacesuit in some strange land beyond the event horizon of a black hole.
Blackstar was released eight days into 2016, an all too accurate portent of a dark year barely begun: “I know something is very wrong,” its final track begins. Bowie died two days later.
Underworld: Barbara Barbara, we face a shining future (3/18)
The first new album by British dance/electronic duo Karl Hyde and Rick Smith in six years became our personal soundtrack for the year. Blackstar was too poignant to play when we were sad, but when Barbara Barbara thumped and throbbed, we felt better. When we were happy, we played it to stay that way. When we were horny, we made love to it. And when the remixes came out, we shuffled them in with the original tracks and piped them through the house, not because were bored with Barbara Barbara but because we weren’t, because we wanted to extend the experience. Barbara Barbara became our panacea for the manifold woes of 2016. It made the future easier to face.
The opening track, “I Exhale,” is a jaded clubgoer’s reprise of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” a stream of disjointed existential ruminations (“Life… it’s a touch… everything is golden”) that eventually coalesce in a yearning for transcendence “over the horizon.” “If Rah” comprises more world-weary reflections overlaid with buzzing beats: “You don’t look old enough to have suffered so much.” But then it’s as if the club is closing, the party winding down: The beat subsides and the mood turns meditative as a pilgrimage wends its way through cynicism to hope.
Parquet Courts: Human Performance (4/8)
“It’s a drive-by lullaby that couldn’t get worse, a melody abandoned in the key of New York.” It’s deadpan urban art punk confidently constructed by a band that’s too mature to remain content with being merely quirky and charming. It’s very New York. It also has the only song I know with a guided meditation through its instrumental break.
Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial (5/20)
“What happened to that chubby little kid who smiled so much and loved the Beach Boys?” rock ’n’ roll prodigy Will Toledo sings. Well, he’s graduated from self-recording in his college dorm room to a real studio with a real band. But guided by the model of Guided By Voices, he has wisely retained his lo-fi aesthetic, as well as his intimacy with the dramas and traumas of youth, which he evokes in bleakly funny lyrics about drugs and drinking and despair that he hoarsely declaims as power chords thunder. He faces a shining future.
Kneebody and Daedelus: Kneedelus (6/24)
Jazz fusion is a little like cold fusion: It sounds great on paper, but nobody seems to have been able to make it work (at least not since the heyday of Weather Report and late-period Miles Davis). But now the contemporary jazz ensemble Kneebody collaborate with LA producer Daedalus, and together they weave fresh sounds that are complex but accessible, and often beautiful. Perhaps it’s the genesis of a new fusion, merging jazz and electronics.
Calidore String Quartet: Serenade (The Musicians & the Great War 2) (7/1)
These young musicians may be the most exciting new string quartet since the early days of the Kronos. When I saw them two months ago, they brought a largely geriatric audience to its unsteady feet with the passion and near-telepathic cohesion they brought to Mendelssohn.
But on this album they demonstrate their technical mastery on early 20th century works by five composer-musicians, including Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud. All of it pushes relentlessly into modernity; all of it bears the indelible marks of World War I (the “Great War”).
(The provenance of this splendid record is a bit obscure. It’s part of a sprawling, ambitious survey of World War I-era classical music on a French record label called Editions Hortus. It appears to be the only volume in the series performed by the Calidore, and the only volume available in the U.S.)
Jenny Hval: Blood Bitch (9/30)
An eccentric, often ecstatic tone poem to vampirism, feminism and menstruation that weaves Hval’s keening vocals and esoteric meditations around chilly electronic beats and fragments of musique concrète à la Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy. I give it extra points for the most wittily transgressive song title of the year: “Period Piece.”
Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker (10/21)
“I’m leaving the table, I’m out of the game,” the dying poet growls, yet he summons his waning strength to explore, one last time, the Christian imagery that informed his best-known songs and to make his peace with… who? “I wish there was a treaty between your love and mine,” Cohen sighs. Is he addressing an old lover, or God? (My money’s on God.)
Bowie’s valediction is plaintive and fervent: Cohen’s is wry and grimly resigned, his voice so gutteral it makes Tom Waits sound like Frankie Valli. He is a poet, and his language is as beautiful as his meter is simple and his arrangements spare. He’s often very funny, too, which makes his farewell all the more heartbreaking.
Mary Halvorson Octet: Away with You (10/28)
Halvorson’s slippery, sinuous electric guitar (she plays a Guild Artist Award, a guitar that’s nearly as big as she is) is one of the most distinctive voices in avant-garde jazz. This chamber ensemble of gifted musicians shows her to her best advantage; the music is challenging, exciting and unpredictable, bending and twisting restlessly.
A Tribe Called Quest: We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (11/18)
Eighteen years since their previous album, A Tribe Called Quest return to fulfill all their shining promise, and that of hip-hop itself. This is their State of the Union address, a clear-eyed, up-to-the-minute survey of an America where there’s “troublesome times, kids, no times for comedy,” where “it always seems the poorest persons are people forsaken.” The raps are as nimble and witty as ever, but their message — “let’s make something happen” — is more urgent; the production and arrangements are as sophisticated as the language is raw. For all the praise it’s gotten, this album is underrated.
