Review of Sway: A Novel by Zachary Lazar

Sway: A Novel by Zachary Lazar

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

It is hard to imagine a more personally mythologized terrain than Stones/Manson/Kenneth Anger for this novel, and ultimately that was my difficulty with it. Lazar is a skilled author, and if these characters were given different, transparent names maybe I could've made the leap into fiction and enjoyed the ride on which Lazar was embarking. But as someone who is a nerd for Stones and Manson and particularly for Kenneth Anger lore, I felt defensive of the parties involved and kept thinking "You don't know how they feel."

I kept wanting this to be a non-fiction book documenting the exact same time period and people, which is unfair to ask of a novel that openly had a different premise. I have watched plenty of stylized portraits of people whose lives in which felt some personal investment and could easily process the poetic license with which they were portrayed, but for some reason it doesn't fly in a book, or at least, for me, in this one.

There is a Stones lyric about not always getting what you want that could apply here, and maybe if I'd tried harder...


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the superior quality of the digital format...

...may highlight certain limitations and idiosyncrasies of these historic analog recordings. (warning on the back cover of Pioneers of Electronic Music) (listen)

This album features one track by the aforementioned Davidovsky along with a couple from Vladimir Ussachevsky, Bülent Arel, Alice Shields and a woman bearing the enviable name of Pril Smiley. I spent the better part of a summer listening to compilations like this from the library in my hometown, picked up on my way home from eight hours at the hamburger stand, and to this day I'm still relaxed by the disjointed bleeps and echo chamber roars of this stuff.

Here are a number of them hanging out at The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

Studio 317, one of four composition studios at the C-PEMC, circa 1970.
Clockwise from the center front, Vladimir Ussachevsky (seated), Milton Babbitt,
Bülent Arel, Pril Smiley, Mario Davidovsky, Alice Shields, Otto Luening.

One of the unanticipated results of this new way of creating music by slicing up tapes rather than corralling orchestras, is the openness it had to female composers, moreso than in traditional classical music, anyway. The two women represented on this compilation also have two of the more engaging pieces of music.

Kolyosa - Pril Smiley

Transformation Of Ani - Alice ...

Also dig this ethereal piece by composer Daria Semegen on a second compilation of works from that studio. (listen)

Electronic Composition No. 1 -...

hangs in the air

Mario Davidovsky's Electronic Studies No. 1 and 3, from the always excellent ANAblog. As an ambitious consumer of weird music in my college years (as now) I discovered the school of music performed a couple "tape music" concerts per year, and one of the most visceral memories was a pianist performing a Davidovsky piece involving a swarm of blips and bloops interwoven with an equally evocative if distant piano part. The beauty of Davidovsky's music that pushes past the novelty of his groovy 1961 technology is how it hangs in the air slightly our of reach. It is not as otherworldly as similar dream music like that of George Crumb; nor is it abruptly Appolonian like Babbitt or some of the Russian composers working in this field at the time. It operates in that space of the idyll, the daydream, the fleeting.

I am very into the new Los Amigos Invisibles record. It creates a perfect sphere of pop ambiance that this listener can usually get from vintage soft rock in weak moments. It makes people want to bust a move, if just a slight, almost imperceptible one, when they enter my office.

Just getting to the mammoth Iron & Wine collection of rarities and b-sides. This is music that begs for a long drive with the windows down, the wind filling in the gaps in his skeletal songs. Plaintively covering New Order is always an easy win in my book.

Love Vigilantes - Iron & Wine

in the kitchen with my invisible friends

The injection of Los Amigos Invisibles into my day has produced a marked improvement in everything. Listen to The New Sound of the Venezuelan Gozdera, Superpop Venezuela, and/or Arepa 3000: A Venezuelan Journey into Space and share in my bliss, or perhaps find some of your own.

Masturbation Session - Los Ami...

