We here at The Biblioklept wish all of our dear readers a very merry Christmas. As our special gift to you, enjoy this fine performance by the late, great James Brown.
Author: Biblioklept
Grandad’s Eggnog
Hopefully everyone is happy and with loved ones and friends during these holidays–and what better way to show love and fellowship than sharing a draught of delicious eggnog (alternately, the sad and solitary can drown their lonely sorrows in this high-alcohol, high-calorie treat). This is an old recipe; I remember my cousin and I stealing sips of this nog during my grandparents’ Christmas parties.
You will need:
A bottle of fine bourbon
A bottle of fine rum
A liqueur of your choice (this is optional; coffee, cream, or amaretto all add a nice touch)
A gallon of vanilla ice cream (substitute frozen yoghurt if you’re concerned about calories)
A carton of store-bought eggnog (alternately, you can make your own eggnog from eggs, milk, and sugar, although it’s a genuine pain in the ass and no one will ever know the difference, unless you go around pointing it out to them, which will make you look like an asshole, and you don’t want to look like an asshole, do you?)
Nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, clove (Use whole spices! Any of your favorite holiday spices will do, but I consider these four essential)
To make a one gallon pitcher of eggnog:
Put about 6 cups of ice cream in the pitcher. Add some cinnamon sticks and cloves; grate some nutmeg and mace into the pitcher. Add 4 cups of the store-bought eggnog, stir mixture. Add about 3 and 1/2 cups of bourbon, 1 1/2 cups of rum, and liqueur (about 1/2 a cup will do) to taste; add more spices. Stir vigorously; cover and allow to set in the freezer for at least 12 hours before serving. Stir vigorously before serving.
To make your guests happy, I suggest serving the nog with both liquor and ice cream at hand; this way those inclined may add either as their taste dictates. (Note for heavy drinkers: if your intention is to get smashed, stop drinking the eggnog after two cups and begin drinking the bourbon straight! The high levels of cream and sugar in this nog will almost guarantee a hangover–don’t overdo it!)
Praise Yaweh
This is what the holy holidays are all about: praising the lord, keeping the faith, practicing good works, and dancing to sweet tunes, all set to special effects that would make the “When Doves Cry” video blush (if a music video could indeed blush).
Watch Rev. Alecia groove the transcendental with crazy neck moves and wicked jazz hands–without even having to get out of her swivel chair! Thanks to Mike Gersten for the vid.
Links, Lists, Liars, Laziness
So I have a number of beefs with the end of the year albums and singles lists at Pitchfork and The AV Club, which I will get to momentarily, but a few things first:
Check out the new audioplayer (“Audioklept” on the sidebar) that WordPress has kindly made accessible. I’ll try to update it regularly with awesome-to-moderately awesome tuneage. Now playing: the sweetly saturated sonic screams of Emperor X: the true indie rock.
Ricotta Park has had a makeover. The site looks great, and it looks like Nick will start posting regularly again. Check it out.
Some of the most enjoyable reading I’ve done lately comes from The New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas, via Tomorrowland. Highly recommended!
You can now easily access the marvelous adventures of Dr. Van Keudejep in one place, courtesy of Troglodyte Mignon. Very nice.
Dr. Van Keudejap ’s interrupted suicide – He lived happily ever after, thanks to the tiny troglodyte.
On to the lists. For the past few days, Got to be a Chocolate Jesus has been counting down the year’s best albums. I’m in accord with most of his top five, posted today: TV on the Radio, The Fiery Furnaces, Destroyer, and Joanna Newsom, all faves of mine made the cut, as did The Mountain Goats, a band I’ve never really listened to. If you were to swap out The Mountain Goats with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s fantastic comeback LP, The Letting Go, I think that would be my top five.
