September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/28/8)

Two years ago, Scott Storch played me two tracks he was working on at the Hit Factory Criteria studio in Miami, where, true to the venue’s name, the wunderkind producer had set up shop and was churning out blockbuster after blockbuster: “Lean Back,” “Baby Boy,” “Candy Shop,” “Run It.” The first track, featuring singer Mya, showed off Storch’s complicated pop genius: It was sinuous and sexy and soulful, driven by the sort of hypnotic, overamped Middle Eastern filigree that was becoming Storch’s trademark.

The second song was by Brooke Hogan, the emergent reality TV bimbo who Storch had signed as the first artist of his Storch Music label. Loud, propulsive, and instantly forgettable, this song showed off Storch’s mega ambition. The former protégé of Dr. Dre clearly hoped to do for this blond wrestler’s daughter what his work on Christina Aguilera’s Stripped album had helped do for that white girl: Give her both hip-hop cred and chart gold.

Back then, as I was profiling Storch for a Miami Herald article, the Miami Beach multimillionaire was flying high and flashing ice. What neither of us knew at the time was that the tsunami of hits he had been riding for two years had peaked: Scott hasn’t had a top 10 hit since then, not with that killer Mya hook, not with Hogan’s pop pandering. He has recently found himself in a heap of trouble, getting dragged into family court for two custody cases and falling two years behind in his property taxes.

The story of Storch’s Icarus fall from the pop stratosphere is compelling enough that two major news outlets recently asked me to write about it; the article I reported for AP came out last Friday. Scott wasn’t talking this time. In fact, he seems to be in semi-hiding, not showing for court dates, no longer at Hit Factory, not talking to his two sons – though I did get a couple of reports of him recently sighted at South Beach clubs. He can leave a waitress a $20 tip, apparently, but can’t pay child support.

I found Storch both repellent and endearing when I met him in ‘06. The fame game has definitely gone to his head, bigtime. But behind the aviator sunglasses and pop-tart arm candy is this geeky music-head, a talented keyboardist who was an early force in the Roots. “He always knew what he wanted to be,” Vanessa Bellido, mother of Storch’s 15-year-old son Steven, told me for the AP story. “He would play the piano unbelievably. He was determined at 15. He was like, I’m going to make it, I’m going to make it.”

I’ve watched many talented artists struggle their whole lives for recognition and survival. But when I’ve come in contact with those, like Storch, or Kurt Cobain, who seem to have won it all, I’m not sure which group is the winners, and which the losers.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 7/9/8)

One day, a few years ago, my husband and I attended an Argentinean rock concert in Miami’s Bayfront Park with a friend of ours from Buenos Aires. We had a bird’s eye view of the pit in front of the stage that separates the band from the audience, an area populated mostly by burly security guards, photographers, and the occasional VIP. When one man walked in front of the stage, he immediately began shaking the many hands stretched out to him from the packed crowd. Everyone seemed to know, or want to know, this guy. Bud and I didn’t recognize him, but then we were new to this world of rock en espanol. “Who is he? Some celebrity?” we asked our friend, let’s call him Alfredo.

Alfredo shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe, immigration?”

The movement of the people around the world may have replaced abortion as the hot-button issue of our time. Immigration combines two of the U.S.’s deepest worries: the economy and “homeland security.” It’s a hornet’s nest of difficult questions that politicians wade into only with great reluctance, knowing no matter what they say they’re going to wind up stung. Meanwhile, xenophobia is symbolic to many people from other nations of everything that’s wrong with Americans: hubris, ignorance, fear. (Not that Americans have a corner on xenophobia: Just ask the Africans in Paris, or the Asian proletarian diaspora doing the globe’s dirty work.)

hattie gossett plugs directly into the slipstreams of this debate in the immigrant suite: hey xenophobe! who you calling a foreigner?, her recent collection of poems from Seven Stories Press. gossett, a New York-based poet of page and stage, writes mostly in the voice of the confused, disappointed, and angry immigrant. There aren’t a lot of refugees from other countries’ war, oppression, or poverty delighting in the American dream in these stanzas. Recent newspaper stories back up gossett’s bodega-level reports: More and more people have not found the embrace of Lady Liberty to be all it’s cooked up to be, and have been returning home to their countries. The Miami Herald even profiled some Cubans who have gone back to their communist homeland – dios mio!

gossett, who often performs her poems with a band and calls herself sister no blues, writes deceptively simple, repetitive lines. But she’s a mistress of rhythm, building patterns and crescendos that load each word with centrifugal force. She has a fine ear for the many accents around her: Puerto Rican, Dominican, black American, African, Indian, etc. She’s all about stirring the melting pot. In the poem “what do you like? how do you cook it?” she lists different ethnic foods over a calypso beat, ending with the observation and question, “we all eat rice & beans/ why can’t we get along?”

