I spoke to a lot of friends yesterday about Dave Brubeck. The hardcore Jazz guys I know don’t care much for his music while other friends were really broken up about Brubeck’s death.

From my friend Alan, a record engineer:

My dad passed when I was five, making me prone to attach great significance to any object of his that was left is his absence. Through these various collections of books, paintings, and my personal obsessive favorite, records, I hoped to get a semblance of what it might have been like to actually hang out with him. Among the mostly classical records he had, there were a couple of notable exceptions, one of which was Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Goes To College, which was easily the first jazz record I had ever seen. I say “seen” because it was probably some time before I actually listened to it, as I seemed to enjoy collecting records even more than listening to them at the time. As years went on, and as I actually began to appreciate all the music I had accumulated, I always had a special place for Dave Brubeck’s music, as something that I could have enjoyed with my dad.

I never felt Brubeck sought to provide a puzzlement, in the same way Monk did so beautifully, or challenge beyond the point of pleasure, like another one my musical heroes, Frank Zappa. His music, specifically “Time Out”, plays out like lovely complex equations, in which you are being given the question and the answer simultaneously. Like he was walking you through a wonderful garden maze with neatly trimmed hedges that were not over your head, but revealed intricate patterns to you the further you went in. You never get the sense that you were hearing something that hadn’t been attempted to that point, but seemed to make perfect sense, both emotionally and mathematically.

And our pal Eric Sanders:

My father is a folk musician. The only classical music I heard in the house was Rossini’s William Tell Overture, but I played classical in school band my entire childhood and ending going to university to study classical music. The only jazz record my pop had was Dave Brubeck’s Time Out. I played in jazz band for my entire childhood, went for a masters in jazz music and have co-lead a successful jazz trio in Atlanta for a decade.

The “odd time” stuff is what I like best. Most is in 4 beats to a bar, with a 1/4 note pulse. Think a simple rock tune. 1-2-3-4. Boom-bap, boom-boom bap. This is “common time.” The other main time signature is 3. Think a waltz. Boom-bap-bap, boom-bap-bap. along with this, there is the lilting 6/8 feel. think a slow blues/ballad.

Brubeck mixed odd meter in jazz. The most famous piece is “Take 5”, in 5 of course. Odd meter wasn’t in swing, odd metered tunes weren’t hits, jazz songs weren’t hits, songs with long unaccompanied drum solos were not hits–yet Brubeck and his magical quartet covered this all with one tune.

Tunes in 5 started popping up everywhere, including on my beloved Blue Note label. Brubeck has many other tunes in 5. The lead track on Time Out–“Blue Rondo a la Turk”–is in 9, not grouped in even 3’s, but phrased: 2-2-2-3 and other permutations. He has jazz pieces in 11 beats and one in 13, that is mostly phrased 3-3-3-4 and they’re all *swingin’. Not easy to do.

The father connection is a compelling one. Here’s Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic:

It wasn’t the music, at first, that I loved. It was the way my dad so clearly enjoyed the music and how much reverence he showed for men like Brubeck and Oscar Peterson and many other jazz legends who had come to Montreal and played there. It was only later, after I had heard these pieces over and over, that I came to appreciate the sound. Looking back, I suppose what I really appreciate is both the music, and the loving memories of hearing that music, of my life when it first washed over me as a child, which is why I was so sad to learn of Brubeck’s death.

We grieve of course when we lose a loved one. But we may grieve again years later when we lose someone, even a stranger, who we know meant something special to the loved one we have lost. The new death reminds us anew of what the old death took from us. I feel that way about Dave Brubeck. His death today makes me think of all those Sunday mornings, and the joy my dad shared with us, a joy which now is gone from this earth. I suppose I could look at it that way. Or I suppose I could see the vivid memory of it all as just another blessing the two men, strangers but collaborators, each in his own way, bestowed upon my life. And I suppose I could make sure that I play “Blue Rondo” this Sunday for my own son.

