September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/20/8)

New York, London, LA, Athens, San Francisco, Detroit, DC, Hialeah. Among the cities that can be name-checked in a punk-rock roll call, South Florida’s heavily Cuban American municipality is generally pretty low on the list. Hia-fucking-leah – as it’s lovingly known on a popular Miami T-shirt – is known more for being the birthplace of the 1970s proto-disco Miami sound (K.C. and the Sunshine Band, etc.) and chongas than for wearers of Mohawks and chanters of “hey-ho, let’s go.”

The band Guajiro is out to change that. Thursday night, opening for a sold-out Rancid concert at Fort Lauderdale’s Revolution, the four-piece played a vigorous bilingual set in which they name-checked Hialeah on the song “Mulatona.” They also debuted the new band Final Reformation – Guajiro minus singer Willy Lopez plus singer Joe Koontz from Against All Authority.

But most notably, they led the moshpit through a chant of their new single “Olé (Latinos for Hope)” (being released by I Scream Records on June 24). The anthem turns a futbol chant into an endorsement for Barack Obama, and translates Obama’s catchphrase “Yes We Can” into the riff “Si Se Puede.”

Guajiro has made a powerful, will.i.am-style video for Oléthat mixes shots of the presidential candidate with video of Guajiro’s sweaty members — Lopez, Jorges Gonzalez Graupera, David Santos, and Dougla’ MacKinnon.

Lots of musicians, of course, are getting on the Obama train; some Latin stars already recorded a video for him. But the presumptive Democratic nominee doesn’t usually get a lot of love from South Florida’s conservative exile community; in fact, today, some of Elian Gonzalez’s relatives (oh God, here they go again!) are holding a press conference against the senator because he has advisors who didn’t believe the boy was brought here by dolphins to be safe from Fidel.

“Tonight it’s about hope,” Lopez told the crowd Thursday night. It’s hard to say whether the stylized youths got it – I did see one kid in an Obama T-shirt, but unfortunately, so many of these third-generation punk fans follow the fashion of the Exploited, but not the politics of the Clash. Rocking for voting is a gutsy move for some Hialeah punks. Ole!

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/17/8)

On Sunday, my local newspaper, The Miami Herald, was one of several around the country to run the first installment of “Guantanamo: Beyond the Law,” an intensive, global investigation of the U.S.’s treatment of detainees in military bases since 9/11. The story, written by Tom Lasseter for the chain that owns the Herald, McClatchy, was everything the world desperately needs from the fourth estate: A thoroughly documented, unrelenting prying open of doors the government has done its best to keep shut (frequently by invoking “patriotism”). The series, which continues all week, reveals how many of the detainees had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the Taliban, how they were often beaten, how some died in custody, and how the accumulation of American atrocities on these people has turned the prison camp at Guantanamo not into a terrorism containing instrument, but a place that breeds terrorists.

Monday, day two of the series, the Herald announced that due to the continuing collapse of the newspaper industry, 17 percent of its staff will be eliminated through buyouts, attrition, or layoffs. McClatchy, in general, is cutting back its payroll by 1,400 employees, or 10 percent.

It’s the best of times, and the worst of times.

The Herald, like many papers, has made a lot of mistakes when it comes to keeping up with changing technology. Case in point: You can’t read articles more than two weeks old on its website, without registering for a special archive service and paying for them. There must be hundreds of articles on, say, Britney Spears in the Herald database, but you will only find the latest news in a Google search of her name. Talk about missed opportunities for easy hits.

The Gitmo investigation, however, shows McClatchy (the nation’s third-largest newspaper chain) making smart use of the web’s multimedia and extended database capabilities. Lasseter interviewed 66 former detainees. You can see many of their pictures in the online version of the story, along with video interviews; handy hyperlinks in the text will take you right to them. There are PDFs of documents used during the investigation, a la the Smoking Gun. There are maps of where detainees are from. And there’s a place to leave comments (though I think this part of the story should have been played up better online).

The investigation, so far at least, is a riveting must-read – and has been the talk of other news outlets. Coming on the heels of last week’s Supreme Court decision overthrowing the illegal detention of many of these prisoners, the timing couldn’t have been better – except for that little layoff announcement.

