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Gluey Tart: Kicking and Dreaming

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Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll, Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson, and Charles R. Cross (It Books, September 2012)

As I work my way through the biographies of all my seventies and eighties rock heroes, I realize there’s no point in fighting my demographic destiny. I did expect this book to be dreadful, at least. Dreadful and tedious. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom and clichés.  And of course it is not entirely free of dreadful, tedious, repetitive, boring clichés, but mostly it is “surprisingly readable,” title aside.

I have always wondered how Ann and Nancy Wilson managed to become kick-ass stadium rock stars in the age of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and all those other very, very male bands. I always wanted to know how much of the early guitar sound was Nancy and how much of it was Roger Fisher.  And I always wanted to know how eighties and nineties Ann felt about being piled with huge hair and big, dark costumes, and shot mostly from the chin up in their videos in a viciously stupid attempt to keep us from noticing she had gained weight. (Answers: because they kicked ass; more Roger, in the songs I like best, but the acoustic stuff is Nancy; and humiliated and irritated, as one might expect.)

The book is told in snippets of narrative by Ann, by Nancy, by other members of Heart, by associates, friends, their mom, and Chris Cornell. This is a half-assed way to put a book together, but it does give Ann and Nancy their own voices. And they are charming. As fluttery, breathlessly dancing in a sun-dappled springtime meadow as you’d expect of anyone who wrote “Dreamboat Annie” and “Dog and Butterfly” and so on, but also as driving and relentless as you’d expect of someone who wrote “Crazy on You” and “Barracuda.”

That’s the dichotomy that made Heart brilliant, and frustrating. I can’t listen to any of their albums all the way through, and individual songs are often divided against themselves, the wild, hard-driving fervor never blending seamlessly with the frothy, acoustic effervescence. (I should point out that I speak of Dreamboat Annie through Bebe Le Strange; I don’t entirely acknowledge the existence of any of their other works.) But they have written some of my all-time favorite songs. I wonder if the hit and miss situation with so many Heart songs is because they were feeling out something that nobody had done yet.

A couple of million critics have written about this dichotomy as a balance of masculine and feminine, but that misses the point. It’s all feminine, and what gets called masculine is instead a side of femininity we don’t usually acknowledge. It was thrilling, back in the seventies, and it still is, more than thirty years later, even though we’ve gotten used to seeing women on a stadium stage. (“Straight On,” for instance, or “Magic Man” – these are pretty much perfect rock songs.) Which brings me back to wondering how they did it, when they did it. Or any time – but especially in the mid-seventies.

And they explain pretty well, considering that it’s really just one of those things. They start out by meticulously recounting their early lives, and in fact their entire family history. I found this touching, in part because I’m a huge fan of putting things in chronological order, but also because they love their family, and each other. I’m into that. They were a military family and moved all over the world during the girls’ childhood, making Ann and Nancy a solid, close unit. They were also musical from a young age. And they found the Beatles. Ann and Nancy see that as the crucial pinch of magic dust that launched them – or Ann, specifically – toward stardom. I’m less convinced; while all their friends were playing at being Beatle girlfriends, Ann and Nancy were pretending to be the Beatles, with guitars and everything. They already had whatever it was.

Next up: Who wrote what. I want to know who slept with whom or what as much as the next person, but I also want to know who wrote what, and under what circumstances. And the book has a lot about the music and about dealing with the music industry, which is always fascinating, in a degrading, evil kind of way. I’m curious about what inspired the songs, too, but that’s usually sort of discouraging. Magic Man, for instance, was a straight-up homage to Ann’s first and overwhelming love, Michael Fisher (brother of guitarist Roger Fisher and, for a few years, their manager). I’m somewhat uncomfortable with that overboard, overwrought song being about a specific man. That’s what happens when you listen in on someone’s creative process, though.

The book is also very much about Ann’s struggle with her weight – or, more accurately, the music industry’s struggle with Ann’s weight. She started gaining in the eighties and, eventually, she was fat. It doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing, but it just wasn’t allowed, in society or, especially, in the music industry. The shit everyone gave her over it destroyed her self-confidence, that blistering individualism that allowed her to get on the stage in the first place. (Well, that, and the music industry in general, and coke.) Have you seen any of those videos from the eighties and nineties? They have Ann’s hair so big she can barely stand beneath it, and her jackets and dark and broad of shoulder, excessive of lapel. She is shown in shadow, cloaked in smoke, or only in close-up, where the big hair and startling blush situation are supposed to fool the eye into thinking she’s smaller than she is. Or, perhaps, just short circuit the viewer’s thought process from an overload of confusion and perplexity. Either way, it’s pathetic. This is a beautiful and shockingly talented woman, and all the music industry could think to do with her was turn her into some kind of clown. That, and focus on Nancy.