The sweetness of such a tropical feast is being tempered by Stereolab and Raekwon's mixtape promoting his new album and his from his cooking show Inside the Chef's Kitchen, resulting in a curious recipe with a wide flavor spectrum. To those who make such decisions: please allow Wu Tang to have a larger presence in the cable food television sphere, even if they lay out all the chicken in the sink like that.

pop-acquiesence

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion (listen) I keep saying I'm over this record already, but I keep listening. One of us is going to win out in the end.



Ornette Coleman - Love Call (listen) I'm researching a possibly multi-format piece about Ornette Coleman and thus listening to him a lot lately. He's the jazz titan that I'm not sure I get. With most big jazz legends, I know my vote, but Ornette generally leaves me puzzled, which as experience shows, is a good sign.

Check Out Time (Alternate) - O...

Desmond Dekkar - This is Desmond Dekkar (listen) If only artists today had the temerity in intrinsic fortitude to name their albums with a personal declarative statement. Like I would love to hear This is Gillian Welch or even This is Ryan Adams. There is a nakedness in such a brazen statement, just like Johnny Cash's trademark "Hello... I'm Johnny Cash" that sucks you in. Dig this side of the great Desmond Dekkar

Fu Man Chu - Desmond Dekker & ...

Los Amigos Invisibles - Commercial (available next week) New album from the perpetually unearthed Venezuelan psychedelic rock disco master blasters. Perhaps this is what Animal Collective is aiming toward and just isn't funky or pop-acquiesced enough to get to.



or maybe they could go this route...

checking my notes after the fact

Greg Brown - Honey in the Lion's Head (listen)
Calvin Johnson - Before the Dream Faded (listen)
Christian Marclay - Records (listen)
Jonathan Kane & February - live on WFMU (here)
Gary Lucas & Gerard Zibden - Down the Rabbit Hole

5 things about the Calvin Johnson/Chain and the Gang show in Scott, LA this past weekend

Perhaps above and beyond the actual content of the show was Bourque's Social Club itself, an exploded infrequent house show situation in a century-old concert hall next to the train tracks in the tiny town of Scott, 10 miles west of Lafayette. It is officially my new favorite place to see a show.



1. Compilation tapes Calvin Johnson makes and sells at his shows. My boy Kevin bought "Japanese Underground New Wave 1983-85." Mix tapes on actual tapes. He knows how to hit a music nerd where he truly lives.



2. The Pine Hill Haints (myspace) upped the ante on Backwoods4life retro shtick by at one point employing banjo, singing saw, washtub bass and snare - and made it completely work. Most of the crowd was actually there for them



3. Calvin Johnson (Beat Happening, K Records) danced the whole night between bouts of setting merchandise out. He has the unabashed, peculiar grace of an Andy Kaufman skit, or an Asperger's Pee Wee Herman, or a deer nervous about tripwires. He should dance at every show by everybody.



4. Ian Svenonius' new thing Chain and the Gang (myspace), channeling his manifestos through spot-on lounge-punk if such a thing exists. His suit, brown professor cut with a maroon sweater vest and black tie made him appear as the James Brown Chair of Sociology at some lost liberal arts college of the contemporary soul. At the beginning he polled the crowd about what they wanted to talk about, and a guy familiar with Ian Svenonius' work offered up "socialism," to which he replied, "Well, this is a social club...." I got to talk to him a little after the show and I think his deal is completely genuine, or is an act thoroughly lived to the point of transparency. I picked up a copy of his book The Psychic Soviet whose pink Gideon Bible plastic cover is item 4b on this list.



5. Calvin Johnson's set with his new band the Hive Dwellers (last.fm). My friend and I were talking about how Johnson is one of those revered singers whose albums kind of made us cringe when they copiously appeared: another deadpan sub-bubblegum exploration after another. Live, however, he is full beatnik juggernaut, as much interpretive dancer as he is roof shattering crooner. He sang without a mic in the tiny hall, playing a guitar inscribed "you're kind of amazing" in careful cursive against the top, and I tend to agree. As much as the Pine Hill Haints were consummate shack-shaking fun, and Chain and the Gang a brilliantly wrought spectacle that turned parody inside out, the Hive Dwellers were riveting and weird, hilarious and a little unnerving; a singular sonic experience.