BIG BOSS BUBELEH

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission.)

Café Europa is a bar and restaurant tucked away between a car wash and a VFW hall on Pacific Beach’s Turquoise Street, a seldom discussed passage the forms the official border between La Jolla and the funkier beach communities to the south. It’s relative geographical obscurity is fitting, in that the Café has tried to distinguish itself from the usual PB drinkery.  Café Europa is dark in tone, deep reds and a variety of earth tones and off kilter lighting cast the room is an atmosphere evoking black and white movie, Bogart smoking cigarettes over bourbon and piano jazz in the back ground, chatter in many languages and accents floating through the air along with the seductive tones of exotic music.

Nothing quite so cinematic, in fact, but that’s what the proprietors are aiming for, and in that respect, providing something different to San Diego’s many choices of nightlife, they’ve admirably succeeded. And as atmosphere is crucial to the venue, the music as well should be unique, possessing the allure of styles oddly familiar, but distinct, different. There is no trance music, no digital disco, so simpering glum rock or agitated rap. Big Boss Bubeleh is the entertainment on this Friday night in early May.

The music stands apart from the typical razzle-dazzle pop that dominate the nightly categories of available live music. Affectionately captured on their new album “A Droite!”, Big Boss Bubeleh music is, seductive and exotic, drawing the rich and sultry traditions of East European and Russian folk music, klezmer, old time jazz and Bessie Smith era blues. Their album has original songs of alluring yet skewed charm. Their sound suggests another era, and yet the music is made contemporary, performed with élan and a sense of movement. It swings, it rocks, it grooves and morphs through a splendidly blended. Above all else, they are as fun to see live as they are engaging to listen to.

Big Boss Bubeleh hails locally from Encinitas, and centers around the husband and wife team of Yael Gmach and Vladimir Yarovinski. She was born a French Jew in Paris, France, and he was reared a Russian Jew raised in the Ukraine. As with many wonderful stories of future soul mates who meet, marry and become creative through confounding circumstances, the families of both Yael and Vlad migrated to the United States, both households eventually landing in California. They met, at last, some years ago at an event Vladdy was playing music with friends. In attendance was Yael, who was sufficiently inspired by the music the ensemble played.

Recalls Vladdy:” I was playing at an event called the Encinitas Art Works out on 101, playing with a couple of people. What we did was play music that was based on Middle Eastern and Jewish/Arabic styles, with blues influencing the whole sound. At one point the guitar player needed to take a break, so he left his guitar on the chair he was sitting in and Yael came up, picked up the guitar and began to sing and play. When she sang, we just played along. It was very sweet, very nice, and we began to play together after that. We played at the East Street Café in Encinitas.  At first, I was just playing guitar on her songs, but then we started writing together, which was important. I showed her some things on guitar, some new progressions from the blues and jazz, so she’d be able to write songs in the blues form.”

“I was trying to confuse her a little. We came with this one song which seemed impossible to play, there was a lot going on in the song, and she was forced to listen to the changes that were coming up, and she did it!  She does it, she’s great! She was playing four chord progressions, like in Israeli and French music, and my idea was to twist it a little bit and show her elements from jazz and blues, and extend more colorfully between songs. Like what you do is like extend a simple song by inserting a twelve-bar blues progression in the middle of the song, so now instead of having three or four chords, the song now has eight.”

With time, Yael and Vladdy married and increased their musical collaborations resulting in the eventual formation of Big Boss Bubeleh, with them as the creative center. To be sure, the band highlights a fine ensemble of musicians that bring their experience and personality to the uniqueness that is this band’s stock and trade. Not surprisingly, musicians this dedicated to their art are able to draw on a wealth of talent from among their friends that add flavor and texture to the intoxicating swell of sound. In live performance, Big Boss Bubeleh calls on the serenely expressive vocal talents of Daryn Belinsky and Erica Adams. On any night one happens to see them, something wonderful and unexpected might unfold, some little miracle of circumstance. Two months ago, performing at Café Europa, a touring, uniformed group of Mariachi Musicians were in the venue, instruments, and joined in, guitars and trumpets, in the extended jam Big Boss Bubeleh was already cooking on. The temperature in the room increased a tad, and couples rose from their tables to dance. Later, in late April, again at Café Europa, a trumpet player asked if he could sit in. The evening had an unexpected ten minutes of superb blues, warm, deep, mellow as light rain. The improvisational aspect of the music draws from many sources, and it’s an element that works with glorious results when musicians are into the music, in the moment.

