The Who’s Tommy

April 9, 2026 //
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When I lived in that commune in Marin back in the 70s, we had a deck where we did aerobics. My clearest musical memory of that deck is of running in place and listening to the soundtrack to Tommy which we had on a reel-to-reel tape, for some reason. I don’t recall that we had any other tapes to play on that machine. (I also recall that that tape broke and someone spliced it.) My clearest song memories are of Elton John’s Pinball Wizard and Tina Turner’s Acid Queen. Oddly not Clapton’s recording of Eyesight to the Blind (the album’s only cover, though other Mose Allison songs were in the running, according to the Pinball Wizard episode (part 1 of 2, here, though the investigation of Tommy itself is in part 2) of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs – the impetus for this blog entry) or several other memorable tracks. I’m sure Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ernie affected me given my own experience of abuse at Synanon and were worthwhile things to excise from my brain until later.

The key thing is that here was one of my formative experiences of rock and roll. We listened to a lot of music in the commune, but my other memories are of the MOR stylings of San Francisco’s KFRC, the only good station we could get in that far north. Silly Love Songs, Boz Scaggs’ Lowdown and Lido Shuffle, Love Will Keep Us Together, Knowing Me Knowing You, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart were all in heavy rotation in the year before I left in the Fall of ‘77. None of these had the sheer force of The Who’s music, even in the weird forms it took on the film soundtrack. I’d have the LP later on, and the original Who album as well. The original rock opera never grabbed me in the same way, though Daltrey’s rendition of Acid Queen certainly made its own impression.

I’m sure I’ve seen the movie all the way through at least once, maybe twice. All Ken Russell movies are strange, but the 70s stuff is out of this world. (Noting that his Altered States [1980] is one of my all time faves.) That said, watching a few clips on YouTube is enough to assure me I don’t really need to watch it again. In addition there are a dozen or so recordings of The Who performing Tommy in its entirety – this started no longer after their LP was released and continued through most of their subsequent tours, it seems. In general, I’m more interested in how they handle their other songs live than these. There was also a stage musical that I’ve never checked out either. That said, I’m now downloading the soundtrack and the original album.

Weirdly, my current book club reading is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union which has an interesting plot point about a possible messiah that speaks in an odd way to Tommy’s own messianic aspect.

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Categories 70s, Fiction, movies, Music, Podcasts, Rock, rock and roll, Writing, yiddish

Books 2026

March 29, 2026 //
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Trying to keep on top of my reading for you, my dear readers, and not have to scramble to post everything at the end of the year.

January

Becky Chambers – A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Jose Saramago – The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Weird and deep and thick – read it hot on the heels of The Alchemist and that was a strange combo. A great read if you’re well versed in the gospels but can deal with what is often considered blasphemy by the faithful.)

Hedda Beekman – Simone op de Schaats (Charming little Dutch story of a teenage girl who helps a friend who lost use of her legs to enjoy the ice. About my level of Dutch comprehension.)

Herman Melville – Moby-Dick (A reread inspired by a Bluesky group under the hashtag #AMonthOfDick. Always a joy. Not just 101 Uses for a Dead Whale.)

February

Becky Chambers – A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Chambers does it again with this two-part look at what the world could be like if we do it right. She recognizes that we have to fuck it all up entirely before we can get there. And we seem to be doing that sooner rather than later.)

Chloe Dalton – Raising Hare (Enjoyable story of a woman who discovers a baby hare in the snow at the start of Covid and learns to raise it and look after its offspring as well, learning lessons of ecology and history along the way.

March

Ocean Vuong – On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (Very good and also sort of niche queer literary fiction.)

Catherynne Valente – Space Oddity (Sequel to Space Opera and also really good. She’s up-front that what she’s created is the intersection of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Eurovision Song Contest. What is amazing is that she’s made it work. Beautifully.)

Robert C. O’Brien – Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Hadn’t read this since I was about 11. Someone on the socials mentioned it and I wanted to read it again. Still good.)

Ian McEwan – What We Can Know (My first McEwan and I don’t know if his focus on the ins and outs of academia and literary research is just in this volume or if it’s a thing with him. That said, I loved how the second half answers almost all of the questions of the first and how the answer to the book’s central mystery isn’t answered until literally the last page.

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Categories books, Literature

Unrankable albums?

