James Church: A Corpse in the Koryo (2006)

The Tanuki is focused exclusively on Japan now, but it so happens that as an undergrad he was a Japan/Asian Studies double major. Never studied Chinese or Korean language, but took his share of classes about them. Was firmly committed to trans-regionalism.

One of the most interesting classes he took was one on Korean politics. This was fascinating for a number of reasons. First there was the savory weirdness of being the only Japanophile in the room: the rest of the class was Koreanists. Americans who study Asian languages and cultures tend to internalize the prejudices of the culture we study, meaning I was getting cold stares from all these white Korean-studies kids for having the temerity to study Japan - didn't I know what Japan had done to Korea? Weird...

But that was the least of it. The instructor was the real trip. He was not an academic, but a recently-retired government guy (I forget which branch) who had spent most of his career observing North Korea professionally. So part of the time he'd lecture on orthodox topics, South Korea over the most recent couple of decades, its transition to full-fledged democracy, and how that democracy worked and didn't work - this would have been 1995 or 1996.

And part of the time he'd bring in printouts of the latest State (I think) Department updates on the situation in North Korea, presumably nothing too secret but definitely more detailed than what CNN was feeding us (and this was back when CNN actually tried to report news). And then tell us What It All Meant. Like, the fact that this particular military unit had been spotted moving around up by the Chinese border probably meant that thus and such a faction's fortunes were on the rise, or the fact that the regime was admitting to X amount of crop failures probably meant that the actual failures were 3X. He had old Kim Jong Il's number, it sounded like. Again, this was '95 or '96, the height of the famine, but very little news was getting out. Based on what he was telling us (and he had this very intense, knowing, worldly air about him, almost as good as Donald Sutherland in JFK), we were all sure that the regime was going to fall by the time finals rolled around, and we were going to have a front-row seat for it, as it were.

Wrong.

*

James Church's A Corpse in the Koryo is a thriller set in North Korea. It was evidently quite widely written up when it appeared way, way back in '06, but I missed it; really, though, what more do you need to know than that it's a thriller set in North Korea? Can it get more intriguing?

Assuming that "Church" is better informed than the guy the Tanuki studied with, this is an amazing portrait of that country. He succeeds in humanizing his characters, without either downplaying the oppressiveness of the system they live under or resorting to making any of them martyrs for a resistance movement. That would have been easy; instead, he gives us people who have their grievances against their government, and sometimes yearn to be elsewhere, but still recognize North Korea as their home. I say he humanizes the North Koreans, and really I think that's the book's greatest accomplishment. The Kim dynasty have been such cartoonish dictators, and the Arirang Festival is such a bizarre and creepy spectacle, that in a world of unfathomable complexity the temptation to seize on North Korea as a simple enemy has been basically irresistible. People talking about mass insanity and stuff like that. Right. That's not what Church gives us. He gives us ordinary people living under pressures most of us can barely imagine, and then acting pretty much like we would.

Empathy is still the hardest thing to achieve.

As a thriller, it's pretty good. It doesn't really give you the standard thrill of putting together a puzzle as a case is gradually, or even suddenly solved - most of the time we're in the dark, right along with the protagonist Inspector O (that's not an initial: that's his name). It's more spy novel than crime novel, really; it's all about how people protect themselves in a situation where nobody can be trusted. O's paradox - how to solve crimes in a climate where knowing anything, learning anything, can potentially damn you - is one I found moving.

Tea. Church takes a page out of somebody's textbook on how to construct a thriller and gives his character a mundane want that is never fulfilled. O wants a cup of tea, and spends the whole book looking for one. As a ploy for constructing suspense and revealing character it does feel a little mechanical, but it is effective, and the choice of tea as the elusive object of desire is a good one: tea being so abundant in East Asia, its scarcity in O's North Korea is particularly resonant.

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Turns out there's a minor, possibly abortive, attempt at an Internete meme surrounding Pyongyang's traffic girls. Sign me up. They're very cute.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)

I just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995). I started it just after finishing Oliver Twist - that's how long I've been struggling to get through it. This is a bad, bad book.

I'm not absolutely positive I get everything he's trying to do - I'll admit that right up front. It seems to me that he's trying to craft some sort of existentialist fable in a surrealistic mode, using dream logic and absurdist machinery. The Kafka homage is clear: the unnamed Central European setting, the hints of totalitarianism, the characters' tendency to babble.

But whereas in Kafka this sort of thing creates unbearable tension broken only by wicked, knowing humor, here everything falls flat. What should be funny is just maddening. What should be resonant is just trivial. I kept remembering Wyndham Lewis's famous dis of Gertrude Stein: "Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along." That's this book: thick, slow, dreary, boring, and endless.

That's all I have to say about the book, really. It didn't do it for me. But you may wish to read reviews by people who liked the book. This reviewer posits a reading that might cause the book to make a certain amount of sense; I didn't see much internal evidence to support the reading, and even if it's true, it doesn't make the book any less atrociously boring, but it's a nice try. This reviewer gushes. Not much one can say in response. Glad he liked it.

