Category: Mere Words

I’m not sure how so many years got by without my having seen this. I was alerted to it by a fine piece, “Why We Keep on Rolling With Dylan” (basically an onstage dialogue between critic Greil Marcus and novelist Don DeLillo), that appeared last month in The Daily Telegraph in the UK.

“In 1991, Bob Dylan was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy show,” Marcus explains. “They now hand these out very promiscuously, but this was unusual at the time — it was a big deal. So Dylan comes on with a very noisy, loud, small band, all dressed in dark suits with fedoras pulled down over their heads. And they go into the most furious, unrelenting, speeded-up piece of music.

“And Dylan is slurring his words, you cannot understand what he’s saying, but you don’t need to. The sound that’s being made is so thrilling. And about halfway through, at least for me — other people might have caught on more quickly, maybe later — I realised he was singing ‘Masters of War.’ His most unforgiving, bitter, unlimited denunciation that he’s ever recorded. It’s a song about arms merchants. It ends with ‘And I hope that you die, I’ll stand over your grave, I’ll follow your coffin.’

“Not too many songs really wish for the death of the subject, the person who’s being addressed. Then he gave a little speech after his award, where he managed not to thank anybody.”

Essential viewing for anyone interested in Dylanography.

What the hell. Tuesday’s musings about Under the Pink got me thinking about all things Tori. Even though I haven’t physically put on one of her CDs in years, it’s comforting knowing that they’re up there, boxed away in the attic, awaiting that day when I cannot go another minute without hearing a musical version of an Alice Walker book or a song about having tea with the devil. Which brings us to Boys for Pele, about which I wrote in 1996:

Because she rides her harpsichord as if it were an unbroken stallion. Because she continues to cultivate her gift for conjuring up musical mood and narrative that hang together and mean something while logically making little or no sense whatsoever. And because the photo in the CD booklet of her suckling a piglet transcends mere questions about bad taste and raises loftier ones about who knows what. 

Her third album proves F. Scott Fitzgerald right when he observed: “To most women art is a form of scandal.â€Â 

Further cultivating her public image as freak extraordinaire, she employs lyrics as disturbing as “Sometimes you’re nothing but meatâ€Â and “I shaved every place where you been.” She seems incapable of not putting her credibility — first as an artist, then as a woman — on the line. She again scores admirably on both counts. 

(Seek out the “Hey Jupiter” CD single for the “Dakota Version” of the song. Industrializing — as much as a piano number can be industrialized — and improving on the Boys for Pele take by adding some nifty background noise that might be a sump pump or a Jarvik-7 artificial heart, it now sounds like something out of a David Lynch film. Included among the four live cuts is a delicate rendition of the tune Amos was born to sing and which presaged her very existence, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.â€Â)

Listening to a recent interview with Tori Amos on NPR’s Studio 360, I was reminded of (a) what a good interview she makes, (b) this 1994 album, and (c) how many of her songs pose musical questions:

Why do we crucify ourselves?

Don’t you want more than my sex?

God, sometimes You just don’t come through
Do You need a woman to look after You?

For Amos, who was 31 years old when Under the Pink was released, the creative process represented as much an act of confession as it did an act of discovery. “Without the songs I wouldn’t know that I feel what I feel,” she told me in a telephone interview. “Let me tell you,” she confided in a wispy voice, “sometimes I can go, ‘I hate that motherfucker,’ and I’ll rip up his picture. Right? Then I’ll start writing this song, this most beautiful—” Catching herself, she laughed and said to herself, “Oh god, you’re just a sap.”

And a successful one, at that. Her 1992 debut solo album for Atlantic Records, Little Earthquakes, revealed a bent for idiosyncratic lyrics, loopy melodies, and neoclassical keyboard work. It went gold in the US and sold more than a million copies worldwide. The follow-up album, Under the Pink, made its maiden landing at number twelve on the Billboard charts.

Born Myra Ellen Amos in North Carolina, her life from that point onward was atypical at best. A child prodigy who won a piano scholarship to Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody Conservatory when she was five, she grew up listening to the music of Nat King Cole, Fats Waller,Jimi Hendrix, and John Lennon. She was expelled when she was eleven. Her father, a strict Methodist preacher who believed you either support or lose your child, didn’t stand in her way when, at the age of thirteen, she hit the piano bar circuit. At the Marriott, they made her play “Send in the Clowns” seven times a night. At Mr. Henry’s, a popular gay bar in Washington, DC, the waiters used a cucumber to teach her how to give head.

