BLUEBEARD (BY) KURT VONNEGUT

Published 1987, 318 Pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

I generally hate being asked "Who's your favorite author?"  I like to think of myself as well-read, yet I don't seem to process books in a way that would allow me to answer such a question.  There are very few authors where I can say I really like more than one or two of their books. For example: I loved The World According to Garp, but then Irving just kept re-writing it, and his recent books have been a disaster. Then there are authors like Stephen King, who has written literally dozens of solid, entertaining novels (and the best book On Writing you'll likely find), whose output to consistency ratio would be extremely hard to beat.  But none of King's books on their own would make it onto my all-time favorites list, so how could he? Or what about an author like J.K. Rowling, who has written one perfect series but nothing else?  Would that be fair?

Point being, Kurt Vonnegut is the only answer I got.  Of the fourteen novels he wrote (in addition to hundreds of short stories and essays, published in numerous collections), I've now read all but four.  A couple of his books are all-time favorites, and none of them (that I've read) were worse than mediocre.  Vonnegut's bibliography is about as solid as any author can hope to achieve while still being as prolific as he was.  Needing something reliable for once, I picked up one of his later works, Bluebeard.  Bluebeard isn't usually considered essential Vonnegut, and while I agree that it doesn't reach the heights of his best novels, it just goes to show how strong of an author he was.  Even as one of his more average books, it's still quite good.  And like most Vonnegut, it's a quick, engaging read, short and "easy" but nonetheless bearing some weighty philosophical musings.  Perhaps it's easily overlooked because it isn't one of Vonnegut's more ambitious novels.  The story is fairly simple: ostensibly the autobiography of an Armenian abstract expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian, the narrative rarely pushes any further than its "old man looking back at his life" structure. Vonnegut divides the story into past and present, and while the two perspectives can be a bit lopsided and don't always merge as well as they should, they successfully move the book along at a brisk pace, even adding a dash of mystery and tension rarely found in Vonnegut novels.

In Karabekian's past, he moves from his childhood home to be the apprentice of a famous American painter in NYC.  Eventually, (inevitably, perhaps, since this is a Vonnegut novel), he gets involved in WWII, before returning to America and becoming part of a circle of famous painters, alongside Pollack and Rothko.  Not nearly so much happens in the "present" thread — Karabekian has retired to his beach house in the Hamptons, where he debates the merits of his own art and art in general with his best friend, an old quirky writer, and a young widow who seems mysteriously keen to pry out the old recluse's secrets.  The present is probably the weakest narrative, and the least developed, not focusing quite enough on these underdeveloped side characters but still dishing out a few morsels of insight.  Yet for the shallowness of the side-stories, it all leads up to an unexpected, well-written denouement.  It's not a complex novel, or even a particularly deep one, but this allows Vonnegut to focus and play to his strengths, developing the voice of his main character into something sharp, consistent and funny.

Vonnegut does a great job of tackling the art world, and Bluebeard could be viewed almost as art-critique, although I don't think it was intended as such.  Most of the insights come in other areas, and through the strength of his signature writing style, which is so earnest and easy and playful that it could carry satire of any kind. Unlike Palahniuk, whose writing I found so forced and processed and wink wink self-aware that it became almost painfully robotic, Vonnegut has always had a natural, sincere approach to the subjects he takes on, and Bluebeard is hardly satire at all — Vonnegut, let's say, examines things, rather than satirizing them.  Some of the flaws common to his later books do pop up here, but not enough to distract — the man had a habit of aping his own style almost to the point of self-parody as he aged, but Bluebeard has only a few moments of overly-silly prose.

Bluebeard deals with many of the themes that Vonnegut tackled in other books, but avoids regurgitating any of them.  I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first Vonnegut novel, since it does cover some familiar ground in a more toned-down, indirect manner.  Yet for those same reasons, it's one of Vonnegut's strongest later-career novels, offering new perspectives and plenty of engaging, fresh material.

