I've never liked concerts where the performers sound exactly like they do on their studio recordings. Live performaces need spice and spontaneity. I want to see and hear a band take risks, explore some new territory, and challenge me as a listener. Otherwise, I'd rather stay home.

For this reason I was looking forward to jamming my way through Wilco’s first of five sold out shows in their beloved Windy City. It was a highly publicized homecoming for Chicago’s favorite Dad Rock band. Mural-sized posters on city busses. Ads on NPR. Official countdowns on local radio programs. But the show itself, while musically and technically accomplished, was, well…boring.

So boring, in fact, that the young woman sitting next to me fell asleep during nearly every song, only to wake up during the applause. A sharp contrast to the energy of the Kanye & Jay-Z show I recently wrote about. Perhaps the snoozer was only feeling the soporific spirit of Chicago Lyric Opera House (a pretty fucking cool venue for a rock show), or maybe she pounded too many PBRs before the show. Most likely, each Wilco tune lulled her to sleep.

Which was surprising given the "jam band" aesthestic Wilco's embraced since their 2004 release, A Ghost Is Born, with guitarist Nels Cline now leading the band into cacophonous maelstroms. But over the past few years these diversions have become perfectly scripted, well-timed (and well-rehearsed) events during their live shows. I wish the band would again explore those exotic spaces outside the riffs and solos we already know.

As James commented in his recent review of the Wilco boys’ latest effort, The Whole Love, the album tends toward “symphonic soft-rock.” Nothing spectacular, offensive, or terribly original. Which is fine for dinner parties and Volkswagen commercials, but pretty lethargic stuff for a live show. Especially when they kick things off with a 12-minute performance of the hushed and insanely repetitive “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend).” Which also has to be one of the clumsier song titles of the year. “Oh shit,” I tell my friend. “This is gonna be a long night.” A night, in hindsight, I should've stayed home.

What the show really lacked was a true spirit of spontaneity—guitar solos that spiralled and splintered, challenging the band and audience to keep pace and anticipate what might come next.  Instead, the audience was taken on a well-planned musical field trip, capably (and soberly) chaperoned by Tweedy & Co. (nobody’s ever accused them of being shoddy musicians). Sometimes the best field trips are the ones where the chaperones get drunk, the driver gets disoriented, and the bus goes careening down a dirt road towards some unknown end.

 Photo: Hidden Track

In a recent Harper’s interview, Ben Marcus (whose new book, The Flame Alphabet , is due out in January) mentions an idea that I’ve recently become obsessed with. The idea is that every writer has one essential story (also known as the "object") to tell—one fixation that must be explored again and again, revised and retold endlessly but never resolved.

For Marcus, the story is this: “A man is in a hole where bad things are happening to him.”

He explains that he has “to work to mask this basic fact,” work that I assume consists of the changes Marcus mentions earlier to style, tone, story or storylessness. I love this idea. If I could, without embarrassment, I would ask Marcus when he knew this story was the one. And yes, I would ask it with the same high-pitched giddiness a school girl asks about true love.

I’m familiar with the notion that all writers have their particular ticks—distinguishing characteristics that are separate from their particular style or voice. For me, it's hands. Hands show up all over the place in my fiction, touching things as a way of knowing, as reassurance. Why? Because hands are trustworthy, obviously. But the idea that they're part of my one story? Rather than feeling limited, I find the idea absolutely exhilarating. I’m not sure if I can entirely explain why, it feels both reassuring and stimulating. And I don't care at all if this idea is actually true or not; I’m still throwing myself in.

I understand that finding your story/object is a lot like asking the question, What’s wrong with you? Hours of psychoanalysis might actually be helpful in this pursuit. But could it be dangerous to know your story? As much as I’m fascinated by the idea, I’m also a little superstitious about answering the question. To miraculously behold my object? Then I’ll know what to do! Fuck. It’s almost like playing the field before getting married. I obviously date the same person again and again, but if I found the one I’d have to acknowledge this limitation in myself.