This was more or less their approach to the music, as well. Most of Heart’s hits came after Bebe LeStrange, the 1980 album I consider their last acceptable one (although I haven’t checked in recently – I guess their albums from the last two years, Red Velvet Car and Fanatic, could be great – but I wouldn’t bet on it). Ann and Nancy tell the story of how the music industry repackaged them in the eighties, choosing hits they didn’t like and clothes they found ridiculous. I was pleased to find this out, because some of that shit is very, very bad, and knowing they realize this, at least to some extent, makes me feel much better about things. All the dirt about the music industry and its hangers on, by the way, is good stuff. It becomes very clear how bands go from brilliant to embarrassing in the space of one album. (Hint: Letting the music industry tell them what they need to do if they want to make it really big. Also, coke.)

I’d read a couple of popular feminist books recently, and I was surprised to find that the Heart biography was one, too. I don’t know why it surprised me, given their beginnings – perhaps because of songs like “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” (which it turns out Ann never liked, thank god; that song is the kind of shit you can’t wait to wipe off your shoe, and even then, you keep smelling it anyway). Ann feels strongly that she was judged by different standards than male rockers were judged by, and she suffered for it, and she resents the hell out of it. That isn’t tricky, as feminist arguments go, but sometimes simple is good. (I was glancing through the Amazon reviews, by the way, and noticed that Ron, an Indiana Republican who can’t spell, is unhappy about the book’s liberal leanings. Life must be frustrating for Ron.)

I got involved with this book, and not just because I spent at least a week reading it (its not exactly tight, and when you’re reading it in spurts of fifteen or twenty minutes a day, it seems endless). Also, I feel that now the Wilsons and I are so close, it’s cold of them to obviously leave out so much of the dirt – because the absence of certain things is palpable. (For instance, despite a decent number of generalized statements about drug use, there are surprisingly few actual anecdotes, making me suspicious. And in the later years, we learn about Nancy’s marriage to Cameron Crowe — and the demise thereof — but there’s almost nothing about what Ann was doing in her personal life over the last twenty years. What up, Ann?)  So, it was a bit of a slog, and a vague slog, at times, but that was all right. Ann and Nancy are likeable, and interesting, and they kick ass.

And I just saw that Rod Stewart has a biography out. God damn it.

Gluey Tart: Takes on Maus

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I hate Maus. Let me count the reasons why. I’m not allowed to hate it, for one thing; I always find that annoying. I’m not crazy about portraying Jews as mice and Poles as pigs and so on (I won’t go into why – better critics than I have already beaten that horse). (OK, I can’t help it – Nazis were humans who killed Jews, who were also human – people killing other people, not one species killing another species, not cats hunting mice, for heaven’s sake.) (Also, pigs? It doesn’t really matter to me whether he meant that insult or not; that’s the kind of thing that happens when you start getting cute about genocide.) I’m full on offended by “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and Spiegelman’s tossing the word “murder” around. (That story is about his mother committing suicide, and he says, “You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!” He also calls his father a murderer for burning his mother’s journals without letting Art see them.) I could write essays about each of these topics, but I’m going to stay focused (well, focused for me) on my main problem with Maus, which is that I believe it’s morally wrong to batten on the pain of your people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Postmodernism. I’m aware of it. And narratives help us understand atrocities like the Holocaust. And the children of Holocaust survivors experienced their parents’ memories in a unique way. And how is it wrong for a writer to work out his demons by telling a story? Plus, mice are cute! Everyone loves mice. I don’t actually disagree with any of that, except maybe postmodernism, but there isn’t much I can do about postmodernism.

My objection is to Spiegelman grabbing his parents’ painful past and carrying it in a fireman’s hold through an obstacle course of writerly tropes to emerge, triumphant, a Pulitzer prize clutched in one hand and an Eisner award in the other, proud and satisfied about making the graphic novel serious and literary and worthy of a couple million graduate theses. He is excessively eager to define himself by his relationship to his parents – that is, my fucked up parents fucked me up, damn it. And who can argue? It’s the Holocaust! You can’t argue with the Holocaust. Of all the writers who have ever written about how their lives are ruined by their damned crazy parents, anyone laying claim to the Holocaust hits the mother lode. It renders anyone’s personal trauma unassailable and worthy of interest.

I am going to assume Spiegelman undertook this project as a way to come to terms with his own pain – an understandable motive, although the subsequent publication of more Maus and the egregious In the Shadow of No Towers might make one wonder, if one were mean and lacking in tact, about the relationship between Spiegelman’s career and his willingness to schmaltz up whatever major tragedy lands at his doorstep. Maybe it’s a chicken and the egg thing – he could be attracted to these themes because of the way his psyche was constructed (by his damned crazy parents). Either way, he thought it was OK to publish this story about mice Jews and cat Nazis, but he almost certainly didn’t expect everyone in the world to decide it was a brilliant masterpiece.

That probably means I shouldn’t hold it against him, but… But. (“Everyone I know has a big but,” sayeth the sage Pee Wee Herman; “What’s yours?”) This sort of thing reminds me of people who write true crime books. Beyond the “Look at me! Look at me! Be impressed by my pain!” thing (and isn’t that why God invented psychiatrists?), I can’t help thinking that putting murder out there for profit and some measure of fame (because we don’t publish things unless we hope people will read them) is wrong. Is it more or less wrong to exploit your own tragedy than someone else’s?  On the one hand, you have more of a motive than simply latching onto a story that might sell (although that is part of your motive; otherwise, you’d keep a diary or something). You’re working through something that is, in some sense, yours. On the other hand, your own family becomes grist for the mill, and even if they acquiesce, you’re still using them.

