Just One Night with Gino

I have lately read Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again, by Norah Vincent. She successfully passed as a man in several settings, for instance, joining a bowling league that she attended for some time. She makes a convincing case that men suffer as much from gender roles as from women, or at least, that they do suffer, but she herself came across as kind of a jerk. She spoke very harshly at times to her female dates, but then was huffy when people weren’t super-polite to her. Her writing is not particularly good. She should have ceded a little control to an editor.

A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True-Life Adventure in the Global Economy is Sara Bongiorni’s account of her family’s attempt to go a year without buying anything made in China, which revealed to them that everything is made in China. At times, they were reduced to hinting to family members that a certain made-in-China item would be a welcome birthday gift, since the ban did not extend to gifts.

In the end, it seemed to me she had done a good job of wringing an entire book out of relatively few experiences—she really did do a good job, in that the book was engaging throughout. Her husband came across as a particularly colorful character. Getting into the spirit of the thing, he took to wearing two different flip-flops (because sneakers come from China), and he wore them everywhere, to the author’s chagrin.

Peter Cameron’s novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You has a review on it that likens it to The Catcher in the Rye. That’s going quite a bit too far. It faded from memory as soon as I finished it.

Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, on the other hand, is a gem. It starts out explaining the family relationships and at the end of the book, it was still doing that. I kept waiting for the real story to start, and it never did; well, there was some sort of mystery at the core of it, but not a hugely weighty mystery when compared to the hundreds of pages of family history. However, her writing is delightful, dry or droll by turns. I would recommend any book written by her.

She writes about a wedding where, when the person officiating asks if anyone has an objection, all eyes swing toward the groom, as they all know he is the likeliest person to object.

I just finished Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love, which was also extravagantly well reviewed. I didn’t think it was quite that good. It was extremely hard to picture anything she was talking about, and her main character has very insistent verbal tics; he uses “And yet” and “But” as complete sentences approximately once per paragraph. Probably once per book, or twice, would have been plenty.

This book does involve several mysteries, which were unraveled right at the end, when I was all discombobulated because you also find out (spoiler alert) right at the end that the main narrator has been unreliable all along. Not very satisfying, but there was a steady stream of imaginative flourishes that I liked.

I am really enjoying most of my new birthday CDs. The Blood, Sweat & Tears CD of the same name doesn’t have as many good songs on it as I remembered from my youth, but The Best of Gino Vannelli is absolutely excellent. I’m listening to it right this minute, while the sweat drips down my stomach. It’s got his hits on it, and several other songs I’d never heard but fell in love with right away.

I sent David and Lisa “One Night with You,” which I knew David in particular would hate; it’s at the exact other end of the musical spectrum from the Grateful Dead. He withheld comment, but Lisa tactfully wrote, “This indeed seems to capture the Zeitgeist [of the era] in all its irony-unimpeded glory.” For an extra thrill, you can go to YouTube and watch him singing it in a white suit and white knee-high boots.

Then there’s the Todd Rundgren Anthology (1968-1985), a best-of compilation full of great stuff, including well-known songs like “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” “Hello It’s Me,” and “I Saw the Light,” but also quite a number of unbelievably pretty ballads I’d never heard: “Wailing Wall,” “Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel,” “The Last Ride.” He really has a way with surprising, gorgeous chord changes. His music is often very touching. Anthology consists of two discs, and there are a few clunkers on the second, but the first is superb, and there’s some good stuff on the second, too.

“Open My Eyes” reminded me so much of The Who’s “I Can’t Explain” I suspected a rip-off—until I saw that the former came out in 1968 and the latter in 1971! So if there was a bit of borrowing, it wasn’t done by Todd Rundgren.

Seether’s Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces is a good solid metal album. You can tell they’ve put in their time listening to Metallica. My favorite song is “Waste.”

On the Three Days Grace CD of the same name, I particularly like “Just Like You” and “Born Like This.” In the liner notes, all three band members thank their female partners first, and in the notes for One-X, from three years later, which I haven’t heard a note of so far, they again thank the same three women first, plus a new band member starts by thanking his “best friend and wife." I thought that was nice.

A wonderful surprise has been the Foo Fighters’ Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace. They write some incredibly beautiful stuff. I hear a bit of Steely Dan in there, and the Internet agrees with me. "Let It Die," "Erase/Replace," and "Come Alive" are particularly gorgeous.

I probably never heard a note of their music before, because they probably didn’t play it on my hard-rock radio station. I have another Foo Fighters CD I’ll get to after this one sinks in. I have also ordered several more Todd Rundgren CDs and will probably end up getting the other Foo Fighters CDs. That’s my big indulgence, I guess: buying CDs (and also taking cabs).