Born and Raised by John Mayer

John Mayer is an interesting character. His first album from 2001 blasted him into the consciousness with his song No Such Thing. Perceptions of him as a pop singer quickly faded as he toured and released albums that proved his merit as a guitarist and writer of great songs.

Mayer of course has become known as a serial dater, perhaps white rock stardom's version of Derek Jeter as he has dated many of the most popular actresses and singers. Jennifer Anniston, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Taylor Swift to name just three. Swift even wrote her song " Dear John" about him an event that Mayer has called embarrassing.

Born and Raised, his most recent album proves once and for all that for all the fluff surrounding his public persona and dating life Mayer is a true artist. This album is a master work.

Quiet, reserved, lyrically and musically strong Mayer answers any question one might have about his talent and depth on this album. Well crafted pop songs, sing along if you like, but most of all songs that match.

The opening song Queen of California opens the album and shows a great deal of the influences Mayer has heard. Sounding like it comes from the early seventies and even referencing Neil Young's After the Goldrush in 1971 Mayer knows his history and open the album brilliantly.

Another song Shadow Days has the same feeling and groove. Singing of being able to finally let it go, and knowing that he is a good man with a good heart and that his Shadow Days are over. A self revealing song that is another song many of us can relate to. Of special interest to me was the Beatles sound in the instruments after the second chorus, Mayer shows all his history lessons.

For all the girls named Olivia in the world you finally have a song with your name in it. Mayer sings that Olivia is taken but that he needs something like Olivia. One assumes he could probably get her if he just sang her this song.

Born and Raised, the title song, is an instant classic. With it's harmonica again bringing Neil Young to mind, and a confessional air Mayer talks about " one of these days, I'll be Born and Raised and it's such as waste to grow up lonely." " Still has dreams, just not the same, they don't fly as high as they used to" Mayer sounds older than he is. Certainly much life has been lived by him in the last decade. This song might be the result of those years.

Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967 starts with a Miles Davis like mini solo and then launches into a whimsical story song about just what it says, Walt Grace's submarine test. Still with the lyric " When your done with this world. you know the next is up to you" Mayer is talking about more than Walt Grace, he is talking about all of us making decisions about not just the next life but the rest of this one.


Whiskey, Whiskey, Whiskey again starts with the harmonica and tells of " trying to find the man I never got to be" and becomes another confessional of disappointment in the deal he made, not with the devil, but with himself. A great song.

John Mayer is not a pop star. He should be taken seriously after this album. This is a thoughtful, graceful, album that is certainly the high point of his career.

Canada by Richard Ford

Richard Ford is one of those writers that does not have a middle ground for his readers. There are many folks who find him to be one of the best writers of his generation and others who feel a consistent desire as I read one reviewer say " to slap his main character for 300 pages"

Those reviews of course are usually for the Bascombe stories that started with The Sportswriter.

I have enjoyed the Bascombe stories. Some times in reading those stories I feel very connected to the author and his character. Ford's characters think much of the time and we learn to like that about them....or put the books away.

So I was of course interested in the new book. This book tells the story of Dell and Berner fraternal twins growing up in Grand Falls, Idaho. Their father is an optimist always believing things will work out. Dad, a Captain in the Air Force, somehow gets in trouble in some kind of embezzling scheme involving stolen cows and the local Indian tribes and gets demoted. He soon retires and finds that his skills do not transfer that well to the civilian world. The children's Mom Neeva is a small, ethnic looking, city girl who is ill suited for life on the prairie.

As their Father drifts from job to job we learn about the twins. Dell, the narrator of the story is a 15 year old who is small for his age, with no real friends, who nonetheless looks forward to starting high school in the fall. He plans to join the chess club and yearns to become part of a group of friends. Dell taller, physically stronger than her brother has a darker, more impatient soul.

Life comes crashing down when his father still drifting from job to job gets himself in a pinch with the local Indian tribe on another low grade criminal enterprise he is working. Threats are made and inexplicably their father decides the way out of this is to cross the border into North Dakota and rob a bank.

Ever the optimist Dad thinks he will blend into the scenery. Of course, he cannot, eventually police come and arrest the kids parents. What happens next is the larger part of the story.

The truth is, not much does. Dell goes to Canada, becomes involved peripherally with a small town criminal who himself is on the run from America.

To be clear this is not a good book. About 200 pages in I had a strong sense nothing of import was going to happen. While the characters occasionally have good lines that make you remember what Ford's special skill is for the most part this book still has the annoying self centered characters but lacks much of the thinking material found in his earlier work.

The plot of the book, the whole story of the young man's first summer and fall in Canada, is weak and frankly no better than a B grade pulp plot.