Honorable Mention:
Field Music: Commontime (2/5)
Steely Dan meets Hall & Oates somewhere in northern England.
Kendrick Lamar: untitled unmastered (3/4)
Even the bits and pieces this guy leaves on the studio floor are better than 90 percent of what came out this year.
Suuns: Hold/Still (4/5)
It’s gloomy and repetitive, and I’m OK with that.
Wire: Nocturnal Koreans (4/22)
DJ Shadow: The Mountain Will Fall (6/24)
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Skeleton Tree (9/9)
Opeth: Sorceress (9/30)
Unrepentant guitar shredding! A Jethro Tull homage! And these Swedes just don’t care that the Doors already rhymed “higher” with “funeral pyre.”
Syd Arthur: Apricity (10/21)
The Rolling Stones: Blue & Lonesome (12/2)
It only took them 50 years to get around to the follow-up to 12 X 5, their second album.
Neil Young: Peace Trail (12/9)
Rock ’n’ roll’s most gifted old crank gets in the last word on 2016 with this collection of deliberately untidy rants.
Songs of the Year:
Field Music: “The Noisy Days Are Over”
Beck: “Wow”
DJ Shadow featuring Run the Jewels: “Nobody Speak”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “Jesus Alone”
Syd Arthur: “No Peace”
May 16, 2016
Book review: Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Rating 4 stars
What if John le Carre wrote science fiction instead of spy fiction? It might come out something like this offbeat novel – though for its first four-fifths or so, I couldn’t quite see why it was classified as science fiction at all.
True, there was futuristic technology – cloaking garments, newfangled pistols – but it seemed almost an afterthought. At its core, the novel seemed to be speculative fiction set in a Europe fractured into myriad tiny city-states (including, briefly, one comprised of Gunter Grass fans) – a satire inspired by such headlines as the Scottish independence referendum.
EUROPE IN AUTUMN follows Rudi, a chef in a Krakow restaurant, as he almost accidentally falls into a new occupation necessitated by the constantly shifting crazy quilt of European borders: He becomes one of a shadowy cadre of apolitical couriers who carry sensitive information and packages (sometimes human ones) across them. In short order we see him transform from bungling yet resourceful naif to jaded professional, old before his time.
It was only late in the narrative that I began to twig onto just how odd Dave Hutchinson’s imaginary near-future Europe really is. That’s where he introduces, via a clever fictive false document, a fantasy conceit worthy of Philip K. Dick, and opens the way to sequels set in his mad but meticulously constructed parallel world.
EUROPE IN AUTUMN is smart, original, distinctive and highly readable. The le Carre influence is unmistakable, but it’s le Carre through a kaleidoscope. Call it The Spy Who Came In Through the Looking Glass.
November 3, 2015
Book Review: “Not on Fire, but Burning”
Not on Fire, but Burning by Greg Hrbek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s tempting to say that Greg Hrbek’s Not on Fire, But Burning is to the War on Terror what Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is to World War II (or perhaps to the Vietnam War, since Slaughterhouse-Five was published at its height in 1969). Both are works of speculative fiction (“science fiction” seems too narrow a category for Hrbek’s novel) about the tragic folly of war whose characters, as Vonnegut phrased it, come “unstuck in time.”
Not on Fire, But Burning begins with a cataclysm in San Francisco, then jumps eight years ahead to portray the aftermath of what is referred to as “8/11.” By this point there have been three Gulf Wars (or maybe just one continuous one, decades long) and American Muslims, blamed for 8/11 even though its cause has never been determined, have been interned on former Indian reservations and decimated by domestic drones.
But most of the novel takes place in an upscale suburban enclave in Northern California, where an adolescent boy dreams of a big sister his parents insist never existed, and his 70-year-old neighbor, a Gulf veteran, hopes to make amends for terrible deeds by adopting a Muslim American orphan. Seemingly unimportant events – a neighborhood pool party, an adolescent first kiss – add to cascades of enormous consequences.
The title of the novel may refer more to its feverish texture than to any incident within it. Its message is that our lives are far more fragile than, for the sake of our own sanity, we let ourselves believe, and that our daily choices are droplets that merge into titanic tides of circumstance than can sweep us away at any moment, despite our noblest intentions.
October 25, 2015
Review: The Best American Short Stories 2014
The Best American Short Stories 2014 by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The 20 stories in this collection range from merely very good to outstanding.
The curating hand of editor Jennifer Egan feels tangible to me, both in the gender balance of writers, which is pretty much 50-50, and a skew toward longer, more experimental writing toward the back of the collection.
If the stories have anything in common, it is their distinct settings. Reading the collection end to end, I got a feeling of travelogue, of visiting a broad range of places, times, and subcultures: a lonely forest lookout post, an emergency room, a rural retreat, an English village in the late Middle Ages, a college frat house, an Antarctic science station. (It’s also interesting, though probably irrelevant, that in two of the stories, the title characters are dogs.)
