Ju Ju -- Wayne Shorter (Blue Note)

Wayne Shorter -- tenor sax / McCoy Tyner -- piano / Reggie Workman -- bass / Elvin Jones -- drums

A 1964 session, sweetness and light meet fire and deep-seated anxiety in seeming alternating breaths. Shorter is thoughtful, probing the moods of his ingeniously laid-out material with finesse that hints at 

more expressionistic playing to come--his tone always struck me as inner-directed--while the band delivers everything their names promise. Elvin Jones continues to convince that he is the greatest drummer in jazz history.

Sorcerer --Miles Davis (Sony)

Sorcerer, the 1967 album from Miles Davis, has been in my CD player the last couple of days and, to pun badly, I've been more than a little entranced by how amazingly well these improvisers, all of whom are distinct and potentially dominating in ensemble efforts, work so cohesively as a group. There’s a perfect kind of modal combustion here, with Miles Davis contrasting his spare and fairly angular sense of improvisation with the formidable resourcefulness of this album's principal  ensemble, Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (double bass) and Tony Williams (drums). The music is a unusual  combination of  the unforced and the aggressive, resisting the temptation to either go slack in their pace or stray toward the harsh vicissitudes of anguished, strident experimentation,  a pulsing course of off-accented rhythms, musical swaths of varying tones and colors, and ingenious interlacing between primary soloist Davis, Shorter and Hancock. Ensemble exploration at its peak, it seems, as the three of them actively listen to and anticipate each other's ideas during the respective solo spots. This is what the great Davis groups did, find unexamined nuance and moods in the musical tones.  Davis and Shorter in particular offer up a few exquisite moments of dialogue as they answer, query, interrogate and respond to musical propositions put forth by the other. As great as the previous occupant in the saxophone chair had been, the redoubtable and effusively  brilliant John Coltrane, Shorter was a better fit for Davis' ideas for the ensemble at the time,  1967, when this disc was recorded His solos are less galvanic than Coltrane's were, more composed, filled with lithe and delicate phrases , wonderfully respondant to the rhythms and pulse Williams and Carter provided and the full range of ideas underscores and textures the sound with.Davis is at his best, lyrical, on the edge of atonal, bracing when needed, the tone of his notes isolated and longing.

A Tribute to Miles Davis--  Wayne Shorter (saxophones) Wallace Roney (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums).

You need to bear in mind that this isn't a dusty museum exhibition where the music of the late trumpeter and bandleader is dutifully eviscerated and mounted on a pedestal. Quite the opposite, as Davis alum Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, along with firebrand trumpeter Wallace Roney perform a number of familiar tunes with vigor and intensity. Mere reverence is replaced with passion and a willingness to stir things up. Roney, in particular, is a wonder and an inspired choice to fill the trumpet position; he has a hard-core virtuosity that rivals Freddie Hubbard, and yet retains a sublimely modulated, vibrato-less tone, clean and pristine. His register-jumping flurries on the live version of "So What" or the delicately etched readings are remarkable examples of pace and phrasing. For an instrument known for its uniformly declarative, sound, with the notes, as executed by the most superlative of players, sounding sharp, full, hard bits of color sculpting whole structures of sound from the metaphorical block of granite. Roney, though, had something else, the rarest of thing in jazz trumpet, the ability to make his extemporaneous statements fluid, one note flowing out of the one before it and into the one that follows in a deceptively easy legato that made you think of the accelerated fluidity of saxophonist John Coltrane. Roney, I'd wager , is the obverse of Hubbard; in my life I've witnessed the glory of two of the most compelling jazz trumpet players, one the skyrocketing lyricist, Hubbard, for whom precision and speed were in the mastery of musical ideas that sped by in breath taking forays, and the other and no lesser , Roney, whose virtuosity was in the service of seemingly unlimited ideas of restatement, reconfiguration, and reimagining of a composer's written score. 

And, square as it may sound, it's always great to have Hancock et al return from their wanderings in the fusion wilderness and apply their singular skills on material that requires the best of their improvisational genius. Shorter, for my money, remains the best saxophonist of the post-Coltrane generation, assembling his solos in abstracted sections and deliciously snaky tangents. Williams is, to say nothing else, an astonishing drummer, a continuous rumble of polyrhythms, rising and falling with the many sly turns of this music. Bop, ballads and casually asserted samba rhythms are highlighted with William's strong, graceful stick work.