Yael Gmach and Vlady Yarovinsky, a North County duo performing and recording under the rubric Big Boss Bubeleh, are a flavor quite apart from what one would expect from local original music. Avoiding the obvious choices of styles, flavors, and stances that local original artists might assume, these two dig into the roots music they obviously love, an intoxicating alchemy of Gypsy jazz, torch songs, blues and swing, as well as calypso and assorted Latin references. And, to be sure, the grainy textures of American music one recollects from the Ozark Mountains to the Mississippi River,

Their new release, A Droite! (a French phrase, “on the right; to the right”), brings this myriad of influences to fruitful perfection, a selection of 14 original songs that, through uncluttered instrumentation and a natural feel for the varied grooves and uncommon weave of genres, makes it easy to willingly suspend disbelief and imagine, for a while, being in an Bohemian cafe on a side street of an East European capital, getting lost in the tales and bitter sweet melodies.

Especially effective is Yael Gmach’s wonderfully adaptable vocals, at once making one think of a Dietrich-like chanteuse from the film Blue Angel, a playful, bubbling style with eccentric elongation of syllables and vocal emphasis where you don’t expect them. Her voice is a low, seductive rumble, a hook that brings you for a full measure of Old-World immersion, particularly on the song “Recalling,” an ironic recollection lessons learned in an enticing minor key, wonderfully supported by Vlady’s precise guitar work and the lyric, ironic musical elaboration by guest violinist Marguerite-Marie Sort.

“Coffee” continues the sweet otherness of this duo’s marvelous world view, a more traditionally folkie number with Yael—in another gloriously alluring accent—lists the tribulations and work ways of doing what one must do on a daily basis only to come to the reward for one’s efforts: a cup of coffee and the caffeine therein. The epiphany of this odd lyric is that a cup of coffee, for all the energy and nervousness it might jolt the nervous system with, is merely coffee, a drink over which the life’s lessons, if any, can be pondered. Again, Sort’s violin commentary over Yael’s wide-eyed vocals lures you even deeper, closer into this unique world. Relatebly exotic, honestly off-beat, funny, and ingratiatingly wise in ways that suggests a intimate sharing among friends, Big Boss Bubeleh’s A Droite! has an effortless and persuasive eclecticism that makes this one of the most delightful entertainments I’ve encountered for a good while.

Says Vladdy of all this music making:

“Many like to stretch, to improvise, to let it breathe. You create cues, places other musicians recognize, and you’re able after a while to stretch the songs into a natural. Extending the songs, improvising around the changes, was something I picked up in playing with reggae musicians. I played with a reggae band from Barbados. It helped me keep a groove going, when it happened.”

The musical connection between Yael and Vladdy seems extra sensory at times. Yael tries her best to describe on why their musical bond is as strong as it is:

“ We meet on the Jewish Side. My dad survived the Holocaust, and at the deepest level of it all is just the joy of living. My father feels a profound joy in being alive. He has the French joi de vivre. I am pretty sure it’s the result that at four years he saw the horrors and maybe his brain said okay, what else can be as awful as that? So, he feels joy in being alive.  Vladimir has the same upbringing; his mother and father survived the Holocaust. So, the music we play is the feature of Jewish people, like black people with the blues, you know?    I would adapt Russian chord progressions, I didn’t even know what they chord were, but I would feel them out on guitar, it was a natural thing. And since I became a musician I noticed that a normal American doesn’t understand those notes or the feelings, they’re not with it. They don’t know the breaks or understand them, Americans don’t know when a song changes back to A minor and gives us the mood of the song a twist.

Vladimir is the one who introduced to how poetry has a relationship to the song, how it applies to the rhythm of the song, and how it can make something into the sort of universal song you’re grateful someone about grass or wind, something, making something common seem profound. He has that ability. As a young man he was considered a fine poet in Russia, he went to a special school for having the ability to write the way he did. BBB has the elements of me and Vladimir, who is kind of the old tree, who is obviously beautiful, Just old…. He’s an old soul. And it’s just that he’s an old soul, because he’s been focused on music for so many years without deviating into drugs or anything else. Never deviated, never bored with the Beatles, he was always gathering more information about music and musicians. It’s like anthropology and music when you meet Vladimir. You would not be bored for a week.  Our relationship is because of music, and that’s because Vladimir is of music. That’s really what he wants to do all day, play music with friends. If you’re hanging out with him, you’ll be playing music.”