My favorites:
Anne Beattie’s “The Indian Uprising”: This poignant portrait of an aging academic starts boldly, with several pages of nothing but dialogue, and ends with an emotional punch.
Nicole Cullen’s “Long Tom Lookout”: The story of an estranged wife saddled with a troubled child.
Craig Davidson’s “Medium Tough”: Impressive medical detail, compelling story.
David Gates’ “A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me”: I was big into Gates early in his career, and I’m just as impressed with him now.
Molly McNett’s “La Pulchra Nota:” The first of three unusual love stories in a row, this one set at the close of the 14th century.
Benjamin Nugent’s “God”: Also a kind of love story in a very particular setting, a college frat house. It has a strong, internally logical ending.
Joyce Carol Oates’ “Mastiff”: A third offbeat love story in a row – again I feel Egan’s careful curating hand – that gave me insight into a woman’s feeling about a man.
Stephen O’Connor’s “Next to Nothing”: Here is where things start getting a bit postmodern. It may be the most memorable story in the collection to me because I changed my mind about it as I went along, which doesn’t happen very often. It surprised me.
Laura Van Den Berg’s “Antarctica”: An intriguing psychological mystery at the world’s remotest edge, just the right place to end the collection.
Book review: Love and Rockets: New Stories #1
Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 by Gilbert Hernández
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Love and Rockets, the black-and-white comic magazine written and drawn by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (plus, occasionally, their brother Mario) was one of the best things about the 1980s for me. When it ended and the brothers went on to other worthy projects, I didn’t pay as much attention to what they were up to. So it’s delightful to rediscover them in collections from the Love and Rockets revival that began around 2008 and find their powers undiminished.
Highlights of Vol. 1 include a complex punk superheroine-team epic by Jaime and a bizarre space opera by Beto starring Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, who in real life were bargain-basement knockoffs of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and the co-stars of a low-budget science-fiction comedy called Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Everything in the collection is as soulful as it is surreal.
Graphic novels are all the rage now, but Los Bros were pushing the envelope of what comics could be when comics weren’t cool, and what they don’t know about the vocabulary and syntax of the medium isn’t worth knowing.
October 4, 2015
Re-reading ‘All the King’s Men’ after the Summer of Trump
The first time I read All the King’s Men I was in my mid teens. It was the phenomenon of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy that prompted me to pick it up again all these years later, even though Willie Stark, the Southern governor whose rise to power in the 1930s the book chronicles, is the opposite of Trump in many ways. For one thing, Trump inherited wealth while Stark was born poor.
Maybe Willie is closer to Bill Clinton, another Southern governor who pulled himself up from poverty and dallied with women (and they do have the same first name). You could even make a case for parallels between Stark and Barack Obama, since a major plot threat in All the King’s Men concerns Willie’s determination to build a state-of-the-art hospital where his state’s residents would be welcome no matter how poor (nowadays it might be called “Williecare.”)
Yet there is a key similarity between Willie Stark and Donald Trump; both tap into a deep vein of populist discontent with the status quo. But as iconic an American character as Willie is, All the King’s Men is at least as much about its narrator: Jack Burden, a bitter ex-newspaperman who serves as Willie’s hatchet man as he consolidates his power in a Southern state that is never specified but it obviously based on Louisiana under Governor Huey Long.
Warren won a Pulitzer Prize for All the King’s Men and went on to become the equivalent of America’s Poet Laureate as well as the only writer ever to win Pulitzers for both fiction and poetry. I haven’t read his poetry, but I suspect he was a poet first and a novelist second, which means he must have been one hell of a poet.
But as beautiful as much of its prose is, the brilliance of All the King’s Men for me lies in how all its incidents proceed not just logically, but inevitably from the interactions of its characters. After the novel’s climax, a series of revelations illuminate Burden’s elegiac ruminations on how we can make peace with ourselves only by accepting our own past and the consequences of our choices.
Embedded at the center of the novel is an interior story that parallels the larger narrative, about a Civil War ancestor of Burden’s, and it is here that Warren puts his finger on America’s original sin: slavery. Warren strives to encapsulate America’s national narrative in All the King’s Men, to write as emblematic an American novel as The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. And in large part, he succeeds.
September 13, 2015
Fandemonium Blog Tour Interview #3: Shady characters
Last of three interviews with the author on the deluxe Fandemonium Blog Tour, Sept. 7-14, 2015.
What makes Fandemonium a unique novel?
It’s unique because I was so clueless and naïve about publishing when I wrote it that it never even occurred to me to try and write in a commercial genre or imitate a best-seller. I just tried to write something good.
Why did you choose the colorful world of comics to feature in Fandemonium?
I was a comics fan and collector for many years, and they say to write what you know. But I sincerely think the book could have been about any business; it didn’t have to be comics.
Still, a comics convention is a particularly apt microcosm of American society, because superhero comics are far more American than apple pie. Apple pie was invented in England; superhero comics were invented in New York City.
Who and what inspired you to write Fandemonium?
One inspiration was the so-called death of Superman in 1992. In Fandemonium much of the plot revolves around a similar stunt, the planned death of a popular fictional superhero called Skylord.