MOLI View contributing editor Rob Levine has done a great job of repeatedly drawing attention to the tremendous existential crisis facing journalism in this country; so has our colleague Richard Pachter. Normally, I would leave this discussion in their capable digits. But this time, the timing of the Guantanamo series and the layoffs is too egregious – and personal. After spending six great years as the paper’s pop music critic, I left the Herald a year ago, in part because I saw the writing on the wall in terms of the future of print journalism, and had a chance to get some Internet experience under my belt (thank you MOLI!). I have tremendous respect for the journalists I left behind. The Herald is far from perfect, but the newspaper has broken some major stories for the community just in the seven years since I have lived here – perhaps most significantly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning House of Lies series on how developers and politicians were taking off with millions intended for public housing. Another realtor just last week went to jail, thanks to that exposé.

I’m sure Lasseter is not in danger of being laid off right now. In fact, they should just hand the guy a Pulitzer this minute and forget the wait. But I’m also sure some people I know and respect will no longer be keeping an eye on the bad guys – whether in city government or local bands – as the Herald cuts are made manifest in the next month. And that hurts. All of us.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/12/8)

There’s perhaps no more famous and fruitful collaboration between a rock musician and photographer than the long friendship between Patti Smith and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Roommates in New York in the ’70s, a period fascinatingly chronicled in Mapplethorpe: A Biography, by Patricia Morrisroe, they both were transgressive pioneers: she as one of the poetess founders of punk, he as a portraitist of gay America. He shot the iconic black and white image of her for the cover of her debut Horses, an album that launched a million musical careers. If you ever get a chance to see Sandy Daley’s obscure 1971 film, Robert Having His Nipple Pierced, don’t miss it. Smith’s rambling narration — while, yes, Robert has his nipple pierced — in her thick New Jersey accent is off the wall and hilarious.

With her walleye, long tangled locks — no gray-hiding hair dye for this artiste — and Giacometti face, Smith has been a visual muse for many photographers since, including REM’s Michael Stipe. For the last decade or so, the singer has been working with fashion shutterbug Stephen Sebring. His documentary about her, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is scheduled for September release by Palm Pictures, it was announced yesterday. New Yorkers get a first peek at it at the Film Forum, August 6 to 19.

According to the press release, Dream of Life “is a plunge into the philosophy and artistry of this complicated, charismatic personality. Sebring captures Smith, who narrates the film, through her spoken words, performances, lyrics, paintings and photographs.” The movie also features Phillip Glass and Sam Shepard (another legendary ’70s collaborator of Smith’s).

Rizzoli will publish a companion book in August, which will include Polaroids taken by Smith. In addition, she and Sebring are releasing on their new PASK label The Coral Sea, a live CD she recorded with My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields — along with photographers and playwrights, Smith has excellent taste in guitarists (Lenny Kaye, Tom Verlaine, her late husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, etc.).

There’s no artist who has been singularly more inspiring to me as a woman than Patti. That said, I find the sometimes reverential attitude of and towards her work since the early ’90s can get a tad annoying. Smith has always prided herself on her sense of humor, citing Johnny Carson as a major inspiration. I hope Dream of Life has some of the wackiness that makes Daley’s movie a classic. Whatever: The world could always use more Patti Smith, now maybe more than ever.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/10/8)

Miami is a photojournalist’s dream. The abundant subtropical sun is god’s little lightbox, and there’s always a rich pageant of subjects: landscapes, characters, news stories, even cute animals.

Michael Carlebach is an excellent study of character. Miccosukee Indians bathing, a snake-oily condo salesman, a freshly mugged guy in a bar, and Jackie Gleason all find themselves pinned to the wall in his black-and-white portraiture show Witness: South Florida, at the Miami Center for the Photographic Arts.

Featuring a profusion of sun-kissed and party-weary South Floridians with furry mustaches, Witness is as much a time capsule as a document of a region. Some of the photos remind me of what Iggy Pop once said to me, about when he first discovered Coconut Grove in the ’70s: “I spent a night or two as the couch guest of a young neo-hippie, in a house that had roof tiles and stucco, and the cement was cracking and lizards and snakes were coming and going and vines were in the kitchen. The inside was going out and the outside was going in. I thought, `This is the place for me.’”

People talk nostalgically about Miami before Gloria, before Madonna, before Andrew and Wilma (all those dramatic divas). But aside from a TK Records greatest hits album, nothing has conveyed to me this unique time and place in American history as well as Carlebach’s photos.