March 29, 2026 //
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Okay, one of my regular podcasts is We Will Rank You (youtube link) in which several friends from southern California rank the songs on albums from bottom to top. Some episodes they go through the whole album, sometimes they discuss their top 5 songs. One of the reasons I enjoy it is that the hosts are only a few years younger than I am and often my tastes and theirs align.

In the most recent episode (The Pixies’ Doolittle), one of the guys asked: Are there any unrankable albums – albums in which there are no duff songs. Great question. Before they moved on, Radiohead’s OK Computer was offered. Yeah, possibly. In my Radiohead canon, The Bends and In Rainbows are better, but that’s a discussion for another day. What’s the first album that comes to mind for you, dear reader? My brain goes to David Bowie first, as always. Are there albums of his that are so perfect that no song ranks lower than any other? The run from StationToStation (1976) through Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) fulfills this for me, but what about 1975’s Young Americans (7 days out of 10, my favourite DB album)?

Clocking in at 8 tracks and 41 minutes, it is almost unrankable. The title track comes in first. From Andy Newmark’s drum riff and Mike Garson’s piano trill, it’s a perfect song. From Win (track 2) through to Fame (track 8, a John Lennon cowrite and Bowie’s first #1 US hit) there are no missteps. Except for a very strange cover of the Beatles’ Across the Universe. It’s possible that even in the Beatles’ canon that song is a misstep. Fight me.

The folks on We Will Rank You talk about ‘the line’ by which they mean, how many of these songs are absolutely necessary. Obviously for me with this album, the line is 7. When Bowie came to make his next album, 1976’s Station To Station, he only included six songs. And for that album , my line is also 6. (Weirdly, the title track, which clocks in at just over 10 minutes, is actually three songs stitched together, but the whole thing works perfectly as one track.)

Categories Writing

Austen Books

January 4, 2026 //
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No, not books by Jane Austen, though Jeffrey Larkin named his bookstore on Haight Street after Jane, his favourite author. When I shopped and worked at Austen, Jeffrey had two employees in the book shop and three more who ran a novelty shop down the street called Forma. One of the bookstore employees got in a motorcycle accident and I covered shifts for him in ‘91 and ‘92. Austen sold mostly used books, and a small selection of new books. Always fun. We all smoked at the time and smoked in the store, because we still could. We drank coffee that we bought from a shop across the street (Jeffrey taught me to drink mine without sugar because it brought out the bitterness in the coffee) and listened to a lot of Nina Simone and Nick Cave. (A lot of jazz, and blues, and the only music that was off-limits was anything related to the Grateful Dead. It was Haight Street and the element the Dead would bring into the shop was not desirable. We didn’t play any punk either, just because it wasn’t conducive to looking at books.)

I remember in winter, Jeffrey made sure customers took off their gloves to look at the books because ‘it’s impossible to look at a book carefully with gloves on.’ I still think of that when I go into a shop from the cold. And that he didn’t have to ask people of a certain age because they knew better.

Jeffrey died of a heart attack at age 51 or so in 1994. He was gay, but had been mostly celibate since his friends started dying of AIDS. I still dream of Austen Books and Jeffrey about once a year. The sublunary version of Austen was a narrow one-room affair (not counting store room and bathroom) of probably 800 square feet. He and a friend built the floor to ceiling shelves that ran the length of the store on both sides. The dream version of the store tends to be much larger – two rooms at least, with tables full of books as well as much lower shelves. High windows sometimes let in light from outside, and the hues tend to the lavender. It’s always good to talk a little with Jeffrey in these dreams.

Last night I dreamed of the shop again, but a young couple owns it now. They said that Jeffrey had moved on. I woke feeling very strangely about that. Insofar as I believe something of us lives on after we die, I hope that Jeffrey has reached a place that he wants to be.

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Categories 90s, books

Books 2025

January 4, 2026 //
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I’m usually more on top of tracking my books in Goodreads – just didn’t this year until I noticed a couple of hours ago that I’d recorded two for 2025. Busily added the rest that I’d read/listened to as noted in my journals. Grand total (I think) of 31.