Both Directions at Once----John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter

Incredibly, what comes to be full-length album of mostly new, previously unheard material from John Coltrane has emerged lo these many years since the man's passing, and it is masterful. What's mind-boggling is that after decades of posthumous Coltrane releases that were previously unheard versions of familiar material --I haven't done a precise count, but it occurs to me that there are enough live versions of Coltrane's disassembly and reconstruction of the  Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune "My Favorite Things" to warrant a series critical comparison in how the saxophonist and his collaborators adjusted their improvisations gig to gig--  but rather something wholly fresh, new, with new compositions and ideas, recorded when this ensemble was at their peak.  The story told as to why this album has surfaced on now comes from Wikipedia, which asserts that the band --Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones-- entered Impulse Records studio in 1963 to lay down the master tape of an album of new material for eventual release. Somewhere in the lapse between that recording and its 2018 release, the original tape was destroyed when the label decided to cut down on expenses regarding storage; what we have here is from a copy of the tape Coltrane had given to his wife. It's not useful to dwell on the reasons for the delay and best, I think, to appreciate how profound this gift of music happens to be.Both Directions at Once, the title, comes from a discussion Coltrane once had with Wayne Shorter at some point, in which had come up the idea of starting their solos in the middle and working their ideas backwards, toward a calmer section that would have been the casual, tentative build up, and then the other way, toward greater fluency, acceleration, intensity from the tenor saxophone's horn, going "both directions at once." You get what they were talking about in mere minutes; Coltrane's playing is serpentine and advances effortlessly through the registers with rail-splitting chromaticism. He darts, dodges, telegraphs and races along melodic lines he creates on initial choruses and subsequently rethinks and rewrites with each return to the song's head; ideas brawl, embrace and interweave in swift, howling glory. The improvisations are as fine, searching and soulful as anything he released in his lifetime. On hand were the members of his Great Quartet, Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass. This is a quartet that has weathered time, circumstance and hundreds of hours playing together, with the sinewy yet agile polyrhythms of the ever-brilliant Jones and the no less masterful Garrison buoying and propelling Tyner's color-rich harmonies and Coltrane's thick, sonic weaves. There is nothing tentative about his disc. It's quite a bit of music from this epoch-defining unit, and there is, of course, nothing better than coming across Coltrane you've haven't bared witness to yet.

Alegria—Wayne Shorter

Fronting a superb brass and woodwind ensemble, saxophonist Wayne Shorter goes to expand his considerable palette with this 2003 set of compositions intended, I suppose, to highlight his talent as a master of texture, tone color and someone who can lead a large ensemble through theme and variation. This is not Ellington, this is not Julius Hemphill, this is not even Gunther Schuller. What is, though, is monotony on a virtuoso level. Technically there is much to admire, but there is little to enjoy since the project is obsessed with making Alegria match other large-group efforts at the sacrifice of the punch and flurry a richly showcased set of improvisations would provide. Oh, if they had reached a little less and jammed a little more. Davis didn't forget to swing amid the expanded contexts of Kind of Blue, and neither Mingus nor Monk forgot the blues wail or the gospel shout in the textures and subtler angles of their respective concert works. There are moments here, of course where Shorter's tenor and soprano saxophone sorties emerge from the arty murk and redundant changes of the ensemble to lighten up the proceedings, but even here it feels rootless, divorced from the melodies they should be making statements upon; one senses Shorter trying to make something happen. Nothing does as

The Velvets

 

A recent reading somewhere in the wilds of the internet revealed a disgruntled rock and roller who wondered why 60s icons The Velvet Underground are considered important at all, expressing finally that she considered the famous Andy Warhol "banana" cover debut album to be wildly overrated. I harumphed, muttered something about youth being wasted on the young and then then composed the following paragraph, less a defense than rant . Note the absence of album titles or the names of songs; the paragraph is aimed , I guess, at those who know what I'm talking about and are able to fill in the missing details. 

