Six straight days of shows and now we get a welcome couple of days off to drive across North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington. Beautiful, desolate country. This morning we agreed that the new McDonalds coffee is a big improvement.
Lotsa time for reading in the van. I read Independence Day by Richard Ford, the second novel in his Frank Bascombe trilogy. I read part one, The Sportswriter, right before tour and part three, The Lay of the Land, will be on my Christmas list. I love these books. The stories are told entirely in the head of Frank, a ponderous baby-boomer, as he struggles to find meaning and happiness at this comfortable point in American history (recent American history: Independence Day is set in 1988; Frank is wary of the ascendance of Bush the Elder). He is a character with no religion, no roots in the land, few living relatives, and no close friends. But this isn't a novel of alienation. Frank is an optimist and finds much to love in whatever it is he's doing, which includes selling houses and trying to forge a connection with his teenage son. Ford notes that we are essentially lucky, in the socioeconomic historic sweep of things, to be alive here and now, though that doesn't necessarily equate into happiness. Happiness is a daily, hourly struggle. In the first book of the series, The Sportswriter, an acquaintance of Frank's in similar straits (divorced, lonely and disconnected) commits suicide. Frank keeps finding reasons to carry on everywhere he looks.
I also polished off Modest Mouse: A Pretty Good Read by Alan Goldsher, which was a pretty bad read, an utterly worthless and unrevealing rock bio. Goldsher has zero access to anyone in the band or anyone who has ever met them. What he's done here is a glorified google search for interviews with Isaac Brock. Brock makes good copy, but he's a defensive interview, closed off to any personal lines of inquiry. The flimsy narrative is padded out with pointless digressions on the nature of unauthorized biographies, or a lengthy list of bands that have licensed songs for commercials (even this is woefully incomplete -- why include T.Rex and Aerosmith on the list but not The Shins or the Walkmen, who are far more salient comparisons?). No new information is proffered regarding the discredited 1998 rape accusation against Brock or Jeremiah Green's abrupt resignation during the recording of Good News beyond what I read on Pitchfork at the time. In fact the book tells me nothing at all about Green or Eric Judy than a few opinions on their playing styles. The author offers this defense early on:
Sadly I can't offer much in the way of biographical information on these gentlemen (i.e. Green and Judy). But like I said, I tried.
Really? You tried? I'm no investigative journalist but if I was writing a bio of a band I wouldn't just throw in the towel without finding out when and where the members of the band were born, for fucking starters. And if I couldn't dig anything up that wasn't readily available on the internet, if I had never met anyone in the band and had never even seen them live until 2005, I wouldn't bother writing the book.