I already hear the collective grumble of irritation saying it isn’t exploitation if it’s art. Art transmutes exploitation into something else, something with a higher purpose. And I believe that, too – to a point. What rises to the level of art? This isn’t the time or place to throw down on what art is or isn’t, thank god, but I don’t subscribe to the “50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” theory. You know, “everyone else thinks it’s the best comic ever, so if you don’t think so, you can’t call yourself a sentient being and you also suck donkey balls.” Well, you say “sweeping metaphor,” I say “somebody get me some damned insurance so I can see a psychiatrist and tell them how my parents fucked up my life.”

Not that I’ve actually read the thing, mind you. I don’t want to, I don’t need to, and you can’t make me. Does this mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion? It does not. I have picked Maus up countless times, willing the book to do anything but annoy me. If you are an educated and intelligent reader and accidentally let it out that you sometimes read comics, everyone assumes you love Maus. They start talking about it as if it had performed three perfect miracles. And because: 1) I hate to disappoint (oh, please – Kinukitty is the most gracious of creatures); and 2) I hate to miss out on things, I pick it up, I read a few pages, I put it back. (I actually have a similar relationship with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I used to keep with my horror books – except  I think Gravity’s Rainbow really is art.) I have done this countless times and have probably read about half of the book, over the last 20 years. I have also read a certain number of essays and blog posts, and listened to a certain number of conversations, and rolled my eyes at a certain number of over-carbonated bookstore recommendations.

The brilliance of Maus would not coalesce for me if I could but force myself to read those missing pages. The Poles would still be characterized as pigs, the Holocaust would still be ugly, and the book would still stink of entitled self-pity.
 
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Gluey Tart: This Night’s Everything

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Akira Minazuki, 2011, June

 
I love this cover. Love it. Minazuki’s style really does it for me because it’s sort of realistic (I said sort of), understated, and charmingly awkward. Not hugely awkward – charmingly. I insist. Minazuki also did Tonight’s Take-Out Night,” which I loved (you can tell because I still remember it, which rarely happens in a months-later kind of way). I’ve also seen a scanlation of another of her stories (about a shinigami) that I loved as well. So we’re four stars solid behind Akira Minazuki.

Her story lines aren’t quite typical, and her characterizations include the subtle details that allow you to jump fully into the story. What could be better than a death god, you might ask? I’ll tell you. Assassins. Assassins trump everything else, especially if they assassinate in sharp, mod-cut suits and use swords. Swords, people. (Some of you might remember my admitted fondness-shading-toward-obsession for assassins of the sword-wielding, brooding headcase variety, a.k.a. Aya in Weiss Kruez. Most of you have no idea what the hell Weiss Kruez is, of course, and while that makes me sad, I’ve come to accept it.)

There was some kind of war in the immediate prehistory of this book, which somehow included individuals fighting on their own with swords (or so it appears in the flashbacks), and some of those lone fighters were recruited to guard the Professor, about whom we know little except that he must have won, since he now runs this large organization of bodyguards and assassins who clear the Professor’s path or some such fascistic euphemism. Nanao has been with the group for ten years and hides his pain behind the refrigerator – I mean, behind a façade of good humor and easy charm.

And we have Aoi, whose name I can remember, although that’s only because I keep thinking it’s “Aioli.” I don’t like mayonnaise, though, even fancy French mayonnaise with garlic in it. Whipping oil and raw eggs together until they’re gelatinous and slimy strikes me as a deeply perverse thing to do. Also, Aoi is a lot of vowels. As an English speaker, all those vowels without the calming influence of a consonant seems to be asking for trouble. At any rate, Aoi shows up, a 19-year-old recruit who takes himself very, very seriously and gets paired with Nanao, who keeps getting his partners killed. Oops. Ha ha!

This starts out as a genre I think of as friendship porn. There is close camaraderie, there is banter, there is some thawing of the quiet, stoic, uptight, enigmatic dude (known in the business as the QSUED, he makes absurd proclamations like “How can hands that kill people show any concern?”) brought about by the largely unflagging cheer, flouting of rules and decorum, and casual flirting of the other guy (or the OG, who says things like, “A little resistance makes it hot, right?”). The OG makes it clear he likes the QSUED, even though he’s haughty and hard to deal with, and the QSUED makes it clear he is brooding and enigmatic and we aren’t going to find out what the hell he might or might not think. The key is that the QSUED would never let the OG take the liberties he does with the QSUED’s dignified person if he didn’t really care about the OG. At some point he graces the OG with a small, enigmatic smile, so you know that deep down, he does have feelings. AWWW!

As is so often the case, this creator has some odd ideas about courtship. Nanao returns from an assassination, blood splashed across his face, eyes wild, and climbs on top of a horrified Aoi. Nanao explains that the killing gets him hot and Aoi just needs to help him get off. Perfectly reasonable, right? Aoi manages to slow things down by almost biting off the two fingers Nanao has stuck in his mouth, and soon Nanao figures out the Aoi is a virgin. He puts this together with a previous observation that Aoi’s sword is unnicked and determines that Aoi isn’t really a soldier, like he is, and wonders, “What kind of mistake got him tied up in this?”