The first Velvets album was an absolute masterpiece, created almost by accident—simply by the band becoming itself and crafting the kind of avant-noise it would be known for. While American and British rock were growing increasingly arty, instrumentally ambitious, and philosophically poetic—driven by a belief that the future belonged to the younger generation and that future was utopian—the Velvets begged to differ. Not so much begged, in fact, as simply were different: in musical interests, background, and general worldview. California bands leaned into the idea of unlimited space and freedom to do your own thing. European bands drew heavily on centuries of culture and musical legacy, blending blues and Chuck Berry into their evolving sound. But the Velvets were formed in cramped New York City, with a population estimated at 17,843,000 at the time—a crowded center of industry, commerce, and culture. It was full of lawyers, CEOs, eccentrics, junkies, prostitutes, and splintered underground experimentalists—a pressure cooker fueled by speed, heroin, and a street-level deadpan. The city was noisy, galvanic, violent, in-your-face twenty-four hours a day. The only response was to make a noise of your own, a sonic mask against the relentless collapse of the surrounding world.There was little interest—or use—for singing about peace and good vibes. New York gave you all the vibes you could handle—and couldn’t handle—whether you wanted them or not, all at once. The songs were about the world the band emerged from: suicide, drug addiction, gay life in a society that wished gay people would vanish quickly. The music was minimalist and primitive—purposefully and effectively so.Lou Reed instinctively reversed course from his prior work as a hack songwriter. He rejected blather and incoherent poesy, offering the Velvets lyrics that were blunt, spare, and aimed to reflect the raw truth of a world far removed from Laurel Canyon or other bastions of pampered art-making.

an old chat from 1978 with Ozzie Osbourne

 

Ozzie Osbourne and me, 1978. Photo by Stan Honda
(Originally printed in the UCSD Guardian, 1978)

A fist, attached to an arm thick enough to choke a Clydesdale, hammered three times on the door of a third-floor room at the Islandia Hyatt House. The knocks echoed through the hallway like war drums along the Congo in a Tarzan movie. Seconds later, the door creaked open, offering a glimpse of a naked man mid-shower. He spun around and bolted back into the bathroom. Paul—the arm’s owner—told us that Ozzy Osbourne, lead singer of Black Sabbath and in town for a December 3rd concert at the Sports Arena, would be out shortly.

Stan, a photographer, and I sat at a coffee table near the room’s balcony, staring blankly at the television. Francis the Talking Mule was giving a rousing pep talk to the generals of the War Department, telling the slack-jawed military brass that teamwork among the branches was essential if the “Nat-zi’s” were going to be whipped. Donald O’Connor cowered in a corner, his face a stupefied blank—perhaps a bit piqued at having to shelve his song-and-dance shtick once again to play patsy to that noxious mule. I pulled out a pen and began jotting down questions for the interview. What does one ask a member of Black Sabbath?

At the height of their career, Sabbath were the undisputed kings of “downer rock.” The music was—and still is—a slow brand of raunch, built on lumbering, simple chord progressions distorted into a cacophony unmatched since the halcyon days of Blue Cheer. First gaining notoriety in 1968 (now celebrating their tenth year together), Sabbath stood in stark contrast to the hippie optimism of the time. Apart from the Velvet Underground and the Doors, they were among the rare bands venturing against the naive utopias peddled by Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, and the Grateful Dead.

Sabbath’s worldview portrayed a universe unhinged—a grim panorama of murder, pointless revolution, politically motivated wars, vengeance, and natural disaster. Their song titles—“War Pigs,” “Fairies Wear Boots,” “Iron Man”—and albums like *Paranoid*, *Master of Reality*, *Technical Ecstasy*, *Sabotage*, and their latest, *Never Say Die*, reflected anything but hopeful optimism.

As expected, rock critics loathed Ozzy Osbourne and everything Black Sabbath represented, exhausting every ounce of invective to deter listeners. But rather than repelling fans, the young rock crowd embraced the band’s doomsday persona, propelling them to multiple best-selling albums and sold-out American tours.

Other acts jumped on the lucrative grim-bandwagon—Alice Cooper, Blue Öyster Cult—spinning similar apocalyptic themes to great profit. But Sabbath endured, consistently selling well and retaining a loyal following. While Cooper and Cult leaned into theatrics and overt showbiz affectation, Sabbath always cut straight to the point. However bleak their declarations, they were rarely pompous, arrogant, or preachy. Ozzy’s near-atonal yelp delivered Sabbath’s message with the blunt charm and streetwise certainty of a man on the corner.

