Recommendations II
What I’m Reading / Watching / Listening to
Listening
Exile on Main St. is my favorite Rolling Stones album. I drive around with it in the CD player of my car, on an endless loop and I never get tired of it. I couldn’t imagine anything different with that one.
But sometimes I think Let it Bleed would be superior (to itself) if it hadn’t been sequenced how it is, and if a (money) choice hadn’t been made. The Beatles fucked up Sgt. Peppers by not putting “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” on the LP, putting them out as singles instead, and then following the tradition of not putting the singles on the actual album (which they assumed the fans would have bought already as singles). Something similar happened with Let it Bleed. “Honky Tonk Woman” was released as a single and not included on the album, instead a different version of it was recorded called “Country Honk”. That version is vastly inferior to the single version. Other than that, I don’t care for how the album is sequenced. The original goes like this:
1) Gimme Shelter
2) Love in Vain
3) Country Honk
4) Live with Me
5) Let it Bleed
6) Midnight Rambler
7) You Got the Silver
8) Monkey Man
9) You Can’t Always Get What You Want
It takes too long to really get going. “Gimme Shelter” is one of their finest songs, but it feels strange as an album opener, especially going right into “Love in Vain” the weakest song on the whole album. Whatever momentum was set with “Gimme Shelter” is immediately lost on the second track. Let it Bleed doesn’t establish a good flow until the forth song. By then it’s almost time to get up and flip the record. None of the songs on the first side were bad, or even mediocre. It’s all great material, other than “Country Honk” which could be swapped out for “Honky Tonk Woman” and be close to the best collection of Stones material on any of their albums. I think it works a lot better like this:
1) Live With Me
2) Let it Bleed
3) Honky Tonk Woman
4) You Got the Silver
5) Gimme Shelter
6) Midnight Rambler
7) Monkey Man
8) Love in Vain
9) You Can’t Always Get What You want
I’ve resequenced the album as an Apple Music playlist. I used to use Spotify but then Neil Young left, and I listen to so much Neil Young, I had to go to Apple Music. If you like the album re-envisioned like I have, but don’t use Apple, just make your own playlist wherever. This is fun for lots of albums you’re maybe thinking—ah damn this album is almost perfect. It can be quite enjoyable to mine b-sides or unreleased tracks and cobble together your own Frankestein’d version of a nearly perfect (in your opinion) album, and make it perfect—replacing weak tracks, and still landing in the footprint/length of the original release. I’ve done this for some other albums, but I usually think about how it would work out on vinyl, as I think side A and the amount of music it can contain, verses side B and the amount of music it can contain (about 22 minutes on each side/44-ish minutes of music in total) is the perfect length of an album.
My kooky little version of Let it Bleed opens with “Live With Me” and then into “Let it Bleed”, it has a stronger start and reminds me more of what I like so much about Exile. I think they had perfected album sequencing by that point, but on Let it Bleed, the sequence always felt kinda arbitrary how it was. I like side A starting out with jumpier songs, punchier ones. I say just stick “Gimme Shelter” at the end of side A, as track 5, and then it’s more epic anyway, concluding that side of what would have been the vinyl. Side B would open with “Midnight Rambler” how it always did. In my opinion those two songs belong together anyway, back to back.
Replacing the country-styled “Country Honk” with “Honky Tonk Woman” makes those first two resequenced songs lead into something, build, makes it feel like the material is building to a height. That single, overplayed on classic rock radio, when placed into this resequenced album, sounds right to me—I get so happy when those damn cowbells come in. Suddenly the single has a place in a larger piece of art and feels of a whole. “Country Honk” probably didn’t need to be released at all. We could have waited forty years and got it as an ‘extra’ on some deluxe thing.
Track four on my version, moves the Keith Richards sung, “You Got the Silver” from side B to side A, where it belongs. It’s a beautiful song. I always love the Richard’s songs, the ones he gets to sing. “Happy” on Exile is a highlight to me, but “Before They Make Me Run” off Some Girls is one of the highlights of that album and buried too far on the back end of the sequencing, in my humble fantasy-record-producer-opinion.
“Love in Vain” as the second track on the official release always felt like a huge mistake, the air completely let out of the tires for whatever “Gimme Shelter” had accomplished. With “Love in Vain” moved to the back of the album, we get it coming out of “Monkey Man” and leading into “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. The low valley of “Love in Vain” lets a rise occur with the final track that otherwise is missing in the old sequence. Everything has a flow this way. And bonus to me, when the playlist ends, it loops right back to track one of side A, “Live With Me” and I find myself listening to the album at least one more time. Something I never did when listening to the real way the album was sequenced, even though “Gimme Shelter” was sufficient, it still set up tracks two and three as the weakest, lowest energy on the album—why do that kind of sad shit to the glorious human race?
Reading
Middlemarch
I’m at the halfway mark of this novel. It’s been wonderful so far. Love, and medicine, and struggles over inheritance. Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot) is an astounding writer, everything so carefully organized and the information released so beautifully.