This book if written by a no name author would have gotten no positive spin and would soon be in the bargain bin. The book's jacket says that this book will be a classic, that is not the case unless it becomes a classic of how an author can disappoint. Ford's characters are often pretentious and annoying, this book does not even have the redeemable qualities that bring them into the level of interest and compassion.

Poor. Poor. A waste of time.

Cool Hand Luke

This Paul Newman movie in 1967 is one of his most iconic. Playing a man put in jail, on a hard labor chain gang, for vandalizing parking meters Newman's Lucas Jackson is a born loser.

As he arrives at the prison it is revealed that he was a decorated war hero from the Korean War but that he was a private when discharged. Clearly Luke has a problem with authority.

Arriving at the prison Luke soon runs afoul of the de facto prison leader known as Dragline. He is played by George Kennedy who actually won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. An award very well deserved. Kennedy as the big, burly, sweaty, illiterate, leader who eventually comes to see Luke as the best of everything. Actually Dragline's being illiterate is never spelled out, one observes it by whenever any mail comes he asks someone to tell him what them words say. This is an excellent choice to let us learn his illiteracy by observation much as his fellow prisoners might.

A boxing match to settle their differences is arranged and Luke is destroyed by the much larger Dragline. He earns Dragline's respect, however, by refusing to stay dowm, in fact he keeps getting up so long that eventually Dragline walks away and will hit him no more.

A pivotal scene in the movie occurs when Luke's Mother comes to visit him. Dieing, laid out on a bed in the back of a truck, yet still smoking she talks to Luke about how he was always her favorite and wonders what will become of him.

When she dies the Prison Warden worries Luke will try to escape so puts him in the box, which is a dark, small, one person wooden shack for isolation.

Emerging from the cell Luke is changed. Escape is his only motivation and he becomes bigger than life for some of his fellow prisoners when he does so.

There are many legendary scenes in this movie. The egg scene, the Warden's diatribe about Luke upon his return from his first escape " What we've got here is failure to communicate " is perhaps more famous than the movie. As the intro to the song " Civil War" by Guns and Roses it is famous for a whole generation of people who might not have seen the movie.

Perhaps however most affecting is when Dragline returned from his escape attempt with Luke talks about how Luke was flashing that Luke smile the last time he saw him. This is as a collage of pictures of Luke smiling throughout the movie.

A prison gang movie is a rare place to find a character you like, one could argue how anyone with an honorable war record could be placed on a chain gang for a drunken night of mischief, but of course it is a movie after all.

Newman, if possible, is an underrated actor. This is one of the movie's that make that true.

Mad Men : Season Finale Next Week

Mad Men has a way of lulling you to sleep and then bang doing something to shock you. Last night's episode was that. Lane's death is just one more piece of very heavy baggage for Don to carry. With his loss and Peggy's leaving the firm due to the way he treated her it seems clear that in Don's path is a lot of human wreckage.

Too bad Don, what we all really wonder is if this French girl can hurt him the way he hurts everyone else.

I cannot help it, I love Roger. His tone and wry sense of humor such as when he told Don, after a fierce sales presentation last night, to " wipe the blood off his mouth."

Roger's LSD trip, needling of Pete, his divorce and his dating of the hat check girl for the disappointing sex as he calls it makes him the indispensable character in this show.

We all look forward to next week's finale.

The Wire

The Wire is one of the most acclaimed television shows ever aired. The awards are numerous. Sitting in the backyard the other day I decided to see what all the hype was about. Using the fantastic streaming service HBO Go I watched the first episode.

As the police detective asks the young man why they let him keep shooting craps with them if week after week he stole the money and ran, ( the young man, the stealer, has just been killed) the man says " You got to, this is America." That in itself is one of only many clever bits of dialogue in the first episode. The show is filmed with a gritty realism that is like the old NBC show Homicide on steroids.

However as good as the episode was, as great as the plot-lines inevitably are, as wonderful and addicting as the show will become over five seasons I reached an easy conclusion. I have no interest in it. Five seasons of real life on the means streets of Baltimore, Maryland, I just do not think I have the need for that.

Life is good if you let the light in. I do not need five seasons of dark. I know this is my decision, and should be taken in no way as a reflection on the quality of the show. Many will say that their are uplifting moments inside the darkness of the show that are more meaningful for the bleakness they rise though. I do not doubt it.

Not for me. Not worth my time. Life is too short to visit that much misery on purpose.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing is the second of the three volume Border Trilogy from Cormac McCarthy. As I read many books at once I must confess that this one took awhile. The book centers on a young man named Billy Parham. Billy, his younger brother Boyd and his parents live on a small farm in New Mexico.

This is a difficult book. There is much meandering thought and much wisdom being imparted from the various characters.

As the book begins Billy and his Father are attempting to trap a wolf that has come up across the border from Mexico and is killing local livestock. McCarthy has been compared frequently to Hemingway and in the writing of Billy's attempts to trap the wolf one sees it. The detail given to each step is exquisite. I must confess many of the terms fall on deaf ears to me but i was able to follow what he was doing.