The shower sputtered to a drip-drip drizzle. Ozzy emerged, his head wrapped in a towel like a turban. He gave a nonchalant “hello,” then paused to watch the TV. A news segment flashed across the screen, reporting on Jim Jones and the secret Swiss bank accounts tied to the People’s Temple. Ozzy lit a Winston from his pack and began discussing the mass suicides in Guyana.

“Fucking Jim Jones,” he said. “What a fucking asshole. An inhuman beast. Making naive, innocent people who thought he was the greatest fucking man on Earth, and small children who didn’t understand what was going on, fucking drink poison. Small kids, murdered. Made to drink cyanide by their parents. You know what that shit does to you? Eats out your stomach from the inside. It’s a lot of fucking incredible pain. Can you imagine what that would do to a child, a little kid? …And I read somewhere that the American government is spending fifteen million dollars to bring back the dead bodies, including Jones. I say leave them there to rot, ‘cause anyone who’d make their kids drink poison doesn’t deserve consideration, whether they’re dead or not. If I were an American, I’d be fucking outraged at the money being spent on those foes…”

I put my pen down and began to ask something. “Considering the recent spate of bad luck we’ve had—like the Guyana affair, the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the deaths of two popes, the fires in Pacific Palisades, the PSA crash, the landslides in Laguna Beach—do you think you’ve been vindicated for the pessimistic outlook you’ve been using in your lyrics?”

Osbourne yanked the towel from his head with a firm snap and wiped some water beads off his brow. “A lot of people have missed the point of our lyrics,” he said, his Cockney accent taking on a slightly defensive edge. “I mean, Black Sabbath has been slagged for being Satanists, baby eaters, revolutionaries—all manner of strange blokes—and that’s hardly it at all. We were singing about how the world actually is, always has been, y’know?

“When Sabbath was first starting, we had to play under horrible conditions, in dirty cramped clubs in the slum parts of town, and we’ve had to put up with bad crowds: drunks, toughs, junkies, rip-off assholes and shit like that. And when you come out of a scene like that, and you’re writing your own songs and all, it’s only natural that you express what you know about what’s around you. Our words came out of our experience.

“We couldn’t tell people who came to see us in concert that the world was a beautiful place, y’know? We couldn’t sing about flowers, love, and peace. I mean, I couldn’t sing shit like that to some bloke puking his guts out in the gutter, could I? Besides…” Osbourne laughed and stood up. “…that kind of stuff wouldn’t cut it in a Black Sabbath song.”

He crooned the first bars of “Iron Man,” their largest American hit, then sang the opening of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He laughed again and retook his seat.

“Y’see,” he continued, “poetry doesn’t go with a Black Sabbath tune. The lyrics that Geezer (Butler, bassist) writes and that I sing would be at odds with anything romantic.”

“Do you have any contempt for art-rock bands like Yes or Genesis, whose lyrics tend towards the religious or fantastic?” I asked, hoping that perhaps Osbourne might spew some caustic comments. Osbourne shook his head.

“Not at all. I enjoy some of their music. The good thing about Yes and the others is that they tell people about the world as it could be. I mean, it’s not healthy for rock audiences to only hear the bad side of things. But when Sabbath came out, there was a lot of that stuff around already, and we didn’t fit into it. We had to be honest and call things as we felt them.”

Stan broke the momentary silence. “What do you think of the punk rock movement?”

Osbourne lay back on the bed and reached over to turn the television back on—sound off.

“Not a whole lot,” he said. “I mean, I really haven’t exposed myself to it a lot, so I really can’t say, but what I have heard didn’t impress me a lot. It’s too basic, really. Too fucking simple-minded. I mean, they had a point to make—one point really—and now that they’ve made it, they don’t know what to do.

“As a movement, punk rockers had a good idea. It’s a strong movement among a lot of rockers bored with all the commercial shit they get on the radio. I like that idea a lot. But the New Waver hasn’t put much thought into the music itself, which is the thing that really tells the worth of any movement. It’s more than attitude. The power of any movement to effect anything depends on the quality of the things it produces.