Don’t mistake that Rodney King-ish quote for naivete. Sarcasm has long been gossett’s weapon of mass destruction, and she often dons people’s points of view in order to expose their shortsightedness. “have we got a job for you!” proclaims the recruiter in the title of one poem: “doctor at home scrubs the hospital floor here.” She also doesn’t buy some immigrants’ own packed-in isms: In “in my country is no like this,” the narrator brags, “nobody cares what color you are/ each group stays with his own/ we don’t have to live next door to them.”

Here in Miami, I know a lot of first-generation Americans who, after decades, still can’t figure out our health care system (or lack of one); who have found their new land to be as cruel as it can be rich; who have gone back home. I also know those, like Alfredo, who have gone to great lengths to be here and have the kind of life they couldn’t have in their native destroyed economies. Or at least that was the story a couple months ago. Because Alfredo works construction, which means round these parts, he hasn’t worked in weeks.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/27/8)

Suze Rotolo is perhaps the most famous arm charm in rock’n’roll, quite literally. On the cover of Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, she clutches the singer’s side as they make their way down a wintry West Village street in 1963. Rotolo was 19 at the time, and the girlfriend of the 22-year-old artist who was just beginning to be recognized as a colossal folk and rock talent. Talk about pressure.

Before and after that photo, of course, Rotolo had a life story of her own, as she tells in A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway). She was a red diaper baby, the daughter of communist Italian-Americans, who became an artist. She was a beautiful, intelligent New York City girl, whose political, intellectual, urban upbringing probably seemed exotic to the exile from small-town Minnesota. One gets the sense from this memoir that Rotolo was and is very much her own woman – albeit a fragile young person with a difficult home life, who probably tended to break “just like a little girl.”

Freewheelin’ is by no means a tell-all. In fact, the author tells very little of the personal details of her relationship with Robert Zimmerman (she does reveal that not even she knew his real name and identity until a news story revealed it). Neither rancor nor a great deal of sentimentality drive the narrative. Four decades later, she is eminently respectful of the four-year love affair and her ex’s privacy – that tactfulness, so refreshing in the age of endless celebrity dish, itself speaks volumes about both Rotolo and Dylan.

Freewheelin’ is most interesting as a document of Downtown New York during the folk boom and the birth of ‘60s counterculture. Mostly, Rotolo pays tribute to the incredible talent pool that was her community, people like Sylvia and Ian Tyson, Dave Von Ronk, and Janet Kerr. I absolutely eat up books like these, documents of bohemian places and times – god, it must have been fabulous to live there and then, I sigh as I turn their pages (even as an equally happening scene may be unfolding outside my window).

Rotolo also captures the souring of the hippie experience – the good trip gone bad. Unsurprisingly, her relationship with Dylan collapses under the weight of their greatly changed lives, as his fame mounts. She is stalked, her apartment burns, and she has the kind of nervous collapse that so many people, living on the edge in pursuit of a dream, had at that time.

The book falls apart a bit too; it’s unclear what Rotolo’s point is, as she grasps for a special light to shed on a much-illuminated era. Still, she has a vivid, clear way of describing her memories that’s enchanting; you can see how a guy would fall for her. “We were full of truths and enthusiasms, non sequiturs, stories, insights, pronouncements, resentments, and of course poetry, prose, and song,’’ she writes.

The Freewheelin’ photo is a portrait of youth in love, two people sheltering in each other’s arms on a cold city street. Rotolo is no mere ornament – and unlike the usual rocker arm candy, her body is completely covered in a bulky winter coat (she told the New York Times she felt like an Italian sausage). Still, she’s the full-maned bohemienne giving flesh to the skinny bard’s songs. An emancipated woman living with her lover – Rotolo was the embodiment of freewheelin’. Her memoir reveals that she was more than just a symbol, though, that she had her own life and stories to tell.

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June 1, 2007 by info.

How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time is not just the biography of a late, great publication: It’s also a history of an era, the early ’90s. Through interviews with staff, subjects, and readers of the magazine that spoke to teenage girls in their own tongue, authors Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer re-create a time when third-wave feminists were rising against the neo-con backlash and rock stars were wearing dresses and kissing on TV. They show just how brave editor Jane Pratt and her staff were in taking on the established, patronizing tone of the genre, and the severe consequences Sassy staffers suffered for speaking frankly about topics like incest, homosexuality and abortion. Sassy was boycotted, sold, decapitated, and eventually snuffed. You just have to cruise MySpace to see how right on Sassy’s take on adolescent angst and guts was, and how out of it most teen mags are.

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May 25, 2007 by info.