The book was also inspired by a real-life incident in New York City in 1995. But I’m not going to describe the incident, because it would give away too much of what happens, and I want you to read the book.
What makes your characters different?
Whatever it is that makes me different. Because the characters, the major ones anyway, are all pieces of me.
Who are your favorite character/s and why?
That’s like asking a parent to name their favorite child. The antihero at the center of the book is a comic book writer named Ray Sirico, and I can tell you that Ray is certainly his own favorite character. Ray thinks he’s my favorite character too, and makes an interesting argument that he is in my blog here.
Ray Sirico is a larger than life character. How long did it take to bring this character to life?
Not very long, actually. He is larger than life, and he just sort of took over. It was creating all the people and places he interacts with that took time.
Why do you feel that Ray is an anti-hero?
Ray is the spirit of anarchy in all of us, the part of you that fantasizes about telling your bosses what you really think of them, that longs to dance naked on a table or jump in a car and run away from your responsibilities. The trouble is, that sort of behavior is poor long-term strategy for living in the real world. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. And people do get hurt by Ray, which makes him an antihero.
Why is Ray’s story so important?
As a cautionary tale, I suppose. Ray has so much to offer the world, but he keeps getting his own way. Yet I find most readers sympathize with him, at least in part. As I said, maybe there’s a little of Ray in all of us.
What makes Harmony Storm’s character important in this story?
I hadn’t really thought of it this way before, but Harmony is a female equivalent of Ray in certain ways. They’re both talented artists waylaid by their own intemperance. Which makes it logical they would be attracted to each other.
The second literary agent to represent Fandemonium was a woman who disliked Harmony and didn’t think she was any sort of real woman. That troubled me. I worried that I had written a sexist, misogynist story, as opposed to a story about a particularly male-dominated industry and culture that still contends with sexism and misogyny today, let alone in 1993, when Fandemoniumis set.
Yet I do think there are women like Harmony in the real world. I like to think an argument can be made that Harmony is a feminist heroine who steers her own destiny, however intemperately she does it. But perhaps that’s self-serving.
Tad Carlyle is a wonderful artist. Why is his character so important?
Tad is a closeted gay man in 1993, when the attitude toward the LGBT community was a lot less progressive than it is today – and it’s still not very progressive today in many places. And he happens to be from one of those places, South Dakota, and to have had a fundamentalist religious upbringing. Like many other characters in the book he’s an outsider.
When we meet Fred D’Auria he is a fanboy fleeing adolescent traumas. Tell us a little about this character?
Fred is shaped by the fact that he’s a victim of bullying. Just today I saw a news story about a bullied 8-year-old girl who loves Star Wars, but stopped carrying her R2-D2 backpack because mean girls in her new school told her Star Wars was only for boys. Fortunately, she got support. But if something like that can happen today, when there is widespread awareness of bullying and the damage it does, imagine how much more difficult it is for a nerdy kid like Fred in 1993. (I touched upon these issues in this blog post.)
Fred is at a crossroads; his life could go in either of two very different directions depending on what happens at Fandemonium. And the odds are against him. He could use some support.
Do you feel that when Fred meets his hero Tad that there is a special message in the book?
Wait, how do you know for sure whether that actually happens? Spoiler alert!
I’ll just say this: I may be unsure about my favorite character in the book, but I know my favorite scene.
What inspired the comic-con storyline?
Don’t tell anyone, but although I had been to some comic-cons, during much of the writing of Fandemonium I was involved with the cable-TV business and was going to a lot of cable trade shows. Much of the landscape of the novel is based on those shows. I think conventions and trade shows are microcosms for society; they are crossroads of diverse subcultures and constituencies.
There are a number of fantasy characters contained within Fandemonium. Who is your favorite? Why?
There are a couple of hundred meta-fictional characters, I think. I decided early on that it would be just too easy to set the book around the real-world superheroes I grew up with. No, I had to make more work for myself by building a parallel world where the best-known superhero is named Skylord instead of Superman or Spider-Man, and the preeminent science-fiction franchise is something called Star Station Sigma rather than Star Wars or Star Trek.
Skylord is the most important character in the Fandemonium fantasy universe – after all, it’s his costume Ray Sirico is wearing on the cover of the book. And Skylord is pretty cool. But I also have a soft spot for all the obscure fantasy characters, the ones that make only fleeting appearances in one or two lines of dialogue, or in small entries in the comic-book price-guide parody that appears in the novel.
I love the fantasy characters so much, in fact, that I gave them all their own back stories and published them in an online supplement to the novel here.
Please tell us more about why 1993 was such a special year in featuring this story?
One book blogger who liked the novel wondered about that too. One reason is that the 1992 “death” of Superman was a major real-life comic-book publishing stunt around that time, as I mentioned above, arguably the moment when comic books broke through the boundaries of nerd subculture to become part of mainstream pop culture. Today comic book adaptations are the most successful motion-picture genre, to say nothing of the revenue they generate from toy tie-ins, video games and the like.
