Review: Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir by Mark Lanegan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In my after-college, semi-Bohemian days, my roommates and I used to be regulars at Chicago’s Lounge Ax. We’d be there for incredible shows in a room that held no more than 250 people, seeing shows sometimes with no more than 40 or 50 others.

If we were there early, the band would often be at the bar, and my roommate Bill had a knack for winding up next to semi-famous figures not saying much. Alex and Ray were better about initiating conversations. I was always the most star-struck, so when I jumped in it was usually with just a banal “that’s cool” so I could claim, with technical correctness, that I’d been part of the conversation.

That’s how we met Alex Chilton, the Rev. Horton Heat, and Rick Miller from Southern Culture on the Skids. The idea of it – a real rock star just spilling the shit! – sounds a lot better than it was. Chilton was just hitting on women a generation younger than he was. The Reverend was an agitated, aggressive guy even off stage. (Rick Miller was cool, though.)

I digress with such memories because reading this book feels like sitting at the bar next to someone on that order of cool. I confess I didn’t know Lanegan’s music – either solo or with The Screaming Trees – before reading this, and I still don’t know it well. But he was famous-proximate from his Seattle grunge days, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Again, better in concept than in fact.

Lanegan defines himself here – and I don’t know the alternative if there is one – as a hardcore junkie. He opens with a description of the day (or is it one of many?) when he got busted. He describes his descent into drugs, some music, occasional transactional sex, and more drugs.

This doesn’t open with a sense that he’s learned anything, and it doesn’t suggest along the way that he has either. He’s been through a lot, but we get it the way you might get it at the bar of the Lounge Ax, some touring musician running a hand through his grungy hair, pulling back on a cheap beer, and sighing out an “insider” story. “I was so high” or “I was too fucked up” or “I was thinking between my legs.” It’s a refrain, and it’s cool only from the outside.

Reading this, it’s not clear to me that Lanegan has learned anything. Props to his punk sensibility that he doesn’t give us much of the “and then I got clean” version – though there is a strange near-final religious epiphany that he describes without exploring.

Instead, we get everything in a kind of monotone, something I experienced first-hand since I listened to this one with him reading it. Most of his stories have a wistful, “I was dumb as shit” quality, a puzzled, almost bemused sense that he was there, that he didn’t return calls that would have used his music as the soundtrack for David O. Russell’s first film, that he neglected to call Kurt Cobain back during the binge in which he killed himself, that he chose drugs over one of about six different women who could have been “the one.”

A few have a vague cruelty to them, a taking pride in kicking the shit out of someone who deserved it or a not-quite-contrite description of how he belittled someone beneath him on the ladder of rock star fame.

Lanegan seems to be working toward honesty with this, but – outside of its slow-motion car wreck quality – it’s fairly closed. Without reflection, it feels something like a journal: Day One, I did these drugs, day two I did these other ones. Again, Lanegan seems to have learned almost nothing other than the fact that he’s somehow survived the wreckage around him. If he hasn’t learned anything, he doesn’t have anything to teach.

All of that’s compounded by amateurish writing. If I’d had the guy in a class, I’d push him on some of the sentence-crafting basics. He overuses adjectives, not just larding them on but allowing them to fill in for the substance of analysis. I honestly can’t tell one of the women he almost loves from another. They’re all ‘sensitive’ and ‘soul-tingling,’ but there’s little to distinguish them beyond the adjectives.

Anyway, I did finish this, and I’m glad for the glimpse at a scene that – in Nirvana and Pearl Jam at least – produced some music I very much admire. As for the rest, maybe the show will be good, but I’m getting tired of the conversation at the bar.


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Review: The Duke's Children

The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: The Last Smile in Sunder City

The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: Dogfight, A Love Story

Dogfight, A Love Story by Matt Burgess
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is written by the brother of a girlfriend of a friend of mine. That’s distant enough that I doubt I’ll ever meet the guy, but it does give me a sense that I could someday find myself in conversation with him. That’s enough to incline me toward this without biasing me in its favor.

And the truth is, I don’t need much biasing here. This has all sorts of ingredients I am prepped to love. Our protagonist is Alfredo, a generally sweet kid who just happens to sell a few drugs and beat up the occasional person. And, oh yeah, determine to arrange an underground dog fight where – if all goes according to the eventual plan – he’ll turn his newly paroled brother back into the police and double-cross everyone in the neighborhood on bets.