Today I got interviewed by filmmaker Jackie Weissman for her documentary, Rock ‘n’ Roll Mamas. A lot of the issues we discussed are brilliantly analyzed by Justin Cober-Lake in his new writeup of Mamarama. Check ‘em out.

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March 30, 2007 by info.

It’s hard to promote a memoir about parenting in 2007 without someone bringing up Alternadad. That’s not the fault of Neal Pollack, who has written this excellent account of his own child-driven odyssey to grown-uphood. Today I finally finished reading Alternadad, not because it’s long (though that is my main criticism of it: It could use some trims), but because like all multi-tasking parents, I kept getting distracted.

I’ve been a fan of Neal’s writing ever since I was asked to introduce him and Augusten Burroughs to an audience at the Miami Book Fair a few years ago and therefore read Nevermind the Pollacks. Dude’s hilarious. His satire of rock criticism, particularly the Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus schools, was spot-on. I also liked him in person (Burroughs, however, was uptight and aloof). One of my biggest new-parent regrets is that I didn’t accept Neal’s invite to go out carousing in South Beach with him and Dan Savage. That would have been a night to remember …

Neal recently wrote a mostly positive review of Mamarama for The Miami Herald, which you can read elsewhere on my website. All of which is to say I’m not the most unbiased reader of Alternadad.

Which I heartily recommend. I laughed, I cried. Neal has a deft knack for deadpan dialogue and a wonderfully irreverent eye, ear, and nose for the grossness of small children. He’s a twisted comic genius. I kept seeing Jack Black playing him in the film version of Alternadad.

Some idiot at Time magazine called Alternadad the Howl of alt-parenting memoirs. It’s irritating that as soon as a male enters a genre, they’re anointed the leaders of the canon. Hey Time idiot (whose name I won’t grace with brain cells), women have been writing this stuff for years. Operating Instructions by Ann Lamott is the genre’s Howl; Ayun Halliday’s The Big Rumpus is our On the Road; Ariel Gore is our Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Pollack is, I don’t know, Ken Kesey (someone else tell me who I am. Or better yet, don’t).

Again, it’s not Pollack’s fault he gets to benefit from male privilege (though he could have been a little bit nicer to sister me in his review – but I digress). And I’m really glad a male’s throwing his hat into the ring — I guess we can’t call them  momoirs anymore. There can be no new approach to parenting without the sperm-providers involved. When people ask me about Alternadad, I like to call it and Mamarama his and hers companion volumes.

Pollack criticized Mamarama for my tendency to wax epochal about culture. I, conversely, think sometimes he could use a little telescoping of his own life. From a cushy upbringing to the family’s righteous organic-food obsession to his stint as a neighborhood organizer, Pollack is thoroughly caught up in upper-middle-class privileges that he sometimes seems oblivous of, or tries to ironically distance himself from via beer and punk.

But that classism does make his family’s eventual plunge into near-bankruptcy poignant. Pollack also misses the mark early in the book when he chastises himself for spending so much time thinking about something as domestic and therefore banal as parenting, whereas his male literary heroes wrote about big topics like war or their penises, or whatver. Wrong, dude: That willingness to take on a Brave New World is precisely what makes Alternadad not just funny, but important.

Alternadad is mostly about the guffaws. But it also provides profundity. Pollack beautifully summarizes the new consciousness that drives us alt-parents to navel-gaze, on page 282: “I felt a new emotion, at least for me. It wasn’t happiness, or sadness, exactly. Maybe it was a kind of all-knowingness, an understanding that life presents you with limitations and that you have to learn to deal with those limitations and be happy anyway. While I recognized the irony of having this life-changing epiphany while buying my son a plastic toy at a chain store that allowed its pharmacists to deny people birth-control medicine based on religious principles, I cried anyway. I wished I could give Elijah more, could be more for him. I just wanted the best for my family, and I felt ashamed that I couldn’t give it to them.”

The pressure to be a provider should be a great literary theme, if it isn’t already. Pollack tackles it with humility, grace, and judicious use of marijuana. We memoirists get a lot of ribbing for our egotism, Pollack especially. But in fact it’s his self-abasing humor that makes Alternadad such a joy.

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March 20, 2007 by info.

Erika Schickel is a L.A.-based writer, actress, and mother of two. And she has written a great momoir. You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom is definitely for fans of Mamarama. Except Schickel is funnier. And in some ways more outrageous (she writes about how going to strip clubs is a welcome break from parenting). And very heartwarming (definitely read the last chapter about sisterhood).

And I’m not just saying this because she gave me a nice review in the L.A. Times. Schickel shows how alt-parenting tomes are not just about punk rock onesies and navel-gazing: That we’re dealing with profound issues of identity, sexual politics, love and culture here, albeit sometimes gussied up into humorous accounts of weed habits. Visit www.erikaschickel.com for more.

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