For more on Brubeck, check this out from Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz:

Dave Brubeck was achieving even more dramatic popularity with his Time Out recording. “Take Five,” the Paul Desmond composition included on this album, achieved unprecedented sales for a modern jazz instrumental performance and did much to legitimize unusual time signatures. But this represented no sudden rise to fame for Brubeck. Rather, the building blocks of this success had been slowly put in place during the course of the prior decade. In the late 1940s, Brubeck started drawing attention for his advocacy of the new and unusual, initially through the work of his Octet. This ensemble, which drew on the most progressive strains in both jazz and classical music, was formed during Brubeck’s stint at Mills College, where he and many of his colleagues in the Octet were studying with modernist composer Darius Milhaud. Subsequently, Brubeck broadened his following while leading a piano trio that mostly showcased his adventurous reworkings of jazz standards. But Brubeck’s greatest popularity came with the formation of his quartet, where his thick harmonies and strident rhythms were set off by the smooth alto work of saxophonist Paul Desmond. The Quartet recorded a number of outstanding live performances for the Fantasy label, in which the dictates of modernism and melodicism were artfully balanced. In 1954, Brubeck left Fantasy for the Columbia label and, that same year, his photo graced the cover of Time magazine. His gradual building of a mass market audience, and the growing polish of the quartet, aided by the addition of the exceptional drummer Joe Morello (in 1956) and journeyman bassist Eugene Wright (in 1958)—to form what many consider the “classic” Brubeck quartet—set the stage for the Time Out success.

The fame and enormous record sales that Brubeck enjoyed were all the more remarkable given the uncompromising nature of his piano work. His approach to the keyboard was almost totally purged of the sentimental and romantic trappings or the oh-so-hip funkiness that characterized most crossover hits. His chord voicings were dense and often dissonant. His touch at the piano was heavy and ponderous—anything but the cocktail bar tinkling fancied by the general public. His music tended to be rhythmically complex, but seldom broached the finger-popping swing of a Peterson or Garner. Only in his choice of repertoire, which was populist to an extreme with its mix of pop songs, show tunes, traditional music—indeed anything from “Camptown Races” to “The Trolley Song” might show up on a Brubeck album—did he make a deferential gesture to the tastes of the mass audience. But even these familiar songs were apt to take on an unfamiliar guise under Brubeck’s hands. He may have put aside the twelve-tone row in favor of “Tea for Two,” but by the time he had finished with the Vincent Youmans standard it could sound like Schoenberg had tampered with the sheet music.

And here’s Scott Yanow from All Music Guide to Jazz, 2nd edition.

Dave Brubeck has long served as proof that creative jazz and popular success can go together. Although critics who had championed him when he was unknown seemed to scorn him when the Dave Brubeck Quartet became a surprise success, in reality Brubeck never watered down or altered his music in order to gain a wide audience. Creative booking (being one of the first groups to play regularly on college campuses) and a bit of luck resulted in great popularity and Dave Brubeck today remains as one of the few household names in jazz.

From nearly the start Brubeck enjoyed utilizing polyrhythms and polytonality (playing in two keys at once). He had classical training from his mother but fooled her for a long period by memorizing his lessons and not learning to read music. Dave studied music at the College of the Pacific during 1938–42. Brubeck led a service band in General Patton’s Army during World War II, and then in 1946 he started studying at Mills College with the classical composer Darius Milhaud, who encouraged his students to play jazz. Brubeck led a group mostly consisting of fellow classmates and they recorded as the Dave Brubeck Octet; their music (released on Fantasy in 1951) still sounds advanced today with complex time signatures and some polytonality. The octet was too radical to get much work so Brubeck formed a trio with drummer Cal Tjader (who doubled on vibes) and bassist Ron Crotty. The trio’s Fantasy recordings of 1949–51 were quite popular in the Bay Area but the group came to an end when Brubeck hurt his back during a serious swimming accident and was put out of action for months.

Upon his return in 1951, Brubeck was persuaded by altoist Paul Desmond to make the group a quartet. Within two years the band had become surprisingly popular. Desmond’s cool-toned alto and quick wit fit in well with Brubeck’s often heavy chording and experimental playing; both Brubeck and Desmond had original sounds and styles that owed little to their predecessors. Joe Dodge was the band’s early drummer but after he tired of the road the virtuosic Joe Morello took his place in 1956 while the revolving bass chair finally settled on Eugene Wright in 1958. By then Brubeck had followed his popular series of Fantasy recordings with some big sellers on Columbia and had appeared on the cover of Time (1954). The huge success of Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” (1960) was followed by many songs played in “odd” time signatures such as 7/4 and 9/8; the high-quality soloing of the musicians kept these experiments from sounding like gimmicks. Dave and Iola Brubeck (his wife and lyricist) put together an anti-racism show featuring Louis Armstrong (The Real Ambassadors) which was recorded, but its only public appearance was at the Monterey Jazz Festival in the early ’60s.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet constantly travelled around the world until its breakup in 1967. After some time off during which he wrote religious works, Brubeck came back the following year with a new quartet featuring Gerry Mulligan, although he would have several reunions with Desmond before the altoist’s death in 1977. Brubeck joined with his sons Darius (keyboards), Chris (electric bass and bass trombone) and Danny (drums) in Two Generations of Brubeck in the 1970s. In the early ’80s tenor saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi was in the Brubeck Quartet and since the mid-’80s clarinetist Bill Smith (who was in the original Octet) has alternated with altoist Bobby Militello.

