Book Review: The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin & Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman

This type of book thrives by stating the obvious emphatically.  Advice tomes, self-help manuals, life & business inspiration.  Have a taste, and see if you can guess which quotes are from Seth Godin ("one of the most popular business bloggers in the world") and which are from Neil Gaiman ("one of the creators of modern comics").

1. "If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do."
2. "An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo."
3. "Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain.  A distant mountain.  My goal."
4. "When you speak your truth, you have opened a door, allowing others to speak to you, directly to you, to your true self."
5. "Life is sometimes hard.  Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong."
6. "Art has no right answer.  The best we can hope for is an interesting answer."
7. "So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can."
8. "Artists fail, and failing means that sometimes you need to change your mind about what you thought the best path might be."

The odd numbered ones are from Gaiman; the even from Godin.  But they all sound like they came from the same barrel of platitudes, from the shelves of AphorismMart.  They're all true and yet like keys you find on the street - they don't open any doors you have to open.  I like that metaphor: these self-evident truths are someone else's keys that don't work on your locks.

And yet I just read - eagerly - both of these works, and paid close attention, searching for ways to move closer to my distant mountains.  I suppose there is something of a useful thrill, then, in finding someone's keys on the street, knowing that they open some door somewhere, taking hope that your keys must also be somewhere around here.

Book Review: Point Your Face At This - Drawings by Demetri Martin

Demetri Martin is mainly a stand-up comic, which explains the breed and brand of humor in his new book.  Comics excel at examining the everyday expressions and behaviors we fail to examine, the phrases we hear and utter regularly without thinking, the things we do automatically, and, thus, the days we spend - the lives we live - without thinking.  A good comic makes us think.

Take one of Martin's drawings in the book: it's a simple number line, running from -2 to 12.  A bracket identifies the number set 5, 6, 7, 8 as "choreography."  Think about it for a moment ... get it?  Another drawing depicts, wordlessly across two pages, six drinking vessels that accompany our passage through life: baby bottle, fast food drink cup, beer stein, martini glass, tea cup, and little water cup with meds.  I know the jokes probably don't work as well when described, but it is a book of drawings.

A section of the book includes charts and graphs such as this one.  There's something inherently funny about turning something as non-mathematical as family guilt into a mathematical graphic that is, in its way, precise and insightful, more than most data-based charts.  Other drawings take common expressions and look at them in a uniquely comic way.

Martin's book of drawings makes for hilarious but quick reading, so I recommend checking out his book of mostly writing, This Is a Book by Demetri Martin (yes, the title includes the attribution), which came out in 2011.  Perhaps you already know him from his work on Comedy Central with The Daily Show and his own program, Important Things with Demetri Martin?  If not, search out some video and take in as much of this wise guy who is quite a wise guy, whose dry, subtle humor might make you laugh out loud, but will more likely make you laugh - and think - in your head.

Book Review: Light & Shade - Conversations with Jimmy Page by Brad Tolinski

Grandma Romeo had given me some money for my birthday.  I can't recall exactly how much or even which birthday it was.  And I'm not sure if I ended up in the music section of Caldor or Bradlees, but I do remember one thing clearly.

My brother recommended using my precious funds to purchase my first record.  I probably was only five or six years old, come to think of it, so the record had been out for a few years already.  The record was Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy.

I spent the next few years enthralled by what we'd now call Classic Rock, a term I despise as it evokes a radio programming slot rather than the power it imparted to many a young mind.  The same way RunDMC would grab me a decade later, and U2 shortly after that, Led Zep, along with Aerosmith and Black Sabbath and their ilk, allowed me to dream beyond the confines of ordinary life.

As a young guy, I preferred the more poppy tunes on the album: Dancing Days, D'yer Mak'er (the title of which I didn't get for many years).  Now, the solemn, driving No Quarter and the moody Over the Hills and Far Away appeal more.  But Led Zep shine has never faded in my heart and ears though my tastes have shifted away from rock n roll as I pass from youth to middle age.

Brad Tolinski's interview-based biography of Jimmy Page was, for me, then, like drawing back the curtain on the wizard of my childhood, but, unlike Dorothy, finding that there really was a wizard back there working the controls.  Tolinski himself is an avowed fan, so if the book has any fault, it would be his unremitting praise even for some of Page's lackluster post-Zep projects, but I suppose we can forgive him that much if it buys us passages like this:

Q:  While "Immigrant Song" is built around a very straightforward, pile-driving riff, it's the subtle variations in it that make it more than just another hard-rock song.  For example, toward the very end of the song, instead of playing a straight G minor for the accents, you play this very astringent inversion of that chord that really adds some bite.  Where did that come from?
A:  It's a block chord that people never get right.  It pulls the whole tension of the piece into another area or another dimension just for that moment and a bit of backwards echo makes it a bit more complete.  It's putting all these elements together that makes the music have depth. ... So to answer your question, where did that unusual G chord come from?  I didn't have that chord when I started writing the "Immigrant Song," but it suddenly appeared while we were working together, putting on a massive brake to this machine.  You know those old brakes where you clutch them and it just pulls out again, pulling it back in - that's how I see the function of that chord.