Having decided that Aoi is essentially pure and untouched, Nanao decides to keep him that way. Years into their partnership, we find out that Nanao has delivered all the killing blows, sparing Aoi that loss of innocence. (I would call this splitting hairs, but it makes all the difference to Nanao.) Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I find all this very romantic.

After years of being an assassin, Aoi eventually, as you might expect, has to kill someone. It is impressively bloody and dramatic, and Aoi completely falls apart. Now, again, I’m not entirely sure I’m sold on this aspect of the characterization, since this guy’s been helping Nanao take people down for years, and I’d think he might have gotten over the whole thing a little. But never mind. It’s fine because it finally gets our boys together in an emotionally and physically intimate way. I love the way all this is drawn, by the way. Nanao is giving Aoi his first blow job (or his first anything), and here’s Aoi:

Ohhhhh!!!!!! Angsty!!!!!! Now we finally get the sex scene we’ve building up to for about 87 pages (give or take a splash page). It’s angsty as well, but also tender. And hot. Totally worth the wait, if not for the actual sex, then for the morning after, when Aoi finally spills his secret.

Now this sets some shit in motion. Nanao goes off to take care of things for Aoi, and it’s a big-time sweep-him-off-his-feet gesture. It changes everything and sets their murky organization after Nanao’s head. Things happen, other things happen, Aoi gives in to the inevitable “love him need him gotta have him for my own” revelation we all saw coming from page one (especially if we happened to look at the cover), and the sailing off into the sunset of yaoi bliss thing is even handled in a sort of dangerous, edgy way that I found deeply pleasing. Possibly thrilling, in, you know, a kind of subdued way.

I very seldom get all directive on you, the reader (in part because I’m not entirely convinced there will be any readers), but in this case I’m telling you, seriously, check this out. Will you love it if you don’t love assassins? I can’t say because I don’t understand people who don’t love assassins and therefore have no idea what they might find pleasing. Mayonnaise, probably.

Gluey Tart: Yakuza Café

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Shinano Oumi, 2011, June

There are many – well, a couple of – things going on in Yakuza Café by Shinano Oumi. What I initially seized upon was that the Fuijisaki Clan Café, staffed by hulking former yakuza, serves nasty tea that stinks.

This book really resonated with me today because I had one of the worst cups of tea ever, this morning. I’m one of those possibly overly detail-oriented people who cares a lot about tea. I used to bring my own tea bags with me on trips because Lipton makes me frown. (I insist that this isn’t as annoying as carrying my own bottle of maple syrup, as someone I know does.) I haven’t carried for a long time, though, either because America is finally figuring out about tea or I’m just frequenting classier joints as I rake in the big bucks as a non-profit cog. It would be hard to say without conducting a study. Anyway, I went to one of my favorite places for breakfast this morning and noticed they were proudly advertising their new line of tea, which they proclaimed “tastes like couture.” I was somewhat skeptical because, while I’ve never in fact tasted couture, I did taste my flannel shirt this morning when it got sort of stuck in my mouth as I was trying to pull it on (pre-buttoned, obviously, because all that buttoning and unbuttoning stuff is fairly strenuous, and who has the time?), and it was pretty bland.

I attend a certain number of meetings and conferences for work, and the hotels and conference centers usually have fine tea. It’s often Tazo. I wonder why that is? I mean, Tzao is fine, but “the reincarnation of tea” (it is “blessed by a certified tea shaman” – and here I picture a filthy bicycle messenger who moved to Sante Fe to chase his or her bliss and became a healer of other former filthy bicycle messengers) always seems slightly incongruous in the bowels of a huge convention center, among busy go-getters walking and Blackberrying and/or iPadding at the same time and, occasionally, colliding into other Blackberrying and/or iPadding go-getters, which always makes me smile, for my heart is dark and twisted – or perhaps “matted” is a better word. I guess the Tazo marketing people have it going on, perhaps because Tazo is a division of Starbucks. Anyway, my question is why, with all the options available, a convention center can provide perfectly acceptable tea, while a restaurant – any restaurant – would serve tea that’s bland and lifeless but also sort of tastes like dishwater. And, apparently, couture.

When I got home, I thought I’d salvage the morning with a rollicking bit of absurdist manporn (well, first I took a long relaxing bath while I listened to Car Talk – I have delicate nerves). (Actually, first, I made myself a decent cup of tea. It was Metropolitan Monk’s Blend, although I considered a nice, plain-talking English breakfast, to cleanse the palate, or perhaps a good Earl Grey, in the spirit of getting back on the horse wot threw me and all that.) (And then I did some laundry; I keep forgetting, but it was on my mind today, possibly because of all this talk about clothing.) At some point in the day, at any rate, I sat down with Yakuza Café and a righteous expectation of some weird, funny, and lascivious escapism. (I obviously use “righteous” in the sense of “righteous weed, dude,” rather than its actual definition.)