But it’s hard to hold larceny like that against a kid who seems the only one in his world capable of real love. He didn’t mean to court Isabel – she was his newly jailed brother’s girlfriend – but it just sort of happened. And he turns out, objectively, to be a much better boyfriend. He cares about her, looks after her. Even, stunningly, listens to her as a partner and fellow human. It’s easy to see why she prefers him to Tariq; for all of his innate screw-up qualities, he’s trying to be a good man.

I don’t think the version of Queens that we get here actually exists, but that’s OK with me. Instead, it’s a multi-ethnic fantasy where Latinos, African-Americans, Jews, and the occasional nondescript white cops all mingle. Everyone is after an edge of some kind, so everyone sort of tolerates everyone else as a way of making personal peace.

There’s a large shot of nostalgia shot things. Max Marshmallow is an old Jewish guy who’s bought a bodega, left it more or less the same, but insisted on calling it a “candy shop” after the institutions of his late 1950s youth. Mike Schiffren, a Russian immigrant and likely Jewish kid, has set up as the local drug lord, but he’s only mid-level. The cops range from lazily to mildly corrupt, but they have their ambition within the force. Everyone’s scrambling for a chance at something. Like the most compelling cities, whether naked or partly clothed, there are stories everywhere.

The good news is that Burgess generally tells those stories well. It may be a bit much to find that everything happens in the space of a day or so, but everything moves along easily and cleverly. Burgess is a strong, literate writer, and he fills us in with what we need as he goes along.

I get a little tired of some of the narrative gimmicks, though. Alfredo’s inner monologue is often colored by the metaphor of his private file cabinet of memories, hopes, and grievances. Isabel often finds herself in deep conversation with her unborn child. Tariq is always trying to determine what “the book” – the Koran – would tell him to do. While I like the characters, the tropes got old.

There’s also a strange and possibly clumsy afterword here, a final chapter that picks things up more than a year later and shows us Alfredo and Isabel in their new lives. It seems an acknowledgement that the first part ended without quite wrapping things up, but then it also seems to suggest we’ll get a full sequel.

Those are small points in the larger structure of a book that I mostly enjoyed. This may be dated now; a decade after Burgess wrote it, he’d likely find much less tolerance for the implicit cultural appropriation here. That saddens me some, though. This is ultimately a generous-spirited book, and I think it’s fantasy of different peoples coming into conflict is something work exploring.

The blurbs compare this work to Jonathan Lethem (one of my favorites) but I don’t quite see that. Instead, I think it’s more a next-generation Elmore Leonard – a book that fits real and feeling characters into a world so saturated with irony that they become all more memorable and poignant.


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Review: The Girls

The Girls by Emma Cline
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: When She Returned

When She Returned by Lucinda Berry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars



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Review: The Prime Minister

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Review: The Nix

The Nix by Nathan Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



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Thoughts after watching Across 110th Street

I’ve spent the last couple days mainlining African-American noir films that I might include in my upcoming first year seminar. I was disappointed in Deep Cover. I thought John Singleton’s Shaft (1990) started off well but then gut muddy. I thought the original Shaft had a terrific tone – which is meaningful in its own right – but that it lacked substance.

So, by the time I got to Across 110^th Street, I was pretty jaded. I wanted a movie that would frame noir as I continue to define it: a kind of applied ethics. That is, in a world where right and wrong cease to be clearly defined, the central question is how can we act for the good.

This film not only asks that, but it asks it from an almost dizzying range of perspectives. It’s hard to watch, hard for the provocative reason that it never lets us settle into any one character as our fixed point of view. Yaphet Kotto is absolutely compelling as a young, college-educated, African-American police lieutenant who wants to modernize policing. He has political backing as the investigation of several murdered gangsters – three black and three white – and two policemen threatens to roil Harlem. He’s against old-school rubber-hose tactics, but it’s clear he doesn’t entirely understand how business has always been done. He is right in wanting to use a lighter hand, but if he wants to solve the crime and perhaps forestall others’ deaths he’ll have to reconsider.

He plays opposite Anthony Quinn whom I haven’t seen on-screen in at least a decade. On the one hand, it’s striking to see how old-fashioned his grand gestures and over-the-top yelling can be. On the other, it still packs power. He plays an old-school Italian-American cop. He’s called a racist throughout, but I don’t know that that’s entirely true. Yes, he has trouble accepting Kotto’s character as his equal, and yes he has no trouble seeing some African-Americans as not-quite-human.

At the same time, he knows his community. There’s a powerful but passing moment early when, with half a neighborhood being held in police custody, a woman asks him to see what he can do for her husband. Quinn’s character knows immediately that the husband is innocent, knows that a by-the-book approach will insult the man and lead to potential trouble later. So he pulls rank and has the man released. Then, on a dime, he starts whomping on another man held at the same time. He may have racism in him, but he sees the people of his neighborhood as real and individual. He knows them, and Kotto can only look on with a great and understated bewilderment and envy. He’s also a corrupt cop, on the take from the African-American mob. He defends it by claiming he takes only gambling money, not drug or prostitution.

