Coincidentally, I had just finished “What is the What,” a book by Dave Eggers.

It’s a fantastic, devastating book about a Sudanese “Lost Boy” and how his life was torn apart, again and again, by the civil war in Sudan. Eggers wrote it after having many long talks with protagonist, Valentino Achak Deng, and it’s a kind of novelized memoir, fiction but based on Valentino’s real experiences. Anyway, it’s a transformative book, not only for the quality of the storytelling, but for for the way that Eggers was able to move beyond the meta-narrative conceit of his first novel, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” toward a work of far greater emotional pull. The book has been a big part of my inner life for a couple of weeks — don’t you love how books do that? — and I was sad to see it go as I turned the last page.

What does this have to do with watching a bunch of indie rockers? Both were brought to me by Dave Eggers, a guy who, when I still harbored dreams of being a fiction writer (a long story…) Eggers was public enemy #1. He was too cool. Too smart. Too aware of being cool and smart. Too aware of being aware of being cool and smart. I, along with my writerly friends, was jealous of him. He was young and hot and he’d turned a great personal tragedy into the first great novel of the 21st Century.We all read McSweeney’s and loved the design, the inside jokes, the pithy online observations, the (realized) goal of creating a new community of literate and hip writers. After a while, the smarty-pantsness of it all started to wear on me, and I wanted something that, for lack of a better word, felt more “real.” I got into reading war journalism. That’s real! Joan Didon. Samantha Power. Policy and history that actually affected people on the outside, rather than making them feel good and white and all Park Slope-y on the inside. That’s how it felt, anyway.

So it was a great relief to read “What is the What” and to love it. And then to go tonight’s show, which was bursting with the bespectacled McSweeney’s crowd (like me!) and to love that, too. I’d come full circle.

Maybe it was just the Grizzly Bear.

I’m reminded of all the years I spent growing up as a Jewish kid in Vermont, one of the most un-Jewish places in the world, where I would attempt to fast and be religious despite no support from anyone else, even my parents. So the internal battle has begun: stop the stomach from turning, and convince myself that I need to be celebrating this holiday that, in my world and even though I live in New York, no one else seems to be celebrating.

A while back I complained about the media orgasm that occurred when Apple introduced the iPod nano. It’s happened again after the media got stroked by the the video iPod. The iPod seems to satisfy two things: the media get to write about their favorite topic, consumerism, and talk about something that has effectively branded itself as “cool.” Maybe we should send some to Iraq so they can watch segments about their country falling apart in between low-resolution Disney and ABC television shows. Too bad you can’t download any CNN broadcasts (I guess they’re owned by the wrong transnational media conglomerate) since CNN’s web site today features the absurd haiku/headline “Progress on Constitution; attack kills 30″ , which might be interesting to read and watch for the those Iraqis that who are living in the giant puddle of shit that Georgie has thrust upon them.

So now Apple and Disney have made a pact to fluff each other’s feathers. Has anyone noticed that Apple has completely abandoned its old advertising technique of telling you how revolutionary they are, about how different they think? With this Disney deal and their incessant battering of the the airwaves with more news about another consumer product, they’re quickly becoming the most hypercommercialized brand in existence, existing less to create a meaningful product and more to perpetuate recognition of their name. Someone tell me, what exactly makes Apple so different from Microsoft?

Tags: Apple| ipod| Iraq

The agenda-setting media in the United States have pretty much stopped reporting on the situation in western Sudan, deciding that the food emergency in Niger is the Africa catastrophe du jour. (You don’t expect them to devote significant time and resources to more than one big Africa story at a time, do you?)

I think the blame is misplaced here. While it’s true that the “agenda-setting media” (if he means outlets like Newsweek, CNN, or ABC) suffers from its own variety of compassion fatigue, or news fatigue, it’s more likely that these places are trying to anticipate what their audiences will be interested in, and justify their inability to focus for a prolonged moment on even one crisis, much less two, on their audiences’ need for variety.

As this map shows, American media pays a pitifully small amount of attention to these crises, period. So saying that Niger has become the “Africa catastrophe du jour” is a bit of an overstatement, but it would be nice if they could expand the Africa quota or whatever and mention — gasp! — two African countries in one newscast or newspaper.