So yes and well now my beefs: first up, like many of you (I’m guessing), I hate hate hate Pitchfork; nonetheless, I visit those jerks daily, as I have for the past seven or eight years. This is the site that gave a “0.0” to The Flaming Lips’ aural odyssey Zaireeka without even listening to it. My major beef with P-fork is that The Fiery Furnaces’ Bitter Tea wasn’t recognized at all; neither did their Top 100 tracks of 2006 find room for Neko Case’s “Star Witness,” which was the best song of 2006. Sure, there were plenty of places where we intersected, but on the whole, their list reaffirms my belief that, in addition to being hacks, these guys have no taste (I blame the editor–some of P-fork’s writers, like Dominique Leone and Drew Daniel have true talent).
Now, The Onion’s AV Club really let me down–generally I love these guys: they’re way less pretentious than most of the music and media blogs, and they tend to have a critical approach fashioned more in the tradition of Creem or classic Rolling Stone. However, they chose The Hold Steady’s Boys and Girls in America–a completely overrated, derivative, and ultimately boring piece of trash–as album of the year. Furthermore, The Decemberists–a band repeatedly given the undeserved descriptor “literary”–also cracked their top ten. Defenders of these loathsome bands usually say that the haters “don’t get” the “meta-cool” of The Hold Steady or the “hyperliterate” Decemberists: they’re wrong: there’s nothing to get: these bands are boring. Just because somebody calls bullshit on something you like doesn’t mean that they “don’t get” it–in the case of the aforementioned hacks, I totally “get it”: these bands lack originality and talent.
Now, on to an artist that I truly “don’t get.” The Liars’ Drum’s Not Dead topped many year end lists, and plenty of my friends loved this album. I didn’t hear what the fuss was about, although I’ll certainly give it a second shot. Maybe it’ll click (that’s how it went down with TV on the Radio). Any fans out there who “get it” and who are willing to explain it?
Mary Timony-Hapi Holidaze
What is Christmas without creepy pagan vampire rock and arbitrary misspellings? Enjoy “Hapi Holidaze” by The Mary Timony Band.
Download “Hapi Holidaze” (mp3)
from “Kill Rock Stars Winter Holiday Album”
Various Artists
Kill Rock Stars
In the Shadow of No Towers–Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman’s Maus, released as a graphic novel over twenty years ago, did more to legitimize the comic as an art form than any other work I can think of. It won a Pullitzer Prize Special Award in 1992 (the Pullitzer committee found it hard to classify…perhaps they didn’t want to admit that they were giving a prestigious award to a comic book!), and today Maus is a standard on many college English syllabi.
After Maus, Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for over ten years, quitting in early 2002 after the September 11th attacks to work on a series of broadsheets entitled In the Shadow of No Towers. These broadsheets were collected in 2004 in an unwieldy 15″ x 10″ book.
Spiegelman lived in downtown Manhattan, right by the towers; his daughter attended school a few blocks away. He saw the towers collapse in person, fleeing for his life with his family. Spiegelman attempts to capture this raw, unmediated, and very personal experience in In the Shadow of No Towers (Sonic Youth’s 2002 album Murray Street works to the same end–only much more abstractly): the narrative is discontiguous, fluctuating from bitter satire to earnest inquiry. Spiegelman’s choice of the broadsheet as his medium (the broadsheets were published monthly by different newspapers as Spiegelman produced them) is tremendously affective: just like the 9/11 attacks, the broadsheets are larger than life, hard to grasp, hyperbolically resisting easy, singular readings. Spiegelman balances bitter attacks against the conformist mentality spurred by the Bush administration with pathos and humor; In the Shadow of No Towers recalls the good-natured satire of broadsheet comics from a hundred years ago, bittersweetening the content. The 2004 collection wisely contextualizes Spiegelman’s work by reprinting broadsheets of “The Yellow Kid” and “The Katzenjammer Kids.”
Like Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers is a fascinating exploration of how disaster confronts and transforms identity. And reflecting its heinous subject, In the Shadow of No Towers ends without concluding: as the foolish Iraq war begins, Spiegelman can no longer shape any meaning or sense from his work. This isn’t a graphic novel–don’t look for a cohesive narrative structure here; instead, In the Shadow of No Towers explores the loose ends, the detritus, the psychic remnants of disaster.
