Listening
‘Top’ Critical Darling ‘Albums of ALL Time’ and a random selection app
I’m overwhelmed by the vast content available on music streaming services. How do you find the great stuff? Critics help weed it down, yes. My go-to is usually to make it more personal somehow, ask a friend or new acquaintance what they recommend. Learn new art, learn more about a person at the same time. I listen to the rec and then talk to them about it. Often I find I’m given an obscure album to check out—which, niiiiice, but I often lack the context to appreciate how the artist has taken a sub-genre to a new height, or a weirder low. Last month I did something different. Maybe the opposite approach to seeking out new-to-me music. And not just music, but albums, strong artistic statements across 45 minutes, up to about an hour. I want to hang out in an artist’s definitive statement for that time, not some career retrospective catch-all. Show me the greatest albums ever made, any genre.
I’d downloaded an app on my phone to use to randomly select entrants to a giveaway I was doing for my novel, Teenager. I had to put about a hundred names/@s in the app on by one and when I clicked a button, it randomly selected a winner. Ten clicks, I had ten random winners. Mailed them a copy of my book. Yay.
It occurred to me I could input anything in the list, and use randomization as a prompt for other things in life. Most helpful, What I should listen to today?
I decided to apply this randomization to album selection because I was in a deep rut of the same spins over and over. I went on Rolling Stone’s 500 Best Albums of All Time and looked for albums on the list I had never digested. Their rankings, disputably, are dog shit. But over the course of that 500, I found many albums I knew well, in genres I know well. Home run after home run culturally. More interestingly I found other albums I was not familiar with, in genres of music I’d yet carefully explored. To narrow things down, I began looking from approx #200 in their rankings, down through the #1 album. Any album I didn’t know on the list, I added to my Apple Music. Any album I only knew the singles (osmosis/often radio) I added them too.
My randomization app-supplement was only necessary because Apple Music is ill-designed. It should already have the feature where you can shuffle the selection of saved ‘Albums’ playing the album’s songs in sequential order. But as far as I can tell it doesn’t. When you hit shuffle in albums, it just shuffles the songs in your library (void of playlists). Perhaps I am missing some setting I could just turn on to accomplish what I want. I started a workaround with the randomization app to achieve my end. I hand-inputted all the albums I had added to my library into the randomization app, and now when I get in my car, I click a button and it selects an album title. I click into Apple Music and put that album on and start my engine. Okay. Thank you.
I have a half hour commute, which becomes an hour in the car a day. Plenty of time to listen front-to-back to nearly any album that’s got critical and popular appeal, which are what those albums on the 500 Albums of All Time list constitutes. There’s cooler lists of course. But the one I chose has a wide net. So now my commutes are interesting in a new way. I am not sure if Songs in the Key of Life is going to come on, or Enter the Wu-Tang Clan, Red-Headed Stranger, or Trans-Europe Express, or Frank Sinatra’s Watertown, or if it’ll be any one of a number of Aretha Franklin albums, or Illmatic, or What’s Going On. Listening to music got fun again. Imagine that! And learning the source material, the root/or commercial peak (often what it is), it’s added to my enjoyment of the deeper cut albums friends and acquaintances recommend in sub genres and sub-sub mutated genres.
Reading
Middlemarch
Elegant and intricate and soothing. This just keeps getting better and better. I’m nearing the 3/4 mark, page 555. ( Yes it truly is one of the ‘best’ novels written in the english language imho). As I’ve said before, I’m reading it slow, on purpose, estimating that I’d like to read it over about eighteen weeks and read other things while making my way through. I love to read massive tomes this way, rather than rushing through anything. Off to the side I’ve seen reviews that say Middlemarch feels like a slog to some people but I’m not having that experience. A gear of many teeth aligning with other gears of many teeth aligning with other gears of many teeth. A system that works together in rousing harmony. A page-turner too. Not to mention one of those novels, if you read it, you’ll find plenty of people who want to talk to you about it. Just the other night I was out at a bar and somebody had heard through a friend I was reading it and we sat around and talked about it for a beer or two and nothing makes me happier than when that happens. One of the things I like best about Middlemarch is that it was a few would-be failed novels welded into a complete success in a sprawling collector ring of a novel. I was just talking to someone the other day about how I think most big tomes are like this or feel like this (Lonesome Dove came to mind). Starts and stops that a creator attempted and it fizzled as a half-hiccup until there seemed to be a clear path for the artist to find a way to mold their material into a multi-faceted masterpiece.