At one point, Yael deftly explains her attraction music and her desire to make music and write songs.”.  I realize it’s a language and its one I wanted to learn. My influences growing up in a Jewish family, whether singing, playing. The whole family sang. I was born in Paris, France. It’s a French-Jewish upbringing. By the time we got to the United States, I had listened to everyone in the Eighties, like Duran Duran in rock and roll. They were cute boys. At some point I picked up the guitar learned to play James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, it was like holding a magic wand, when you got the feeling inside you want to release, and it does the same thing for everyone around you. You can feel it. I see it in people who are getting into the song.  I had discovered the feeling of being able to be a songwriter. It was a life change. I the first song I wrote by myself was “Song for Easy”, who is my niece. Suddenly, at the age of 38, I realize there was a new life that was going to be born to by little sister and her husband, it was there was this new life growing in my little sister. I put it out there about what life means to me…. It was amazing, it was like my first child, in a way. I felt like I’d a contribution somehow. How did I feel about that, after I wrote the song and performed it? It was like trees…I just looked suddenly. I was always planted, but after I wrote the song for my niece, I felt even more planted but also…beautiful. I felt as though I made a contribution.”

  

Contribute she did and continues to so with husband Vladdy in the wonderful troupe Big Boss Bubeleh, aided by a splendidly diverse and gifted support cast.

Big Boss Bubeleh plays frequently at Café Europa in Pacific Beach and at select venues through out the county. “A Droite!” is available from CD Baby.

MUSIC YOU CANNOT ADMIT YOU EVER LIKED

Seriousness shanghaied the joy of rock and roll and used it to wipe its furrowed rear. The worst offenders are the truly repellent likes of Yes, Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull, those bands with wind-up toy time signatures, castrati vocalists, and reams of wretchedly vacant philosophizing that was so steeped in skull-fuckingly dull cliches that I suspect even Rod McKuen and Edgar Guest would call these guys grunting, formless worms choking down their own fecal trails. Still, I think some of this ambitious stuff works on their own terms--King Crimson, The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, and his Magic Band. The lyrics from all three bands were idiosyncratic and free of pud-wilting platitudes. Overall, the music for the three of them was unique and entirely original blends of marginal influences that, when stirred the right way, created something just as authentic. Peter Townsend had been called an intellectual so often by both the rock and the mainstream press that I suspect he came to believe and sought to live up the image of the Thinking Artist. The irony was that he already was doing Art, a unique and original kind of music; his sagging jockstrap of an ego trip with Quadrophenia robbed him of that talent. He never got his groove back. I do think good rock and pop musicians and songwriters can be taken seriously to a degree. Still, there is always the danger of pomposity and self-congratulating bombast, the inflated sense of importance that nearly always saps the music of genuine inspiration and vitality. Yes, even the best of our generation's singer-songwriters have been maudlin, precious, and bordering on hard-edged baloney-mongering. But they have a knack, in general, to recover from their worst work and give us something actually inspired, focused, full of conviction. Still, others have not regrouped from their worst efforts. Sting, post-Police, is an autodidactic tourist in other cultures' music; he is lost in his pretensions, lost to us. Joni Mitchell decided she wanted to be a composer and a poet of a highly diffuse, Eliot ilk and tried to merge meandering imagery with poorly conceived, Mingus-inspired impressionism; she has been minor league ever since. Peter Gabriel, in turn, has been largely quiet on the solo front and involved himself instead in other projects; this keeps our memory of his music a fond one.