BLUE RECORD (BY) BARONESS

Progressive Sludge Metal / Southern Rock
Released 2009

When I put together my Top 10 Albums of 2009 list at the end of last year, I spent weeks scouring blogs and forums and online review sites looking for any albums I might have missed.  But even with all my intended thoroughness, I still made one glaring error.  The Blue Record got a lot of press after its October release, and ended up on many "best of the 2009" metal lists, often finishing in the top 3.  So I downloaded it, listened to it, and decided it was worth keeping around, but it didn't grab me right away.  Every now and then I gave it another spin, until eventually, only a week or two after I published my own Top 10, I suddenly found myself playing the Blue Record more and more and more.  By early January I was listening to almost nothing else.  It's an album that's perfect for any mood or occasion, that I can always throw on after work and find myself caught up in its infectious energy no matter how dull or shitty my day has been.  The Blue Record deserves to be spun all summer long, but it got me through an entire winter.  It's one of the few albums that stands as entertainment of its own right, a soundtrack to 45 minutes of spastic air-drumming.

The thing is, I can pinpoint exactly why Baroness didn't grab me at first.  They're from the elite Georgian school of sludge metal, the same state that's also somehow brought us Mastodon, Torche and Kylesa.  I like all these bands well enough, except for one thing: their vocals.  If you've heard any of them, you know what I'm talking about, because their vocals are all pretty much the same, down to the rhythm and structure.  Each verse is pretty much delivered like this: shout shout shout / shout shout YELLLLLLL.  It's simple and repetitive, and the "drunken bearded man shouting at a bar" vibe always really turned me off.  A lot of metal has this problem, from Isis-derived post-metal to stoner metal and back to sludge.  Not that metal vocals are inherently bothersome, of course — the ones that work, work really goddam well — but that metal listeners tend to be unnecessarily forgiving of genuinely bad vocals.  As much as I respect all of the above bands, I could only take them in small doses because of their vocals. 

Baroness was no different, but I sensed that the music underneath was within my tastes, moreso than their more traditional peers.  For one thing, Baroness isn't nearly as classically sludgey as, say, Mastodon was with their first few releases, nor nearly as wanky-prog-metal-y as Mastodon became with their latest effort.  There's an unmistakable southern vibe to the music, down to the folky acoustic interlude "Blackpowder Orchard" and it wonderfully compliments Baroness' unrelenting, upbeat energy — like a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Melvins with the record player set at 45 rpm instead of 33.  Instead of wasting all their time trying to find the [fucking] heaviest [fucking] guitar tone ever [dudeeee] Baroness sends nearly every song galloping out of the gate with a stampede of drums and riffs so blazing, you may find yourself spontaneously air-guitaring on a crowded subway platform.  [Not that I've experienced this myself. I've... read about it.]  Instead of morphing into some prog-metal, seizure-inducing bonanza, Baroness keeps every song tight and perfectly coordinated, each filled with a ton of texture, little tangents and details and experiments enough to still earn it the "progressive" label, but these elements are always secondary to the pacing of the song, instead of being responsible for it.  Baroness never meanders enough to get distracted.  Songs move fast, almost too fast to keep track of.  The drums are unrelentingly propulsive, like this album is being shot at you out of a cannon.  Yet it's fun.  It's coherent.  It's never boring, it never loses focus, because these guys have their style down to an art.  Baroness doesn't have to be the heaviest band on the scene when the Blue Record contains some of the tightest song-writing you'll ever find south of the Mason-Dixon line.

So after a few listens, something strange happened: I grew to not mind those vocals.  Then, inevitably, I guess I liked them.  Now I can't imagine the Blue Record without them — shouty and rough and incredibly repetitive though they may be, no other style would really fit the energy and intensity of Baroness' music, and I dare say they work much better here than over the slow, heavy march of other sludge bands.  The Blue Record is pretty intense, and dense as well, yet even at its most technical it never loses sight of being fun.  (And there's nothing wrong with metal being fun).  This is an album I want blasting from my porch all summer long.  This is that album that makes me want to own a car again, badly, just so I can rock out to it while tearing down the highway with the windows down.  This album will give you whiplash.