There is no shortage of Dave Brubeck records currently available, practically everything he has cut for Fantasy, Columbia, Concord and Telarc (his most recent label) are easy to locate. Brubeck, whose compositions “In Your Own Sweet Way, “The Duke” and “Blue Rondo a La Turk” have become standards, has remained very busy (despite some bouts of bad health) into the mid-’90s.

There’s some background. Now, here’s some music.

Two-Part Contention

Three To Get Ready

Strange Meadow Lark

The Real Ambassador

Jump For Joy

The Duke

Charles Matthew Hallelujah

Bossa Nova U.S.A.

Blue Rondo A La Turk

The Library of Congress presents the following audio interviews that Joe Smith conducted with the likes of Mick Jagger, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Ahmet Ertegun, B.B. King, George Harrison and much more.

Hey, this is Gold, good people. Diggum Smack.

Over at Flavorwire check out these two features: 20 Brilliant Musicians on Why They Make Music and 20 Brilliant Filmmakers on Why They Make Movies.

Here’s the one on Tom Waits:

“My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. ‘Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?’ they asked me the other day.

I told them this story: ‘In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, “Look at me… I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you… you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.” And they grew up in that forest together.

And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, “Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.” So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.’”

And Wong Kar-Wai:

“Cinema has certain qualities, and it’s the image. Sometimes this image has its own breathing or tempo. It has to linger, and will linger because you want to have more. It is very instinctive. It is very instinctive when you’re shooting the shots in front of this video, the monitor, you know exactly, because sometimes it takes you more than 10 takes or 15 takes… Afterwards, the most enjoyable part is the final weeks. That means you put everything together, the sound, the images and everything to create a film… it’s beyond words… I think one of the reasons you keep making films is because you want to experience that part again and again.”

News that Phillip Roth has retired from writing made its way around today. Here is David Remnick’s take over at The New Yorker:

Roth told Les inRocks that when he turned seventy-four he reread his favorite authors—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Hemingway. Then, he said, “When I finished, I decided to reread all of my books beginning with the last, ‘Nemesis.’

“I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was more or less a success. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”

“After that, I decided that I was finished with fiction,” Roth went on. “I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. I studied them, I taught them, I wrote them, and I read them. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!”

…Roth long resisted the idea of a biography, and he has mocked the form in his fiction and in interviews. Some years ago, he worked for a while with Ross Miller, a professor at the University of Connecticut, but the two fell out and there was no biography. Recently, he wrote a hilarious screed for The New Yorker’s Web site about the Wikipedia entry for “The Human Stain.” But the need for a rather more complete account of his life persisted. This year, Roth relented and signed a collaborative agreement with Blake Bailey, who has written fine biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates. He told Les inRocks that he is allowing Bailey free access to his archives for as long as necessary, but that he has instructed his executors to destroy the archive after his death. “I don’t want my papers lying around,” he said. “No one has to read them.”

[Photo Credit: Eric Thayer]

Via Laughing Squid check this out…Off Book-We Love Retro Media: Vinyl, VHS, Tapes and Film.

[Images Via: The Vinyl Dustbin; Trampoline…]

Steely Dan isn’t for everyone. But I dig them and I really like this nerd-a-thon with them taking about the making of Aja.

This Friday night, of the hundreds of bands that will play New York City, Special Patrol Group will attempt to blow the doors off Arlene’s Grocery at 7pm. It’s a tall task to blow the doors off a rock-n-roll club. It’s taller when it’s 7pm.

But for Special Patrol Group, this is a sweet slot. Their fans, largely drawn from the coveted demographic overlap between young parents and parents of young children, require a decent bed time so they can make pancakes and attend soccer practice at 9 AM the next day.

I know Special Patrol Group because I met one of the founders of the band, Matthew DeMella, at one of those Saturday morning soccer practices a couple of years ago. He’s a music teacher, a dad, a husband, and a fellow harborer of inappropriate expectations for post-toddler soccer players. And after we talked about that stuff, he told me about his band.