STANLEY KUBRICK SUCKED THE AIR OUT OF EVERY ROOM HE WALKED INTO

Many a film goer worship at the altar of Stanley Kubrick, expatriate American director who relocated and remained in England until the end of his life. He's done fine work, but I generally pass on listening to the sermons in his name and the communion the entrenched faithful take as they finesse their feelings towards the late auteur's standing as genius.  I have always thought that Kubrick was a stuffed shirted pedant as a film maker, a man with a knack for visually striking imagery who has often mistaken long takes (consistently) , and sparse narrative detail (consistently) as being adequate substitutes for keeping his movies moving along. His determination to let the audience fill in the blanks is okay in my book as a strategy, but for my sense of how a movie achieves a narrative ploy, Nick Roeg does it better in lining up his narrative lines with his visual allegories; he is splendid at getting to the novelist's (Proustian?) quality of exploring an idea within an idea without having his name branding the project. You are watching a film directed by Nick Roeg, not witnessing another episode of NICK ROEG PRESENTS. Kubrick made sure you knew who the puppet master was, who the visionary was, who the genius was, and who's world you had just walked into when you took your seat. He wants us to linger on his images, contemplate the color scheme,the lighting, ponder how long it takes someone to add sugar and cream to their coffee. I have consistently found little reward in his films beyond an appreciation for the quality of production and design. At this point I'll insert my favorite Kubrick movies, as of his moment:s Dr.Strangelove. Everything clicked in this film, but I suspect Terry Southern's s work on the script had much to do with how funny it was.Next would be Fujll Metal Jacket--SK allowed the the generic particulars of a war movie to remain in fact and, in fact, produced a Vietnam film that was better than  Apocalypse Now.He is other wise inert as film maker, convinced his greatness, that conviction infesting his films with conspicuous ego attempting to make rather routine ironic twists and such appear profound than they actually are. He was a middle brow thinker who pulled the wool over the eyes of middle brow critics and teh middle brow audiences they wrote for , making them all think that he was something more than he was. He is lugubrious , a snail paced auteur .

“How to Steal the Laptop of Your Childhood Nemesis"

This has the whiplash jerkiness of a rap tune, rhymes and near rhymes popping up in places you didn't expect them, no less jarring than deep pot holes on an old street. It is exceedingly clever and fast, an accumulating dust storm of detail regarding off key references, minor and major complaints, bits of property, accessories, a furious attempt to inventory the things in an apartment of a someone the narrator has had a long standing resentment against that seems an attempt to catalog and classify a rival, an enemy. The poem is the prate of someone in a hurry, brain and limbs gorged with adrenaline, who is in the process of constructing their rationale for the break-in and mischief as they skulk and prowl around the transgressed abode.

She keeps a spare key in a hollow rock

outside the kitchen door she doesn’t lock.

Her lights are on. Her sheltie is all talk.

You shouldn’t need the code for the alarm

(1234) because she tried to arm

the thermostat again. You’re getting warm.

Her master suite smells like a Hallmark store.

Her vanity is huge. Try to ignore

the fact that everything’s a metaphor

and that I’ve let you walk right into it.

Blow out the Yankee Candles she left lit.

Take in the master bathroom. Take a shit.

Flush adamantly. Agitate the handle.

Refill the Softsoap. Light a Yankee Candle.

Her MacBook Pro is hiding, like the Grail,

in plain sight. Anyone but you will fail

to look directly at that bathroom scale.

Open her desktop. Close her Yahoo! Mail.

She keeps her recent photos in a folder

called “Photos.” Click a thumbnail and behold her

in sunlight in a champagne off-the-shoulder

sheath wedding dress, fussed over by attendants.

She’s 40 and has come into resplendence

like an inheritance, like heirloom pendants

flattering ear and flawless collarbone.

I should have told you, or you should have known,

that she has changed the most and aged the least

of all your enemies, her face uncreased

by laughter, worry, shame, or self-denial.

Those are her cheekbones. That’s her cryptic smile.

Those are her footsteps on the kitchen tile.

Look at these things, look at this banality, witness this list of open windows on the lap top computer, who wouldn't deserve this foul deed for being so much themselves in their own apartment? Eric McHenry piles it on and keeps the poem moving, the rhymes unexpected and nonsensical, serving nothing other than the obligation to create coherence and cadence (and distraction) in the commission of what is a crime, plain and simple, this is a point of view of a hand held camera, jittery, unfocused, unsure of what it is recording. Surreal in large part, clever and whiz-kid in verbal exuberance, this is a resentment acted on that becomes impulse behavior. This person, this person who found the hidden key to the apartment, is out of control and immune to sense making. This makes the poem effective , sinister, a virtuoso tour of a mind concocting a symbolic act that cannot be read by others .

Best records of 1979

(Unearthed from an online newspaper morgue,  here are my 10 best albums from 1979.-tb)

After a modicum of meditation, soul-searching, and late-night phone calls, I've decided that this annual autopsy we call a "year-in-review" won't be as grisly as I imagined. In fact, the most outlandish generalization one could make about the state of pop music in 1979 is that it was merely "okay." As in any year, there were plenty of decent albums that passed through my hands on to mine and my writer's turntable, but there was a sizable proportion of discs from new and established artists that fall well-below what one wants to hear. In any case, rock and roll doesn't seem to be dying at the present moment, though I, like anyone else who's been involved with the stuff too much for their own good, would have to have heard more records that reached the highwater mark. What follows are my annual hit-and-run comments on the previous year's more or less notable releases.