All these daffily disparate ingredients — combined with the sad truth that somewhere along the way she was raped and lived to sing about it on her own fruitcaky terms without reducing herself to martyrdom (“Yes, I wore a slinky red thing/Does that mean I should spread/for you, your friends, your father, Mr. Ed?”) — converge to create songs that are not about blame, but about taking responsibility.

Amos refused to take responsibility, however, for Womanhood or the feminist movement at large, an agenda that many critics (music and social) famously tried to foist upon her.

“I guess I’m kind of boring because I just go about my biz trying to work on myself. When I’m working and listening to my real feelings about things, and trusting them, then I just have to allow that to be enough. Whether I say something that offends somebody or gives somebody a giggle—” She paused. “You have to let go of the responsibility of people’s responses. Sometimes I’ll say things that I might not have said if I would have had more sleep. But, at the same time, that’s real, too.”

Between her first two solo albums, she released a hushed and breathtaking cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” When I asked if she felt any sort of psychic connection with Kurt Cobain (who had just committed suicide a few months earlier), she replied, “Totally.” In the silence that followed, she whispered the word twice more.

“I think it could’ve gone either way for a while,â€Â she commented on another singer/songwriter’s theory that, if left alone to deal with his demons away from the limelight, Cobain might still be alive. “If he would’ve been on medication for the depression. Put all the emotional stuff aside — it’s hard enough waking up every morning — it’s just that you’re a depressive and you have a chemical imbalance.â€Â

Aware of life’s little imbalances, Amos found it difficult to take her fame too seriously. She knew from experience that there were worse alternatives. “Like, we have no idea what it’s like to live in Belfast with those people killing each other,â€Â she said. When she had toured there recently, she’d done so with the reality of bomb scares and a guard at her dressing room door. Because of her name, in the demented minds of some of the more radical Irish there existed a connection between her and the Tories and their principles. “And my whole religious position,” she said wearily, “blah, blah, blah. In Ireland, I always get a bit of a stink because I tell them that the Virgin Mary swallowed, and they don’t like that shit.”

She stopped reading reviews of her work. “It didn’t make me feel good. You read the great ones, you’ve got to read the shitty ones. If you’re going to walk into the ‘opinion world,’ then you have to listen to them from all sides. And I’m just not in the mood. I know when I suck and I know when I’m great. Grade me that all the elements came together, and it didn’t overcook and it didn’t undercook. You know, I got the baby out of the oven just in time.”

Speaking of bad reviews, I mentioned the heavy-metal band that Amos fronted when she came to Hollywood in the late Eighties, called Y Kant Tori Read? While she could no longer worm her way into the plastic snakeskin pants that, along with thigh-high boots and big hair, that had contributed to her mode of dress at the time — and contrary to most of what had been written about this period in her career (most likely because it wasn’t something her more ardent feminist fans wanted to hear) — she giggled and admitted, “Hey, I enjoyed some of it. I had great hair spray. Looking back, I was coming out of my skin as a person.” Before the band, “I was so miserable. My jaw was in a constant clinch mode.”

It was also a learning experience. “I have no illusions about this business. Not one. That’s why I think I’m doing so well. When I say ‘doing well,’ I mean I don’t cancel shows, I’m not jumping out of windows. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sometimes wear on me and I want to crawl into the corner with a friend.”

Though she had no trouble getting down to brass tacks when it came to the business side of her music, the act of songwriting remained something of a magical mystery to her. Despite her professionalism, it wasn’t something she could force to happen. “If the songs don’t show up knocking on my door, bringing a bottle of chardonnay or a box of shoes, I can’t even think about it. It’s like they already exist, and I get a whiff of their perfume and I get inside of their essence and what they’re trying to tell me. They show up, showing me who they are, and then I’m trying to translate their feelings. Sometimes I don’t do a very good job, and they come back and harass me until I do.”