Leisure Town
Tristan Farnon’s hilarious webcomic Leisure Town plays ludicrously with distinctly American tropes of sex and violence, resulting in some of the most mean-spirited humor this side of Peter Bagge or Robert Crumb.
Populated with psychopathic plastic animals and dope-smoking astronauts, Leisure Town is a world plagued by school shootings and AIDS jokes, misogynists and cubicle drones. Farnon’s ugly sense of humor might be hard for some to swallow–or even understand–but his work addresses the stochastic cruelty inherent in a commodified culture, a culture where people only have value as faceless automatons, as lumps of flesh to be detonated. Enter at your own risk.
Piercing
David Gaddis produced only one webcomic, but it’s beautiful. Do another one, Mr. Gaddis! In the meantime, take five minutes to read “Piercing.”
David Foster Wallace Talks Tennis on NPR
A couple of weeks ago, loyal reader Damon Noisette left a link to a David Foster Wallace piece on Roger Federer. Click on the player below to listen to a cool interview with DFW about this piece. I know, I know–the interview is a couple of months old–but I’m trying to integrate audio into this website, and this is something of a trial run. Enjoy (or not).
[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/1757889]
2006 Superlatives
Best Book I Read in 2006:
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.
Best Book Published in 2006 that I Read in 2006:
I read plenty of fantastic books this year, but I don’t think any of them were published this year (although I’m sure that plenty of great books came out this year. I’m always playing catch-up). The closest I think I can come is a paperback of Dave Egger’s collection of short fiction, How We Are Hungry, which came out in October of 2005, actually (to plenty of mixed reviews–but I liked it a lot!). I will also read Egger’s What Is the What as soon as possible. Maybe this Christmas break (feel free to send me a copy). Here’s The New York Times Book Review Top 10 of 2006, and courtesy of the American Library Association, the TTT (the Teen’s Top Ten, popularly known as “the titties”).
Least Enjoyable Book I Read in 2006:
God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia by Cornelia Walker Bailey (with Christena Bledsoe). I’m sure lots of people would really enjoy this book, in fact, I recommended it to a few of my students. Not for me though.
Most Likely to Succeed:
Ricotta Park will storm the nation (if Nicky Longlunch ever decides to start posting again).
Most Likely to be President:
Barack Obama?
Best Dressed:
Saddam Hussein always was a sharp dresser–
–but after some {ahem} troubles–
–he had a fabulous makeover! Saddam looking dapper and energetic, yet casual and academic (oh, and seriously pissed)–
Best Movie I Saw in the Movie Theater in 2006:
I’m pretty sure it was Litle Miss Sunshine, although I also enjoyed the movie where Will Ferrell was a race car driver.
Best Movie I Saw in 2006:
The New World (dir. Terrence Malick). This film is beautiful. You must watch it (twice).
Best Album of 2006:
Lots of contenders–M. Ward’s Post-War, Joanna Newsom’s Ys, Destroyer’s Rubies, OOIOO’s Taiga, Girl Talk’s Night Ripper –all were great (and I know that I’m forgetting dozens)–but The Fiery Furnaces’ Bitter Tea didn’t leave my CD player for months…in fact I’m sure it’s still in there.
Best Song of 2006:
“Star Witness” by Neko Case. Crafted from images that at first seem vague, “Star Witness” relates the haunting tale of a tragic accident. And the worst part of the accident is how mundane the whole scene is to everyone besides the speaker: “This is nothing new/No television crew/They don’t even put on the siren.”
Most Overrated Album of 2006:
The Crane Wife by The Decemberists. The Decemberists are so boring.
Best Live Performance of a Musical Group:
The Fiery Furnaces at Common Grounds (Gainesville, FL). One of the best concerts I have ever attended. The kids danced as The Fiery Furnaces deconstructed their songs, rearranging them into new suites, punching in and out of different albums. The true rocknroll.