Best Records of '79

1) Armed Forces — Elvis Costello (Columbia): Although Nick Lowe's production is at times heavy-handed and strains too often for effect (too much piano, echo chambers, an overkill of vocal overdubs), Costello remains a formidable talent that no amount of cheap garnish can obscure. At best, (more times than not) Costello is dead on target. At worst, he's utterly incoherent and artlessly paranoid.

2) Nice Guys — The Art Ensemble of Chicago (ECM): By definition, avant-garde or "free" jazz is supposed to be difficult for the uninitiated to warm up to, but the Ensemble's latest seems (to me at least) to be the one '79 release in the genre that even Mangione fans can find enjoyable. Nice Guys is a brilliant crazy quilt of styles and strategies, with the shifting textures and colorations of saxophones, trumpets, drums, bass, and a plethora of more obscure instruments proceeding through a fascinating session of unconventional improvisation.

3) Trevor Rabin — Trevor Rabin (Chrysalis) Rabin is a singer-songwriter-guitarist from South Africa who's same-named debut album supplies the kind of mega-rock that Todd Rundgren's been promising for years. Rabin proceeds through a far-fetched array of styles, from Mountainesque heavy-metal, syrupy ballads, McLaughlin-inspired jazz-rock, Zappa-like ensemble virtuosity, through disco and reggae, often blending these incongruous strands into the same song. And, incredibly, it works.

4) Van Halen II — Van Halen (Warner Brothers): Edward Van Halen plays flashy hard rock guitar with admirable vengeance and ingenuity, that is enough for me. That is to say that it's enough for those times in the middle of the night when your brain is wracked by an alphabet soup of your mom's diet pills and the rapid notes from Van Halen's many solos here are the closest you're willing to come to have a large dog rip out your throat.

5) One of a Kind — Bill Bruford (Polydor): The former Yes, King Crimson and Genesis drummer deftly leads a band of superb musicians through a session that combines the best of progressive rock (compositional organization with a rich sense of harmony and counterpoint) and the best of fusion rock (inventive soloing meshing hard-rock dynamics with fleet-fingered technique). Guitarist Allan Holdsworth performs as though in a fluid and fluent state of grace, and bassist Jeff Berlin is someone to watch out for. The best moments, though, remain with Holdsworth, who extreme legato rivals that of any post-bop saxophonist in or out of this life, Coltrane, Shorter, Rollins, Michael Brecker, Josh Redman, you name it, and his technique, smoothly deployed as he tests the out rings of a chord progression and seems to begin solos in the center of an idea and then exploring the logical note sequences in both directions simultaneously, is stunning in the ways his spotlight moments build tension and then releases it. 

6) Shiny Beast (Bat Pull Chain) — Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (Warner Brothers): Beefheart, rock's most idiosyncratic avant-garde individualist, is refreshingly in place for once, seeming to have hammered his worrisome kinks and quirks into a form that benefits his talent for constructing fractured, asymmetrical, dada-derived music. Splendid use of free jazz tonalities, urban blues, Caribbean rhythms, and rhythm and blues. The music is as crankishly idiosyncratic as it's ever been (jump-cut time signatures, a free mixing of "free-jazz" randomness and pop song structures, blues and neoclassical shades blending into thick atonal texture) and Beefheart's vocals, one of the raspiest voices anywhere, deliver his dadaesque, free-associative lyrics with the same kind of off-kilter verve.(One would be remiss in thinking that Beefheart's lyrics are without substance or lack meaning: no less than Wallace Stevens, who explored his dreams of a world of perfect arrangements and their contradictions, Beefheart, nee Don Van Vliet chooses to inspect a terrain of imperfect things, material and organic, and forge connections and conversation between them with nothing but the force of applied and intense whimsy. )

The effect sounds like an Unlikely super session between Howlin' Wolf and Alfred Jarry (costumes designed by Max Ernst) . His new Magic Band, featuring ex-Zappa sidemen as Bruce Fowler (trombone) and Art Tripp (drums) , handle the demands of the music with disciplined ease, executing Beefheart 's quixotic time signatures and self-deconstructing arrangements with a professionalism that tends toward both perfection and liveliness, usually an unlikely symbiosis in art-rock groups. However cerebral Beefheart's music sounds, though, it should be POinted out that Shiny Beast is a fun album, full of good humor and strong material. This time out, The Captain is out to entertain and beguile, a work of art that does what any object of scrutiny must do, which is to offer a genius's bluster, blarney and brilliance the only way it can be presented, in your face, without apologies or a phone number for a second date.