Walter Wanderley: Talkin' Verve (1998)

Walter Wanderley gets no respect. First of all there's the indignity that nobody's ever heard of him. Then there's the fact that he has a nerdy name (so does the Tanuki: this is the face of commiseration), and looked like he should have been managing the men's wear department at a small department store in the mid-Atlantic region. He was a bossa nova star in Brazil who came, like many others, to the US to capitalize on the craze here, but he arrived a little too late to really enjoy it. And his instrument - the organ - doesn't immediately spring to mind when you think of bossa nova. As the liner notes, by John Corbett again, say, the combination conjures up images of "demented Wurlitzer salesmen and a frustrated roller-rink operator or two."

That's how you know Walter Wanderley gets no respect: in the late '90s the guy is starting to get enough attention from club-music outfits and whatnot that his label, Verve, decides to devote a volume of the Talkin' Verve series to him (1998). But they're embarrassed enough about it to feel like they have to present him ironically - look at that stack of sliced American sandwich cheese on that cover. "Cool and refreshing!" Yeah? If I were to attempt to decode this, to recreate the thinking behind it, I might come up with something like this: "Yeah, Creed Taylor signed this guy, but the label never gave him the big push, and, well, I don't know jazz, but isn't Jimmy Smith the jazz organ player, and we already have him, but then again the cool kids seem to be interested in this guy for some reason, but you know, they're kids, it's probably just a goof, but still, maybe there's a buck to be made there, but only if we let them know we're in on the joke - I know, let's put cheese on the cover. 'Cause, you know, he's kind of cheesy, but we know that, so it's okay."

Does that make it okay? I dunno. All I know is that Corbett spends his whole essay trying to hit the sweet spot of youthful irony while simultaneously letting any serious jazz fans who might be reading know that he's not fooled, he doesn't take Wanderley seriously.

But I do. And I don't know jazz, but I know a distinctive sound, a complex emotional approach, a sharp sense of syncopation, a crack rhythm section, and a vervacious take on melody when I hear it. And that's what I hear here, and I would have welcomed an attempt to teach me a little more about where that comes from and what it means. While I'm snapping my fingers and smiling a goofy smile because it's all so nerdy and unexpectedly fun.

I keep harping on the liner notes to this series. It's not that I'm looking to be told what to like and why: I trust my own taste. But I don't trust my own knowledge: or rather, I trust that it's limited, and can be improved, particularly in the area of jazz and contingent musics, and in fact I welcome instruction there.

...You'd never mistake Wanderley for Jimmy Smith. Smith's organ purrs like a cat. Wanderley's sound is more twisted than that. I don't know what he did to his rig, but each note punches and then quickly dissipates into a haze of colored light, like a puff of dry ice. And it's true, the cumbersome mechanical nature of the organ makes it an unlikely bossa instrument - it kind of lumbers where the acoustic guitar can skip and dance - but Wanderley makes that work for him. He plays with determined agility, and a wholly fresh sense of the rhythmic role of keyboard chords, and he makes that dry ice punch sound really...funky is the only word. Like, heaviness plus tricky rhythmic exactitude equals something Fred Wesley might have appreciated.

There's something here. Check him out with Astrud on "Tristeza." Kicking back on "Music To Watch Girls By." Twizzling the perfect melancholy sunset sailboat bossa with Luiz Henrique on "Blue Island."

I need a new word. Kitsch doesn't cut it: it implies that it's not worth liking, no matter that you like it. Whereas I tend to think that if you like something, genuinely like it, that's kind of a clue that there's something there worth liking. Follow that, and it might lead you to interesting places.

Bill Wyman, but not that Bill Wyman, imagines Mick Jagger responding to Keith Richards

There's a rock journalist named Bill Wyman who's not, and I repeat not, the same person as the one-time Rolling Stones bassist. Over at Slate, he's written a piece on Keith Richards's memoir - you may have heard he published one. He does it from the coy perspective, fictionalized, of Mick Jagger stating his own case.

It's a little snarky about the Stones' later work, not to mention inaccurate (if they avoid their '80s albums in concert so assiduously then why were two songs from Undercover featured on Shine A Light?). But overall it's an excellent corrective to the Keef-mythologizing (which I love, by the way) that marks absolutely all writing on the Rolling Stones. Like, Keef may have been the genius in the Stones, but it fell to Mick to be the adult. What would you have done?

I won't even quote from it. It has to be read in its entirety.

Astrud Gilberto: Talkin' Verve (1997)

The killer track here is the opener, "Beginnings." Yes, that's a cover of the Chicago song. The first time through it, you'll think: this is shit, Astrud should not be covering Chicago, and this song should not be covered like this. The second time through it, you'll think: well, actually she may have a point there. The third time through it, you'll be in love. The arrangements are almost identical; the one Astrud uses is a little lighter, with a little more beach in the rhythm and a little less grease in the horns, but still it's mostly the same arrangement. And she sings the same melody: all she does is whisper it, rather than croon it like Robert Lamm. But that's all she needs to do. It's a prototypical case of less is more: by whispering that gorgeous melody, she makes it even more powerful, even more seductive. Chicago's "Beginnings" gets you up and dancing; Astrud's sends you flying.