Wrapping up my Old Testament Reading
and thoughts on an edited 600-ish page Old and New Testament Bible
This summer I’ve been working on a novella to be included at the end of my next book, hopefully. The novella is written in a style new to me, but old as time. This abbreviated style found in old myths. Stuff flying past. Truncated. I wanted to study that style of writing deeper, see how it’s done, figure how to move some of my work in that truncated direction. Most books I have ever read have focused on scenes, characters directly interacting with each other, nuance developed carefully, slowly, beat by beat, theatrically. I wanted to see what can be done working outside of that. Telling a history (a false history in my case). The Old Testament seemed an obvious place to look. That said, I probably could have gotten the same milage from reading Journey to the West, Saga of the Icelanders, Gilgamesh (again), Beowulf, on and on. But it was an Old Testament summer and now today, I’m retiring from it. I started with Genesis and ended up with the prophet Ezekiel almost 1200 pages into my massacred Penguin Classics paperback. I didn’t read the entire OT. I cherrypicked different books to get broad strokes of God and man’s relationship, and the philosophy/wisdoms. Since I like to read paperbacks, and mark them up with notes, I made my own edited paperback of the OT and NT (more on that below). A smart person could easily make a PDF of this same material gathered online and read along on eBook reader, but I don’t like eBook readers (I can’t mark them up the way I want).
For my research and study for this novella, it was also a New Testament summer (to be wrapped up this fall also). There’s less cherry picking to be done in the New Testament. The story is a lot simpler than the OT—streamlined. Instead of a wrathful Hebrew God of perpetual rules and vengeance, contradictions, tangles of emotion, the NT is all Jesus, and his clear ethos. NT has the life and death of Jesus told four times (Gospels), and then in Acts, the followers of Jesus (apostles) carrying on his word, followed by Paul ‘creating’/ ‘cementing’ the religion in further adventures of letter writing and other campaigning.
My edition of the OT and NT is the KJV, 1900 pages, (Penguin, ISBN: 13-978-0141441511) that’s with a brief intro by David Norton and notes/summary on every book of the bible and and maps in the back. This edition is a paragraph Bible with easy to read, adequately sized font. Still, that thin paper you might have used to roll joints when you were fourteen. But of course, this 1900 page book is too big to carry around, tucked under my elbow, to be read on job sites (where I do most of my reading and marking up). I knew if I was going to read the Old and New Testament and see what it accomplishes broadly, I needed an edited down version, a highlight reel of those two ancient texts that still somehow carried the narrative thrust of the whole strange thing, Genesis to Jesus’ Rapture. The Garden, to a new city, New Jerusalem. I looked around to try and purchase this version I wanted online but nobody makes customized OT and NTs (maybe they should? It’s public domain after all). Pick and chose and print on demand, cobble it into a Frankenstein’d version, the way Nike let’s you customize your sneakers—any color combos you want! I got excited when I heard my friend Adam Robinson had done design and layout on “all the books of the Bible” (as a freelancer for a faith-based publisher), but it only turned out to be the New Testament and the Kickstarter to get the project off the ground never got fully funded. If I wanted an edited down version of the Bible I was going to have to make it myself.
But what would an edited Bible (OT and NT) even have in it?
My research (haha, I shouldn’t even call it that) to get it down from 1900 pages to approximately 600 came about the same way I figure out what movies to watch and what records to listen to. I asked around for a while, got some personal opinions from some of my fiends, this time mostly the faithful friends, Jewish and Christian. I clicked around on Google, reading up on what random bloggers and theologians and regular dummies like me consider ‘The Greatest Hits of the Good Book’. There were listicles. There were slideshows. There were YouTube bloviators. A priest and and rabbi or two. There was even John Steinbeck to bother.
With my personal list jotted down. I ordered a new paperback copy of the Penguin Classics The Bible and got ready for another ridiculous home arts and crafts project. I got out the razor blades, neutral PH adhesive, bookbinding tape, all my various humble clamps.
Here she is:
Old Testament:
Books of Moses — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. I wrote about these here.
Samuel 1 & 2 —Jumping here eliminates about 100 pages of holy-land-getting narrative (Joshua) and holy-land squandering (Judges) all of which is more or less summarized at the start of Samuel 1, which then goes on to tell the most exciting stories in OT in three very satisfying arcs. God hears, Oh the people want an earthly King even though they got me? Oh they’ll get one all right!! Three main characters, the prophet Samuel, King Saul, the second king, David. Holy heists, battles, heroes morph into villains, family shit becomes civil war galore.
Book of Job — A story of a man made to suffer to prove a point
Psalms — tiny songs and poems of worship
Proverbs — Advice and wisdom for life.
Ecclesiastes — “He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it” and “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven” — sometimes cynical, sometimes beautiful, the heart and balanced soul of mankind, nearly a Buddhist or Taoist text at points. People are complex and so is life. Says, surprisingly, Don’t try so hard.
Song of Solomon — Incredibly moving love poems bordering on erotic.