                  When the world falls apart some things stay in place…

He gave us 21 years of amazing professional tennis. He was the new young turk who yanked the baton away from the old young turks like John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors and Ilie Năstase. Like them, he infused the game with some much needed personality (if not all-out punk rock attitude), which sadly is once again in short supply on the tennis court. These reasons alone would be enough, but Andre Agassi yesterday at the U.S. Open, having lost the final game of his professional career, exemplified why I’ve loved him through the years. 

Standing mid-court, unable to hold back the tears, he forewent the customary post-game interview and, saying goodbye to professional tennis, addressed the 23,000 New York fans giving him a standing ovation:

“The scoreboard said I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn’t say is what it is I have found. Over the last 21 years, I have found loyalty. You have pulled for me on the court and also in life. I found inspiration. You have willed me to succeed, sometimes even in my lowest moments, and I’ve found generosity. You have given me your shoulders to stand on to reach for my dreams, dreams I could never have reached without you.” 

Last Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of sitting down with Robert Christgau, the self-appointed Dean of American Rock Critics, in his East Village apartment. This was indeed a big thing for the kid here, considering that I’ve read Christgau’s work, well, ever since I was a kid. His Consumer Guide to music has appeared in The Village Voice since 1969 and has since been collected in three volumes of books that have long shared a space on my reference shelf alongside the first — and best — edition (the one edited by Jim Miller) of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, Greil Marcus’s books, and all of Pauline Kael’s collections. As a teenager in Utah, so that I might stay on top of what Christgau (and Sarris) had to say, I subscribed to The Voice. 

Through the years, Christgau became part of the very pop culture he writes about. On 1972’s live Take No Prisoners album, Lou Reed wondered aloud from the stage: “What does Robert Christgau do in bed?” I’ll forgo quoting where this line of thinking took him; suffice it to say that it culminated with Reed rhetorically asking, “Can you imagine working for a fucking year and you got a B+ from an asshole in The Village Voice?” In his review of the album, Christgau responded with his usual humor and aplomb by thanking Lou for pronouncing his name right. And he only gave the album a C+. 

“I always admired Christgau’s writing and wit and courage,” singer/songwriter Elliott Murphy wrote yesterday (before we even knew about Friday’s goings-on at The Voice), “and when he gave Aquashow [Murphy’s debut album] an A- it was the only grade I ever got that I was proud of.” 

All of which brings us back to Tuesday evening in the East Village. Christgau had kindly consented to an interview for a book I’m putting together about the critic Paul Nelson. I didn’t agree with everything that the Dean had to say, but what he said was never uninteresting. Such had been the tacit terms of our writer-reader relationship for over three decades (we should be so fortunate in all of our relationships). Earlier that day, he had even more kindly arranged for me to get into The Voice‘s library, where I was able to glean invaluable material from 30- and 40-year-old bound volumes of the newspaper. I owe him big-time.

 

So it was with considerable shock last night to discover an article in The New York Times that told, in part: 

In a move that decimated the senior ranks of its arts staff, The Village Voice, the New York alternative weekly, yesterday dismissed eight people, including Robert Christgau, a senior editor and longtime pop music critic who had been at the paper on and off since 1969. 

In a statement released yesterday, Village Voice Media described the layoffs as an effort “to reconfigure the editorial department to place an emphasis on writers as opposed to editors.â€Â The company added, “Painful though they may be in the short term, these moves are consistent with long-range efforts to position The Voice as an integral journalistic force in New York City.â€Â 

The article went on to say: 

Mr. Christgau, 64, who noted that he had forged the paper’s style of music criticism, with its “serious consideration of popular music at a critical level,â€Â said in a phone interview that before he learned he had lost his job, he had begun organizing the paper’s Christmas consumer review. â€œI was really thinking about what I was going to do. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,â€Â he said. “I was doing my job.â€Â

What befell Robert Christgau on Friday is not uncommon in everyday corporate America. I watched the same thing happen to people I’d worked with for years, as they fell victim to the ever advancing bottom line. Unlike Christgau, as it got closer I was able to make the decision, to paraphrase Keith Richards, to walk before they made me run. 

I have no doubt Christgau will do just fine, that this, like many seemingly life-crushing changes, will turn out to be an opportunity in disguise, an unexpected detour taking him down a path he wouldn’t otherwise have taken to a better destination than he could have imagined. 