Dutch:
I’ve started reading Dutch kids books that I find in Little Free Libraries. It’s helping a little bit. I’d do myself a greater favour by reading the kranten (newspapers – I learned yesterday the root of this word is ‘courant’ a French term for newspaper also used in English). Anyway:

Wipneus en Pim bij de Trappertjes by B.G. Van Wijckmade

Lotje Met Chimp naar het Circus by Jaap ter Haar

Audio:

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan (highly recommended – fascinating stuff)

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

To Hell With Poverty by Jon King (narrated by the author, a history of the initial run of the band Gang of Four. Andy Gill had passed away before its publication, so can’t argue with King’s general assessment that he was a serious expletivedeleted.)

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang (depressing insofar as the inherent sexism of the Valley hasn’t changed in 40 years and it’s only getting worse. But a great piece of reporting.)

Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters by Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn.

Speaking My Mind by Leo Varadkar (Very interesting, but I fear he’s too protective of his own [well-earned, don’t get me wrong] legacy. He could have taken more risks with it. Also: before reading, bone up on the main Irish political parties. He writes for an audience that knows one from another.)

Head On by John Scalzi

Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri

Other stuff:
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis (This is an early 19th C. Brazilian classic read by just about every high school student there – it was recommended to my office book club by a Brazilian colleague. I quite enjoyed it, but what I really wanted to talk about in our discussion of it is how it’s informed by Vita Nuova (see above), Tristram Shandy, and Candide. Which no one else in the group had read. I doubt I’ll make the time to write the essay that ties them all together, but I want to.)

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Light slightly fantastical reading that I enjoyed. Read it for both the office book club and the local expat book club this year.)

Nana and Luna by Delacorta (same main characters as Diva – light reading if you can ignore the 14 year old protagonist’s highly sexualised presentation. The 80s were a different time.)

Guards, Guards by Terry Pratchett (Classic Pratchett.

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis (expat book club entry – interesting but ultimately depressing to me. As a new dog owner, I found the deaths of dogs hard to take.)

The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar (Gorgeous. Highly recommended.)

The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred Year Old Man by Jonas Jonasson. (If you enjoyed the first one, you’ll enjoy this one too.)

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Moreno-Garcia is an excellent writer and this one’s a treat – super-creepy mid-20th century set take on the old gothic novel, with nods to The Yellow Wallpaper.)

The Planets by Andrew Cohen and Brian Cox (Gorgeous tour of the solar system with the depressing notation that the likelihood of other planets like Earth in our galactic neighborhood is very slim.)

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (I enjoyed this one and am likely to check out more – pretty sure I have Daisy Jones and the Six in my TBR. Hugo is an actress from the golden age of Hollywood who contracts a writer for a Vanity Fair-like mag to write her life story. With twists.)

The Fisherman by John Langan (Recommended by my friend Matt, this was a doozy. I don’t do horror, generally, but I was intrigued by his description of it being stories within stories. Langan was meticulous in his construction of this tale. I’m going to read more by him, but this is his only novel. Several short story collections await.

Patti Smith – Just Kids (reread for expat book club – so good, but so sad. While I’m well familiar with the setting and the people Smith talks about, the Dutch members of the club – not entirely expat, come to think of it – and the 28 year-old Ukrainian woman found the name-dropping a little hard going.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick (It’s PKD – if it weren’t weird, you’d be surprised.)

Strange Angels by Andrea Speed (sweet queer fantasy of competition between gods among other things.)

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Gorgeous and winding and it helps to create a family tree in the first chapters so you know what’s going on later. Very sad but so well done. Roy definitely earned her Booker with this one.)

Unleashed by Emily Kimelman (Sydney Rye Mysteries #1) (Beginner detective takes on the powerful of NYC with the help of a fantastic dog. #2, Death in the Dark, is a novella. I’ve got #3, Insatiable, queued up.)

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands-set novel of a trio of siblings and the strange history of the house their parents bought after WW2. Also: The best-written sex I’ve come across in ages. Some, but not all, members of the office book club were put off.)

James by Percival Everett (I enjoyed this retelling of the Huck Finn story from Jim’s perspective. A Pulitzer Prize in literature is usually a mark of quality. Amusingly, the woman at Marcus Books in Oakland who sold it to me said that she’d read several other works by Everett and didn’t think this was close to his best.)

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (I missed this when it was in competition with Grisham’s The Firm for the book everyone on Muni was reading, and I think it would have served me better had I read it at 25 or so, but I enjoyed it. Very strange to read a tale of a shepherd boy in search of Truth just before picking up my current reading, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago.)

Categories audiobooks, books, Fiction, Literature
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