“Take the flower-power hippie movement. From the Love Generation, there was a lot of excellent, exciting music that came out of it, and it still stands up today. Like the Beatles. Those guys changed the world with their music. There were kids in Taiwan wearing Beatle haircuts and singing the words in English. In the Soviet Union too. Flower-power caused a revolution that was felt throughout the world. It was a beautiful thing—until The Machine—I mean the music business, the media—got a hold of it and turned it into something meaningless. Like hamburgers.

“The real hippies just took off to do their own thing, while all the fakes came in and started making fucking money off of it…”

The talk meandered through several topics, such as Walt Disney (“Mickey Mouse was the greatest thing to happen to the planet since Jesus Christ”), and the improved appreciation they’ve been receiving from music writers over the last decade. It appears they realize the band members are not the minions of the Devil, but rather that Black Sabbath is just a rock and roll band—albeit one of the ages, truthfully, whether we like it or not.

GENE PITNEY, AN EARLY FAVORITE

 

Gene Pitney's final curtain call came not with a cough or a stagger, but with a performance—rounded, complete, and received with a standing ovation in a Cardiff auditorium. The word used was “natural causes,” as if God Himself were a concert promoter with a fondness for showmanship, allowing the tenor to finish his set before drawing the velvet drapes. There’s a polite symmetry to it—no collapse on stage, no tortured final note bent grotesque by mortality. Just applause, quiet egress, then absence. His voice was pure architecture: each syllable a stair climbed with theatrical intent, each chorus an attic gable framed in steel and longing. Pitney sang of love in the way-stained glass renders saints—ornate, overwrought, and wondrous. The songs were simple. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. World ends. And yet beneath the corn syrup of the lyrics, there surged a man excavating feeling as if sorrow were a quarry and he the last willing laborer. In the Sixties, when music began its slow morph into rebellion and fuzz pedal aphorisms, Pitney was romanticism’s holdout—unashamed of strings, crescendos, and hearts bleeding into vinyl. “Town Without Pity,” “It Hurts To Be In Love,” “I’m Gonna Be Strong”—these weren’t mere tracks. They were sonatas of collapse, teenage Gothic, snapshots of pain that, through their excess, found strange dignity.I bought his records back then, amid my youthful pantheon of pop: The Four Seasons, tidy in their falsetto flights; Peter, Paul and Mary, solemn with their folk harmonies. These now feel like embroidered samplers on a Midwestern kitchen wall—nice, nostalgic, and devoid of heat. But Pitney? Pitney remained. A soft spot formed around his melodrama like a pearl around grit. In later years, when his name was spoken with smirking condescension, I found myself defending him—not out of loyalty, but recognition. The man had made banality soar. The Prince of Perfect Pitch, they called him, and rightly so. He turned pubescent emotionalism into operetta, and made the adolescent experience seem operatic, and perhaps holy.

Joni Mitchell’s Reckless Drift

People liked it when Joni Mitchell changed. She had always changed. The Hissing of Summer Lawns made sense in that way, as a kind of departure that didn’t feel like escape. It was praised, mostly. Artistic growth. Personal evolution. That sort of thing.Then Hejira came. It was less loved, but still understood. There were broader structures, jazz textures, lyrics that became less declarative. Mitchell was turning inward. That was the signal. The listener had to follow, or not.Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is the sound of getting lost. Or staying lost. A double album that wanders. The songs are long, some more than ten minutes. There are chords struck and held, left hanging like unsent letters. She sings over them. Not quite melody. Not quite meditation. There is Jaco Pastorius. Wayne Shorter. John Guerin. Their job is to find shape in the murk. Sometimes they almost do.The lyrics are impressionistic. That word is polite. What they really are is scattered. Images with no center. Ideas that don’t argue, just drift past. The poet has rights, they’ll say. Poets can do anything. But this isn't poetry, not really. It is a kind of posture. An affect. Something performed.She touches on things that matter. Weariness. Freedom. Sex and age. But nothing connects. No hooks, no phrases you remember later. No way in. What she offers is not music in the usual sense. It’s art. That’s the claim. The capital-A kind. And the paradox is that she loses the craft in reaching for it.There was a time when she was precise. When she built songs that held. But now the line between artful and arty is crossed and blurred. She’s among those who’ve come to believe their importance entitles them to indulgence. Lennon. Yes. Others.It is not failure. But it is not connection, either.

NO LENNON AT THE STADIUM , 1973

 

He said it like a man who’d just seen God in a parking lot.