Here at Bronx Banter, Alex lends us insights about the creative process, almost on a daily basis. One of the things that he says a lot, and that I take to heart, is that just showing up counts for more than you’d think. I think that’s a Woody thing. And when Matt told me about Special Patrol Group, I immediately thought about the importance of showing up.

Special Patrol Group was formed in 2005 and they’ve been recording and “touring” ever since. But when you’re a teacher, a dad, a husband; when you attend soccer practice, make pancakes, and consider those events as essential, what’s left? How the hell can you rock and roll in a sliver? Hint: a big part of the answer is having an amazing wife who says, “O.K.”

The band is comprised of four regular members. Matt and his brother Jon play guitar, Katie Patrizio provides the vocals on more than half the cuts, and Mike Blancafor is on drums. Logistics present as big a challenge as anything else.

Jon DeMella, gifted with not only musical talent but also the unflinching ability to advocate for gigs that the band may not actually deserve, does promotion. He’s awesome at it. He lives in Seattle. Katie Schmidt had to miss a gig last Halloween because she got snowed in and caught pneumonia. It would be like Derek Jeter missing three months of the season.

Special Patrol Group , as expected from a band that only plays four gigs a year, is not flawless. But they’re comfortable on stage and with each other and that gives them sufficient leeway to find their groove before long. When they do, they’re a mash of seventies and late-nineties influences that suggest a group of musicians who’ve been loving and leaving different kinds of music their whole lives. 

The songs are intelligent, unafraid of complexity, and often contain some stretch that you will be humming to yourself on the way home. Matt says “Belle and Sebastian, Elvis Costello and Dinosaur Jr.” I think I hurt his feelings when I said “Pavement,” but that was intended to be a compliment.

After last year’s Halloween snowstorm, when their lead singer and most of their fans were unable to leave their homes, they played before an audience of two. Not their fault, but still, that had to sting. On some nights, they’ve had venues give them crap about not bringing enough paying customers through the door and they wonder why they signed up for this. But there are more nights when they fill it up. There are nights when the band clicks and the fans all get sitters and, in that sliver, they’re rock stars.

When Matt told me he was a teacher and had a band, I thought of Robert Pollard, the patron saint of teachers-with-bands. Pollard taught fourth grade as he pounded out a dozen lifetimes worth of dingy, unforgettable riffs. Guided By Voices was an influential band, and can mount credible reunion tours for each of their many incarnations. They packed in venues like Irving Plaza and Hammerstein Ballroom and us sardines chanted G-B-V until our throats ran red. And the prevailing wisdom on Guided By Voices is that they never made it.

“Making it” is important to most, and it’s attractive to all, but it’s an obvious trap. A saner calculation utilizes your own proprietary formula and measures things privately. I can’t speak for Special Patrol Group, but it strikes me that they wouldn’t dedicate this small space in their lives to something so big unless it made them feel good. They might aspire to more, but this is what they’ve got right now. And on Friday night they’re showing up, again, and that’s pretty great start.

For more information about the band and a list of available songs, click here. 

Apropos of nothing, here’s a 1981 Rolling Stone interview with Keith:

Did you find anything worthwhile in punk rock?

Yeah, there was a certain spirit there. But I don’t think there was anything new musically, or even from the PR point of view, image-wise. There was too much image, and none of the bands were given enough chance to put their music together, if they had any. It seemed to be the least important thing. It was more important if you puked over somebody, you know? But that’s a legacy from us also. After all, we’re still the only rock & roll band arrested for peeing on a wall.

Apparently, the punks weren’t impressed. They really seemed to hate bands like the Stones.

That’s what we used to say about everything that went before us. But you need a bit more than just putting down people to keep things together. There’s always somebody better at puttin’ you down. So don’t put me down, just do what I did, you know? Do me something better. Turn me on.

…Obviously, some of the Stones’ greatest music was made on dope.

Yeah, Exile on Main St. was heavily into it. So was Sticky Fingers….

Was it difficult for you to record those albums?

No, I mean, especially with the Stones, just because they’ve been at this sort of point for so long, where they’re considered, you know, “the greatest rock & roll band in the world….” [Laughs] God, my God — you gotta be joking. Maybe one or two nights, yeah, you could stick them with that. My opinion is that on any given night, it’s a different band that’s the greatest rock & roll band in the world, you know? Because consistency is fatal for a rock & roll band. It’s gotta go up and down. Otherwise, you wouldn’t know the difference. It would be just a bland, straight line, like lookin’ at a heart machine. And when that straight line happens, baby, you’re dead, you know?