I love yakuza yaoi. It’s one of the many tropes that never gets old for me. I especially like the really silly stuff, good-natured and sweet as a puff of cotton candy. I love the ridiculous plots about huge, disciplined tough guys falling for some adorable, smiley little fruit loop and behaving against character for the rest of the story. This one, for instance, is full of gangsters who cry at the drop of a hat. Copious, Ranma-style gushing tears. It’s just funny, sort of in a Benny Hill way. And there’s more of the fish-out-of-water humor with the café itself, which looks like the waiting area in an ad agency or something. Possibly a funeral home, since there’s calligraphy on the wall that reads “Mortality.” And, of course, the unfortunate tea.

There were a couple of sour notes, initially. It became clear almost immediately that this was going to be one of those “older man falls for true love when true love is a small child” things, which creeps me the hell out. It’s a common trope, but one I never get used to. Kind of a “you say romantic, I say someone call DCFS” kind of thing. Also, there’s the first sex scene. The little fruit loop touches the dragon tattoo covering the back of the man who fell in love with him when he was a child – hereafter to be known as Mikado, which is his name, and less awkward than TMWFILWHWHWAC. Whenever anyone touches the dragon (hyuck hyuck, she said “touches the dragon”), Mikado’s pent up emotions rage uncontrollably, so Mikado throws the fruit loop to the floor and has his beastly way with him. It is, in fact, a rape scene, since Mikado doesn’t ask and the fruit loop says no repeatedly, but in this, as in most of these yaoi rape scenes, the fruit loop doesn’t really mind too much. That one doesn’t bother me excessively; what perturbed me here was the initial unveiling of a penis (always a fraught moment, as they are often artistically sidestepped in some way that looks bizarre or troubling, like the classic “beam me up, Scotty, you big stud” bar of light). It’s the fruit loop’s penis, and it looks like one of those marzipan mushroom things. I’m pretty open minded, but that’s just not sexy.

Otherwise, though, I’m pretty good with this. The morning after the sex scene, Mikado tries to atone for his misdeed by cutting off his pinky. The fruit loop calls for help, resulting in what I see as a truly classic bit of dialogue: “Mikado-san’s trying to cut off his finger!” “Not again!” And a bit later, the evil marketer (there’s always an evil marketer) takes the fruit loop aside and says, “So you’ve encountered the dragon! You’re lucky to be alive.” That, my friends, is a good one.

There is a serious story at the end, providing Meaningful and Heart-Wrenching background for the evil marketer (by which I mean pat and overwrought, although it does involve flirting by way of full-back Buddha tattoos, which one admittedly doesn’t see every day), but we can overlook this, especially after we finally figure out who the hell it is we’re reading about (which took 15 pages for me). Let us spend no more time on it, and also waste no compassion on the marketer, for he is a marketer and doesn’t deserve it.

Gluey Tart: Tonight’s Take-out Night

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Akira Minazuki, June, 2011

“Can a buttoned-up professional hope to fend off a rogue romantic’s aggressive advances … or is the heat of playful passion too enticing to ignore?” I briefly pondered this breathless question, posed by the back cover, but was almost instantly drawn into an even deeper, more important question – to wit, why can’t I have purple hair too?

The back cover also promises that the book “features a feast of beautiful men fumbling and fighting as they do their best to resist true love!” I think the copywriter did an especially good job here. And how often do you think about the work of the copywriter? Books are often purchased or not based on the back or inside front cover, but does anyone ever pause to congratulate the nameless publishing wage slave on a job well done? No, they do not. (Not that I take this personally or anything.) Ahem. That minor distraction over, let us “sink [our] teeth into sweet, savory temptation!”

The first story, “We’re Eating In Today,” is the sort of thing I often find annoying, the “lower-level employee comes on too strong but eventually seduces senior employee anyway” trope. It loses some of its punch in the U.S., I think, since we don’t get exercised about organizational hierarchy in the same way. It makes the scenario less shocking. I also tend to find annoying behavior annoying. It helps that the junior employee, the manager of a chain restaurant – let’s call him Ted (his name is Iwakiri, but I can’t keep that in my head because I suck) – is really pretty sweet, despite proposing the moment he meets Norton (that’s Matsumoto, who is higher up on the corporate food chain because he’s from the parent company’s planning department) (if Iwakiri gets a random new name, it’s only fair that Matsumoto does, too). So, the insta-proposal thing is irritating, yes, along with the unsolicited ass grabbing, etc. It’s supposed to be funny and cute, and it isn’t, BUT.

As with so many things in life, you have to try to lighten up and go with these fine yaoi clichés, and if a creator can sell them to me, I’m willing to buy in. This story isn’t exactly substantial, but it has something, and somewhere in there, I started rooting for them to get together. Shy Norton is SO SHY. Sweet, pushy Ted is SO SWEET AND PUSHY. Norton comes to Ted for help with a work problem, and Ted couldn’t be more supportive. And they have sex in a restaurant booth. Using cream for lube. (You have to love that.) Then there’s a complication caused by Norton’s thinking he should never see Ted again (you can sort of see his point), and the complication is resolved, and they have sex. Norton couldn’t look more miserable as he tells Ted he loves him.