Most Disappointing Live Performance of a Musical Group:
Wilco at The Florida Theater (Jacksonville, FL). Wilco didn’t seem to know that they were playing in a theater. Jeff Tweedy seemed completely annoyed at the crowd for not boogeying to the jams. Wilco’s performance came off like a simulation of a band that was really “into” the vibe–like they had watched films of themselves to improve, like a football team or something.
Best New Product:
Okay, boxed wine is nothing new, but in 2006 I started gleaming the cube. Boxed wines stay fresher longer than wine from a bottle, and are generally much less expensive. This summer I found my habit–which a prejudiced few might think declasse–validated by the cultural elite. I attended a pre-wedding party in a cave in the south of France this summer; Damien, the winemaker (it was his cave) served us box after box of delicious wine, trumpeting the superiority of the box as a vessel. So see.
Worst People of 2006:
Check out my previous post for some superlative hatin’.
Man of the Year:
I wasn’t on the committee this year. I understand that they might have met in Orlando this year. This guy John Griffis heads the whole thing up. I’m sure he has a MySpace account. I really don’t know who won. I think this guy Andy won.
Woman of the Year:
The woman of the year is my darling wife Christy, of course.
Maude Flanders, RIP
Dave Eggers on Infinite Jest
Last week Little Brown published a new edition of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest featuring a new introduction by Dave Eggers. You can read the whole introduction here (thanks to Bob Tomorrowland for sending me the link).
Eggers’ intro weighs in on the current “readability” debate in contemporary fiction. In his 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” Jonathan Franzen (author of The Corrections) attacked “difficult fiction,” focusing on writers like William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, whom Franzen views as “Status” writers who don’t really care about their audience. Franzen posits that “Contract” writers (like himself) take a more humanist, social approach. In his intro, Eggers avers that DFW’s work denies these classifications; the content of DFW’s work may be complex and weighty and downright philosophical, but DFW’s tone and his humor and his pathos ultimately allow for an accessible, fun read.
This blog has previously come out against Franzen’s argument: biblioklept is a fan of both the difficult and the more accessible–and the work of authors like Eggers and DFW prove that Franzen’s types are empty models. It’s too bad for Franzen that Gravity’s Rainbow and Ulysses require more work on the part of the reader than say, Stephen King or Tom Clancy. The Bible and Shakespeare and Moby-Dick and Gabriel García Márquez also require work from the reader, and no one could make a legitimate argument for removing them from the literary canon. One day, Infinite Jest will take its place in that same canon, alongside the work of Pynchon, John Barth and Don DeLillo–all authors whose work requires some effort on the part of the reader.
Eggers disscusses the effort required to read Infinite Jest, noting that it’s not a book you can simply put down and come back to a few weeks later. From my own IJ reading experience, I know this to be true: I made three attempts before finally getting into it; once I was “into” it, I was addicted, reading well past my bedtime, lugging the large object around on the Tokyo subway, reading snatches during my lunch break. IJ made me laugh loudly, it made me cry a few times; I even found myself so excited that I had to stand up during the climactic fight between Don Gately and the mysterious guys in Hawaiian shirts. When I finished the book, I immediately started re-reading it, sifting through its dense language for added meaning. And one day (month), when I have the time, I plan on reading it in its entirety again.
If you have any interest in this book, read Eggers’ foreward–he does a much better job selling this book than I could. I will say that this book is a favorite of mine, and that if you put the time and effort into it, you won’t be disappointed.