In the meantime, Christgau’s website remains available online and, in an act of sheer generosity and (deserved) egoism, reflects virtually everything that man’s put into print. With his recent review of the New York Dolls’ latest album, his writing demonstrated the same thing that the resurrected Dolls did with their music: that rock & roll done right is ageless. 

Yesterday evening we drove into Manhattan, parked right off of Spring Street, and walked the few blocks to the firehouse. They found our names, nydeborah‘s and mine, on the guest list and welcomed us inside. Servers zigzagged through the crowd and foisted upon us some of the tastiest hors d’oeuvres I’ve ever tasted — delicate little crab cakes, sandwiches made from paper-thin breads and cheeses, the tiniest pigs wrapped in the tiniest blankets — and made sure our free hand was always wrapped around a glass of wine or a cocktail. They showed us around the splendid New York City Fire Museum, where, among its collection of fire-related art and artifacts dating from the 18th century to the present, a restored 1921 Type 75 American LaFrance fire engine proudly bore the name Brooklyn. With great reverence, they escorted us into the room housing their 9/11 memorial, where faces are put to the names of the 343 firefighters who lost their lives that day.

Then they took us upstairs to the third floor to see what we were there for in the first place: a special screening of three National Geographic Channel documentaries devoted to 9/11 that begin airing this Sunday evening:

• Inside 9/11 [Sunday, 27 August]: Nominated for a primetime Emmy and updated to reflect new information from this past year, this four-hour miniseries traces the timeline that led up to the deadly attacks, spanning decades and circling the globe to reveal a clearer picture of the events.
• Triple Cross: Bin Laden’s Spy in America [Monday, 28 August]: Playing out like an espionage thriller, Ali Mohamed, a radical ex-Egyptian Army officer, became a CIA asset, joined the US Army, and served the FBI as an informant — then triple-crossed all three in the name of his true allegiance: Osama bin Laden.
• The Final Report: Osama’s Escape [Tuesday, 29 August]: How did Osama bin Laden walk away from a brutal barrage of bombs and gunfire by US forces during the battle at Tora Bora? A penetrating look at how this infamous terrorist eluded the world’s most powerful military machine in Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Seven hours of material had been expertly edited down to 90 or so riveting minutes for this preview. And when all was said and done, despite the horrible imagery (the planes hitting, the aftermath, the posters advertising the missing) and sounds (the explosions, the screams, the sobbing), which have long been seared into our collective psyches, what haunted me most was the image, both fanciful and frightening, described by survivor Louis Lesce, a no-nonsense career counselor attending a two-day class on the 86th floor when American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower:

“The ceiling fell, collapsed. And I remember the resumés starting to fly out of the room. I’m sitting there and a resumé just passes me by and stays in the middle of the air, so much so that I could read the name, and then it floated by.”

When the screening was over, the audience sat stunned, silent, filled with our thoughts of that morning. I remembered turning on my car radio, back in Salt Lake, and hearing that the second plane had just hit. I remembered getting to work and not doing anything but watching, with Lou and Larry and Steve, the news on TV until the towers came down. I remembered the long walk back to my office. I remembered lying awake in bed that night, scared of how things were never going to be the same again. I’d felt alone for a long time, but never as alone as that night, where the dark seemed darker.

Then the audience snapped out of it and broke into enthusiastic applause.

I’m glad these brilliant documentaries, executive produced by the impressive Jonathan Towers, brought back all these memories. They should. Don’t miss them.

Without any Why We Fight rhetoric or any Michael Moore high jinks, sans Nicolas Cage or Oliver Stone, Towers simply lays out the facts and keeps the viewer glued to the screen. We get to think — instead of being told what to think.

Inside 9/11 ends with the November 2001 wisdom of Osama bin Laden. Still basking in the glow of 9/11, unperturbed by the bombs bursting in the distance, he summed up the Gordian knot that is life as we now know it:

“We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”

The onscreen image of bin Laden fades and only his superimposed words remain, hanging in the air like a name on a resumé floating past Louis Lesce almost five years ago.

Bob the Gambler, Frederick Barthelme’s fine 1997 novel about Ray and Jewel Kaiser and Jewel’s teenaged daughter RV, concerns itself with the introduction of a fourth member into their pieced-together Mississippi family: gambling, and its effect on their love for one another.