A part of me wants to know so I can just attack and attack and attack, but another part of me wants to keep my obsession to my subconscious, at least for a little while longer.

Photo: excursuses.wordpress.com

Until very recently I hadn’t popped my hip-hop cherry. My only foray into that world was via Girl Talk’s mash-ups, which is kind of like trying to score with your cousin: it just ain’t legit. But on the night of November 30, my cherry exploded in a fantastic ass-grinding soundquake at Kanye and Jay-Z’s “Watch the Throne” concert at Chicago’s United Center.

We arrived early to catch the unofficial warmup act: the flesh-fest on the mezzanine surrounding the arena. Tits and ass on parade. NFL players with their retinues, cruising. Hipsters with handlebar mustaches darting nervously through the crowd. South-siders looking skeptically at North-siders. And a couple of geeky white dudes watching it all go by. It was one of the most entertaining opening acts I’ve experienced, itself almost worth the insane $160 admission.

The show finally started. Kanye and Jay ascended on giant glowing cubes at opposite ends of the arena and the United Center was transformed into the Midwest’s hippest blinged-out, iPhone-illuminated dance club. It was also the largest crowd-generated ganja smoke machine I’ve ever known, the acrid haze casting a mystical blue aura around the two performers. They appeared like titans flaunting the spoils of their conquests (“Let’s get faded, Le Meurice for like 6 days / Gold bottles, scold models / Spillin’ Ace on my sick J’s.”).

I didn’t know the majority of the songs, but it didn’t really matter. More often than not, they simply instructed the crowd what to do: “Throw your diamonds in the sky!” “Lemme see your hands!” “Bounce!” They were the masters and we their kowtowing servants. Their charisma was majestic and totalitarian."You know how many hot bitches I own?!"

After 2 ½ hours and nearly 40 songs, Kanye and Jay wrapped up the show by playing “Niggas in Paris” eight times. (They played it ten the next night.) While audiences from Atlanta to Detroit have enthusiastically embraced this finale, it just reminded me of the time I heard a Dallas radio station play Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby” for an hour straight. I’d like to think Kanye and Jay were above such stunts, but I guess you gotta give the people what they want. Or what you think they want.

After their first pass through “Niggas in Paris," we headed for the exits—much to the astonished chagrin of our stoned neighbors and distracted security guards (“What? Where are you goin'? It’s not over!”). And as we walked out into the late autumn night we were pleased that we fled before the show devolved into a litany of repetition. Indeed, it was an overhyped show that celebrated its own hype. But it was hard not to be swept up in such a tidal wave of  narcissism, at least for a little while.

It had been an aggressive, but proper, deflowering.

Photo: Associated Press

The White Review''s current issue has a stunning example of High Intellectual Preposterousness. Lars Iyer has written a manifesto calling for an acknowledgment of the end of literature:

The only subject left to write about is the epilogue of Literature: the story of the people who pursue Literature, scratching on their knees for the traces of its passing. This is no mere meta-gamesmanship or solipsism; this is looking things in the face ... It’s time for literature to acknowledge its own demise rather than playing puppet with the corpse.

Is he serious? This is silliness, this is absurd. From the style of the manifesto itself, it’s hard to judge whether he’s being satirical or sarcastic, or if he’s really asserting what he believes to be true. Manifestos are full of pomp and grandeur, drenched in language that is bombastic, declamatory. Iyer’s is no exception. So I hunted the internet in search of his true intention and found that no, he was not joking. In a  3AM Magazine interview, he elaborates:

It is not simply that the relationship between literature and community has collapsed, nor even that literature is no longer in contact with politics. For me, the meaning of literature itself—the very possibility of literature—has collapsed. Literature, like left-wing politics, seems impossible ... I can only say that it seems to me that literature has, in some fundamental way, run its course.

What does this mean, "literature has run its course"? Is that why Iyer's book, Spurious, is so interchangeable with his blog, Spurious? To me, this is like saying sex has been slain by pornography, that eating is over because of fast food. People will always fuck and eat. Fucking and eating aren’t destroyed by depravities and deformations in their use. Yes, there is history and influence and philosophy and modern practice and all the rest. But there is still choice and there is still necessity.