But Fandemonium is also about mass media in transition, not just comics. And 1993 was the year everything changed forever in media because that’s when the graphical World Wide Web was introduced.
I’m a print journalist turned Web producer, so I think about these things. Ray Sirico and I have a conversation about these topicsin my blog here.
Why should general fiction readers choose Fandemonium to read?
Comics are a very particular topic, but it’s a paradox of fiction that the more particular it is, the more universal it is. Why do we still relate to the story of a medieval Scottish warlord and his wife, for instance? Because Macbeth explores facets of human character that are as relevant now as when Shakespeare wrote it.
Not that I’m comparing Fandemonium to Macbeth, of course. That would be pretentious and presumptuous. Actually,Fandemonium is more like Henry IV.
Who is your favorite hero in fiction?
Now you’ve got me thinking about Shakespeare. Let’s see, there’s Hamlet, a feckless, hyperverbal procrastinator – yeah, I’ll go with Hamlet. I can relate to that guy.
Who is your favorite author? Why?
Thomas Pynchon blew my mind at a formative time. I wrote about that recently in my blog.
What book inspires you?
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest also blew my mind. It altered the boundaries of what the novel can do. Wallace is an immense loss.
Which film do you like and why?
Oh gee, too many. I’m the sort of guy who can go crazy about art films like Malick’s The Tree of Life one minute and Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Godzilla: Final Wars the next. Pretty much anything that’s not commercial. Maybe I’m an obnoxious hipster movie snob. I have never seen Forrest Gump. Does that tell you anything?
Which TV show do you like? Why?
Also too big a subject. You’re talking to a guy who wrote a weekly TV column for a decade, and works for a daily TV show’s website right now. Let me say this: As banal as much of it is, I take television seriously. Like comics, it is a powerful and underrated medium. TV is better than the movies these days.
So let’s just talk about recent shows. Mad Men was an important show for me, as for many people. I wrote about it recently hereand also here.
The most interesting show I’m watching right now is Mr. Robot, a somewhat surreal drama about a young computer hacker in which it’s difficult to tell just what’s going on, but it’s so contemporary and stylish and thoughtful that you just roll with it.
Oh, and the second season of HBO’s True Detective that recently ended was woefully underrated. People who do not appreciate it simply have not seen enough film noir.
What is your favorite film? Why?
Now you’ve got me thinking about film noir. I have too many favorite films to talk about, but the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly, which is so noir the opening credits run backward, is one of them.
Incidentally, did you know that Antigone Bezzerides, Rachel McAdams’ character in True Detective Season 2, has the same surname as the screenwriter of Kiss Me Deadly? I stumbled across that just the other day. Even Wikipedia doesn’t note it. Antigone Bezzerides is a very good name. It’s the sort of name I would try to come up with for a character.
Which living person do you most admire?
I have the oldest yoga teacher in the world, Guinness World Records-certified. Her name is Tao Porchon-Lynch. She just turned 97. I had class with her just last night. She marched with Gandhi in India, twice. She was in the French Resistance. She had an MGM contract. She was friends with Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward. She wins ballroom dancing contests with male partners in their 20s. She embodies creativity, balance, tolerance and love, everything that is positive in life. She is my friend, and it is a privilege.
Which dead person do you most admire?
Now you’ve got me thinking about Gandhi. I’m good with Gandhi.
Tell us a little about yourself?
I think I just did! But there are some biographical details here, along with a photo my wife took that I like.
Fandemonium Blog Tour Interview #2: What’s in a name
Second of three interviews with the author on the deluxe Fandemonium Blog Tour, Sept. 7-14, 2015.
What is the name of your latest book, and if you had to summarize it in less than 20 words what would you say?
Topless Hotties is the title of a piece of fiction I’ve been working on that is either a long short story or a novella. I hope it’s not a novella. It’s about a veteran journalist who has a knack for writing headlines. Full disclosure: I happen to have won some awards for writing headlines.
How long did it take you to write Fandemonium, from the original idea to publication?
The book evolved in fits and starts over 15 years. At various points I put it aside for years, rewrote it from start to finish, and even gave up on it altogether, or so I thought. It was represented by two different agents, under two different titles. It was rejected by many editors, some kindly, others not so much.
What genre would you place your book into?
Well, that’s one of the things that kept coming up in the rejection notes: Editors complained that it doesn’t fit into a genre. I think it’s a literary satire, a comic novel with serious overtones, but I guess that’s not a genre like “crime” or “dystopian young adult novel.” By the way, did you know there’s a Twitter feed called “Dystopian YA Novel”? It’s pretty funny.
What made you decide this particular type of book?
At the risk of sounding New Age-y, I’d have to say the book decided what kind of book it wanted to be.
Do you have a favorite character/s from your books? And why are they your favorite?
I can’t be the first writer to say this: That’s like asking me to choose my favorite child. How about if I tell you about my agents’ favorite characters instead?
My first agent, a man, liked oversexed actress Harmony Storm and wanted more of her, and disliked 12-year-old comics fan Fred, a lot. My second agent was a woman who hated Harmony and felt she was unrealistic. But she loved Fred and wanted him to be introduced earlier.