I've loved Astrud's voice for years and years, placing her at or near the top of any barroom discussions of sexiest female singers. But my opinion of her was entirely based on her work with Stan Getz: Getz/Gilberto, sure, but more than that Getz/Gilberto #2 and Getz Au Go Go (I've always maintained that the definitive version of "The Girl From Ipanema" isn't the original, but the live version from #2). I'd always avoided Astrud's solo work for Verve, as I'd read that it was lame.

How wrong I was, if this disc is a fair sampling. And it may not be: this disc concentrates on her later Verve recordings, from 1966 to 1970, avoiding her immediate post-Getz work. Whatever: what's here is really really nice. A lot of bossa nova, to be sure, much of it in lush orchestrations by Gil Evans (tending to the moody: "Berimbau") or Eumir Deodato. But a lot is straight pop: covers of Chicago, the Bee Gees, Nilsson, Petula Clark, the Association. All is interesting, and at best beguiling: "Crickets Sing For Anamaria," "Maria Quiet," "So Nice (Summer Samba)" with the limpid accompaniment of Walter Wanderley...

Talkin' Verve With A Twist (1997)

Another one of those themed multiartist Verve compilations: Talkin' Verve With A Twist, 1997. The theme of this one seems to be lounge jazz, as was popular back at the turn of the century. Oh, we Gen X-ers do love our irony.

Like the Cool volume, Verve's compilers seem to have felt it necessary to dip into their non-Verve-proper holdings to make this work. About half of everything here was originally released on Mercury, Metro, MGM, or Fontana. I don't know enough to know if that means anything, except that perhaps Verve's releases in the '60s, while working - pioneering? - the same pop-jazz territory, still had more jazz cred than these other labels' offerings. I dunno.

In any case, these are pretty straight pop, with enough horns to fool you for a moment or two, but usually no real improvisation. So it's as pop that most of it has to be judged. Some of it is okay: the Xavier Cugat numbers are pleasant, Art Heatlie and the Electric Saxophone's take on "Peter Gunn" is fun, Willie Bobo's "It's Not Unusual" is as awesome as you think it will be. And some of it is dire: poor Stan Getz tootling through "Marrakesh Express," Blossom Dearie embarrassing all within hearing with "Blossom's Blues" - I feel like I need to add a few extra sets of quotation marks to that last one just to distance myself from any assumption that I might accept it as a blues...

Quotation marks. The liner notes, by John Corbett this time, are a doozy, imagining a turn-of-the-century hipster drinking cocktails and reading Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp."
Literally - that's the conceit. It's a valiant try, but in the end it just makes my head hurt. I'm of the generation raised on camp and irony, so that I, like I suspect most of the people I know, sometimes can't figure out whether I really like something or just "like" it, or whether there's any difference at all... But Sontag's essay has never proved particularly helpful to me in sorting through these issues, and Corbett's, while kind of entertaining, just feels weird. Like, does he think this music is worth re-releasing or not? Does it have any musical value, anything to offer that's worth taking out of the quotation marks? I can't tell from his essay. Maybe he assumed none of his readers would care. But I do.

Bob Dylan In Concert Brandeis University 1963 (2010)

So there was a bonus disc that you got for pre-ordering the Witmark Demos. It's a partial but professional recording of a show at Brandeis University, 5/10/63. The tape hadn't been circulating - it was in the private collection of the late Ralph Gleason, and you can read about its discovery here - so this was real news to collectors.

It's short for a CD but almost forty minutes long - a vinyl album, if you remember those, and longtime Dylan fans know there was never a proper Dylan live album in the '60s, despite well-known plans for one. This would have done just fine: excellent sound, excellent performance. Somewhat odd setlist: it's strange that he's still performing "Talking Bear Mountain" this late, and even odder that he seems to be encoring with it. But it helps lighten the mood.

It needed it. One of the things this disc shows is how full of mood swings a Dylan show was during this period. Granted that this is a very incomplete picture of the night's proceedings, still it can give you whiplash, going from the goofy horniness of "Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance" to the sardonic satire of "Talkin' John Birch" to the wrist-slittingly depressing "Hollis Brown" and "Masters Of War." Then back to comedy with "Talkin' WWIII." Then contemplation with "Bob Dylan's Dream." I mean, this was some serious journey Dylan was asking his listeners to follow him on.

I'm glad we have this show. I'm glad Sony released it so promptly after discovering it. I'm glad I was fortunate enough to be able to preorder at the right time to get it.

Does that sound snarky? The whole bonus-disc concept rankles. It bugs me that this valuable document, this pleasurable listening experience, is not really available to anyone who wants it - just those who manage jump through the right hoops right now. What about that kid who gets turned onto Dylan next year, and obsessively sets out to collect it all? What does he do about this disc? I think about these things. That's why I'm a liberal. Sony, on the other hand, wants me to be a libertarian about it: I got mine, so fuck everybody else.

Side note: when I was growing up, the John Birch Society was nothing but a line you may or may not have read in a history textbook. It felt about as relevant to the world I knew as, say, the Whiskey Rebellion. Listening to it this morning on the way to work, I was amazed at how resonant it's become to me. Dismayed, too, of course...