The Creatures – 02 – Feast

August 9, 2026 //
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After their initial EP Wild Things and the drug-infused LP A Kiss in the Dreamhouse, Sioux and Budgie decamped to Hawaii. Here the local instruments and culture infused the first full Creatures LP. This pattern would inform Boomerang,recorded in Spain and Hai recorded in Japan.

That said, in the several years since I last wrote up a Banshees album, I’ve not been able to write anything cohesive about this one. I’ve loved it for decades, especially Gecko and Dancing on Glass. But my usual track by track just never coalesced into a review.

The single, Miss the Girl (like The Normal’s Warm Leatherette), was inspired by JG Ballard’s Crash, but I was never grabbed by the A-side of the 12” I had. Their cover of Mel Torme’s Right Now on the B-side, however, ended up on many mix tapes.

I give it 3 1/2 stars and say ‘Check it out.’

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Categories 80s, Music

Blondie – Autoamerican

August 4, 2026 //
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Released: 1980
Produced by Mike Chapman

Side A:
Europa
Live It Up
Here’s Looking at You
The Tide Is High
Angels on the Balcony
Go Through It

Side B:
Do the Dark
Rapture
Faces
T-Birds
Walk Like Me
Follow Me

Autoamerican is probably my favourite Blondie album. I certainly played it the most, and I didn’t really keep up with them after. It’s my favourite despite the two inescapable singles. While The Tide is High and Rapture did boffo business (both hit #1 in the US), at least three other songs would have done well as singles (IMHO), T-Birds, Do the Dark, and Live It Up. (The previous two albums, Eat to the Beat and Parallel Lines had 10 singles released between them.) The crazy thing about Autoamerican is that it shouldn’t work, at all.

From the atmospherics of opener Europa, through some disco, some new wave, the reggae and hip hop of the two singles to Lerner and Lowe’s Follow Me (from Camelot), there’s nothing holding the damn thing together.

Live It Up is almost punk in its lyrics, but closer to disco in execution.
Here’s looking at you is closer to jazz. The Tide Is High started life as a reggae song. Angels on the Balcony is a ghost story with a pop interlude. And side one closes with Go Through It, which is almost country. Those rolling drum fills are gorgeous.

Do the Dark is sort of a disco rock thing. Rapture is the song we all know and love – first hip hop (ya don’t stop, go out to the parking lot) song played on MTV. Of course it was white folks doing it because it would be several more years before Yo! MTV Raps hit the scene.
Faces is a slow beautiful strangeness about the underclass on the Bowery (the neighborhood where CBGB was located), a tribute to the folks living on the street there.

T-Birds, about roller derby of all things, is still (45 years later) my favourite song on the album. It’s rock and roll (with an amusing spoken interlude) that simply works. Walk Like Me continues the rock and roll – its hard edge makes it possibly the one song on the album that wouldn’t have been out of place on Eat to the Beat (or Plastic Letters).

And then the whole thing drops into a little echo chamber with their take on the Lady of the Lake’s song, Follow Me, from Camelot. It closes the album out beautifully.

As I said, it shouldn’t work – but it manages with panache.

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Categories Rock, 80s, rock and roll

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.

April – May – June

Michael Chabon – The Yiddish Policeman’s Union – Still brilliant. The Cohn Brothers were set to film it several years back but its conclusion as written would not fly now.

Harry Harrison – The Men from P.I.G and R.O.B.O.T – Very silly, but very much what I needed in the moment.

Fredrik Backman – My Friends – Okay, but overly repetitive and somewhat simplistic given its heavy themes. Definitely could have used an editor. From the guy who wrote A Man Called Ove (filmed with Tom Hanks as A Man Called Otto).

Italo Calvino – Six Memos for the Next Millennium – Interesting stuff that still fascinates 40 years after Calvino’s passing. Inspired me to pick up Georges Perec’ Life A User’s Manual, which I’d been meaning to read for about 10 years.

Jeff Chang – Water Mirror Echo – Excellent biography/cultural critique of Bruce Lee from the writer of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. I grabbed this audiobook after listening to an interview which might have been on Fresh Air, but I’m failing to find it.

July

Stella Gibbons – Cold Comfort Farm – I enjoyed this, having only been familiar with the movie (which I saw on its release before I knew all of the stellar people in its cast – Fry, McKellen, Beckinsdale, among others). It’s possible I would have gotten more out of it had I read Lynn Truss’ afterward (in a more recent edition than the one I read, but shared at the book club for which I read it). Truss suggests that Gibbons was taking a major jab at D.H. Lawrence with her portrayals of the Starkadder family. Hmmm.

August

Daphne DuMarier – Rebecca – Gracious but this was so good.

Henry H. Sapoznik – The Tourist’s Guide to Lost Yiddish New York – really fascinating look at the architecture, food, and theatre of early 20th Century NY Jewish society. Sapoznik is a multifaceted Yiddishist and it’s worth your while to enjoy the audio edition, which he narrates.

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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
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