I won’t spoil it (although I was recently reading about a study indicating that people actually enjoy stories more after they know what’s going to happen, rather than enjoying them less), but here’s a damned cute little scene at the end, too – more riffing on the shy Norton is shy theme, and it is thoroughly charming.

All right, I’ll admit it. I don’t care about spoiling the damned scene. I’m just too lazy to describe it. All right? Are you happy now?

The second story, “A Flower Petal Falls from the Sky,” is the main event. It’s a quiet, beautiful little thing that is obviously based on folk tales about Yuki-onna, a ghostly woman who lives in the snow. My favorite depiction of her is the “Woman of the Snow” story in Kwaidan (a 1964 movie directed by directed by Masaki Kobayashi – it tells four Japanese ghost stories and it is the shit, people). The Yuki-onna figure in the manga is a man named Kirin (which we know is going to be significant, a kirin being a sacred beast, and lucky, too). Kirin is sly and mysterious, and slyly and mysteriously seductive. And Shinnosuki, the handsome young doctor he meets in a blizzard, is similarly mysterious. And hot. He’s the bishonen Clint Eastwood, to painfully mix our cinematic metaphors (and what else are we here for, after all?). We know this is the case a) because of the way he’s drawn, b) because he turns down Kirin, and c) because he’s so cool about it.

Kirin is impressed, too, looking speculatively at Clint’s mysterious and attractive back and thinking, “There haven’t been many people who’ve rejected me.” A few pages later, after a few manly acts of kindness on Clint’s part, Kirin gazes off into the mid-distance and thinks, “I want this man’s life.” Then he fills us in on his back story, which doesn’t take long, since all he can remember is wandering in the snow and “a nothingness like hunger.” He steals life from others “to make up for something I lack.” But all these souls only satisfy him for a moment, and he has to take another one. Like me and – well, any number of snack foods, really. Anyway, this kicks ass as a romantic setup, as far as I’m concerned.

Kirin finally wears Clint down and achieves rolling around on the floor status, but he decides not to kill Clint because “I want to be touched more,” which Kirin clearly finds fascinating. Then every time he thinks about Clint, he starts to melt. This is perhaps heavy handed, but I’m willing to overlook it in the heat of the moment. There’s a lot more story after this, but basically, we all know what happens. They fall in love and Kirin becomes real. I enjoyed getting there, though.

The last story, “Love at Your Fingertips,” is about a shy apprentice sculptor who gets to work with his reclusive mentor, who likes to touch things. Because, you know. He’s a sculptor. There’s a slightly weird flirtation that ultimately flings them into each other’s arms (and, subsequently, onto the floor, as well). Also nice.

I love the art in this manga. Minazuki has a distinctive style and reliable draftsmanship, bless her heart. It’s a luxury not to have to worry about strange distortions in every other panel. She has another manga recently published in English, This Night’s Everything, which is next on my to-read pile. There’s an assassin, and I love me an assassin.

Gluey Tart: Does the Stupidity in My Book Bother You?

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Look, the last thing I want to do is harsh on Steven Tyler. I love Steven Tyler. I probably wouldn’t want him spending the weekend at my house because, face it, he seems pretty high maintenance. But in a more abstract way, I love him.

And I pretty much loved his book, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? It was very entertaining, and many of the things you want in a rock biography. The relative sizes of Aerosmith’s respective dicks, for instance. See? You want to know, right? I was also charmed by the pains Tyler seemed to be taking to be as kind as possible. His claws certainly came out a time or two, especially when he started talking about drug and band issues (one in the same, pretty much) from the mid- ’80s on, but overall I give him points for trying.

I didn’t read this book because I love Aerosmith, although I do (well, I love about five years of Aerosmith’s career, from 1972-1977, and am indulgent about another few years shortly thereafter, especially Joe Perry’s solo albums). The specific reason was that I read Cyrinda Foxe’s biography, “Dream On: Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith” (a euphonious title if ever one I did see). Cyrinda Foxe’s book was pretty damned interesting. She was associated with Andy Warhol’s crowd and married David Johansen of the New York Dolls before marrying (and then divorcing) Steven Tyler, so as you might imagine, she had Things to Say.

Now, it’s stupid to assume that you’ll like someone just because you like his music. People often become rock stars because they’re narcissistic assholes, and cocaine doesn’t make that situation any better. But “Dream On” made Steven Tyler sound like a monster. A minor monster, I guess, but the kind of guy who lies and cheats and doesn’t give a damn about anyone other than himself, including his wife or his daughter. Cyrinda wrote about a man who was completely out of control, cruel and miserly and interested in nothing besides his drugs and his band. (She was an innocent in all of this, of course.) And I can see that, to a point, but she protested too much.