“Lennon’s going to be here!” he shouted, voice cracking with the kind of hope that only rock and roll or religion can summon. “I just heard it—John Lennon’s gonna be here. Hot damn!”

He jittered in his seat like a man with too much caffeine and not enough conviction, eyes darting between the Padres game and the stage that loomed like a concrete altar. “What inning is it? The ninth? How many more are there?”

The city had been baited. KPRI, with all the subtlety of a carnival barker, had promised “the most significant musical event of the year.” A phrase so bloated with self-importance it practically begged to be deflated. Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band were the headliners, but the real draw—the unspoken seduction—was the possibility of Lennon. No one needed to say it. It was in the air, like ozone before a storm. Lennon would come. He had to. He’d played for the retarded children in Central Park. He’d sung for John Sinclair, the jailed poet-activist, and turned protest into melody. Surely he’d show up for San Diego’s sickle cell clinics. Surely.

 Jimmy Smith, “The Incredible,” took the stage first. Forty minutes of jazz noodling that circled itself like a dog chasing its tail. Smith, a man whose fingers had once inspired rock gods, now seemed to be playing for himself and a ghost audience that had long since moved on. He stitched together fragments of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, but the seams showed.

The crowd was restless. The stage towered fifty feet above them, a monolith of bad planning. Crew members loitered in front of the platform like bureaucrats at a revolution. The people craned their necks and squinted into the sun, and when they couldn’t see, they jeered.

Papa John Creach came next, electric violin in hand, backed by a band called Zulu that was tight but uninspired. The audience had already checked out. They played Frisbee on the baseball diamond. Someone ran the bases. Another slid into home. The music was background noise to a game of make-believe.

Creach saw it, laughed, and played on. He was a professional. He’d done this with Jefferson Airplane, with Hot Tuna. He knew the drill. But the crowd didn’t care. They were waiting for a Beatle.

“Where’s Lennon, goddammit?” someone growled.

The air was thick with catcalls and war whoops, the kind of primal noise that comes not from joy but from the slow boil of disappointment.

And then she came.

Yoko Ono, flanked by three bodyguards in black, walked to the mic like a priestess to the pyre. She wore white—pants, shirt, the whole ensemble—and raised her arms in greeting. The Plastic Ono Band struck up a beat, mechanical and methodical, and Yoko began to wail.

It wasn’t singing. It was something else. A high-pitched warble, raw and unfiltered, like chalk dragged across a blackboard in a hurricane.

“Hello, San Diego,” she said, peeking up from her lyric sheets. She spoke of expectations, of how the city was nicer than she’d imagined.

“Where’s John?” someone muttered behind me.

She introduced a song for her missing daughter, Kyoko. “Don’t worry Kyoko,” she shrieked, again and again, until the words lost meaning and became sound. Then came “Woman Power,” a feminist anthem with a Miles Davis groove and more of Yoko’s vocal acrobatics.

The exodus began.

People streamed toward the exits like ants from a burning hill.

“Let’s do a slow blues,” Yoko said.

She sat at the edge of the stage, hair falling over her face like a veil. She didn’t sing. She moaned. She sighed. She mimicked the rhythm with breathy theatrics, and midway through, she feigned an orgasm—gasping, writhing, a performance that felt less like art and more like a dare.

The song ended.

She stood.

“All right, see you later,” she said, and vanished.

No Lennon.

“Let’s hear it for Yoko in her first San Diego appearance,” someone announced.

“And her last,” came a voice behind me.

I turned and shook his hand.

---

Originally published in the San Diego Reader.

TONE DEAF WRITING SINKS ALL GOOD IDEAS

Ocean Vuong takes inspiration from the elegance of other writers and works hard to construct memorable, poetic sentences. Note here that the verb used is construct, not compose—the latter implies an effort of musicality, the work of a writer with an ear for euphony. The list of those who can do this effortlessly is long—Updike, Cheever, Baldwin, Nabokov, Abe, Toni Morrison—but the line of those who slave away to achieve it is infinitely longer.Vuong is by no means a horrible writer. In fact, there are stretches of fine detail and emotional nuance when he leaves the poet’s hat in the trunk of the car. I say “trunk of the car” to suggest that Vuong writes at his best when he stops trying to take the reader’s breath away with images that are clearly designed to do just that.The premise of the novel is certainly sound for a three-hankie literary sob-fest. The Emperor of Gladness follows a depressed 19-year-old college dropout named Hai who becomes the caretaker for an elderly widow, Grazina, suffering from dementia. They form an unlikely bond and find a sense of belonging in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut.

