Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays, many of which are justifiably famous, by Joan Didion, oft considered the greatest essayist writing today. Generally that’s how the book is sold and, truthfully speaking, the pieces here give support to the claims. Since most of the essays were written to capture timely events thirty odd years ago the occurrences are dated, so the big reason to pick up Slouching Towards Bethlehem is its reputation and Didion’s skill.

Didion writes like Ernest Hemingway, another renowned essayist, her sentences simple and perfect. While Slouching Towards Bethlehem didn’t stylistically knock me flat the way Moveable Feast did, it’s both a joyful and instructional read. As an unprofessional writer I appreciate the incredible skill that goes into crafting each and every line Didion writes. As a reader, I appreciate the clarity and magnetism of each essay.

Yet, despite my marveling at Didion’s work, I never really engaged with the book fully. I enjoyed it, am glad I read it, and would recommend it freely, but it was always separate to me, never a part of me the way, to return to a previous comparison, Moveable Feast was. I cannot identify with Didion. There’s something about her which keeps the book out of reach.

Thematically we’re simpatico. Much of Slouching Towards Bethlehem deals with the failing of the American Dream. The question of what you do when life doesn’t turn out as Madison Avenue promised has long fascinated me. Do you keep buying in, more and more desperately (“Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”)? Do you try a different path (“Where The Kissing Never Stops”)? Do you drop out entirely (“Slouching Towards Bethlehem”)? What happens when you realize the central tenet to society as you know it is at best unsustainable, at worst a total sham?

Didion doesn’t provide any answers to these questions – in fact she really can’t since the answer is unique to each individual, dependent on personal strategies to deal with the unwinding knots. What Didion does do is give several snapshots of people in the process of making their decisions, proving everyone is fascinating in their own methods.

[Buy It.]

I came into Rings skeptical of its staying power, a perception built over several failed attempts to educate myself on reggae. The lack of success in these endeavors leaves me unsophisticated enough to know if Sean Bones plays quality reggae or not. I do know I enjoy it.

Genre conventions are mixed with indie scene lyrics (you’ll find no protest songs here). The tracks are kept simple and interesting, no mean feat in a genre easily ruined by overplaying. Rings falls off in the second half, “Smoke Rings” being the only standout, leaving me with that familiar suspicion this album will get a lot of play in the dying summer months then be relegated by Smart Playlist to Summer 2010.

Recommended Tracks: Act So Casual, Smoke Rings

Luxury Wafers has a great session with Sean Bones here.

You can buy Rings at Amazon and eMusic.

“Act So Casual” live at Piano’s in New York, NY on 5/6/09:

Like most sampler albums, it’s a grab bag, using bigger names (Bad Religion, NOFX) as incentive to try newer artists.

Despite my punk roots, a lot of this just feels too young for me, having already gone through the stage bands like Sing It Loud and All Time Low inhabit. The target audience for this is junior high girls, which I don’t mean as an insult (Green Day has done some great work aimed at this exact demographic). For more adult listeners Cash Cash mines the Daft Punk sound with “Party In Your Bedroom” and Westbound Train pulls some reggae out with “Check Your Time,” but both end up sounding rote.

The big guns split results. NOFX’s “Creeping Out Sara,” a recount of meeting Tegan and Sara‘s Sara (or was it Tegan) at music festival, is predictably hilarious (“I told her I was a big fan of her band, she asked me if I had a favorite song, I admitted I’d never actually heard them but I liked k.d. lang”) but an acoustic version of Bad Religion’s “Sorrow” unfortunately doesn’t work as well as the impactful electric version on The Process of Belief. The only keeper for me was Jeffree Star‘s “Prisoner,” an electro rock stomper with a catchy club feel.

Recommended Tracks: “Prisoner” by Jeffree Star, “Creeping Out Sara” by NOFX

You can download it free through iTunes using this redeem code.

Cooke comes from the Bruce Timm school of art. His drawing has an animation feel, brush stroke lines, and backgrounds are suggested rather than rendered in minute detail. His page composition is superb, bring a cinematic feel.