Literature does not die, there is no end in it, it is something we do.

Rather than spend more time in inquiry and exasperation over this high intellectual dreariness, I’d like to simply present some evidence to the contrary. For intelligent discourse concerning the interaction of literature and culture, primarily in terms of how some of the more powerful influences and gatekeepers of culture present literature, I suggest an interesting piece by Roxane Gay up at the Rumpus. To see the existence of a literary magazine partially initiated because “we are tired of hearing that literary fiction is doomed,” check out Electric Literature.  And to hear from a true professional about his interactions with the great beast of literature, I highly recommend this interview with Ben Marcus from Harper’s.

A quick glance at any one of these demonstrates that literature has not run its course, and, for a great number of people, does not seem impossible.

Photo: living.oneindia.in

With Charles Shield’s new biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes, being reviewed all over town, I keep seeing the cartoon Vonnegut head. With each successive viewing, which is of course reminiscent of Vonnegut cartoon head encounters of the past, I become more and more convinced of the appropriateness of the image. Vonnegut has cartoon qualities: the downtrodden acceptance of fate, his unavoidable sentimentality, his common way of speaking for the utilization of common sense. Vonnegut was a bit of a goofnut. But I also see, in the vast proliferation of his image as cartoon, just a sliver of animosity. A certain satisfaction in our ability to put Vonnegut in his place—as a caricature.

One of the major concerns of Shield’s biography is to address the contradictions between Vonnegut’s image and how he was in real life (what pretty all biographies set out to explore, right?), but also to bring to light just how in control of his image Vonnegut really was. Not that Vonnegut was merely playing the fool in order to endear himself to an audience, but that he actively pursued an image that would sell. Which doesn’t fit all that snugly with the image of the good-hearted, simple-minded goofnut.

I’ve always been rather protective of authors’ private lives. I’m inclined not to care about the person but to behold their work. Yet with someone like Vonnegut, whose presence was so adamantly inserted into the page, distinctions between narrator and author, character and autobiography, blur. Should we be alarmed? Do we now have to question the narrator of Slaughterhouse Five as insincere?

Before such madness unfurls us, let me propose something. Reading Vonnegut had an extraordinarily positive effect on me as a teenager. Here was an author ready to tell you the true stupid shit about human beings but who still asks you to be decent. Vonnegut, as simple-seeming as he may have been, attained a kind of nobility to aspire to. As much as the true man may have failed in coinciding with his ideal image, isn’t it still significant that he sought out attempts at decency?

Photo: NYTimes

Classical music can be one temperamental bitch.

Take, for example, what recently happened during the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance of Anton Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. One concertgoer (this guy, it turns out) was so disgusted by conductor Osmo Vänskä’s “self-indulgent bad conducting” and the LPO’s “terrible playing” that he stormed out halfway through the performance yelling “Rubbish! ...This is terrible! ... Rubbish!” (Listen for yourself.) Unfazed, Vänskä and the LPO completed the performance without further incident. But try that kind of shit at a Mark Kozelek show and he’ll rip you a new asshole.

Classical music geeks are famous for their subjective peculiarities. One man’s forte is another man’s mezzo-forte. And there’s certainly no room for compromise—you’re just fucking wrong. Which makes the critical love fest that has followed the release of Riccardo Chailly’s recording of Beethoven’s complete symphonic cycle with Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra rather shocking. Since becoming music director of the esteemed Gewandhaus Orchestra in 2005, Chailly has solidified his reputation as one of the most accomplished, demanding, and energetic maestros in classical music today—qualities which also helped shape his new Beethoven cycle.

“Superb...joyful...fearless,” beams one critic. “Fresh and bold,” says another.Gramophone magazine, the apotheosis of classical music reviews, boasts that the performances under Chailly’s baton are a “tour de force,” “distinguished,” “electrifying,” and “powerful.” And according to The Guardian, it’s one of “the best modern-orchestra versions of recent times.”