America Is Awesome
“America Is Awesome” by Natalie Dee
Happy Thanksgiving
Deerhoof–Friend Opportunity
AUDIOKLEPT SPECIAL EDITION: Deerhoof–Friend Opportunity (Kill Rock Stars; releases Jan 23, 2007)
Deerhoof are a kind of paradox–innovators working in a tradition–deconstructing the whole of modern music (as well as not-so-modern-music) with their voices, drums, guitars, and keyboards. With Friend Opportunity, the San Francisco band has distilled the buzz and clatter, the melody, muscle, and grace of their past few albums (2005’s The Runners Four, 2004’s The Milkman, 2003’s Apple O’) into a concise, nearly-perfect 36 minutes. The Runners Four topped a lot of year-end lists last year, but to me it was overlong and undercooked–plenty of good ideas that needed to be edited and refined. With Friend Opportunity, Deerhoof achieves a beautiful balance, reining in chaos and noise in favor of punchy rhythms and hooks that are sure to sink into your mind. Not to say that the vibrant anarchy of past albums has been in anyway discarded or even subdued–Deerhoof have simply gotten better at using chaos as a musical element, a means to an end, rather than an uncontrollable variable. Tracks like album opener “The Perfect Me” and “+81” establish pop ideals, cribbing from classic rock riffs, only to deny, deconstruct and then revive these ideals–all in under three minutes. “The Galaxist” is particularly sweet, opening with Faheyesque guitar picking and breathy melodies, and moving into a joyous beat that would make Fela Kuti proud. If the world had better musical taste, “Matchbook Seeks Maniac” would be on every radio station, the perfect slow dance for the Bizarro World prom. The brevity of these tracks is a plus: most of the tracks on Friend Opportunity lack the repetition common to pop music, moving through several ideas in under three minutes–ideas that stick in the head, causing a listener to hit repeat. The album closer, “Look Away,” is the only track to deviate from this method. Clocking in at over 11 minutes, “Look Away” comprises nearly a third of the album’s content, and will undoubtedly not stand repeated listens by some listeners. The track seems tailor-made for listeners who expect some noise from their Deerhoof, and those listeners won’t be disappointed. Nonetheless, even in an 11 minute anti-epic, Deerhoof controls the chaos and noise, resulting in some challenging and beautiful moments. Despite a 2007 release date, I consider Friend Opportunity one of the best albums of this year. I can’t wait to buy it.
Writers on The Simpsons
In tonights episode of The Simpsons, Lisa and Moe go to a writer’s seminar called “Wordloaf” in Vermont. Is this a real thing? I googled, but I found nothing.
Moe has been invitedto Wordloaf by Tom Wolfe, who loves Moe’s book of poetry, Howling at a Concrete Moon. What Wolfe and the other writers at Wordloaf don’t realize is that Lisa has engineered Moe’s book, editing it together from Moe’s fragmented notes of despair, and giving it its title. Disappointment, betrayal, and humiliation ensues. Also, I think Homer might’ve eaten a donut or something.
Authors Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) and Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) also guest star. By the way, biblioklept is coming down here, officially, in complete disagreement with Jonathan Franzen’s opinions on “difficult writing.”
Thomas Pynchon’s non-image makes a brief cameo. By my count this is his third appearance on the show.
Overall, despite jokes about grading papers and grad school and several obscure literary references–all things so dear to my heart–this episode was not so funny.
McSweeney’s Issue 13 (Chris Ware)
Charles Burns’s gorgeous title page for McSweeney’s Issue 13 captures the bizarre mix of romance, abject horror, and mutually assured destruction present in the horror comics of the 1950’s.
I love all things McSweeney’s–Dave Eggers, The Believer, etc–but Issue 13 of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is particularly excellent, and is easily the most beautiful, most aesthetically pleasing book I own. Designer and editor Chris Ware (author of the sad and dense graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth) offers a concise but thorough history of cartooning. Ware places Robert Crumb, the Hernandez brothers, Art Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes, and other great artists into a tradition initiated by Rodolphe Töpffer and Krazy Kat, and perfected by Charles Schulz. This richly-colored book comes wrapped in an old fashioned broadsheet comics page, and includes work from some of the best artists and cartoonists from the past 100 years. Despite the wide range of cartoonists represented, Ware unifies the issue in a theme of despair and depression. Imagine this famous moment in cartooning–Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown’s wishful kick at the last minute, tripping him and humiliating him and betraying him: that pretty much somes up Ware’s theme. But even though it’s sad, it’s funny and somehow beautiful–and real.
If you are a bibliophile, you must buy this book. You won’t be disappointed.
Biblioklept 