Billy cannot catch the wolf despite his best efforts. Finally one evening he sets a trap, under the remains of a fire that has been cookfire for some travelers the night before. As he tells his father this his father warns him to return at first light and hope that no one else attempts to use the fire-sight. And he goes to bed and the authors states " that he never saw him again." A very jarring line as one has no idea what is to come.

That morning when Billy arrives he has caught the wolf. He is transfixed, the wolf is caught by the foot but Billy watches her and cannot bring himself to shoot her. For the next fifty pages of the book we see Billy taking the wolf to Mexico. Muzzled, leashed, and taught to follow along on a rope behind the horse Billy travels until his story takes a turn he did not wish. He wanted to return the wolf to the wild, suffice to say for Billy Parham things often do not happen as planned.

Along the way in this section of the book and others Billy meets many different people, most of them Mexican. He meets good people and bad but the good outweigh the bad by far. One of the most compelling and noticeable parts of the book is that, for all the hard luck and sadness that comes to Billy , most of the people of the Mexico he travels through are overwhelmingly generous and kind. Travelers are fed and housed as a matter of fact to be taken as normal.

When the wolf part of the story comes to it's conclusion Billy returns home, slowly and with no great plan, and finds his home abandoned. Billy learns that his father and mother were murdered by horse thieves. Billy, in his stoic way gets his brother Boyd from family friends that have been taking care of him and they head out on the trail. They never come to a spoken decision about their plans but yet they know where they are going.

They cross the border in Arizona and then their story beings. In Mexico again. The same frustration occurs in this book as the previous, many of the characters speak in untranslated Spanish. In cases where necessary I had to use my Spanish to English translator. Still the payoff is worth it.

If you are looking for the typical Western with quick pace and easily resolved problems this is not the book for you. McCarthy's characters do not speak much but they think much and we as readers are given a glimpse of those thoughts on life and death and all the other thoughts we all have late at night.

Along the way Billy and Boyd meet some characters easily remembered. To advance the themes of the story these characters often have much to say, and much that they say is shaded in gray, with duplicate meanings and understandings.

This man is an exquisite writer. It is not easy. It is work. McCarthy however writes characters as deep and thoughtful and affecting as any you will find.

Be ready to take time. Take breaks if you need. I finished two books between the wolf section and Billy's return home, I even contemplated giving up. I did not and I was greatly rewarded. This is a fantastic book. A book that will stick with your memory for a long, long time.

I have a couple of biographies to read but I am looking forward to finishing the series soon. It is something to be on a shelf with Hemingway.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the more polarizing of the " great" twentieth century authors. To be honest I have never been a fan of his work. I have attempted to read a story here or there and have often found him too out there for my taste.

Recently I did read a couple of short story collections that were free on Ibooks, included in those were Harrison Bergeron. This story, which I reviewed earlier, was one that I originally read in college. After reading these stories recently I was more receptive to trying Vonnegut again and where better to begin than with his most popular and certainly his most controversial work Slaughterhouse Five. Our friends at Amazon made this easy by making this book the Kindle Daily Deal a couple of weeks back.

The story centers on Billy Pilgrim. An optometrist from Illium, Illinois Billy is a former prisoner of war who survived the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany at the end of World War II. Billy has come unstuck in time. The story is told in a non linear fashion because Billy's life is anything but linear.

Throughout the story we see Billy as a young boy, we see him in the war, we see his capture, his time in a POW camp with British soldiers, and of course his fateful time in Dresden. This experience in Dresden changes his life and haunts him. Billy returns home and marries a successful optometrist daughter, he goes to college and unexpectedly becomes a very successful optometrist. Billy is the only survivor of a plane crash and perhaps strangest of all Billy is captured by aliens. The aliens treat him well but put him in the zoo on their planet and mate him with an Earth female.

Throughout the book Billy visits these scenes in his life as well as others. It takes some getting used to. I had tried the book before but at the time needed it to be more literal and less of a satire. However taken now the book is actually quite good.

Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war in Europe and he was greatly affected by the firebombing of Dresden, perhaps the most controversial part of the European War on the Allied side. The book uses some interesting techniques including Vonnegut addressing the reader in both the first and last chapters.

The most striking and recognizable part of the book is the authors use of the phrase " So it goes." This is used any time the subject is death or dieing. Over 100 times do we see this.

This book takes a little work but it is not a hard read. Nothing like the Cormac McCarthy book I am currently reading and hope to finish very soon. This book just requires you to let the story come to you as it comes to you.

Once you do this you surely see the appeal of a book that by attempts to show that there is no way to write a coherent book about a massacre which is what he considered Dresden to be.

I am glad I attempted it again.