Far too often, however, Vuong gums up the narrative flow with sentences that are incongruous—sometimes even ridiculous—howlers that make you swallow hard, like you’ve bitten into something too bitter or too sweet. Lines like “I know, it’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter” or “Our hands empty except for our hands” are examples of poetic overreach. These images, similes, and allusions often feel absurdly strained and tonelessly incongruous. They add nothing to the storyline—no irony, no momentum, no mystery, and no real connection to the emotional core of the suffering being portrayed.I finished the book in fits and starts, forcing my way past the roadblocks of these inept poeticisms. There was no joy in Mudville after closing the final page. Vuong clearly wants to be a good writer—perhaps even a great one—but that will be difficult unless he develops a sharper sense of what works in his prose and what doesn’t. Composing means paying attention to how well the words come together to form an effective whole. Vuong has the raw talent, but he needs to learn when to let the poetry serve the story, not smother it.

THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo

 

The worst thing that could happen to all of us, at times, seems less like a nuclear holocaust that would render the planet a charred cinder than all of us being cast into our own self-designed hells. What if we had to talk to each other and depend on the function of collective wisdom and planning just to exist another day? What if the lights went out, the internet went blank, planes fell from the sky, and there were no distractions to mummify our individual sense of terror?Don DeLillo’s 2020  novel The Silence tells the story of five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022, when a sudden, unexplained global event causes all digital technology to cease functioning. As usual, DeLillo stays in the world he knows and has chronicled so well over the decades—that of privileged white Americans relying on their powers of rationalization to convince themselves that things are fine and normal, even as the various systems that gave them affluence in the first place—finance, science, political skullduggery, technology, college-level obfuscation—fall apart and cease to operate. It might be said that DeLillo’s fictions have always been about the failure of belief systems that once seemed to explain and define the universe his characters inhabit. Just as the advances in science, philosophy, capitalism, ideology, and the rest en masse replaced the gods and became the de facto religious beliefs of the modern era, DeLillo highlights the death of these old-new gods. He shows how individual and collective dedication to various beliefs about how things *should* be leaves us clueless, comic, full of dread—doubling down on convictions that no longer convince anyone, at the core of their being, that anything is fixed in place.The Silence is that tale again, in brief—a terse and lyrical ode to a world that has literally run down, suddenly and seemingly permanently without the power to fuel our commerce and distractions. It is a comedy written on a philosopher’s sketchpad, a setup for a joke that just ends—no punchline. It makes you think, What the hell just happened?—which is the point. I’m inclined to think that’s the wrong question. Rather, we might ask: How long have we been walking in our sleep, earbuds connected to cell phones playing music we don’t even like? Has it all been white noise, in all things? Something worth asking—and a book worth reading from a great American novelist.

 

A MASTERPIECE FROM JOHN CHEEVER

 
The Wapshot Chronicle  is John Cheever's first novel, published in 1957, and it is a timeless masterpiece of expressing the sorrow, the pity and the tragicomic of middle class life .  The titular family consists of eccentrics, all pursuing their varied and impulse driven distractions. The novel follows Leander Wapshot, an aging patriarch and ferryboat pilot in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, as he grapples with his eccentric family and fading relevance. His sons, Moses and Coverly, leave home to seek purpose in a world that seems increasingly absurd and disjointed. Moses navigates a series of romantic misadventures and professional aimlessness, while Coverly wrestles with existential confusion and sexual identity. Their cousin Honora, a wealthy and domineering matriarch, exerts control over the family’s finances and future. Through their missteps and revelations.  All such activities show to be vanities and the characters, despite vague assertions and protests from time to time of declaring themselves fully motivated citizens, show themselves to be a rudderless lot, a family in decline, each in their own way sensing that a veil has lifted and the illusion of their own normality is evaporating , but who still maintain that all is fine with their oddball takes on reality. Cheever has one of the greatest, if not the greatest prose styles of his generation, an elegant tone that guides savvy and sympathetic sentences , with an anonymous narrator that never reveals his or her hand, keeping matters in the third person, showing intimate knowledge of the lives of this family and their ideas as such, but withholds any outright suggestions as to how anything resolves . He wordsmithery is a marvel of elegant brevity with  just enough detail, his treatment of seasonal light is brilliant conveyed. Also on display is a sad ruthlessness in how he leads the reader toward the inevitable. The effect is comic, but the laughs are not slapstick but more like a melancholic jolt of recognition, as a reader’s own experience realizes the folly our gathering of the generationally related have embarked on.