7) New Values — Iggy Pop: Iggy, who is the godfather of punk if anyone is, has finally transcended the problems that too often stopped him from delivering that all-purpose knockout punch. The music is crunchy, cantankerous rock and roll, Iggy's vocals have the appeal of the off-hand remark, and the lyrics succeed in being anti-intellectual without the obnoxious posturing that is the calling card of many whom Iggy has influenced. Iggy proves here that he is the main-man.  That said, and do so sincerely, I fancy myself more an MC5  kind of guy;  I prefer music that gives us the effect of a demolition derby on the other side of the River Styx, relentless metal twisting and screaming tires until the torches lighting Plato's Cave are dosed.

8) Fear of Music — Talking Heads (Sire): Talking Heads, I fear, is more of an alliance with art-rockers like Eno, Roxy Music and John Cale than with the New Wave, but that hasn't stopped me from liking them. Their music has a cleverly controlled graininess that puts them half-way between garage band amateurism and the post-twelve tone rigors of the "new music" conceptualists. David Byrne's lyrics, sung in a voice that sounds as though it might evaporate at any moment, expresses the tortured politics of the paranoid mind while allowing as little self-pity as possible. This is the work of a refreshingly straightforward sociopath.

9) Rust Never Sleeps — Neil Young (Warner Brothers): Young, who, like Norman Mailer, has been producing advertisements for himself for years to little advantage (self-revelation must attain the universal, not the therapeutic, it's to sit well as something I'd like to investigate), has released a masterpiece of a kind, a rock and roll testament that deals with American icons, institutionalized violence, and the sand-trap of self-love (among other themes). And Crazy Horse helps Young play some of the dirtiest rock and roll of the sear.

10) Squeezing Out Sparks — Graham Parker: Parker bites the head off of everyone who's ever done him dirt with music and lyrics that have the mainstream kick of the old Rolling Stones. Blunt, uncompromising stuff.  To get to the issue that never left Parker's orbit while he was still someone who was interviewed and received a fair amount of airplay, Parker does indeed resemble Elvis Costello vocally. Somewhat, that is, as Parker prefers to talk-sing along with his snarling, while Costello can snarl and croon at the time. And while Costello strains credulity when he strains too often for high notes that refuse to come to him easily, Parker after three songs or so becomes something of that insomniac dog next door who won't stop barking. 

THE FADED WORD : Tom Wolfe, RIP

Tom Wolfe was alternately responsible for some of the best and worst American writing that found its public during the Sixties. On the one hand, he invented a new lexicon for journalists, full of sound effects, exaggerated emphasis, sly allusions to relevant bits of obscure literature, acute character sketches, a discerning eye and ear for the revealing detail and phrase, and snappy prose as well. His nonfiction articles were Heckle and Jeckle cartoons made prose, and with it, he left us a few masterpieces, not the least of which being "The Right Stuff" and "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Of course, for San Diegans, there is the "Pump House Gang," his essay about the La Jolla folks contained in the same-named book of collected magazine pieces. He fancied himself a social critic. There were some things even a snappy prose style could not disguise., although his ability to rewrite and paraphrase complaints about contemporary experimental art and modern architecture were entertainments galore. He revealed himself as a conservative in culture, but he had lost relevance to the current conversation by the time that element was revealed. His essays became diffuse, stumbling, grouchy, suffused with barbs that missed their targets with an increasing frequency. 

Worse, I think, were his novels, where the snappy prose style vanished all told as he attempted to refashion himself as a master of the 19th Century social novel, best revealed in his first effort "Bonfire of the Vanities," a long, very long slog about how NYC corrupts the soul on all levels of society, from politicians, bankers, gangsters, civil rights activists...It was a festival of straw-men, as wearisome to read as the volume of "Atlas Shrugged" you found yourself slogging through for a book club. Wolfe was a mixed bag of results, but what he did well will remain in our canon. The best of his work, his nonfiction, in my view, will need to be read by generations to come for readers who are looking for some salient clues on what America was thinking at a critical period.