How long have you been writing? Who or what inspired you to write?
Not counting the novel set in Disneyland I started when I was 9 or 10, I guess my writing career began my junior year in high school when a short story I wrote for a homework assignment got published in the school literary magazine and then won a New York Times award at a press day event. Validation is addictive.
Did you always want to be a writer? If not, what did you want to be?
Since I was trying to write a novel when I was 10 or so, I guess the impulse goes back pretty far. But I was also very interested in science as a kid, and I was always attracted to computers. Maybe if I’d paid more attention to math in high school, I might have wound up writing computer code instead of novels.
Fandemonium is a complex narrative that includes many different types of characters. How did you come up with your characters’ names?
I’m pretty obsessive about names. If I can get a character’s name just right, their whole personality comes right along with it.
I grew up in Buffalo, New York, where there is a rich tapestry of ethnic surnames: Polish, Italian, Irish, Eastern European. For two years I want to a prep school run by a Hungarian order of priests. Maybe that’s why so many of the names I see in contemporary novels seem bland and anodyne to me in comparison.
I keep a file of real-life names I like. I think a lot about the names of kids I went to school with. Sometimes I look carefully at the production credits of old movies. I have pored through telephone directories and genealogy websites.
And sometimes I look out the window. I struggled for months to think of the right name for the hotel most of Fandemonium is set in until one day I noticed a van driving by that said OLYMPUS CLEANERS. There it was.
Some of the names in Fandemonium have specific meanings to me. Fred is named D’Auria because he’s to me he’s golden, a golden child. Harmony Storm’s first name is ironic and contradicts her surname. There’s a character named Alec Tilton after the late rock musician Alex Chilton, just because I happened to like that name.
One book blogger who reviewed Fandemonium was completely enamored of a very minor character who shows up briefly only twice, a TV reporter called Taffy Poppenberg. I’m pleased with that name.
Do you decide on character traits (e.g. shy, quiet, tomboy girl) before writing the whole book or as you go along?
As I go along.
Are there any hidden messages or morals contained in your books?
No, they just come right out and bash you across the skull, I think. Subtlety may not be my greatest strength.
What is your favorite book and why?
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon turned my head inside out, which I touched upon in a blog post here. Purple America by Rick Moody affected me deeply. But I guess I’d have to choose Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, which shatters the boundaries of what a novel can be.
Do you think books transfer to movies well? Which is you favorite/worst book to movie transfer?
James M. Cain had most of his books sold as movies but avoided seeing them. When people asked, “Don’t you care what they did to your book?” he supposedly answered, “They haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right there on the shelf.”
I think Ang Lee did a nice job capturing the wistfulness of Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm in 1997. It’s an overlooked film that I think will be rediscovered.
The best book-to-film adaptation of all time may be John Huston’s 1941 version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. The final line, “the stuff that dreams are made of,” caps the movie exquisitely, and it’s not in the novel. Bogart came up with it.
As far as I know, no one has ever been able to make a decent film of The Great Gatsby, even though it’s been tried five times since 1925. I’ve only seen the 1974 and 2013 versions and I didn’t like either of them. I’m not sure Gatsby is filmable.
Your favorite food is?
I am not a foodie. My dad was in the supermarket business, and I was raised on processed food. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a fine meal now and then; I do. But day in, day out, it’s fuel to me. I have a foodie friend who hates when I say that. But put me in a decent diner, I’m a happy man.
Your favorite singer/group is?
I’m a lot pickier about music than food. It’s a huge topic for me. My younger brother, my only sibling, is a professional musician in New Orleans, where bad music simply isn’t allowed.
Let me carve the huge subject down and say that two of the most interesting albums I’ve heard this year are “From Kinshasa” by Mbongwana Star, a band from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and “IF” by Paul de Jong, formerly of the band The Books.
Your favorite color is?
I don’t know. Maybe if I had my colors done I’d find out. I’ve always sort of wanted to do that.
Your favorite author is?
Thomas Pynchon. For one thing, no one does character names better than Pynchon, not even Dickens. They’re amazing.
Why should readers choose Fandemonium to read?
Because it’s fun. Because it’s a bit messy, on purpose. Because it’s about comics, on its surface, anyway, and comics are a medium whose vast and subversive influence is still sneaking up on us. Because comics are transverbal, if you will, and brand themselves on our brains before anyone can do anything to stop it, although plenty of people have tried. Because comics are like rock and roll in that they’re disreputable yet irresistible, and will never die. Because comics are like jazz (superhero comics are, anyway) in that they are one of the few art forms indigenous to America and hence explain a lot about America. Because I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have some kind of emotional connection to comics, whether they care to admit it or not.
I used to have some of my old comic books framed in my living room. Sometimes when grown men, burly men who had come to deliver furniture or do work on the house, happened to enter that room, their eyes would fall on those comics and soften, and I could tell they were remembering the boys they had once been.
And readers should choose Fandemonium because comics are only part of what it’s about. It’s really about people who make and love comics.