I expected the film to come down to a perverse buddy-cop experience with our sympathies going from one man to the other. As it turns out, though, the film is richer than that. We go long stretches without seeing either Kotto or Quinn and, instead, focus on some of the purportedly secondary characters. All of them come across as multi-dimensional, as confused people trying to do what they believe is the good.

There’s a mafioso, Nick D’Salvio, who’s clearly in over his head. He’s handsome and self-possessed, but he knows – and others taunt him – that he has his status because the “old man’s” daughter has married him. You don’t rise in a violent game because a woman takes a liking to you, so the unspoken thinking goes; therefore he must be soft.

In several of the early scenes, we see him happier when he’s at a family party or holding onto his kids. When he does punch someone, he looks at his bloody hands and shakes. It’s compelling; he doesn’t want to do what his role demands that he does. He thinks he is ‘doing right’ by fulfilling his father-in-law’s demands, but we can see the toll it takes on him. He becomes tougher and uglier. He ceases to be the man he was at the start.

There’s Richard Ward as Doc Johnson, the African-American boss of Harlem. (Interestingly, Shaft has a Bumpy Jones character in the same role. Both are clearly references to the real-life Bumpy Johnson.) He’s “the king” where he lives, but only because the Italians have backed him. He resents their condescension, and he chafes at the rules they expect him to play by. He has no problem having people killed, and he sells drugs as readily as he runs numbers, but he also has a cultural pride. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s “boy,” and – while I’ll have to watch it again to untangle some of the finer plot points – his betrayal of the Italians at the end allows the police to get to a hold-up-man on the run before the mafia, ultimately depriving them of $100k.

If there’s a standout performance in my book, though – and there are a lot to choose from – it’s Paul Benjamin as one of the hold-up guys. He carries whole scenes on his face, impassive except for a powerful quiver along his jaw. In rare unguarded moments, we see the innocence that might have been as he daydreams about living beside water so he can fish and garden. More often, though, he is as he tells his loving wife: a 42-year-old ex-con with a medical condition (epilepsy) who has no shot at a future…no shot except that, through a crazily fortunate turn of events, he’s managed to steal $100k in mafia money.

Just as the film never lets us settle into any one perspective, it does remarkable things with sound. The music by 1970s soul great Bobby Womack and 1950s jazz great J.J. Johnson is fabulous. But, as often as we get proto-Scorsese or Tarantino overdubs of it, we also get stretches of aching quiet. Director Barry Shear flat out gets it in the way the loud and the quiet call on us to switch perspective in that other fashion.

If all of that weren’t enough, this ends with a remarkable shocker. [SPOILER: DON’T READ THIS UNTIL YOU SEE THE FILM] As the climax arrives, with the two other hold-up men tortured to death, Benjamin’s character is on the run from the detectives and, though he’s less aware of it, Johnson’s soldiers. Fatally wounded, he tosses the money to the street below, where a bunch of schoolchildren realize what it is and disperse the money. Then, he turns his attention to the approaching Quinn and gets ready to fire.

Kotto stops him, firing the fatal bullets and saving Quinn. It’s a strange moment of affirmation, but it feels earned. Kotto has had to step outside his quiet impulses, and Quinn has had to acknowledge, fully acknowledge, his partner’s capacity.

Then, and this is the real [SPOILER:], the African-American gangsters shoot Quinn from another roof. I read it as their acting on orders from the Italians to kill a copy who, once on their payroll, has proven too independent. I want to look again, though, because it may also be Johnson’s men determined to strike a blow for racial justice of a kind.

In any case, as Quinn realizes what’s happened, realizes he’s been shot in the head and will die in moments, he grabs for Kotto’s hand. A bewildered Kotto grabs it, and the camera holds on their clasped hands. It almost feels like a glitch in the movie as things stop, jump a frame, and then freeze on a single instant of the two men having found common ground. The film moves forward another couple frames, enough for us to see the hands begin to come apart, but it ends with a still of the two still holding each other.

It’s such a rich image, one that seems both earned and fleeting, that’s haunted me in the ways that the best and most compelling films do.

There is, at last, no single right way to do right. It’s a complicated world, inflected by differences of race, wealth, and age. The film works, and works well, because it recognizes that complicated truth and then gives us so many excellent characters (and performances) to play it out across.