As a novelist, Wolfe aligned himself with 19th-century social novelists Balzac and  Dickens, with a strong dose of the 20th-century American novelist Dreiser. His aim was to become engaged with society at all its levels and with the citizens of all its sectors, high and low. Nice ambition, I think, but his novels for me seemed more like exercises of sheer will rather than genuinely felt inspiration. When he ceased being a journalist, Wolfe became a polemicist, in essence, albeit with a Ph.D. He seems to be the case of a man of obvious gifts, occasionally used to brilliant effect, who wrote fiction so that he would have a shiny example of the very thing any thesis he developed would have us think is the preferred kind of fiction America deserved. 

As an artist/critic (or critic/artist), I never got much farther than thinking that Wolfe needed to write novels so he could construct an all-encompassing proposal to cure the aesthetic missteps that were preventing artists from producing narratives that actually matter. That polemic he wrote was called "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," again chastising the current crop of writers, circa 1989, and proposing they follow the example he provides them with "Bonfire." Wolfe could certainly toot his own horn, and he could certainly switch arguments when it suited him; in 1973, he co-edited a non-fiction anthology called The New Journalism, which featured articles by Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, and others, journalists and novelists who created a new kind of journalism that employed fiction-techniques.In his introduction, Wolfe declared, more or less, that the conventional novel, the novel made up entirely from the imagination, had run its course historically, and the vivid nonfiction of New Journalism would replace it altogether. 

To be fair, this is not a case of Wolfe jumping onto bandwagons as much as it is him building the bandwagon itself. Never without an interesting thought, never sans a flash of real insight and snappy verbs and matchless similes, Wolfe was, in my view, a failed novelist, artistically, something that can be measured by the fact that over the last couple of decades, the discussion of the late writer's four novels has been virtually non-existent. His novels seemed like the results of arduous labor, strained, repetitive, increasingly lazy in their verbal aberrations; his inventiveness turned into indulgence and dithering.

 Barry Alfonso, a writer, based in Pittsburgh, sent me a note that added a crucial context for Wolfe in American intellectual tradition.  He writes:

It strikes me that Wolfe is comparable in some ways to T.S. Eliot. Both of them appropriated the razzle-dazzle split-screen jazziness of their modernist moments to ridicule and attack modernism itself. They won huge audiences that were uneasy about the changing societies they lived in and uncomfortable with their roles in it. They played with the lingering guilt sophisticated people feel about rejecting cultural traditions even as they chopped, channeled and mutated those traditions themselves. Wolfe and Eliot had their avant garde cakes and ate them too while they stuffed them up the dilated hyper-stimulated noses of the public.

A sound comparison to Eliot, Mr.Alfonso. I thought of John Dos Passos myself, a left-leaning novelist who was revolutionary in subject and experimental in the structure in his early fiction, especially in this USA Trilogy, but who later turned more conservative in his politics writing a blander fiction for most of his remaining career. Dos Passos even came to become a regular contributor to the National Review. However, I think Wolfe as a writer was undone not by politics--a smart and perceptive conservative thinker is worth a read--but by his style. It goes without saying, usually, that writers with careers that span over several decades sees a decline in their work; some escape this curse by changing styles or expanding their worldview. Mailer, Updike, DeLillo, and Didion have done this. Wolfe began, I believe, with a flashy, impressive, dazzling virtuosity and never strayed from it, and seemed caught up in the challenge about how he was going to keep up the pace, top what he'd already published, how to go further than he had before. He gave up on finessing his sentences and became lazy and diffuse. I dare say his last book, The Kingdom of Speech, was a challenge to linguistics in general, and Noam Chomsky, in particular, was incoherent through and through and factually incorrect on the history and practice of the subject matter.

Barry Alfonso adds this in a subsequent message:

I think the Dos Passos comparison is apt -- the USA Trilogy used motion picture techniques to describe the fractured realities of its era just as Wolfe adopted the lurid colors and cartoonish gestures of '60s pop culture to capture the passing scene. Something you said about style prompts the following...your co-favorite chew toy (with Bob Dylan) Jack Kerouac was once asked which was more important: style or content. Kerouac said style because it CONTAINS content. This is similar to the McLuhan slogan that the medium is the message. I think this applies to Wolfe's journalism in the '60s -- the way he wrote embodied the essence of what he wrote about. And, as a critic, he was COMPLICIT in the cultural scams and absurdities he wrote about -- in fact, he had a hand in CREATING them. I suspect Kesey and company realized this. Ultimately, Wolfe was a cultural liberal facilitator/fellow traveler -- no, he was a cultural liberal PERIOD, even if he wouldn't admit to it. You can't make fun of executions by cutting off somebody's head, as a wiseguy once opined.

