PODCAST

I posted Episode 681 of my Virtual Memories Show yesterday, featuring Colin Asher his amazing new book, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music (WW Norton)! We talk about how Elmo Hope’s Sounds from Rikers Island album inspired him to explore how the criminal justice system changed the course of twentieth century music, how he chose the five artists to focus on — Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, Elmo Hope, Johnny Cash, Ike White, and Tupac Shakur —, the history of the carceral state, criminality and the popular images of Black and white “outlaw” artists, and how many artists’ careers were shaped, derailed, inspired by prisons. We get into the tightrope act of using Johnny Cash as a counterpoint to the racial dynamics of the book (as well as the work Cash did for prison reform), why he had to close the book with the story of Tupac and his mother, Afeni Shakur, and how hip-hop developed in response to America’s mass incarceration movement, how the philosophy of incarceration shifted from rehabilitation to punishment, Musicambia‘s work to bring music education into prisons, and what it means to pursue the arts for personal growth, even when you’re on death row. We also discuss how some arts writing can suck the joy out of the arts, why he prefers discussing art in relation to society rather than in relation to other works of art, why he made playlists for The Midnight Special, how playing vinyl records makes music a choice instead of wallpaper, the “burn the world down and replace it with an utopia” phase of his youth, the secret origins of his writing career, his dream projects (incl. the novel he’s noodling on), and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL!

Recent podcast episodes: Kate Maruyama & Me • Heather Cass White • Paul Gravett • Luis Mendo • Benoit Denizet-Lewis • Clare Carlisle • Josh Alan Friedman

Every book (non-comics) that I’ve finished since 1989.

BIRDY!

Always on watch:

INSTAX

Here are a bunch of Instax pix from the past month or so, from NY, LA, and NJ:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are a couple of links for you

• RIP Victor Willis . . . RIP Om Malik . . .
  RIP Ann Blyth . . .

• Here’s the NYT obit for Jerry Moriarty. And the New Yorker tribute to Mark Singer.

• I’m glad someone did this study, because I’ve long felt like pop music lyrics have tended toward the first person (and become more boring in the process) in recent decades.

• Steven Heller interviewed R. Sikoryak about his new book, Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated. I’m going to record with Bob this weekend, and now I have to come up with questions Steven didn’t already ask. Booooo. . . .

• Gotta reconnect with David Thomson sometime, too, for his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light. Here’s a NYT piece by AO Scott about it/him.

• Dmitry Samarov reviewed THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL. So did the NYT (glowingly!).

• Here’s a profile about Joyce Carol Oates with an aside about her Twitter posts.

• Oh, great: private equity wants to get into backlist book publishing.

• Three writers talk about God.

• By the Hebrew calendar, Monday was the first anniversary of my dad’s death. I went out to the memorial park, recited Kaddish, and took a pic of the grave & tree to send to my brother. Earlier in the day, I commemorated Dad by trying to untangle some of his remaining financial complications. When I texted my brother the tree-picture before he left for shul to pray for Dad, I wrote, “You take care of the higher plane; I’ll deal with the crap he left behind down here.”

Berlin Noir

To resolve last week’s cliffhanger: I arrived in Newark from San Diego at 5:40 a.m. and got in the door at home at 6:40. No more trade shows for ~3 months, then another flurry for the fall season.

Yesterday, I took a call from a trade show in Berlin where I’ve presented pre-recorded/remotely the last 2 years. They’d like me to speak in person this time, and it looks like my schedule will permit, but also, IT’S NEXT MARCH. I can barely keep track of things right now, much less plan for something 8+ months away, but I guess it’s good to be wanted.

I mean, this morning, when I wrote about that call in my journal, I tried to remember when it happened in the past 2 weeks, before realizing that it was, in fact, yesterday.

So now, let’s recall one of my favorite of Bill Griffith’s Zippy The Pinhead strips, from his Edward Hopper week:

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list. Today, I caught up on the 5-day backlog from my LA/SD trip. I just finished the boxed set of postcards of Vogue covers, and started a set of Criterion edition covers.

EXPENSES

If you want to help out with Virtual Memories Show expenses — this email runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $25/month, and the remote recording account is $20/month — or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can make a one-time contribution of any size via Stripe, or a recurring one via Patreon. Or maybe save your money for when I launch the Kickstarter for my Instax book.

NEXT TIME

Thanks for reading this far. See you next time, I hope.

If you ever go to Houston, you better walk right, you better not stagger, you better not fight,