Fandemonium Blog Tour Interview #1: How it all began
First of three interviews with the author on the deluxe Fandemonium Blog Tour, Sept. 7-14, 2015.
When did you begin writing? Why?
I might have been 9 or 10 when I started writing my first novel. It was going to about the kidnapping of Walt Disney, because that would give me an excuse to set it in Disneyland, which was the most wonderful place imaginable to me and millions of other American baby boomers, better even than Oz or Wonderland because it was real. We knew it was real because we saw it on TV every week, even if we couldn’t get there.
I even researched the novel; my mom took me to the library and found me a biography of Walt Disney. I probably got a couple of hundred words into Chapter 1 before I abandoned the project. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to write. The problem was that I didn’t know how to type.
Maybe I should go back to that project. Now it could be about Disney’s body getting stolen from cryogenic freeze. All right, nobody take that idea. It’s mine.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
In my junior year of high school I was assigned to write a short story as homework for my English class. At the time there was racial unrest in my hometown of Buffalo, New York, as in many American cities. I wrote a story about the white owner of a little grocery in a racially troubled neighborhood. I lifted the ending from a scene in Lord of the Flies – not the words, mind you, just a visual idea.
I don’t remember how it got to my high school’s literary magazine; maybe my English teacher passed it on to them. All I know is that when the magazine came out, there was my story, in print.
The magazine titled the story “Henry P. Gordon” after its protagonist, because it hadn’t occurred to me to give it a title. One character’s name was changed, because the typesetter apparently misread my handwriting; I had written it in longhand. It was credited “W. Schindler” because the magazine’s editor thought my name was Bill. It was not really his fault. I was shy and didn’t know many guys (it was a boys’ school) outside my own classes.
Some weeks or months later I was half-listening to the announcements on the school’s public address system one afternoon when I was surprised to hear my own my own name mentioned outside a disciplinary context. It seemed my story had won an award, a New York Times certificate of honor. I did not know it had been submitted. I had never even heard of the competition. I guess the judges didn’t notice the Lord of the Flies swipe.
That was when I first considered myself a writer, as opposed to somebody who sometimes wrote things he rarely showed anyone.
Later on I had some other pieces published in that literary magazine, fragments of a novel I never completed. I even got a poem published. But I had been too shy to sign my name to it, and they put another kid’s name on it.
I have not thought of these incidents in a long time.
What inspired you to write your first book?
Fandemonium was inspired by a 1995 incident in New York City that I read about in the press at the time. I am not going to describe the incident because it would give away too much of the plot, but it inspired to me to write a single-sentence synopsis that eventually grew into a 400-page novel. I wish I still had that handwritten sentence.
Do you have a specific writing style?
I hope not. Fandemonium is written from the points of view and in the varied voices of multiple protagonists — a rookie move, perhaps, but on the book’s Amazon page one reader says, “each voice was distinctive and compelling.”
How did you come up with the title?
For a long time Fandemonium was called Childish Things. That was the title under which it went to many editors the first time it went around. I don’t remember what specifically impelled me to change it, but I know the title change came after I had rewritten the original manuscript from start to finish. I found the phrase “childish things,” from St. Paul, kind of somber for a book with a lot of antic goings-on. It also provided very little clue that the book is about a comics convention. However, the phrase still appears in an incident in the novel.
When I got a new agent I wanted to call the book Smash-Bang Picto-Funnies, which I thought sounded very cool and postmodern but which I now think would have been a bad title, although that phrase also does appear in the novel.
One night my wife and I spent several hours batting a slew of titles around. In the end we couldn’t come up with anything better than Fandemonium, which I think does manage to convey some of both the subject and the spirit of the book in a single word. I’m OK with Fandemonium. I think.
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Lots of them. Too many, maybe. But I guess the primary message is one that many artists have strived to convey, but still bears repeating: It’s OK to be weird.
How much of the book is realistic?
Funny thing about that. The book is set in 1993, and I felt I was taking poetic license with the scale of the comic book convention the story is set around, making the fictional con bigger and crazier and more colorful than the real cons I had been to. But in the time since I wrote it, reality has caught up; comic cons today are, if anything, even bigger and crazier than the one I dreamed up. I wrote about that in my blog after visiting New York Comic Con last fall.
What books have most influenced your life most?
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon turned my head inside out so thoroughly that it has never fully returned to inside in. I touched on that in my blog here.
Few other novels immersed me like that until I finally got around to Infinite Jest, which is ineffable. David Foster Wallace is an immense loss.
If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?
Rick Moody.
What book are you reading now?
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, a wonderfully written memoir about a white girl growing up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
Jeff VanderMeer did a lot to obscure the boundary between genre fiction and literary fiction with his Southern Reach trilogy, which is distinctive and haunting science fiction cum horror. And that is a good thing, I think, because that boundary isn’t useful for anything.
Why is Fandemonium a unique novel?
Because I was so naïve and clueless about the publishing business when I wrote it that it never occurred to me to try and write in a marketable genre or to a particular audience. I just wrote the sort of book that I would find entertaining.
Why should readers choose Fandemonium to read?