These aren’t the glamour shots of the future Ocean Drive, though there is a little Miami Vice in them. Shooting regular folks in their homes and habitats, Carlebach is Miami’s Weegee. Other photos capture the quiet intellect of a city generally considered obsessed with appearances: Isaac Bashevis Singer and Tenneessee Williams stand alongside shots of a Mariel boatlift refugee and of a pregnant woman and her boyfriend – the “boyfriend” looking so much like a woman, you have to take the caption’s word for it.

Health demands led Carlebach from South Florida a couple years ago (he needs to stay near the North Carolina institute that gave him two new lungs). At Witness’s opening Saturday, he spoke of how he missed the crazy visual stimulation of Miami. Lots of other photographers were there to see these quintessential documents of the Magic City; many of them are Carlebach’s old students at the University of Miami and current employees of The Miami Herald. As happens at any gathering of journalists these days, there was glum talk about the change in times, outmoded technologies, decaying economies.

Along with informing us of the present, journalism is the future documentation of the past. Maybe, we need it now more than ever.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 6/5/8)

The Down Home Southernaires were playing their hearts out in the middle of the exhibit room at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Hipsters and swells, there for the opening of Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock n Roll Since 1967, walked around the group, staring and smiling. To actually hear the Southernaires’ psychedelic indie swamp boogie, you had to don one of the headphones hanging on the soundproof plexiglass box inside which the band was playing. The musicians were pictures at an exhibition, a natural-history museum diorama sprung to silent life, Art Rock Exhibit A of a show that seemed to ask, What is the connection, or disconnect, between visual and audio stimulation?

Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version), by Rirkrit Tiravanija, is the attention-getting centerpiece of this remarkably cool gathering of album art (Funkadelic head case Pedro Bell), photographs (uber-underground Richard Kern), videos (Robert Longo, Red Krayola), photomontages (punk feminist pioneer Linder – how f-ing cool is that?!), artifacts (lots of Throbbing Gristle; cool factor to the infinity degree), drawings (Rita Ackerman, Yoshitomo Nara), sculptures, and whatnot. The show originated at MOCA in Chicago, whose Dominic Molon curated it; it opened in Miami on May 29 and runs through September 7. Did I mention it’s really, really cool?

The exhibit title is misleading: Sympathy digs a lot deeper than anything as obvious as a giant lips logo. The array of film, art, and video taps into more of a Gen X demo than a boomer one. The Andy Warhol-assembled Velvet Underground is the aesthetic jumping-off point for what is essentially a survey of three decades of subcultural pioneers, with lots of contemporary pieces. As the Throbbing Gristle flyers and Christian Marclay installations show, sound and vision have a history of feeding each other – these are people who see industrial refuse as musical instruments and vinyl records as found artwork.

A lot of attention has been paid of late to Miami’s vibrant visual arts scene. But as Sympathy for the Devil proves, where there’s art, there’s usually noise – the Down Home Southernaires are the tip of a growing musical iceberg providing a soundtrack for Hernan Bas, Naomi Fischer, Jose Bedia, etc. Perhaps, the MOCA show will serve as a sort of inspirational mecca for cross-disciplinary creative types in what DHS calls the Black Magic City. Any artist can book time in Tiravanija’s Petri-dish rehearsal studio, and the museum is hosting a battle of the band series beginning June 24.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami is located at 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, FL. For information, please call 305.893.6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org. Museum hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm; Sunday noon – 5 pm, and last Friday of each month from 7 – 10 pm. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents/City employees, and children under 12; $5 non-members; $3 seniors and students with ID.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 5/29/8)

Stew looks sardonically out at the audience in New York’s Belasco Theater from his vantage point at center stage. Sometimes, as he narrates the action of Passing Strange, the show he wrote with Heidi Rodewald, which just won two Obies and is nominated for seven Tonies, he sets his heavy black glasses on top of his head and pauses with lips pressed tight, emphasizing a particular absurdity – of a character, the plot, the whole situation of being a longtime outsider artist finally let in. It’s a healthily skeptical narrative device that intellectually keeps this smart, funny play from becoming what it has actually become: a Broadway musical. “Can you believe it?” the gesture says. Well, yes.