Ego & Other Tails is a collection of six stories (only four of which have Cooke’s art), but a mere two of these are worth discussing herein. The first, “Ego,” is a Batman story. It sometimes seems everyone who writes a Batman comic starts with a psychological analysis story. Cooke pulls it off better than most, seeing Batman as a manifestation of “make your weakness your weapon” strategy. Though, with neither a shift in the character’s thinking or groundbreaking presentation, this comes off as just a reaffirmation of purpose. Which, in reader terms, equals “yawn.”

Two things Cooke does best is Catwoman and noir, so the big treat of this book is “Selina’s Big Score,” a Catwoman story without the Catwoman costume. It’s a heist story done straight noir, with all the themes of desire leading to destruction. Really it’s the only compelling reason to own Ego & Other Tails, but this story is also available in trade paperback by itself (including a gallery of covers and pinups), so nothing new is being offered here. However, since the Selina’s Big Score trade is out of print, you can save some hassle, buy Ego & Other Tails, and just ignore the deadwood.

You can buy Batman: Ego and Other Tails on Amazon.

There’s a surplus of titles available that I’ll hopefully get around to reading.  For no particular reason whatsoever, I started with I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy, which you can download it for free here.  (For citation purists, yes I know you underline book titles but on teh intertubes it makes it look like a link so I’m making a stylistic choice of using italics instead).

The book follows Ralph Carston, a handsome young man from Georgia who’s gone to Hollywood to make it big in movies. He and roommate Mona Matthews work as extras, barely scraping by, when a courtroom fracas by Mona gives them a flash of notoriety. This leads to a swank Hollywood party and an introduction to Ethel Smithers, a rich older woman with a less than pure interest in Carston.

We’ll go ahead and stick a big ol’ SPOILER WARNING on the discussion from here on in case we have some readers hesitant about learning too much.

The primary thread, of course, follows Carston’s descent into depravity.  Or it should, but I can’t get myself too worked up over the author’s definition of what depravity is.  True Carston loses his virginity to the elderly Smithers as part of an unspoken trade for her influence, but his commitment to sacrifice his soul for his desires, the hallmark of a noir book, is, at best, wishy-washy.  He comes and goes from the Smithers house indecisively, hardly the passionate commitment to destruction a noir lead normally displays.  Instead, he ends up a struggling actor who gets to meet lots of powers-that-be, come and go as he pleases, and has to endure some unpleasant company.  That sounds like a better than average Hollywood job.  Sure he has a bad first sexual experience but that was probably the case for all his friends back home too.

The hard-edged writing style gives the book a noir feel but I don’t find the characters as broken at the end as the genre usually leaves matters. While they undergo the losing of morals, idealism, and integrity, the ending situation is a mixed bag, with Mona pulling out of the tailspin to presumably live a decent (if somewhat defeated) married life. Carston appears set to continue his try for stardom, albeit with a more cynical (some would say realist) view. There’s an inevitability of failure in the air but the consequences are not damning – the worst we think that can happen is Carston goes back home to Georgia.

More telling is how success is portrayed. The successful characters are so because they prey on others perceptions. There’s the hack writer who acts outlandishly, making others conclude he must be a genius and therefore a fabulous writer. There’s the actress skinny dipping at a Hollywood party, who admits to Carston she doesn’t like doing these things but it’s how she stays successful. Ethel Smithers achieves her success with young men by giving the image she can help them achieve stardom, although Carston’s experience with her “contacts” proves continually unsuccessful. In other words, it’s all a game, and the characters who can best deny who they are in truth are the ones that win.

There are some digs at the manufactured Hollywood image of “anybody can make it!” that still read fresh today, but a lot of Cranston’s loss of idealism is similar to what any college student entering the working world finds. Hollywood may have been a precursor to the view that “your employer’s interest in you extends only so far as you remain profitable to them,” but that attitude has seeped so fully into all areas of industry today that the reader tends to side with the machine over Cranston because he’s so, in our modern view, naive and simple headed. This reality is perhaps more noir than the author truly expected us to turn out, but you adapt to the world you’re given or you end up like Cranston, playing by the rules of the dream rather than the rules of the actual game.