Barthelme knows loss. The one-after-another death of his parents in the mid-Nineties, on the heels of the death of his big brother Donald in 1989, made it possible for Barthelme and his brother Steven (both of them college professors and, like Donald, writers) to gamble away more than $250,000 — most of their inheritance.

Anyone familiar with the allure of gambling will easily understand Ray and Jewel’s beautiful and twisted illogic when they risk all they have — and all they don’t. Barthelme’s accomplishment here is that he makes it possible, too, for his non-wagering readership to comprehend how Ray can, on one hand, cherish a quiet night at home in front of the TV with Jewel and RV, and on the other (the hand holding two queens), risk losing it all.

Along the way, the Kaisers acquaint themselves with other artistic treatises on the subject — most notably Jean-Pierre Melville’s amazing film Bob le Flambeur (providing not only the book with its name, but also RV’s nickname for her stepfather) and Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, whose protagonists’ ill-fated systems and schemes are somehow lost on Ray and Jewel.

Bob the Gambler is infused with Henry James’ “felt life.” Just as there’s no doubt that at some point Bruce Cockburn encountered a bullet hole in “Peggy’s Kitchen Wall,” equally convincing is Barthelme’s elegy to an addiction that promises something (and it’s not money) for nothing.

Barthelme’s writing has always been about gambling: seeing how long he can draw out his sentences, his passages, the moments between his characters, until they reveal more than is on the page. Like Peckinpah’s best slow-motion shots, meaning is not found in the action, the action resides in the meaning.

Writing in the same seductive tones as the addiction itself, Barthelme is clearly best friends with the fleeting yet inveigling sensation that comes from beating the odds: the feeling that he’s somehow, if only for a moment, managed his own destiny.

When this film first opened in Manhattan, its run was so short that, by the time I read about it, it was gone. So it was with considerable delight that I discovered the film had returned, this time to Brooklyn, last week. 

Edmond seemed to have everything going for it: a script by David Mamet, based on his 1982 play of the same name; starring the incomparable William H. Macy, always marvelous but especially so in Wayne Kramer’s wonderful 2003 film The Cooler; and director Stuart Gordon, who did HP Lovecraft proud with his adaptations of Re-Animator and From Beyond. On the surface, this film seemed like a winner. 

Therein lies the problem: Edmond is all surface. 

Edmond is the same character at the end of the film as he is at the beginning — but it’s not Macy’s fault. The way the story is written, we don’t know if the racial epithets Edmond spews are a sudden eruption or part of his daily routine, whether he’s at the tail end of a journey toward violence or whether it’s a destination he’s inhabited for some time. It’s not a one-note performance but a one-note character, devoid of any sense of what, if anything, has been lost. Just as Gordon’s direction plods from one scene to the next, Edmond is a dead man walking from the first shot to the last (where he becomes a dead man lying down). Because we are not permitted to experience his fall, but rather just follow his somnambulistic walk on the wild side, there is no tragedy. We, like Edmond, feel nothing. 

Unlike Cape Fear‘s Max Cady, who promised, “You’re gonna learn about loss,” Edmond offers no such lesson. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker’s famous obvservation, the film runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.

Similarly, a litany of usually fine actors are put through their paces so quickly and without distinction that often they’re gone from the screen by the time we realize who they were: Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator), Dule Hill (fine here in a role that’s about as far from The West Wing‘s Charlie as he can get), Joe Mantegna (always amazing, but especially so as Dean Martin in The Rat Pack), Denise Richards (the Charlie Sheen-Denise Richards divorce), Julia Stiles (so memorable in Mamet’s State and Main), Mena Suvari (the American Beauty herself), Rebecca Pidgeon (also fine State and Main — and married to Mr. Mamet), and Debi Mazar (not used nearly enough in Entourage). Despite all this thespian firepower, the only onscreen chemistry occurs in the scene between Macy and Stiles in her character’s apartment, when, for a fleeting moment, it seems as if she and Edmond might have found in each other a twisted kindred spirit. Alas, even that spark is extinguished before it can ignite anything else.

A gentleman, a few rows ahead of us, served as spokesman for the sparse audience when the film faded out and the lights came up. “That’s it?” he said. Indeed.