Passing Strange, which moved from the Public Theatre to the Belasco February 8, is the story of that skeptical artiste as a young man. The Youth, played with just the right mix of wide-eyed gawkish disdain by Daniel Brecker, escapes the phony palm-tree-studded life of growing up black and middle class in LA by following his muse to Amsterdam and Berlin, where he falls in with hippies, anarchists, and performance artists. Stew thanks GW Bush for the show’s inspiration. “When I found out that he had never been to Europe in his youth (or in his adulthood until he became prez!!!) I immediately knew I wanted to write a play about a kid who wanted to go to Europe,” he writes on the show’s website. “That fact about Bush said a lot to me about America’s lack of interest in anything foreign except that which it can exploit (always to exploit – never to learn from).”

In the show, Stew, who with Rodewald had a band called the Negro Project for a decade, is just as critical of Euro bohos’ curious interest in and ignorance of his background as he is of American close-mindedness. In order not to get evicted as a pop capitalist pig, the Youth winds up playing the skin card, pretending to have been a kind of Crip to his communal flat-mates – who lap up his gangsta art. “No one in this play knows what it’s like to sell a dime in South Central,” Stew drily states to the Belasco crowd, making fun of what must have been his own adolescent shuck and jive – and raising a red flag for any minstrel tendencies in this current song and dance.

Years ago I recall seeing Stew busking in the Astor Place subway station; I’d like to say I recognized his Elvis Costelloish genius back then, but I’d be lying. I’m definitely rooting for him Tony night, June 15. He’s the lucky, worthy struggling artist who has finally hit the lottery – bravo for his capitalist pop!

Passing Strange will perform Tuesdays at 7 p.m.; Wednesdays - Saturdays at 8 pm; Wednesday and Saturday matinees at 2 p.m.; and Sundays at 3 p.m. at the Belasco Theatre (111 West 44th Street) on Broadway. Tickets are priced $111.50 - $66.50 - $36.50 - $26.50, and are available through Tele-charge at www.TeleCharge.com, or by calling 212-239-6200.

For additional information onPassing Strange, visit www.PassingStrangeOnBroadway.com.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 5/27/8)

Phil Martin is one of the best things to happen to this website. The Brady, Texas-based musician, poet, retired professor, and all-around pontificator is MOLI’s most prolific blogger. At his Campo Madrone profile he has 19 different tabs, including the D&E Ranch, featuring the prose of his alterego Cletus Duhon, and the Border, photographic and writerly snapshots of life where Mexico meets Texas. As if that weren’t enough, Phil has also launched a profile for the Cowboy Chautauqua Company, a performing troupe of cowboy singers and poets. You can read more of his poems there, and hear some great Americana anthems, like Andy Wilkinson’s “I’ll Be Better Than This,” which Phil says was inspired by something he said.

I’ve never met Phil, though I try to keep up with the emails he sends me through MOLI – man, I envy his verbosity and quick wit! Unlike some of us, Phil isn’t paid to blog. He just has a passion for writing, and he’s found us to be a good site to air out his bounteous ink, so to speak.

After a decade hiatus, Phil is trying to revive the CCC. You can book one, two, four, or a whole posse of poets, writers, songsmiths. It’s great to experience Martin’s original American voice virtually wherever you are – but I’d love to see him and his friends in person. Judging by the Campo Madrone blogs, it would be a pointed, philosophic, hilarious, and poignant night of songs, jokes, and running commentary. Like an old campfire gathering – one where W. is likely to get roasted on a long pointed stick and someone gets messy confessional.

The Chautauqua is based on an historic form of popular culture, pre-Internet, even pre-the chitlin circuit: “Chautauquas were a big part of the American entertainment scene during the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th centuries,” Phil writes in one posting. “They died out mostly because of the invention of motion pictures and radios . . . but they thrived for nearly half a century. Describing what they did isn’t easy because a wide disparity of styles and formats existed among them. But a national circuit developed, one where traveling troupes of entertainers came through small towns across America on a regular basis. These shows were in part educational, aimed at bringing the thriving culture of the cities to the rural parts of the country.”

Brady is a long way from my perch in Miami Beach, but I feel like I’ve gotten to know Phil in the past year. (His wife, Evelyn [nice name], makes the amazing Lathers del Corazon handmade soaps and lotions, which I highly recommend.) I’m not just saying this as some sort of MOLI promotion, but getting to find a voice like his – or really, I should say voices, since he writes in so many personae — is what makes me believe in the use of a social networking site, or the Internet in general. Call it digital chautauqua. Make sure to send him an email – and be ready for a new pen pal.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 5/22/8)

Politicians have to do a certain amount of pandering. That’s why Barack Obama now wears a flag pin, and John McCain has gone on an ethical staffing spree. But more important than catering to constituencies is staying ahead of the curve of public opinion. In other words: leading.