The people making a case for this being one of the greatest english language novels, they know what they’re talking about. We’ll see how it ends though …
The other day I saw a tweet someone put up that said if it takes more than three weeks to read a novel, you really haven’t read it. Who knows if that’s true. I don’t care, and don’t worry about being on a certain timeline about anything. I like to read a doorstop ‘masterpiece’ novel while reading many other novels at the same time. It took me eighteen weeks to read Ulysses when I read that, I’d read a fifty-something-page chapter in the beginning of the week and and then dip into something I suspected was equally a supposed ‘masterpiece’ for the rest of the week. Something I’d never read, or studied, as an adult—things like Hamlet, MacBeth, Waiting for Godot, To the Lighthouse, As I Lay Dying, Sound and the Fury, on and on. This was around the time that I began marking my books up heavily so I could study them, and read deeper than ever before. I remember how happy I was back then, because I was drinking a lot less, and I had bought a rechargeable book light for $12, and each night when it was time for bed, I’d read a bunch before I fell asleep. My point is, it’s probably going to take me eighteen weeks to read Middlemarch too. But nothing is a race. If you’re going to read something and try to learn something from it, you should take your time, and actually learn from it—you should take a lot of notes on it, in it, if you can. The marks you made in the margins will help you on the journey through the 900 page book now, but also in the future, because hopefully, you’ll read it again someday. I’m on page 444 right now. Everything is up in the air. Marriages are in trouble, other marriages are just about to pop up like flowers it seems. There’s opposition to a new hospital. People are against surgeries, they like leeches or something. Funny enough, over the last few days, I’ve been reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, and he’s mentioned George Elliot a few times. The guy was a huge fan of nature, (for a while) The Gospels, and almost as much as Jesus, George Elliot.
Letter of Van Gogh / Letters to Wendy’s
I’m about halfway through Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. They’re completely amazing. I can’t believe we have them. The letters are presented, one-sided, often Vincent writing to Theo, instigating and pushing for him to write a letter back. 1875-1890. The first thirty pages or so of the letters have to do with Vincent trying to become a clergyman, a man of God as vocation. He’s drawn to art, yes, but these earliest letters function as ‘test’ sermons to his younger brother. And they are brilliant. He is brilliant. But clergy life not a good fit for him. By page seventy or so, Van Gogh is wandering the countryside on foot, making pilgrimages in nature, sleeping in haystacks, and piles of sticks and beginning to wonder if he could make it as an artist if he turned his back on preaching and devoted himself to art-study and art-making. It’s a major breaking away, and his first steps independent from the life his family wanted for him. It’ll be a hard life and one that will eventually kill him, but the letters are so inspiring and full of moments of potent wonder, just as the man himself was. Like I said, it feels like a miracle this book exists. The paintings are undeniably great but the mind behind the paintings is one that will astound most readers. Lots of myths were presented to sensationalize the artist after his death to secure his eternal ‘greatness’. And even that death has been mythicized, as recent research shows, he didn’t actually kill himself. A child shot him in the stomach with a low caliber pistol. Regardless of myth, it’s exceptional to be able to read what he actually thought and felt, in his own words (translated of course, in my Penguin Classics edition by Arnold Pomerans).
Last night I finished reading Letters to Wendy’s by Joe Wenderoth. It’s a collection of poems written in 1996 on customer feedback cards (How Are We Doing?) at the fast food chain, Wendy’s. The book is very wild, goes in directions that feel completely unhinged and by that I mean, perfect. I’ve got a used copy somebody marked “Sexual” and “Vulgar” up in the corners of some random pages that aren’t particularly the sexual or vulgar ones. The book also fell in some water it appears, long ago, or somebody cried a lot on it. Maybe the person who wrote “existential much?” on the bottom of the page that was just regular psycho, and not existential at all. This is a beautiful book. Read it some day. I’m always drawn to books that are written on small slips, often at a job, two of my favorite of those are Tom Sawyer by Joseph Grantham, and Raking Leaves, also by Grantham. Two collections of poems, the first, written on bookmarks at a bookstore in NYC while he was working as a bookseller and the second, written on a prescription pad while working as a clerk in a pharmacy in rural North Carolina. However the work comes out, when it’s this good, you just have to thank the sky above that it exists.