And most of her protests involved a perceived lack of fabulosity re. their living conditions, which makes me wonder. Instead of taking her to an amazing New York apartment after their marriage, she said, Tyler took her to a disgusting, filth-crusted hovel in the wilds of New Hampshire, which you’d think was located in Darkest Peru or something, from her description. And then he expected her to do things like clean up after herself and cook food. And he didn’t buy her things. She left her exciting life in boho New York (where she lived in a hovel with David Johansen) to be with this big rock star, and he didn’t pay out properly Well, I don’t know. She didn’t marry Tyler the moment she met him – in fact, she was around for awhile before leaving her husband for him. Where he lived never came up? Not once? I can also kind of see how someone who’d suddenly become a big rock star and had been touring nonstop for a year or more might want to go someplace that was comparatively safe and quiet. Cyrinda Foxe was many things, but rational doesn’t seem to have been one of them. (Same goes for Steven Tyler, of course. Two irrational, high strung, drug-addled showboats does not a solid union make, apparently. Who knew?)

Foxe also claimed that Tyler later dumped her and their daughter Mia in another hovel in New Hampshire while he toured and lived the high life. (Ha! Get it? The high life!) She was on her own, alone, and he didn’t give them any money at all, and she had no way of getting back to civilization. She also claimed there wasn’t a problem with her own drug abuse, and all of that seems unlikely. (How hard can it be to get out of New Hampshire?) Tyler was on the road constantly, and he certainly did cheat and do a staggering amount of drugs, but their relationship was obviously a train wreck, and train wrecks are a two-way street. Or something like that.

There were good times, of course, mostly involving partying and expensive jewelry. Foxe described a touching moment on the road with Aerosmith where she expressed admiration for an insanely expensive bracelet she saw at a jewelery store. That evening, Tyler pulled back the covers and displayed said insanely expensive bracelet adorning his dick. As she squealed in delight, he told her to dive for it. Oh, darling!

So, fascinating and lascivious and stuff, but leading to a number of questions. So, I was eager to read Tyler’s side, thinking I could maybe merge the two together and divide by two and come up with something , you know, truthish. It worked, to a degree – although I might also have to read “Creating Myself,” Mia Tyler’s 2008 biography (Mia is Steven and Cyrinda’s daughter). (She is a lovely woman, but I have serious doubts about her literary abilities.) I’ve already read “Walk this Way,” the 1997 “biography” of Aerosmith by Stephen Davis (who wrote “Hammer of the Gods” about Led Zeppelin), and I partially reread it after finishing “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (answer: no, but your title does). Because, you know, I do shit like that. Anyway, I have finally come to some (obviously dubious) conclusions about this man I don’t know at all.

He is not the most self-aware pencil in the sea, Steven Tyler. I can hear your collective gasp of outrage and shock now. Steven Tyler? Not completely on top of his shit? Well, yes. That’s my main takeaway. It only bears mentioning because he seems to feel that he’s done enough rehab and soul searching and so on that he understands things now and can present his story objectively, and get preachy about my Xanax. He tells me that it is a crutch and he knows what I’m really doing because he’s been there. (His error is that I take Xanax as prescribed for an actual problem – a concept he has apparently never considered – while he snorted pounds of Xanax to get high.) (Snorted.) (Anyway.) He is angry and resentful and feels the band has done him wrong, especially guitarist Joe Perry, and he will not forgive them for telling him his drug problem was completely fucking out of hand. (It was.) His main justification for this resentment is that the rest of the band was fucked up too, especially Joe Perry. And while that is no doubt the case, it just makes the extent of Tyler’s drug use even more impressive, rather than diminishing its scope in any way.

This is as good a time as any top point out that a lot of Tyler’s book is about drugs. A lot, a lot. I was expecting that, though, because it’s a story about Aerosmith, and Aerosmith was about drugs. That’s what they did. They toured and made music (and Tyler does also include a lot of delightful anecdotes about how certain songs, lyrics, and sounds came to be – I found out, for instance, that he says “‘cept for my big ten inch” in “Big Ten Inch Record,” on Toys in the Attic, not “suck on my big ten inch – a bit of a disappointment, really, partly because on of my favorite childhood memories is of my aunt walking by my cousin’s bedroom when that song was playing, stopping for a moment to listen, and saying, “That braggart!”), and they took drugs. Those things were on equal footing. And taking massive amounts of drugs narrows a person’s world so much that a man like Steven Tyler can look back on a time when he had the world at his feet, and what he can tell us about it is where he hid his tuinals and how he managed to snort cocaine during the shows.

Tyler also makes many of the expected excuses for generally being an asshole – although the behavior he is excusing is in many cases not what anyone might expect. Taking legal custody of a fifteen-year-old girl so he could have sex with her, for instance. He explains this by saying he loved her. (Oh. Well, then. Who can argue with that?) I’m largely unflappable, as far as getting exercised about sexual mores, but I admit that I do look at this episode askance. (Tyler talks more about this  in “Walk the Way,” by the way, saying the girl had several abortions and was badly burned in a fire in their apartment while he was on the road – he said she was too young to be left alone, but he couldn’t take her with him, so…) Anyway, he has his reasons. Everyone does. For the most part, the excuse-making isn’t excessive and he’s willing to make himself look pretty bad. I respect that.

This balance holds until roughly the second half of the book, when he starts to lose his grip. I have a theory about why Tyler can be more or less reasonable about the events that happened before the first time he went to rehab, but not anything since. That reason is that he was so high, all the time, that he can’t really remember what happened before he went to rehab. (That would also explain some of the factual discrepancies between “The Noise in My Head” and “Walk this Way.”) Since going to rehab, and going to rehab, and going to rehab, he’s had some moments of sobriety and thus actually remembers some of the things that have happened in the last twenty years. I find that things are more annoying when you remember them.