And as good, albeit unlikely, a sign as any that Obama will be our country’s next leader is his opening act when he speaks at Sunrise’s Bank Atlantic Center on Friday: the Spam All Stars.

In South Florida, and in the global jam-band circuit, the Spam All Stars are well known to be the best Latin funk band led by a DJ, ever. DJ Le Spam (aka Andrew Yeomanson) leads his multinational ensemble through what he calls electronic descarga. The improvisational grooves are mostly rooted in Cuban music, but there’s hip-hop, rock, dub, etc., in there as well. Ever since they first established a Thursday night residency at the Little Havana nightclub Hoy Como Ayer some seven years ago, the All Stars have typified the progressive, eclectic embrace of a Miami demographic that loves Cuban culture – but isn’t necessarily down with the bomb-throwing tactics of the old-guard exile community.

In other words, having the All Stars warm the crowd up plays to the Latin vote that all the candidates, who are converging on South Florida this week like sharks around a bloody game fish, will be sucking up to. But it’s a Latin vote for change; Spam’s not Willy Chirino, or Gloria Estefan. Spam All Stars provide the soundtrack for a new Miami: a town that is now predominantly Spanish-speaking, yes, but that’s as much due to recent immigrants from other Latin American countries as to the generations who fled Castro decades ago. Plus, the children of those ‘60s exiles have come of age, and like most second-generation immigrants, they don’t necessarily share the world views of their parents.

As Ana Menendez urged in her excellent Miami Herald column, when you come to Miami, please don’t just talk about Cuba. “Whatever you do, for the love of God, please do not pick up any maracas,” Menendez counsels.

Perhaps, before Obama takes the stage, Spam will spin “Si Se Puede,” the recent anthem by another South Florida band, Guajiro – a song that features electric guitars, not maracas. “Si Se Puede” is the Spanish translation of “Yes I Can.” It’s a bilingual hardcore answer to the will.i.am Obama tribute. Guajiro are three Cuban Americans, and one Irish drummer, from Hialeah who play Rancid/Clash/Green Day-influenced punk. They don’t wear Che Guevera shirts – but they are down with Barack.

I believe the last time Obama spoke at an event like this in South Florida was for the Miami Book Fair in 2006; he was at downtown’s Gusman Theater, and it was one hot ticket. The BAC is about three times as large as the Gusman, able to hold about 15,000 (depending on the setup). It’s a place for rock stars; the last time I was there I saw Bruce Springsteen. And right now, Obama is America’s number one idol.

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(Originally published on MOLI 5/20/8)

Dean Wareham is nothing if not self-lacerating. One of the on-the-road tales he tells in Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, his memoir of his years as the lead singer and songwriter for the bands Galaxie 500 and Luna, is about his first time with a prostitute. In a legal brothel in Hamburg, dude prematurely ejaculated. “’Schade,’ she said, which translates, ‘It’s a shame.’” Talk about the ultimate deflation of rock-star mythology – Black Postcards is a far cry from Hammer of the Gods.

The subtitle “Rock & Roll Romance” is meant ironically. The bleak title is far more accurate: Black Postcards is as much a chronicle of failure as of love.

It’s hard to imagine a big audience for this book, since, as he’s the first to admit, Wareham has never had a hit record in his life. And yet, even as I wondered who cares about yet another gig and hotel room (a seemingly repetitive pointlessness that is Dean’s point precisely), I found myself anxious to return to Postcards every time I put it down. This was partly because to some degree, I was reliving a segment of my own obsessively insular indie-rock past. During their brief lifespan and early in my career as a music critic, Galaxie 500 was one of my favorite bands. I reviewed them for The Village Voice and later, met Dean, Damon, and Naomi when they were recording at Kramer’s Noise New York studio. I wound up living around the corner from Wareham in the East Village and used to run into him on Bowery often. We’d stop to chat about what we were listening to, or whatever; Dean was always personable, and I liked his wife, Claudia. I remember being floored when he told me that he had landed Stanley Demeski to play with Luna; we both raved about the Feelies drummer’s economical way with a snare. Â

But that was years ago; I moved, and only peripherally stayed attuned to Dean’s career and personal life. Reading Postcards was a bit of a surreal experience: I knew the action and players intimately in the first half, but the end was still a mystery to me. I really wanted to know what happened to this old acquaintance I suddenly knew better than ever. (People have told me they’ve had similar reactions to my book; now I get it.)