Because it’s fun. Because it’s a bit messy, on purpose. Because it’s about comics, on its surface, anyway, and comics are a medium whose vast and subversive influence is still sneaking up on us. Because comics are transverbal, if you will, and brand themselves on our brains before anyone can do anything to stop it, although plenty of people have tried. Because comics are like rock and roll in that they’re disreputable yet irresistible, and will never die. Because comics are like jazz (superhero comics are, anyway) in that they are one of the few art forms indigenous to America and hence explain a lot about America. Because I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have some kind of emotional connection to comics, whether they care to admit it or not.
I used to have some of my old comic books framed in my living room. Sometimes when grown men, burly men who had come to deliver furniture or do work on the house, happened to enter that room, their eyes would fall on those comics and soften, and I could tell they were remembering the boys they had once been. So maybe Childish Things wasn’t such a bad title after all.
And readers should choose Fandemonium because comics are only part of what it’s about. It’s really about people who make and love comics.
What is the message of the book?
Wait, we talked about that, remember? You already made me think about that, and I think I’m still OK with what I came up with then: It’s OK to be weird.
– See more at: http://dealsharingaunt.blogspot.com/s...
Rate Your Lodging: Olympia Tower Hotel and Convention Center
This review of the Olympia Tower Hotel, setting of Fandemonium, appeared on rateyourlodging.com, the website for Rick Moody’s novel Hotels of North America, on Aug. 1, 2015. Hotels of North America is available Nov. 10, 2015.
OLYMPIA TOWER HOTEL & CONVENTION CENTER, 302 PARK AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY, JUNE 8-10, 2012
Anyone my age who grew up watching New York TV knows the phrase “the peak of elegance in the heart of Manhattan” like they remember the name of their first pet. You couldn’t get away from the commercials. The thing is, at one time it was probably true. Movie idols, presidents, famous authors – back in the day, none of them would be caught dead staying anywhere else. Come to think of it, one or two of them did wind up getting found dead at the Olympia. Those New Year’s Eve parties must have been epic.
But by the time foreign investors snapped the place up in one of the real estate frenzies of the early ’90s, the Olympia’s best days were far back in the rear-view mirror. The rooms were pretty small by modern standards; the plumbing was starting to go; you heard about bugs and rats. After all, they say there are abandoned subway tunnels right underneath the place. Anytime you’ve got tunnels, you’ve got rats the size of Jack Russell terriers running around down there.
So these foreign guys who bought the Olympia – Arab oil sheiks, Russian mob, who knows who they were – started knocking down all the buildings around it. Everybody knew something funky was going on. One morning you’re walking the dog and you notice this empty lot where there’d been a supermarket with apartments above it just the night before. Oops, how’d that happen? Better not to ask. Next thing you know, there’s a convention center where you used to pick up a six-pack.
These foreign guys, Japanese yakuza, Colombian drug lords, whatever they were, had it in their heads they were going to lure big business junkets away from Chicago and New Orleans and San Francisco and bring them here to New York, where they’d put all these expense-account business guys right in their own hotel connected directly to the convention center, one-stop shopping conveniently located near major strip clubs and escort services, everything under one roof. This was back in the day, of course, back before Times Square got a high colonic and became a shopping mall for your Aunt Molly from Topeka. These days, of course, if you need a hooker, you go on the Internet.
But I digress. These foreign guys, Serbian mafia, human traffickers from Cambodia, whoever they were, were so ignorant of our American way of life that the first event they book is a comic book convention! So instead of lawyers or insurance agents, their fancy new convention center is swarming with superheroes and space aliens and giant furry hedgehogs.
Long story short, it was a fiasco – some kind of riot or disturbance, property damage, arrests, lawsuits, the whole nine yards. So much for booking the National Congress of Periodontists next year; they prefer Anaheim, where life is normal, thanks just the same.
The funny thing is, for comic book and fantasy geeks, the Olympia became sort of a shrine. To this day they come from all over the country and ask, is this where it happened? Is this the place? Some of them I talked to think the hotel is haunted, I swear to God.
Anyway, after the foreign investors, neo-Nazis or Chinese triads or whatever they were, declared bankruptcy and went back to killing people and selling them for parts or whatever it is they normally do, a couple of comics geeks who’d made trillions inventing an app or something bought the Olympia. These smart geeks promoted the fact that this was the famous hotel where a comic-book convention had gotten out of hand, and now there’s conventions there all the time – not just comics fans, but people into Japanese cartoons, sci-fi shows, those books about magicians, all kinds of things. And these cons are huge – you wouldn’t believe how many people are into this stuff.
So this summer, instead of going to football fantasy camp again, my buddy and I did something different: We took a weekend package at the Olympia and checked out one of these cons. You would not believe how many hot women there are running around in spandex and loincloths, and the guys are all huge fat slobs. They say “cosplay is not consent,” but you get these women talking about what they’re into, the consent comes, especially when you’ve got a nice room with a minibar and cable TV right there.
It was awesome. We’re definitely going back next summer. ★★★★
–Charlie Lyczek
Rick Schindler's Blog