Great to know that there really is magic in this world.

Book Review: Food by Mary McCartney

I have no use for two types of cookbooks: the esoteric and the simplistic.  I also dislike those which lack photographs of the completed dishes as much as those which overindulge in candid shots of hot chefs.  Mary McCartney's collection of vegetarian recipes and photographs, then, is the perfect book: the recipes are challenging but won't cost you a hundred bucks in specialty items from every ethnic grocery in town, and, since her first calling is as a photographer, the photos illustrating the book are a tremendous and beautiful help in selecting and preparing meals.

I made a full, fancy meal from three recipes in the book: the eggplant wraps, quinoa & white bean soup, with coconut rice pudding for dessert.  I did have to cough up a few extra bucks for fancy ingredients: pignoli (aka pine) nuts, quinoa, arborio rice, and sundried tomatoes, but all of these came in under $20 together and were available at my neighborhood supermarket.

The eggplant wraps were fantastic yet simple: wilted spinach, toasted pignoli nuts, and cheddar wrapped in a thick slice of fried eggplant.  I love recipes where a vegetable substitutes in for bread; we once made tacos where a broad leaf of lettuce served as taco shell, and I don't think I've ever had better.

The quinoa & white bean soup was stomach- and heart-warming, but perhaps better suited for a winter's eve than a summertime brunch.  The quinoa, however, seemed kind of useless for such a pricey item, and the soup would have been just as good with pastina in its place.

A chocolate sauce made the coconut rice pudding leap from the bowl rather than hunker gelatinously as pudding often does.

I did spend a good four hours preparing this big meal, so I wouldn't recommend constructing an entire menu from McCartney's book unless you have that time; also, the total grocery bill ran upwards of $50 just for this meal.  However, one would do well to select a recipe once a week from this collection to try out something new and surely delicious.  By the way, we had a vegan and two gluten-free eaters at this meal, and McCartney's recipes easily pleased everyone (though my son had his eggplant wraps minus the cheese).  And a final note: yes, Mary McCartney is the daughter of Linda and Paul McCartney, a legacy she neither hides nor overemphasizes in the book, but pays respectful homage to, as many a cookbook author gives a nod to her forebears and influences.

Book Review: WARP - The Reluctant Assassin by Eoin Colfer

Full disclosure: I am an Eoin (pronounced "Owen") Colfer (pronounced "Colfer") fan.

I have read everything he's written, all fifteen or so young adult works, his handful of young readers, and his two novels for adults (well, three, really, counting his Part Six of Three continuation of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker series).  I got 30 copies of Artemis Fowl and made 35 of my students read it.  I "liked" him on Facebook.  We named our dog after him (though we spell it "Owen").

Moreover, I consider him a modern master; he can balance a swiftly developing, viscously convoluted plotline while drawing in precise detail fascinating and wildly different characters.  His scenes remain embedded in your memory as if they had happened to you; you will see people in the park or grocery store and mistake them for his characters.  Pardon me a second while I wipe the foam from the corners of my mouth.

Colfer is best known for his nine-book Artemis Fowl series, and this title marks the first in a new, open-ended series involving time travel between Victorian London (think Jack the Ripper) and the modern day.  And my mentioning of Jack the Ripper is not accidental: the villain in this novel is the man who is such a murderous devil - Garrick - that he himself knifed Jack the Ripper just to show him up.  Now that's a bad dude.

Witness how Colfer controls the tension in a particularly bloody scene:

     Percival whistled two notes, high and low.  The signal for Turk to advance from the folds of velvet curtain that concealed him.
     Turk made even less noise than Percival, as he wore silken slippers, which he called his murder shoes.  He came up on Garrick from the rear and reached out for a shoulder, to steady the magician for the scimitar's blade, but his questing fingers skinned themselves on glass instead of flesh and bone.
     A mirror, thought Turk.  I have been misled.
     Terror sank into his gut like a lead anchor - he had the wit to know that he was done for.
     The mirror image of Garrick reached out through the mirror and plucked Turk's own sword from his hand.
     "You will not have need of this," said Garrick's image, and he plunged it directly into Turk's heart.
    Turk died believing a phantasm had killed him.

Obviously, if you were expecting something cute and nifty along the lines of Spy Kids, you, too, like Turk, have been misled.  I doubt Disney will be making this one into a movie any time soon - it would be the first NC-17 kids' movie ever.

But you can see, even in such a short passage from the center of the book. how Colfer shapes short-lived characters amidst a tense action scene - Turk's name, his silken slippers, his nickname for them, his scimitar, his darkly comic "I have been misled," his confusion as he dies - all these little touches delineate a character distinctive from the others (he is one of a trio sent to kill Garrick).  Colfer makes this person real and living even as he kills him.

If you cannot bring your big adult self to read young adult fiction, no matter how masterly crafted, then go for Plugged or Screwed, Colfer's works for big people.  However you go about it, step into one of his perfectly formed worlds and you'll find the boundaries of your world blown open.