When I first began visiting Brooklyn, I’d marvel at the sight of a squirrel in the city. Such a sighting was infrequent at best back in Salt Lake (one of my earliest memories is of the squirrels that scurried up and down the trunk of the huge tree behind my Aunt Polly’s house just south of Ninth and Ninth) and always brought with it a sense of wonderment. I was used to seeing them out in the wild, when we’d go fishing or when we’d picnic in one of the nearby canyons; but seeing these furry little creatures, with their hand-like feet and feet-like hands, in the midst of suburbia… well, let’s just write it off as my being easily entertained. 

And though their comic antics still captivate me, as I approach my eighth month in the Big City — where you can’t throw a small stone without hitting a large squirrel — I now recognize these critters for what they are: bushy-tailed rats. 

Not counting the two honest-to-goodness rats that ambled across our path one night as nydeborah and I walked across a plaza in fashionable Park Slope, we have other wildlife in Brooklyn, too. I’m also not talking about the partygoers who came to our block party and filled our street last Saturday with a full day of eating and drinking and laughing with friends new and old. No, I’m talking about the shadowy creature that nydeborah spied walking across the fence in the backyard after the party was over. “There’s a possum in the backyard,” she called out.

This didn’t surprise me. Last October, we’d awakened one chilly morning to find a soaking wet possum hanging upside down from the back fence, where it had caught one of its hind legs between the pickets. It had rained all night, and the poor creature (looking like the proverbial wet rat) had exhausted itself from trying to escape. Still, it had enough life left in it to hiss and snap at me whenever I got close. 

What needed to be done was clear: someone simply had to lift up the possum to free its leg from between the posts where its body weight had trapped it. Another thing was clear, too: I was not the one to do it.

Instead, we picked up the phone and called the [queue up the Law and Order theme] Emergency Service Unit.  Not only does ESU provide expertise and specialized equipment to support the various units within the NYPD — dealing with everything from collapsed buildings to auto accidents and hostage situations —  they also are adept at animal-removal. Donning leather gloves and utilizing a noose pole, the two-man team swiftly freed the possum and sent it scampering away unharmed.

Fast forward to last Saturday night, where the quadraped in question turned out not to be a possum but rather a raccoon. For a half hour or so it entertained the few remaining party guests by performing a Buster Keatonesque tightrope act on the power lines. 

 

Alas, the raccoon was about as good at acrobatics as Mel Gibson is at good will. After parading back and forth nervously, right side up and upside down, and several times nearly falling, it finally made its way onto the roof of a neighbor’s garage. There it posed and strutted for several minutes, culminating with a fit of hissing (not to be confused with a hissy fit), looking for all the underworld like Satan’s lapdog.

The following morning, I stepped out onto our front stoop to discover a rather large squirrel burrowing headfirst into one of our many bags of garbage from the night before. All I could see were its haunches up in the air as it pulled trash out onto the sidewalk. I stepped down one step to shoo it away, but it heard me, turned around, and came right at me, leaping up onto the granite cap on the corner of our fence. For more than a minute we stood there sizing each other up. My hand fumbled for the doorknob behind me, for I sensed that any second it was going to charge. Ultimately it sauntered away, but not without one or two glances back, silently assuring me it would return.

Friends back home often ask me if New York is as scary as it appears in the movies, on TV. I always tell them no, that the people here are friendly beyond belief. But I don’t tell them about the animals, no, because I sense they’re always there, just out of sight, listening, waiting…

Ten years ago, in June of 1996 when Gone Again was first released, I had just received word from a friend, the terrific short story writer Alison Baker, of the untimely death of a mutual acquaintance. It had been the second such letter in about as many months. “Sorry to send bad news again,” she’d closed. “As we age, you know, this sort of news becomes prevalent. One will come to dread the personal letter.” I’d hoped she was wrong then and I today remain hopeful of the same. I love receiving letters — even if it means suffering the occasional bad news. I’ve yet to reach the age where each morning I scan the obituaries, like a vulture scouting out carrion, looking for familiar names among the grainy black-and-white faces that have gone the way of all flesh. Instead, I prefer to mark my time on this earth by the friends I’ve made, the movies I’ve seen, the books I’ve read, and, perhaps most of all, the songs I’ve heard. 

