The Bookshelf Diaries (an occasional series): Macan, Walker, Townshend, Chabon
“If you want to write, the first thing you need to do is read.” In the current lull before the next big push on the new book (which is fated to have a labor lasting many months), here's what I’ve been reading lately. Rocking The Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture by Edward Macan is a surprisingly—at times aggravatingly—academic tome about that great hoary beast, progressive rock. Skirting the stupor-inducing sections about music theory and harmonic structure, as well as some of Macan’s more esoteric digressions, I thankfully emerged with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for a genre...
Read MoreTim Green Will Return
Well, we made it: welcome to 2013. New Year’s Day is the perfect time to talk about the future with one eye on the past, and that’s definitely the agenda for today. First up is a minor housekeeping item. Every post I’ve made on this blog from the very beginning has featured as its title a song title or lyric fragment. This has been a fun game to play, but as the post count has risen, it’s come to feel somewhat limiting. So, it’s time to move on and let the post titles say what they need to say, whether...
Read MoreSecret World
The more Michael Chabon I read, the more I’d like invite him to lunch sometime. That semi-delusional sentence is not in fact as absurd as it might seem at on first read; I only live 90 minutes from my Pulitzer Prize-winning imaginary friend Michael, and we do have a fair bit in common. Between progressive rock (and jazz), comic books, baseball, Jewish roots, an acute awareness of our own shortfalls as fathers/husbands/human beings, and, oh yeah, that whole making-stuff-up-and-writing-it-down thing, there would be plenty of conversational ground to cover. So, I really hope I’m not screwing the chances of that...
Read MoreEnglish Electric
I have a love-hate relationship with a number of things. Technology. Grammar. And today's adversary: research. I love research because I get to learn new things (no, really, it’s that simple). I hate it because it’s a huge distraction, often dropping me down Internet rabbit-holes from which I only emerge hours later with a heap of semi-useless information and no actual writing accomplished. In recent weeks I’ve taken to posting tidbits from my research forays over on the Believe in Me Facebook page (like it, won’t you?). For example: “Stolichnaya vodka comes in at least 21 different varieties, including white...
Read MoreThank You (Again)
On a day for giving thanks, I'll start with these two: Thanks to Riffraf Magazine and Richard Fulco for your faithful support, including the fresh post about Believe in Me that went up today as part of Richard's "Writers and Music" series. Thanks to you, the readers, for your comments here and over on the Believe in Me Facebook page, for continuing to spread the word across the vast empty spaces of the interwebs, and for, well, giving a damn. It means a lot. Here's a gift in return -- a link to the post I ran at Thanksgiving last...
Read MoreWe Are One Tonight
Buckle in: this is going to take a minute. As I've mentioned before, Tim Green spends a lot more time in Believe in Me contemplating things like faith and destiny than I had anticipated when I sat down to write the story. As much as he wants to rely on a rationalist approach to sorting out the world around him, moments arrive where things happen that he can’t explain, threads of his life colliding in ways that make him question whether the universe is indeed random, or if larger forces may be at work. As he notes at one point,...
Read MoreDesire
“Persistence,” a wise man once said to me, “is the whole ball of wax.” He was talking about finishing a novel, but the statement applies equally pretty much across the board. Almost everybody starts things; it’s the finishers we remember. And his statement is so right, so true—but also, in its boldness, incomplete. On these pages I’ve talked already about many different things related to my novel Believe in Me: the music that helped inspire me, the writers whose work informed my story, the movies whose ideas seeped into it, the subjects like faith that unexpectedly became part of its...
Read MoreMaster of Time
A great novel is like the best acid trip in the history of the world. It lifts you out of your reality and places you in another one, with a new identity, a new environment, new perspectives. It wakes you up to possibilities you hadn’t considered and drops you in the middle of experiences you’ve never had. I just got back from a trip I was taken on by an old friend (not really, we’ve never met, but it feels that way sometimes after almost four decades as a Faithful Reader) —by the name of Stephen King. Long known primarily...
Read MoreMaking Movies
Maybe it’s the pace of life. Maybe it’s the overwhelming volume of choices we face every single day. Maybe it’s the near-death experience that our nation’s middle class has been going through over the past decade. Whatever the roots of the situation, it seems that when it comes to our stories—books, movies and the like—America is going through a period of desperate cravings for cultural comfort foods. Book (and comic-book) adaptations, sequels, reboots and remakes dominate the screens at the nation’s multiplexes, with original stories an almost-forgotten relic of an earlier, more imaginative time. All of which is prelude to...
Read MoreConnection
Last Friday morning, I tweeted “Headed to the Ronnie Montrose tribute show in SF tonight. The memories will be swirling around all night long (Hagar pun intended).” They were, as one world-class player after another hit the stage to play the music of my youth, the music made famous by a man who late in his 40-year career became my friend. There were so many remarkable moments crammed into one evening that I’m hard-pressed to keep this post to a reasonable length. But I’m not here to deliver a concert review (capsule version: an awe-inspiring display of both love and...
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