[Photo Credit: Lynn Goldsmith]

If they’d only get their shit together for a few minutes…RZA explains.

Arart: Wow.

This speaks to me. From Isaac Chotiner’s 2008 Atlantic interview with Jhumpa Lahiri:

One critic who reviewed your first book said that your prose is extremely un-self-conscious and not showy. Without making a judgment on that, do you think he was correct?

I like it to be plain. It appeals to me more. There’s form and there’s function and I have never been a fan of just form. My husband and I always have this argument because we go shopping for furniture and he always looks at chairs that are spectacular and beautiful and unusual, and I never want to get a chair if it isn’t comfortable. I don’t want to sit around and have my language just be beautiful. If you read Nabokov, who I love, the language is beautiful but it also makes the story and is an integral part of the story. Even now in my own work, I just want to get it less—get it plainer. When I rework things I try to get it as simple as I can.

Do you have any desire to write a huge, panoramic novel?

I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m an effusive writer. My writing tends not to expand but to contract. If I do write more novels, I think they’ll be more streamlined and concentrated.

That fits into what you were saying about your prose style, right?

Maybe. Yes. I don’t like excess. When a great sweeping work is great, what makes it great is that there’s no excess.

[Photo Credit: Camille Van Horne]

Here’s our pal Mark Lamster’s Q&A with Christopher Bonanos, author of Instant: The Story of Polaroid:

ML: One aspect of public relations at which Land was especially adept was in building relationships with artists. Because a Polaroid camera is a bit clumsy in the hand and hard to focus, because the saturation of the film is so idiosyncratic and rich, and because the format is so unique, Polaroid encourages, as you note, a kind of self-conscious artiness. It’s amazing what a broad spectrum of artists ended up working with Polaroid. I know when I started taking Polaroids, I was influenced by Walker Evans, one of the “house” artists.

CB: That’s somewhat true — though I’d say that it even more encouraged a kind of casual artless shooting that equates with what we do on social networks. The other day, I met an artist named Tom Slaughter who was a huge Polaroid user back in the eighties. We were going through his photos — he has thousands — and it’s striking how much each box of them looks like an Instagram feed. They’re the same kinds of casual snapshots that somehow also feel documentary and a little profound: people eating and drinking, sitting on the porch, whatever. And it’s even the same square format, which is not an accident: the Instagram guys explicitly pay homage to Polaroid in their logo, and have a display of old Polaroid cameras in their offices. On the genuinely arty end of things, though, it’s true that Polaroid opened up its own big niche. The spontaneity was valuable to some people, like Andy Warhol; the color was especially useful to others, like Marie Cosindas; and the unique technology was valuable to Ansel Adams and a lot of other people.

I’ll never forget my father’s Polaroid camera, the sound of it being unfolded, the pleasure in pressing the red buttom to take a picture (always a treat), watching the image come out. And then fighting with my brother and sister to see which one of us could shake the photograph until an image appeared. It felt like magic.

Oh, and it ain’t over…

[Photo Credit: Sincerely Lola]

Sam Anderson interviewed Junot Diaz in yesterday’s Times Magazine about Diaz’s new collection of short stories, This is How You Lose Her:

How many stories did you generate in total?

I’ll tell you what, I can name the stories for “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” before “The Cheater’s Guide to Love” came. There’s a story called “Primo” that was supposed to be at the end of the book — that was a miserable botch. I spent six months on that, and it never came together. There was a story called “Santo Domingo Confidential” that was trying to be the final story, that I spent a year on. I must have written a hundred pages. It was another farrago of nonsense. I wrote a summer story where the kid gets sent to the Dominican Republic while his brother is dying of cancer; he gets sent because his mom can’t take care of him. It was a story I called “Confessions of a Teenage Sanky-Panky,” which was even worse than all the other ones put together. And that was another 50-page botch.

That must be tough.

That’s why I never want to do this again. It’s like you spend 16 years chefing in the kitchen, and all that’s left is an amuse-bouche.

There’s a classic bit of creative-writing-class advice that tells us we need to learn to turn off our internal editors. I’ve never understood how to unbraid the critical and the creative. How do you manage that?