Wolfe was at his best at his craft when he was a journalist, more the observer than the commentator. We realize his brilliance was how he used his verbal razzle-dazzle to characterize the accumulation of details and incidents. The scenery and he had a knack for getting the revealing quote and those statements that gave his subjects the gift of personality. And for all his novelistic exuberance, he was anchored to the facts; the story arc, whether he liked it or not, was being drawn for him, and his inventions had to be restrained and made to cohere to what actually occurred. This isn't to diminish his achievement as a craftsman--he does indeed elevate journalism to art, as he does with Electric Kool-aid and The Right Stuff, two masterpieces that survive the hard judgment of time. As a critic, though, he began as a fun read, an amusing grouser on things that confounded him, ingeniously entering into a conspiratorial alliance with his readers who likewise were suspect of the claims and posturings of modern artists, architects, and the communities of critics and taste-makers who made those careers. Possible. He too quickly, though, became a habitual and distressingly imprecise curmudgeon whose complaints had less impact on contemporary thinking about cultural matters; imprecise because one wasn't always sure what he was trying to find fault with and because his writing became alarmingly diffuse, more rhetorical bombast, sound, and fury, lots of grandiloquent throat clearing. He was making less sense as a critic, but it was obvious he was bitter. His last essay sparked any significant conversation was his piece "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," his manifesto extolling novelists to become engaged with the world around them rather than write fictions that take readers out of the world and into an author's metaphorical neurosis. Beyond that, Wolfe's fabled gifts were all but useless in gauging how insane the world was behaving.

Everyday Negoiations

I walk through this arch and its half shadows and I am gone, on the other side of wall in a world that might not be there. That's what I think , crossing the street, the late afternoon sun creating large swaths of slanting shade that caused the downtown high rise and over windowed condominiums that loomed over the cross purposed train tracks to seem emptier than they normally be so close to  five in the afternoon. Large, empty, thick with history of conceptions, bad business deals, lies told on phones with rotary dials. Even the newer structures, staggered edifices with mix materials of steel, glass, concrete and wood notable for the profusion of balconies , seemed to have been constructed in a designer's mind to recollect and establish a connection when matters of public welfare and taste were hand in hand. 

It was a simple contradiction to resolve, the resolution being to either rid the city of the people altogether and so not have a center of constructed perfection where down with the presence of human weight and woe, or , less violently, resign yourself to a convenient solipsism, imagine that only you exist and that since because everything is merely an aberration of the senses, you have it in your means to filter out the faces, the torsos, the expressions of others who crowd your personal space, a space you require to be everything you can see. This space halts behind the skylines and the ridge of far trees and power lines.

 The place that others inhabit is beyond your concern or care. Let this failing light and what it reveals for mere minutes in the day, the deep resonance and secret shapes of what is molded to functional requirements which are now matters for history books, add peace to your mind, which is fevered and quirky and fast on the draw when disturbing elements intrude over the invisible lines of death you've drawn on every black of concrete you tread over. But now, it’s time to be gone, to consider the void, what is   beyond this passage, the shadows that malinger and grow until only the basic outline of the walkway is visible under the least luminescent  light above. Time to board a train to where? Anywhere? Does it make a difference? When was the last time going in a direction you've decided upon prior to a journey result in a quality difference? 

Sleep faster, we need the sheets, your father said, eat slower, your mother mentioned, and then continued, we have miles to go before we run out of gas, this said in a Ford station    wagon going between Detroit to Cleveland by way of the turnpike, listening to radio stations fade and criss cross their news , weather sports, there was country music playing , a gospel choir, someone screaming Jesus almighty God , rain and no rain, the sky dark with clouds , thick groves of trees along the road behind which seemed to be one large factory after another, smoke stacks poking the clouds, flashes of rows of broken industrial windows obscured by perversely green flora and fauna, there was never a good time to play fifty states, Cleveland was rain and shadows and deep hills where tall houses were build, hills where the rain went and filled the basements, every house in the neighborhood had a third floor that had walls growing moss...