SURVIVOR (BY) CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Published 2000, 289 Pages
Characters: C
Writing: C-

Plot: D
Pacing: B

Poignancy: C-

Chuck Palahnuik wants to write satire.  He wants to be a hybrid of Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo and Napolean Dynamite.  He wants you to think that he's outrageous, shocking and insightful.  His efforts earn him blurbs on the back of his book like this: "A wild amphetamine ride through the vagaries of fame and the nature of belief in America at the close of the twentieth century."  Lots of people tell me how much they love Palahniuk, so he's doing something right, I guess. I hate sounding so negative in reviews for books that aren't, honestly, all that offensively bad or totally without merit, but Survivor is just not a well-constructed book.  It's a clusterfuck of plotting and characterization, it's aimless, cheap satire, and it tries so desperately to be shocking and clever and post-modern that it's nothing but contrived.  But it isn't a difficult read.  It's not painful, and it moves fast.  Even if you're as bored with it as I was, you'll have no problem finishing it.  If you're into Palahniuk, you'll probably enjoy it.  But as far as I'm concerned, Palahniuk's forte is finding a million clever ways to say nothing at all.

I blame his reputation largely on "Fight Club."  Don't get me wrong, "Fight Club" is a great story, and I consider the movie to be one of the better films of the last 20 years.  The book, too, is good.  If the movie had never been made, I would probably hold the book in high esteem.  But David Fincher went ahead and directed a great film, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter were fantastic in it, and as a result, Fight Club is one of the very, very few instances where a book is not as good as the movie based off of it.  It's not worse, per se, it just doesn't add anything to the story — it reads like a novelization of the movie, with no added depth, detail or development.

Survivor takes all the dark quirkiness and zany randomness of Fight Club and wastes it on an aimless story and pointless satire.  That, I think, is my main gripe — Palahniuk is obviously trying to take the piss out of American media, celebrity society, religion, social elitism, economic elitism, our fixation on physical beauty, the superficiality of suburban America, et cetera; he's trying to blow us away with a zany nonstop narrative of flippant satire.  He's not afraid to tackle anything!  He's not afraid to show us how fucked up we really are!  He's not afraid to talk about sex and murder and religion openly, frankly and provocatively!  But it's all so stupidly lightweight and ADD, I'm still not even sure what he was getting at.  Palahniuk has the attention span of a 4 year old, and never settles on any plotline or "hook" long enough to make a single one of them work.  Satire isn't satire if you just take a bunch of exaggerated, wacky situations and throw them together.  You have to actually be saying something.  Palahniuk seems to be writing a different story from one chapter to the next, yet none of them manage to advance the plot naturally or develop Palahniuk's "characters."

The problem isn't that Palahniuk lacks imagination, obviously.  He's just not a strong enough writer for any of his ideas to cohere into something meaningful and interesting.  He writes with the same consistent voice, the same clumsy, contrived gimmicks, the needless post-modern sentence rearrangement that makes his writing read like something from your Junior year fiction workshop.  Even though the novel is supposedly being spoken into a recorder by the main character — he's delivering his life story while waiting for the plane he hijacked to crash — all the reader can hear is Palahniuk's own generic, choppy voice.  Characters don't act of their own accord, they just stumble into situations, they react glibly, satirically, like neutered ironic hipster puppets. When, about a quarter of the way through Survivor, a secondary character describes the protagonist out loud, there's a disorienting jolt from seeing how the character is supposed to seem compared to the impression of him we get from his voice and habits.

Palahniuk wants to bring his satire down to a rapid-fire, hard-hitting salvo, and falls into a lot of grating habits as a result — sentences that endlessly repeat each other, paragraphs broken up into one-by-one list form, pointlessly rearranged grammatical structures.  His struggles with poignancy aren't a dealbreaker, and they don't really derail the book, just make it slightly annoying to read.  Its Palahniuk's resulting inability to focus that hurts the story the most.  Survivor is a satire that never bothers to explore the things it's satirizing, and the things it's satirizing are so broad or vague that it's hard to be sure whether they need to be explored to begin with.  It's a book about fame where the protagonist is never shown being famous.  It's a satire of celebrity culture where the character becomes famous from one page to the next, with no reason given.  It's a take-down of superficiality where the character never cares what he looks like, or has any reason to.  Survivor is trying to be a lot of things, and doesn't achieve any of them.  Fittingly, it's not even a terrible book, just a completely unnecessary one.