Street of Crocodiles / The Driver’s Seat
Street of Crocodiles was brilliant. Bruno Schulz was an author who was cut down far too early in life, murdered in the streets by an SS officer, and his rumored-masterpiece novel, The Messiah, lost. Street of Crocodiles was his first collection of short stories, sometimes called Cinnamon Streets, as well, in other countries. The stories are dense and bizarre and feel like a marriage of Kafka (who Schulz had helped translate) and the dream logic of someone like David Lynch. While reading Schulz, I kept thinking he was the missing like between someone like Kafka and Beckett in a way. The surrealism of Schultz, leading into the absurdism of Beckett. Whatever it all is, the stories are at once beguiling and easy to enter. They focus mainly on someone becoming lost in their own little world—a father’s descent into madness mirrors the city itself becoming a maze that changes as you move through it, and time itself is slippery and the rules of time change as you go. I don’t want to make more of this than what I got out of it, but it’s the kind of book that feels like it requires a re-read and a knowledge of things like the Old Testament (at least) but Hebrew mysticism off-the-beaten-track would be a great resource too. For instance, it says in the introduction of the collection that there is a thirteenth month in the Hebrew lunar calendar that happens every three years and in that magic month, events such as the ones that happen in Street of Crocodiles perhaps are more likely to occur. Do you like bonkers books? This collection will make your head spin and make you feel something at the same time. If you want to see what I mean, start with the story “Cinnamon Streets”, the best one in the collection in my opinion. If you’re like me you’ll maybe start to wonder, hmmm, why is everyone so worried about the rules of good writing? Great writing is often so off the rails we have to call it genius.
Like Street of Crocodiles, I read The Driver’s Seat for two reasons, first off it was recommended to me by my friend Jimmy Cajoleas. I was on the beach with him and asked what his favorite books were and he gave me a list of four: these two, and The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns, and Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser. Of the four, I only have the Walser left to read. All three were great and I recommend them, highest of all, so far, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. It’s an 88 page novella about a woman in the swinging 60s, immediately after the start of women’s lib, and birth control pills, who goes on a holiday. It’s a murder mystery and more. It doesn’t really have a TWIST per say, but it does too, it’s one of the most unique books I’ve ever read, so perfect on every page, full of such dramatic tension, it makes Hitchcock look relaxed. Technically a crime novel, but really a novel about a changing society and a person who makes the best use of that changing society to reach a gruesome end she is thirsty for, but she needs the help of a special man, who she is on the hunt for. When she finds him, fireworks go off. Anyway, I think you should read this book some day. Slim books are usually the best books, it’s like the author really had to make sure everything counted. I read one review of the book that said the reviewer often feels like novellas are just short stories that were padded out to reach a certain page count. I really can’t think of anything I disagree with more. Novellas, a really great one like this, are so potent and powerful, they sometimes seem like the highest art form. But then again, there’s something to be said for the 900 page english countryside novel that’s going to take me eighteen weeks to read.
Watching
I’ve gotten back into exercising. The thing that keeps me most in line with making sure I do the sets of the things that I say I’m going to do in my little program, is that I watch something ‘good’. I had no such luck with two movies I recently watched. Both sucked. The first one sucked so bad it was the rare car crash that was riveting to see. Some Kind of Monster, the Metallica documentary where they go to group therapy, and make their album St. Anger. It was like This is Spinal Tap (one of my favorite movies) but in real life. Just like Spinal Tap, the rock stars are often so stupid it’s hard to imagine they can figure out how to do … anything. The film also focuses on their hunt to try and find a new bass player, who quit, partly it seems, because he wouldn’t want to be in a band that makes a documentary about being in group therapy. I laughed a lot, but not really at the guys in the band, they’re suffering, they’re hurt, they’re trying to figure themselves out—I laughed at the ludicrous situation(s), and the people trapped in them, and wondered the whole time the film was playing, how was this ever released? That it was made felt bizarre, that it was released feels almost as impossible as that book of letters from Van Gogh existing. I love Metallica’s first three albums, so it was really fascinating to see them try and move on, with a new member, from the work they put out which wasn’t as good (to me), but had made them world-wide rockstars, had made them Spinal Tap.
The other movie was called At Eternity’s Gate and it stars Willem Dafoe playing Vincent Van Gogh. A biopic, shoddily made by a hack writer/director. Dafoe is really good in it though and so are the reproductions of the Van Gogh paintings. The other actors really struggle in it, especially Oscar Issac. I’d avoid this movie. I mean, I kind of knew better because biopics are usually so lousy. But this one was schmaltzy and awards-bait material. The story is great of course, it’s the life of Van Gogh, and goes beat for beat with him as he begins to paint in his colorful style. There were good moments of the film, plenty of times Van Gogh meets people around town who you can recognize instantly as the models for some of his most famous works. And the end of the film runs with a theory, backed with convincing evidence, that he did not kill himself, but rather was murdered by a kid in town who was playing with a gun and bullying him. Well whatever. I wish there had been a component director attached to the thing. Sure, the director wrote it, but what is writing a biopic based off of five hundred pages of letters written by the subject himself. All this said, I don’t mind when a movie is shitty, this one just irritated me because it could have been something really special in the hands of a great director, retaining Willem Dafoe and kicking most of the rest of the cast out.
YES to resequencing Let It Bleed!
100% agree re: AT ETERNITY'S GATE. And maybe time to re-read The Driver's Seat, which I read for a class in university and therefore probably didn't appreciate enough.