Back from L.A.!

Great reading, great experience. Scott Plagenhoef talked about Belle & Sebastian's aesthetic and the changing face of music fandom with the advent of the Internet and the access it provides. I showed Richard & Linda Thompson pictures, some courtesy of Blair Helsing, a new Internet pal who drums in the San Francisco jazz combo Echo Beach Band, and some graphic depictions of Dante's Inferno, while I read from the book. Kim Cooper read parts of her narrative about Neutral Milk Hotel and showed an artist's rendition of the lyrics to "Holland, 1945". We had a pleasant Q&A with the audience and signed some books. I had a number of great friends who showed, plus my brother flew down from the Bay Area. All in all, a wonderful experience. Thanks, Hammer Museum!

Also want to mention that it's 33 1/3 pitch time! Get your pitch together.

Reading in LA TOMORROW

I can hardly believe it myself, but I will be reading from my book at the Hammer Museum in LA tomorrow evening at 7.

Incidentally, I learned a lot from this article, and I think you can, too. (Thanks to the RT List!)

3 x 33 1/3 at the Hammer Museum in LA

It's free! Be there!*

* should you happen to be in the vicinity.

I have a new gig as part of the crack team blogging about movies at The Screengrab, which is Nerve.com's movie page. My first post is up now. It ain't much, but it's a start. I'll post more for tomorrow.

LA Reading at Metropolis Books

So, a week & a half ago, I read from Shoot Out The Lights at the delightful Metropolis Books in LA with Kim Cooper and David Smay. And it was fun! The picture above is from Pinky's Paperhaus, and it depicts my famous "man in a box with a microphone" mime routine.

I'm coming back to LA on October 29 to read at the Hammer Museum with Kim Cooper and Scott Plagenhoef. Don't miss it!

RT interview on Graeme Thomson's blog

Graeme Thomson's new book I Shot A Man In Reno is about death in popular music, and it sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Of interest here: Mr. Thomson was kind enough to post a wonderful interview with Richard Thompson on his blog.

Also of interest: Mr. Thomson had some entertaining posts while guest-blogging at Powell's Books.

More on the KEXP review + reading in LA on Saturday + sad news

After I posted that last review, I had an amicable back & forth with Chris Estey in the comments thread. He had this to say:

I have to say I’ve been struggling a bit in hindsight with my criticism of your fictional aspect to the book. I was actually leery of your combining a fictionalized character with so much story behind such an important record being readily available, but you really did pull that element off well, too. Perhaps much better than I suggest in my final paragraph above. Other 33 1/3 volumes had done it, as had other writers elsewhere, to a less satisfying level of literature. Thinking back on it, you did a really good job of telling a story many of us can identify with — the feeling that the creator of an album (or story, for example) is a twin of ours, creating a disturbing simulation of our own existence. I had bought “Shoot Out The Lights” just before my deep, several-year engagement with a girl fell apart, and the LP didn’t seem to have any lyrics that couldn’t have been written about my own existence. You captured that weird energy between fan/listener and singer/songwriter so well that it’s been more memorable than a lot of other fiction I’ve read this year. So, well, I want to thank you and encourage people even more to check out your analysis of Richard & Linda Thompson’s (arguable tie for best) album, with less hesitation than my review originally stated. You’re a damned good writer!

Man! High praise, indeed. Thanks, Chris! If you're ever in Austin, let me buy you a beer.

Just a reminder: Don't forget I'm reading in LA at Metropolis Books on Saturday, August 30, at 6 pm with Kim Cooper and David Smay. It will be 33 1/3-tastic!

Also, finally with the sad news: Dave Smith, a scholar of Richard Thompson's music, recently passed away at the far-too-young age of 58. His book The Great Valerio, a close analysis of Richard Thompson's themes and inspirations, is a surprising and pleasurable read for all RT fans. And you can download it for free from the Internet. Do the man proud.

Another review + upcoming reading

KEXP read my book! And mostly liked it! I can live surprisingly well with being called "too ambitious" by those guys.

Childs adds a fictional narrator, a philosophical folk rock doppelganger
who assesses the moves of the declining couple as his own life spins out of
control, in mordant comparison to Dante’s Inferno and Virgil’s Descent. I have
to admit that I found this part of the book a little distracting, and a mash-up
of perhaps more personal creative writing with a remarkably solid analysis of
the Thompson’s output ends up feeling too ambitious. (Childs is similar to
conceptually extrapolative Camden Joy, but gives a lot more of the archetypal
solid rock write trivia and insight.) Fortunately, this interwoven subplot is
pulled off enough not to ruin the spot-on observations and criticisms that fuel
the rest of the book. It shouldn’t keep you from reading it, and you should buy
the album Shoot Out The Lights immediately if you haven’t got it.

I have to point out that I don't mind this ambiguity some reviewers feel about the fiction in my story. I knew it would be offputting for some, but it serves the primary thesis ("Shoot Out The Lights is a song-cycle about living in Hell") by giving readers a narrator and arc to mirror the story of the Thompsons, plus it allowed me to revel in certain flavors of darkness that are, happily, not a part of my own life. I suppose one of the common threads in the cricitism is that the story and analysis could have been better integrated. Maybe so, but I should state that the back-and-forth between reality and fiction was intentional and meant to be somewhat comic (the fact that I am explaining this is a sign that maybe I failed at that). I meant Virgil's perpetual confusion and misery and sad-sackist intellectualism to lead him to jumble his honest reflections of the album Shoot Out The Lights with his own position as a fan, an outside observer, and the ultimately flawed guide to the album. He's less a poet from a bygone day than the creepy loner who narrates many of Richard Thompson's songs. But the fact that I am explaining this is another sign of failure. Therefore, by the logic of this paragraph, I can live with failure. QED.

In other news: PEOPLE OF LOS ANGELES! I'm reading with Kim "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea" Cooper and David "Swordfishtrombones" Cooper at Metropolis Books on August 30th at 6 pm! You will notice that all three albums under discussion have the distinct scent of nostalgia for an impossible past. What could be more fun than talking about that?

PLUS, if you have yet to do so, GET ON THE BUS. The "Crawling Down Cahuenga" Tom Waits tour bus, that is. If there's still availability, you owe it to yourself.