OVERLOOK MOUNTAIN HOUSE

Photo courtesy of Alison Yuhas.  Other photos taken by Derek Dellinger unless otherwise noted.

When the Hudson River School of painters began to romanticize the quintessentially American Hudson river valley in the early 19th Century, well-to-do Americans suddenly saw in their own backyard an untapped region of beauty and adventure.  Scantly populated even today, New York state has always offered views of farmland, mountains and river vistas without a lengthy trip to Europe, where socialites had previously traveled for vacations.  No sooner had the region become fashionable than luxury hotels sprang up through the Catskills and surrounding regions — among the earliest and most prominent of them the Overlook Mountain House.

Situated near the peak of Overlook Mountain, which rises above the town of Woodstock, the ruins of the Overlook Mountain House can still be found today.  The remains that stand are actually of the fourth hotel to be built on the site — as with many buildings of the 19th Century, fires frequently leveled the facilities and forced reconstruction.  The original Mountain House was built in 1833 and maintained through the Civil War before a second version of the hotel was put up in 1871.  It burnt down four years later.  A third hotel lasted a few more decades until the fourth and final Mountain House began construction in 1928 — and, though it remains today, this hotel was never actually completed or used.  Eventually, the state bought the land and boarded up the abandoned house, which nonetheless managed to suffer damage in yet another fire in 1941.  (Prompting the question: is Overlook Mountain a volcano?  Since I have not found any evidence to the contrary, I'll have to assume that it is.) 

At around 3,200 feet, Overlook is far from the highest peak in the Catskills, and the parking lot where one begins is already something like 1,800 feet in elevation (driving there feels like that first leg of a rollercoaster, when you're being ratcheted up the hill).  The path to the top isn't a true hiking trail, either, but an old carriage-way now laid with stones.  It's straight and smooth and mostly unshaded, but such trails are often deceptively unforgiving compared to traditional hiking trails, especially when you're marching more or less straight uphill. There are no switchbacks and no views, and thus there's little to break up this hike except jealously at fellow hikers passing you as they come down.

When you finally make it, it's well worth it.  The main building of the Mountain House can be seen from a distance, but there are others scattered throughout the woods, including the stone foundations of a large circular fountain. The Mountain House is so easily accessible from the trail — which itself is only a short drive from the town of Woodstuck — that it will be visited by dozens of people on any given nice day, so there's no need to worry about the legality of your visit.  The building is relatively safe considering its age, and since the upper floors have all collapsed, there's nowhere to walk but on solid ground.  For this reason there isn't a whole lot to see, either — mostly walls, a few remaining staircases, and the trees that have invaded the interior.  The other, smaller buildings have even less to offer, and probably aren't worth exploring in-depth.

Continuing up the path toward the true peak of Overlook Mountain will bring you to the Overlook Mountain fire tower, one of only a few that remain standing (and accessible) in the Catskills.  The tower is only a half mile from the hotel ruins, and equally worth seeing.  During the summer months, volunteers are stationed in a small ranger cabin and will gladly give you a history lesson.  The tower can be climbed during any season, day or night, but it's definitely best experienced with the gale-force winds that often blow across the top of the mountain.  Climbing up the frail exposed structure with little beneath you, little above you, little around you and blasts of wind beckoning you into the void, you will stare into the Expanse and come face to face with your own humanity.  The observation platform at the top is at least enclosed in plexiglass, with a number of tools at your disposal to triangulate the location of forest fires. Despite the mountain's relatively short stature, its location and exposure give a fantastic view of the entire Catskill region. 

The town of Woodstock is a worthwhile destination of its own, especially if you're into eyeball-searing 60's fashion aesthetics.  Beyond the novelty tie-die t-shirts, it's a cute artsy/touristy town with plenty of restaurants and coffee shops and quirks.

Further reading:
hudsonvalleyruins.org
wikipaltz.com

Photo courtesy of Alison Yuhas