The best rock & roll has always been a kind of musical letter-writing — “song-mail,” if you will. Given rock’s roots and the social significance it has garnered through the decades, this is not an inappropriate view of the music that has documented my generation and perhaps yours. Always meant to do more than merely fill the space between our ears, rock combines words and music and provides a vehicle by which the artist can report in and say, “This is where I am at this point in my life. This is what I think. This is what I want.” Or, like Rutger Hauer’s replicant Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner, making sure his memories aren’t lost like tears in the rain: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion…” 

It had been eight years since Patti Smith last graced us with a letter from home. Before that, Dream of Life, the album she recorded with her husband, ex-MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, was the first time we’d heard from her since she dropped out of the rock & roll limelight in 1979. She’d moved to Detroit, married the other Smith the following year, and, by all accounts, had happily become a Midwestern mother of two. And, for the rest of the world at least, stopped making music. 

Patti Smith’s Gone Again is a musical letter of the sort that seldom gets released in the musical marketplace, mainly because it concerns itself with the aforementioned “bad news.” Death inhabits the album, raises its impressive lizard-like head throughout, but is held at bay by Smith and her stalwart band of rock & roll argonauts. This may be Smith’s show, but it’s Death’s dance, it’s Death (this time, at least) making her sing. To wit:

• March, 1989: Robert Mapplethorpe, for whom Smith had been lover and muse, dies a very public AIDS-induced death. 
• June, 1990: Original Patti Smith Group keyboardist Richard Sohl dies of a heart attack on Long Island. He was 37. 
• April, 1994: Fred and Patti Smith weep at the news that Kurt Cobain has committed suicide. Old enough to be the Nirvana leader’s parents, they adored his music. 
• November, 1994: Smith’s husband Fred dies of a heart attack.
• December, 1994: A month later, Smith’s beloved brother Todd, in whose face Sid Vicious once smashed a glass, dies of a heart attack. 

All things considered, how could Gone Again be about anything but death? 

The fine album reunites Smith not only with her two bandmates of old, guitarist Lenny Kaye and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, but also features Television guitar virtuoso Tom Verlaine, ex-Velvet Underground founding member John Cale (who’d produced Smith’s debut album Horses in 1975) on organ, Tony Shanahan on bass, and Smith’s sister Kimberly (immortalized in song on that debut album) on mandolin. 

The tone of Gone Again tends more toward the stately than the raucous, though the latter certainly finds its moments. There is a transcendent, mantra-like quality to some of the songs; the overall effect meditative. But within the music’s self-imposed aural constraints a shitstorm brews, blowing in a full-force gale capable of taking out everything in its wake, as in the wash of droning electric guitar that becomes a tidal wave in the Cobain tribute, “About a Boy.” 

The title cut is Native American in its rhythms, with Smith coming on like the “crazy and sleepy Comanche” she declared herself to be so many years before in “Babelogue.” “Dead to the World” is a folksy, whimsical, Dylan-influenced death dream, proving that she isn’t blind to the humor inherent in the subject matter she’s grappling with. And, in a nod to Dylan himself, with whom she toured when she returned to the stage in December of 1995, she delivers a ballsy rendition of his angry anthem, “Wicked Messenger.” 

But best of all there is “Summer Cannibals,” the album’s first single. With Daugherty’s sinew-snapping drumsticks and Kaye’s guitar lines shooting like spears around her, Smith erases any notion that eight years have passed since we last heard from her. Like a little girl reciting a jaunty, macabre nursery rhyme, she sings: 

and I laid upon the table 
another piece of meat 
and I opened up my veins to them 
and said, “come on, eat” 

The anger. The joy. The sense of humor, funny and transcendent. Everything about the song, from her oh-so-perfect pronunciation to her guttural, Linda Blair-way of saying eat, makes it one of her best songs ever. 

And if, at the time, the album as a whole struck us as something less than we’d hoped for — too subdued or contemplative in spots — perhaps we should have questioned whether it was our own expectations that were out of whack. In Smith’s absence, the value of her musical legacy, especially in light of the overdue artistic and commercial vindication of punk rock, had increased many-fold. 

Let’s face it: If Jesus Christ had come down off the cross, JD Salinger had written another book, and Hillary Clinton had come clean about something going on back then called “Whitewater” — it still wouldn’t have been enough. We Americans, like Smith’s own “Summer Cannibals,” are insatiable in our wants.