A fan of both Beethoven and Chailly, but no classical music wonk, I can only say that Chailly’s Beethoven cycle is intense and driven, reawakening Beethoven’s music for a new century and the coming-of-age of the Millennial Generation. I also believe it’s something music fans of all stripes should include in their collections. And if Big Boi thinks Kate Bush’s new album is “very, very deep” and “good ride music,” he’ll definitely dig Chailly’s Beethoven.

So here are three simple reasons you, and Big Boi, should check it out.

• Big sounds. Beethoven’s music marked a decisive break with soothing, soporific chamber music that preceded it. Music was now loud, scandalous, unpredictable. Chailly’s recordings unleash the abrasive spirit of Beethoven’s revolutionary aesthetics. Turn it up.
• A Clockwork Orange. With Chailly’s galloping take on Beethoven’s Ninth—a true celebration of life—one can finally grasp Alex’s ode to “Ludwig van’s” final symphony in Burgess’ novel: “Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures!” Sure, Alex's "lovely pictures" included a bride dropping from the gallows (in the movie, anyway); like I said, classical is nothing if not subjective.
• The cover. It’s just fucking cool. Recently, classical labels have been focusing on making covers more alluring to (younger) buyers. Hence the growing popularity of some classical music hotties. While lacking the drool-worthy sex appeal of a Ryan Gosling, Chailly still looks dapper and fierce as hell in the Avedon-style cover photo. Indeed, Chailly commands your attention. He dares you to listen.

So accept Chailly's challenge and discover what radical Romanticism sounds like. 

Image: Gewandhausorchster

“Okay, Mr. Shteyngart, can you please remove your pants?” Ever compliant, the Super Sad True Love Story author drops his designer jeans to reveal that he is wearing…what?

Does a certain contemporary Pushcart Prize-winner still wear Underoos? Does the latest Pulitzer-winner prefer the silkiness of Victoria’s Secret panties against his hairy nether regions?

Wouldn’t you like to know.

Recently the Financial Times and the New Yorker featured profiles of writers and their libraries, hoping to unlock some great secret about what book collections say about their curators. Voyeuristic bibliophilia at its geekiest. Yet we don’t learn anything new about writers: they own a lot of books; like to talk about books; think Chekov was a genius (fair enough); and feel like they haven’t read enough books.

So rather than invade writers’ libraries, why not launch a literary panty raid? Invasion of privacy issues aside, analyzing undergarments might reveal far more about our favorite writers and expose what kind of creative stuff they are made of. “Scandalous!” cries Oates. “Okay,” mumbles Roth, loosening his belt. “Undergarments?” queries Boyle.

Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, supposedly changed his underwear only once a year.  Evidently his underwear became a type of protective second skin he was reluctant in shedding. And Jane Smiley writes in a robe—or perhaps even less. She’s rather vague about it.

Looking back, I imagine that Hemingway went commando or strapped on some sandpaper. Something rough and uncomfortable yet oddly liberating, the feeling of which helped him keep his prose economical. Tolstoy, too, probably free-balled it under his coarse peasant garb—a vain attempt to rid himself of impure sexual thoughts.

Other writers, however, must have required some type of confinement. Jean-Paul Sartre probably preferred Gauloises-singed tighty whities, something that undoubtedly irked Beauvoir’s more refined sensibilities. And I like to imagine Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf shielding a secretive sensual side, burying sexy lace buried under heavy woolen skirts. Much like their prose, both women harbored fiery passions beneath stoic veneers.

Or there’s the curious case of John Cheever. As a young and poorly paid writer, Cheever donned his only suit in the morning to commute to the building where he rented a room in which to write. Upon arriving, he would undress and carefully hang his suit. Then he would sit down and write. “A great many of my stories were written in boxer shorts,” Cheever wrote in1978.

Our contemporary literary giants should be as forthcoming about their unmentionables. What was Underworld written in, or IQ84? Given the massive girth of his latest tome, I imagine Murakami required something roomy and durable. Perhaps a simple pair of cotton Hanes boxers or, ideally, his awesome red running shorts. 

Photo: Jaunted