And that’s enough, really, about Steven Tyler’s book. I just remembered that Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer wrote a biography a few years ago, so I’m off to download that sucker to my Kindle (unless I have to buy the printed edition so I can look at the pictures). If it’s any good, I’ll let you know.

Gluey Tart: Rock On, Fan Fic Woman

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After years of comfortably not thinking about Stevie Nicks at all, she is back in my life. And since YOU WANT TO KNOW!!!!!!, I will tell you all about it.

For reasons best not explored, I have been exposed to an enormous amount of Fleetwood Mac over the past few months. Not the Peter Green version that has, I think, a certain amount of critical sympathy, if not cred (if you like blues-based rock at all,“Oh Well” is just an awesome song). No, I’m talking about the Lindsey Buckingham-Stevie Nicks version, which was ubiquitous in the ’70s and has less critical sympathy. I have even listened to Buckingham-Nicks, their first album (never released on CD, which hardly seems possible, but there you are). (They’re naked, if that helps.) I have listened to that Walter Egan album Buckingham and Nicks worked on, Fundamental Roll (remember “Magnet and Steel”? Anyone?). I have listened to all of Lindsey Buckingham’s solo albums. I have listened to part of a Christine McVie solo album. I have listened to and, I’ll admit it, enjoyed late, decadent Fleetwood Mac in the form of Tusk.

And in the sort of oooh spooky cosmically significant dream catcher sort of coincidence one associates with Stevie Nicks, I also saw her on TV recently. Circumstances conspired against me in a perfect storm of crap that included watching “Dancing with Painfully Annoying Has-Beens Like Ralph Macchio, and also Kirstie Alley, Who Is Actually Pretty Great.” Stevie’s lost all that post-cocaine-addicted-to-some-kind-of-painkillers weight, I noticed. Good for her. She also forgot one of the verses to Landslide, I’m pretty sure (I might not be remembering properly since I was pretty focused on feeling wildly sorry for myself, and I don’t multitask well). (I mean, how many times has the woman sung Landslide? If you laid every performance of Landslide end to end you’d be in outer space.) She was pretty and her voice didn’t sound too bad and she didn’t look hopped up or insane, so that’s really more than anyone has any right to expect, and good on her.

So I’ve been thinking about our girl Stevie. I have a long history with her. One of the first albums I owned was Rumors (along with Rod Stewart’s Night on the Town, which I stand by to this day, and Roger Daltrey’s One of the Boys, which I don’t) – in 1978, for my twelfth birthday. (And, ouch.) I was obsessed with Stevie Nicks in the late ’70s, as was just about everyone else in the United States. I first saw her on TV in 1975, probably, twirling around in her chiffon and top hat and shit, and I was in love. I adored Stevie Nicks in the uncritical and utterly absorbed way only a nine year old can. I can still remember how badly I wanted to be her – a cruelly thwarted ambition on par only with the realization that I really wasn’t ever going to find a wardrobe that would lead me to Narnia. (I still haven’t quite given up on becoming an intergalactic princess.)

I didn’t know anything about what being Stevie Nicks would involve, but that didn’t make the distance between us any easier. So I did what everybody does in a situation like that: I wrote fan fiction.

My nine-year-old fan fiction was no doubt excruciatingly embarrassing, and it is a mercy that none of it still exists. But I clearly remember spending long, happy hours imagining Stevie’s life – where she lived, what she did in her spare time, whether or not she cooked. (No, I decided.) I agonized over whether or not her boyfriend (I didn’t realize that was Lindsey Buckingham, at the time, so I made one up) lived with her or not, and whether I should refer to him in my stories as her boyfriend, which seemed old-fashioned, or her lover, which seemed risqué. I was extremely unclear on the details, mind you, but I was sure she’d have one, whatever it entailed. The actual storytelling was sparse because I had no idea what Stevie Nicks and her fictional boyfriend, Ted, might do. But I did spend a lot of time browsing catalogues, picking out items for Stevie’s fictional home. Clothing was difficult, since the only catalogues I had at my disposal were Sears and Spiegel (for fancy), so I especially enjoyed picking out furnishings and linens, which were less obviously wrong. I also remember that Stevie had a Siamese cat, much like I did.

So in addition to watching “Dancing With the Stars” and listening to Tusk, I’ve also realized that I’ve been writing fan fiction since I was nine. Awkward, isn’t it? Still, it’s best to lance the wound and let it heal. And it could be worse. (No, really. Two words: Mackenzie Phillips. Who wrote that book about having an affair with her father. Definitely worse.) (Also worse [in Stevie’s own immortal words (from “Crystal,” on Fleetwood Mac): “The crystalline knowledge of you/Drove me through the mountains/Through the crystal-like clear water fountain/Drove me like a magnet to the sea.”] [Drove me like a magnet to the sea? I figure she originally wrote “Drove me like a taxi to the airport” but decided that wasn’t romantic enough.])