Well, nothing much happens, yet like the crazy rhythms Demeski gets out of a few spare drumbeats, it’s a lot. Postcards is a chronicle of the life of an Ivy League-educated, moderately successful indie/modern/alt rocker (choose your sobriquet). Up and Down With the Rolling Stones it’s not. There’s a fair amount of Ecstasy but barely any groupies. Kramer and former male prostitute/talent scout Terry Tolkin are interesting side characters, but they’re not Truman Capote or Marianne Faithfull. The biggest plot development is when Wareham leaves Claudia and their young son Jack, after taking up with Luna bassist Britta Phillips. Confessing his constant crying, Wareham is not afraid to come across as a sensitive sad sack. But clearly, he can be a bit of an asshole too.

Dean always seemed sad (best bedroom eyes in alt rock), smart (Harvard), and wryly sardonic to me, and that’s definitely how he comes across in his memoir. He never sentimentalizes or mythologizes. He’s surprisingly funny, in a flip way. His bands may never have become as big as Metallica or Nirvana. But his literate audience is probably large enough to eat up Black Postcards. And as Liz Phair said in her NY Times review of the book, Wareham definitely captures an era and a way of life.

Still, I don’t really buy it when Wareham laments having sacrificed the “normal” life of a suburban family to being a musician. Being a band leader and a good husband is no easy balancing act. But I don’t believe for a minute that Wareham’s going to disappear into New Jersey and become an accountant now that Luna is disbanded. After all, he’s already found a second artistic career, one he’s pretty good at. And book tours are much less grinding than rock ‘n’ roll ones

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September 11, 2008 by info.

(originally published on MOLI 5/15/8)

Oscar Wao and Newell Ewing are comic-book fanatics. Both outsider youths have bodacious moms and superhero complexes. Wao is an obese Dominican in Paterson, New Jersey, who’s seemingly stuck in a perennial virginal pubescence. Ewing is an actually pubescent WASP denizen of suburban Las Vegas. Both nerds are ‘07 literary heroes: Wao is the titular protagonist of Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, while Ewing is the missing child at the center of Charles Bock’s debut novel, Beautiful Children.

Both books were released, the former by Penguin, the latter by Random House, to an envious amount of hype (envied by this writer, at least). Wao, the successor to Diaz’s acclaimed 1997 collection of short stories Drown, was years in the making and wound up winning a Pulitzer. Bock’s book, also a long-term labor of love, earned him a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review – and a MOLI book of the month pick – though it doesn’t seem to have lived up to its initial hype with sales or prolonged fanfare.

Diaz and Bock are both products of literary schools: Diaz teaches at MIT (and compares a gruesome bit of torture to a MLA seminar in one stretching-it passage in Wao) while Bock has talked about the years he spent workshopping Beautiful Children under the tutelage of masters like David Foster Wallace. Both books can be self-consciously writerly. Wao breaks free of its footnotes and rotating narrative voices, while Children gets bogged down. Both represent a triumph, and moral denouement, for geek chic.

It used to be that male writers would at least feign a certain machismo – emulate Spanish civil war fighters or Neal Cassady or junkie outlaws or lords of the rings. The adolescent obsessions with fantasy and sci-fi that Diaz and Bock must themselves have once had – given their meticulous attention to genre detail – would be the kind of dirty past you’d want to keep hidden. Superman would deny his Clark Kent. These days, a familiarity with the arcana of the Fantastic Four can apparently earn one a hardcover, major-publisher, balls-out book deal.

Diaz and Bock put their antiheroes through ugly fates, yet clearly they love them. For all his weirdo unsexiness, Wao is one of the more finely drawn, empathetic, original characters to emerge from Paterson since William Carlos Williams’s wheelbarrow.

But I’m waiting for a female lit star who sees her altergo in Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Supergirl, and Tank Girl. She should be awkward, fat, shy, and doomed – and earn her creator a fat book contract and NYT slice of hype.

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