SOBRIETY GETS THE HEAT TO THE MEAT

 

So in the nineties I was in a men's intimacy group, a bunch of sober guys who wanted to talk about personal matters, issues, conflictions and compulsions with other sober men on a level much deeper and more personal than what offer up at a standard AA meeting. So this fellow, an alcohol treatment counselor ironically, had just finished a very long monologue on his sexual hang-ups, with a good number of side trips through other subjects that managed to be both gamy and banal, and when he stopped talking, the rest of us rose from our seats, chairs, the two sofas that were crammed in this studio apartment . So this fellow from South Oakland , whose apartment it happened to be, had a TV set hooked up to a VHS player, and a lone, unmarked cassette laying on top of it.

"Let's TAKE A BREAK AND RELAX, FELLAS."

So the guy from South Oakland grabbed the cassette and shoved it into the video player. So then the fellow from treatment with the curated sexual hang-ups looked up to the screen . Then you could nearly hear his jaw drop. Imagine a rusty creak, a loud , rasping scrape of severely oxidized metal.

Porn stars flashed on the TV screen, wherein guys in seventies porn mustaches were putting their engorged presences anywhere the actresses would allow. Mod Squad music, cheesy fuzz tone guitars and Farfisa fantasias, poured from the TV's tinny speaker. "Yeah" Mr.South Oakland muttered,"Get that, hit that, fug, this is the stuff…" The room filled with cigar smoke and reeked of coffee left on the burner too long, as both porn movies and comatose confessions of sexual impropriety filled the room.

FROM WONDERFULLY VAGUE BUT EVOCATIVE TO MUMBLING AND MUDDLED

Greil Marcus has a gift for crafting poetic, wide-ranging essays that explore rock and pop music, popular culture, and the unexpected intersections between songs and the historical forces that shape our lives. At his best, Marcus opens our eyes—urging us to listen more closely, to dig into the motivations of artists, and to sharpen our senses in a quixotic hope of nudging humanity toward some kind of upgrade.  His finest work remains Lipstick Traces, a 1989 doorstop of a book that ambitiously surveys what its subtitle calls the “Secret History” of the 20th century. Marcus argues—though never too directly—that the century’s art movements formed scattered, often chaotic pockets of resistance to the numbing status quo. These movements, whether intentional or accidental, pushed back against a system designed to keep industrial populations distracted and docile while the powerful consolidated wealth.  For Marcus, it’s all connected: surrealism, cubism, Russian cinema, Cabaret Voltaire, blues, bebop, Coltrane, Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan. Lipstick Traces is a whirlwind of baroque poetics and intellectual hyperbole. It doesn’t offer firm conclusions so much as it suggests, hints, and gestures toward meaning. Like Ken Burns with a sharper edge, Marcus assembles a dazzling collage of names, dates, and trends, then lets the implications hang in the air, unresolved. He writes as though perched outside of history, watching the ambitions and failures of brilliant men and women unfold. The result is part prose poem, part critical impressionism—a book that invites readers to construct their own narrative from the fragments he presents.Years later, Folk Music  arrives in the same style: a Burnsian drift through five essential Bob Dylan songs, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Murder Most Foul.” But this time, the magic falters. Without a clear thesis or guiding argument, the book feels like a compressed mashup of dates, names, songs, controversies, and half-remembered cultural moments. The connective tissue is thin, and the absence of a coherent line of inquiry robs the book of momentum or purpose.Marcus has written five other books on Dylan—many of them insightful, often beautifully written. But Folk Music reads like a retread, as if he’s run out of fresh things to say about the former Mr. Zimmerman. It’s hasty, clumsily structured, riddled with awkward transitions. At times, it resembles the ramblings of a once-brilliant mind hoping that if it keeps talking long enough, something profound might emerge. This time, it doesn’t.