You’ve raised one of the thorniest dialectics of working, which is that you need your critical self: without it you can’t write, but in fact the critical self is what’s got both feet on the brakes of your process. My thing is, I’m just way too harsh. It’s an enormous impediment, and that’s just the truth of it. It doesn’t make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn’t more valorous. I have a character defect, man.

So turn on your harsh paternalistic, militaristic critic —

It’s my dad.

O.K., invite your dad in: I want to hear his review of Junot Díaz the bad writer. What is wrong with that stuff? What are the mistakes you make?

First of all, nonsense characterization. The dullest, wet-noodle characteristics and behaviors and thoughts and interests are ascribed to the characters. These 80-year-old, left-in-the-sun newspaper-brittle conflicts — where the conflicts are so ridiculously subatomic that you have to summon all the key members of CERN to detect where the conflict in this piece is. It just goes on, man. You know, I force it, and by forcing it, I lose everything that’s interesting about my work. What’s interesting about my work, for me — not for anyone else; God knows, I can’t speak for that — what’s interesting in my work is the way that when I am playing full out, when I am just feeling relaxed and I’m playing, and all my faculties are firing, but only just to play. Not to get a date, not because I want someone to hug me, not because I want anyone to read it. Just to play.

[Photo Credit: Fornication]

Swell oral history on “Cheers” by Brian Raftery over at GQ. Anyone who ever loved that show, well, you’re in for a treat.

Over at Time, Cormac McCarthy talks movies with the Coens.

Head on over to Flavorwire for these pearls of wisdom from William Faulkner…

“Read, read, read. Read everything —trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” – Statement at the University of Mississippi, 1947

“All of us failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. In my opinion, if I could write all my work again, I am convinced that I would do it better, which is the healthiest condition for an artist. That’s why he keeps on working, trying again; he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won’t, which is why this condition is healthy.” – Interview with The Paris Review, 1956

[Image Via: The Economist]

Dig Chris Jones’ profile of Teller in the latest issue of Esquire.

Teller is sixty-four years old; he has been a full-time magician since 1975, but he first began performing magic tricks when he was five and had nearly died. The only child of Philadelphia artists Joe and Irene Teller, he had contracted a viral infection that blossomed into a heart ailment called myocarditis. After a long stay in the hospital, he had to spend more time recuperating at home. Luckily there was a relatively new marvel called TV to occupy him, and he watched Howdy Doody, from which he ordered the Howdy Doody Magic Kit. It included a trick with a box and two lids. When Teller opened the box on one side and showed its contents to his indulgent parents, there were six tiny Mars bars; after he’d theatrically rattled it and spun it so that he could open the opposite lid, there were only three. “This is an absolute miracle I can do with my own hands,” he says today in the present tense, as though no time has passed.

Because Teller performs almost entirely without speaking, his voice, strong and certain, comes as a surprise. He speaks in prose, in long, languid paragraphs peppered with literary and historical references. (He once taught high school Latin; dissatisfied with the prescribed textbook, he wrote his own.) But his round face, particularly his eyes and mouth, continue to do much of the talking for him. He is capable of great expression with just a turn of his lips, and his eyes are big and shining. They are also quick to brim with tears. “I’m more apt to cry at something beautiful than at something sad,” he says.

My twin sister and I spotted Teller on the Metro North train to Manhattan in the late ’80s (I think he lived in Irvington at the time). He was sitting behind us and we introduced ourselves–we’d loved him in Long Gone–and he was a great guy. We talked for the rest of the trip and then walked him to the theater where he was performing.

[Photo Credit: Carlos Serrao…and here’s more on Teller.]

David Carr had a good feature on Neil Young yesterday in the New York Times Magazine.

“Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time,” he says in “Waging Heavy Peace.” “I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn’t know what to do next.”

He decided to do it sober after talking with his doctor about a brain that had endured many youthful pharmaceutical adventures, in addition to epilepsy and an aneurysm. For someone who smoked pot the way others smoke cigarettes, the change has not been without its challenges, as he explains in his book: “The straighter I am, the more alert I am, the less I know myself and the harder it is to recognize myself. I need a little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere.”

Sitting at Alice’s Restaurant on Skyline Boulevard near the end of the day, he elaborated: “I did it for 40 years,” he said. “Now I want to see what it’s like to not do it. It’s just a different perspective.”

Drunk or sober, he can be a hippie with a mean streak. He broke off a tour with Stephen Stills without warning and sent him a telegram — “Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil.”

For more, click here.

The Best Word Ever? Click here.

Still Diggin’…