Ezekiel — Hallucinations and monsters/angels. The people have become loathsome to God and God wants to evict, so he sends a loathsome prophet. Bakes shit bread, rants, lies on the ground for 390 days and raves about the end of the world, predicts a messiah that will one day show up. If you love to read novels, you can make a novel out of the Old Testament starting with Books of Moses, continuing into Samuel 1 & 2, and concluding with Ezekiel.
Jonah — ah you know, the guy who gets swallowed by the whale.
My New Testament goes like this:
The Gospels — a slim novella, 150 pages. Jesus’ life and death four times, the stories making a kind of Rashomon, multiple points of view, details changing in recounting, human errors left to describe the Divine/supernatural.
Acts — What the surviving apostles did after Jesus’ death
Romans and Thessalonians —the apostle Paul’s letters as the story of Jesus becomes the established Christian religion
Revelation — A prophetic vision of the end of the world, using much of the imagery and language from Ezekiel, but now we are dealing with Jesus’ version of destroying rather than Yahweh. Vengeance and wrath replaced by love.
The edited version I made would not be useful to a religious person, Jewish or Christian but serves as a way for a novice like me (and most people I know) to look at the foundational texts of both religions as they develop and evolve into one of the weirdest and most epic tales. If I want to learn more, I’ll not only have to read the entire 2000 page version but I’ll also have to go to temple and church and listen to what rabbis and preachers have to say. Maybe that will happen, life is long. My point is, every religion on the planet is interesting to me and to learn about them opens some very wild doors.
The Old and New Testament edited like this contains some of the most ‘metal’ writing, real doom and damaged writing, but also some of the sweetest, some of the most psycho things I’ve ever seen written down, but also some of the gentlest and most compassionate. The New Testament, same deal, But I don’t know, I didn’t have to endure this stuff when I was a child and I have never had anyone in my life who was manipulative, or twisted, become overbearing or straight up wicked by using the religion as an excuse to abuse people. That happens all the time. I was just never around it for it to happen to me. I was raised agnostic and most people I knew were raised agnostic. All I am saying here at the end of this long rant about my Frankenstein’d Bible, is that people can be beautiful and gruesome in the same life, and a book can be beautiful and gruesome in its life, and to understand the people, you should read their gruesome and beautiful book sometime to see where it all comes from.
Watching
The other day, my friend Steve Anwyll, author of the excellent novel, Welfare, came down to Jersey City to visit from Montreal. As usual we sat around and talked for hours, a bit about writing/editing, books, music, movies, documentaries. He told me he’d recently seen one on the Son of Sam, the .44 Killer, who shot a bunch of people, often in parked cars, on various lover’s lanes, Bronx and other outer boroughs of NYC, 1977/78. When the killer is apprehended, he tells authorities he was receiving his instructions from a thousand year old demon who had possessed his neighbor’s dog. Maybe you heard that already! But this doc had some other salacious material to it that made things stranger. It’s a four hour documentary, which I watched this week, broken up into four sessions. Part one is about the murders. Part two about an investigator who digs deeper into the story of the murders and thinks the police purposely didn’t tell the whole story for political reasons. Part three, the reporter uncovers evidence that Berkowitz (Son of Sam/.44 Killer) was not acting alone, and in fact had not caused all the murders himself, but was in a cabal of Satanists(!!) in a secret cult with ties to Manson, who traveled everywhere with German Shepherd guard dogs, were also participating in the killings. Okay. Part four was about how the investigative reporter kept pushing to get his Satanist cabal story out to the public but no one ever really believed him (despite the book he wrote about it selling well). Ultimately the doc is the story of how a person, the reporter, can be driven by obsession and what they consider the truth, to the detriments of their own life, to the apathy of the general public, or just, you know, you can only say so much kooky stuff out loud (even if it’s kooky and TRUE) before you just become a kook to everybody.
I should take that advice.
Also, me—I’m kind of fucked with other things to watch. Just like there’s too music, there’s too much to watch and I specifically need things to view every day after my day job, while I’m doing my forty minute timed workouts. Right now I do double kettlebell cleans, presses, and squats while watching something. But the TV can’t flash high art because those kinds of things you can’t blink or you’ll miss something profound. I also don’t want to watch total bullshit. I want to find something enriching and interesting there in the middle.
Maybe you have some ideas.
Maybe you can suggest some things to me that you really like and wish I’d watch.
Or maybe I’ll just get on google again, go through listicles and slideshows and come up with a list and add it all to some randomization app and when I click the thing it’ll say, Ernest Goes to Camp and I’ll watch Ernest Goes to Camp.
Thank you Lizzie, I just this comment. Finally got the substack reader on my phone. I watched Angels in America when it came out, was pretty good!
Maybe this is too high-art to be a good workout recommendation, but I think the thing I've seen this year that I enjoyed the most, that inspired me the most, is the 2003 HBO miniseries version of Angels in America. The smartest, sassiest dialogue. The cruelest and kindest people. And Emma Thompson as an angel.