Meanwhile, the ridiculousness that is the Rolling Stones continues to get attention. What is it with peoples’ continuing fascination with them? Like most people, I like pre-embalming, I mean pre-1980 Rolling Stones, but most everything since then has sucked.

Disclosure: My first CD was that un-classic album, Steel Wheels, a sorrowful collection of bad, bad songs that only hinted at the band’s past glory.

Anyway, the band has completed its transformation into a group of wrinkled, capitalistic pseudo-plutocrats, and we congratulate their ability to dance on stage without walkers. “But the drugs they did…!” goes the story. Yes, it’s true. They did a lot of drugs, and yet are still alive to make music. Isn’t this the story that went around two years ago, when everybody was “amazed” that they could tour again? And now we all pretend that that never happened, and their ability to dance is amazing. Is this really news or does the “agenda-setting media” just think people will be interested?

I’m looking forward to Mick, Keith, Ronnie, and Charlie coming around in 2050, when their enbalmed bodies will be trucked around from ballpark to ballpark as people express false surprise at how well their bodies have held up. We may be into World War Four by then, but this story will be so much more interesting.

Tags: Darfur| Niger| Rolling Stones

It didn’t last in part because Eugene was a dick, and in part because I was a dick. He was obsessed with how “punk rock” things were. He once told the singer of another band I was in that he wasn’t punk rock, that he didn’t even know “who Nick Cave and Bad Seeds are.” It’s a stupid obsession because, if you want to break it down, nobody is really punk rock. Even Sid Vicious might have done some softy thing in between slashing his arms with broken glass. Nevertheless, Eugene gave me and others the insult he considered the harshest of all, the tragedy of not being punk rock enough. I would soon discover that I don’t have the stomach for being in a rock band at all.

I ended up going to college in Vermont and Eugene moved to New York, and through the years I would hear about his new band, Gogol Bordello, and how good they were, about how he changed his named to Eugene Hutz for some reason, and about his life as a model who appeared on the covers of European fashion magazines.

Yesterday Darren sent me a link to the trailer for the new film, Everything is Illuminated, adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s hugely successful novel. I remember reviews of the book that mentioned a comic character in the book, a Ukrainian who mangles English in cute ways. I hadn’t thought about that for a while (though recently I did walk by Jonathan Safran Foer and his wife, Nicole Krauss, in my neighborhood, which made me feel cool for about two seconds).

So Darren sent me the link to the trailer, and I watched it. That funny Ukrainian sidekick? He’s played by Eugene Hutz! My Eugene Hutz! His name is even second on the poster, right after the star of the film, Elijah Wood! It’s totally insane to watch the trailer and see Eugene talking in the same accent I remember, acting as the comic sidekick to Elijah Wood. I’m happy for him, and I’m sure he’s great.

But one question comes to mind: is it really punk rock enough?

Tags: Hutz| Gogol Bordello| Safran Foer

But, for some reason, Joni’s album Court and Spark still does something for me. Blue is great, but tends to me a little too 18-year-old-girl-alone-in-her-dorm-room for me at times. Court, however, marks the beginning of Joni’s jazz/fusion stage, and is full of wonders.

So my friend suggested I listen to Hejira, the notorious album featuring Jaco Pastorius on bass. For the uninitiated, Pastorious was a hugely popular bass player in the ’70s who is credited (or faulted, depending on your outlook on these things) with popularizing jazz fusion bass. He also looked like this:

He died too young, but he left in his wake a decade of breakthrough, innovative, and supremely cheesy music that sounds a little like Muzak being played through a giant garden hose that’s being swung in circles by an elephant.

Anyway, he’s on Hejira, and due to my friend’s suggestion, I downloaded some of it. And you know, it’s wonderful. Jaco isn’t cheesy at all, Joni is still good, and it’s full of curiosity and depth. I’m grateful for albums like this that jumpstart the dormant music-lover in me.

Technorati Tags: Jaco Pastorius| Joni Mitchell| music