The Yankees Really Do Suck!

 

In Fenway Park, the chant, “Yankees suck!” is as ubiquitous as bad sightlines and smelly concourses. Many “experts” picked the Yankees to go to the World Series, but this year Red Sox fans are right.

 

I am a longtime Yankees fan, but this comes as no surprise to me; I picked them to finish third, with a possible slip to fourth, which is where sit as of this writing. It’s no fluke; they’ve been a notch over.500 club for two years running, which is a systematic failure, not an aberration. The Yankees complicate ineptitude by being relentlessly boring. Way more so than the Bronx Bummers of the late ‘60s through 1975, when at least they had guys like Horace Clarke, Bobby Murcer, Joe Pepitone, Mel Stottlemyre, Tom Tresh, and Roy White who played their hearts out. If the current squad were a car, lemon laws would be in play.

 

Bad teams often “rebuild” by holding a fire sale. That’s flat-out dumb. Other teams cherry-pick what’s good and leave the dregs at the bottom of the cup. What’s to be done?  

 

First things:

 

·      General Manager Brian Cashman had a good run, but he’s worn out his welcome. His strong, tall guys approach to offense is old school. You cannot win with a team that only scores via homeruns and strikes out 25% of the time. Signing sore-armed Corey Kluber and trading for Jameson Taillon is on Cashman. Plus, you can’t rely on a lineup whose only lefthanded hitter is 37-year-old Brett Gardner, who should retire and become the new hitting coach.

·      Gardy would be an upgrade over current hitting coaches Marcus Thames and P.J. Pilittere. Gardner could teach bunting, situational hitting, and how to put the bloody ball in play.

·      Aaron Boone never made sense as a manager. Handing over a club with a $200 million payroll to a guy with zero managerial experience is the equivalent of building a Formula 1 race car and tossing the keys to a teenager. The Yanks need a seasoned baseball mind, not a freakin’ cheerleader.

·      Can the entire conditioning staff from A-ball on up. Injuries are part of the game, but the situation in New York is ridiculous. How about less weight training and more flexibility regiment?

·      More scouts and fewer Statheads.  Tampa and Oakland do well with analytics. They are outliers. Baseball is about winning games, not compiling numbers for fantasy geeks. Analytics are #1 on my list of why baseball has become boring. A few old-time stats matter–OBP, ERA, and (yes) batting average–but the rest is just crap dumb guys use to look smart.

 

 

Who is untouchable?

 

·      Aaron Judge is fragile, but also a slugger, a patient hitter, and a quiet leader. He strikes out too much, but he’s the big-ticket draw.

·       Gerrit Cole is a workhorse and one of the top half dozen best pitchers in baseball.

·      D J LeMahieu is having a down year, but he’s a rare contact hitter on a squad of whiffers and will be at or near .300 by year’s end. It would help if the bottom part of the order hit their weight so opposing pitchers can’tt force DJ to chase pitches out of the zone.

·      Gio Urshela is the guy who came from nowhere and is simply solid.

·      Domingo German has had off-the-field issues, but he’s a payroll bargain and arguably their second-best pitcher.

·      Young pitchers with potential: Mike King, Nestor Cortes, and numerous guys in Scranton deserve a serious look. This includes Luis Severino who is coming back from Tommy John surgery but has ace potential. He wouldn’t bring much in a trade because of his injuries, so keep him.

 

Who can be moved for the right deal?

 

·      Deivi Garcia is one young arm I would trade. I doubt his durability and suspect he’ll be hittable.

·      Gleyber Torres is the guy most of MLB wants. The Yankees need to hold out for a major haul if he’s traded.

·      Jordan Montgomery is a lefty who’s really a classic #4 or #5 starter, not the # 3 where the Yankees have slated him. I like Monty but he’s definite trade bait.

·      Miguel Andujar is a very good hitter who should be a DH except…

·      Giancarlo Stanton holds that role. His massive contract handcuffs the club, but if Cashman could trade him without paying most of his salary, I’ll back off the idea that he needs to move on.

·      Jonathan Loaisiga has come into his own, though Boone overuses him. Chad Green falls into this category as well, but I’d trade either for the right deal.

 

Movable players:

 

·      Aroldis Chapman has been a lights-out closer, but he’s also 33 which is about when closers begin to break down. Might be time to sell high.

·      Gary Sanchez is one of the most frustrating players I’ve ever seen. Terrible catcher, but somebody will want him for his big bat (when he manages to make contact).

·      Taillon should never throw another pitch in Pinstripes. NEVER sign a pitcher who has had two TJ surgeries. For that matter, never trade for anyone who plays for the Pirates.

·      The rest of the staff if not mentioned previously. Some are good, but they’re not good enough. Corey Kluber was a mistake, his no-hitter notwithstanding. Justin Wilson and Darren O’Day shouldn’t have been signed in the first place.

·      Clint Frazer is a needs-a-change-of-scenery guy. I thought he’d be a star, but that hasn’t happened. He’s 26 and someone will overpay for him.

·      Aaron Hicks is on the DL and would have to approve of a trade, but get him out of here. He’s another Cashman mistake.

·      Tyler Wade is fast, but he doesn’t hit enough to take up roster space.

·      Rougned Odor is an example of how bad things have gotten. Anybody want him?

·      If all else fails, bail on the season, promote young guys from the minors, and see if they can play. How good do they have to be to hit .200, which would be better than the bottom third of the order has produced?

 

Hope Dunbar: June 2021 Artist of the Month

 

Hope Dunbar

Sweetheartland

 

Hope Dunbar made an earlier appearance in this column for her Three Black Crows project. I liked it a lot. I love her latest, Sweetheartland. I love it so much that I’ll just come out and say if Hope Dunbar isn’t the next big thing in country music, every record producer in America should undergo a brain transplant!

 

The title track is both memorable and deceptive. It’s a paean to the American midlands, the people who work it, and—as the title implies–her sweetheart. Ahh, let’s talk about that. She’s the wife of a small-town Nebraska minister, but she’s not cut from the robes you might imagine. Once we get our catchy opening appetizer, Dunbar mixes affability and nostalgia with attitude, defiance, and the occasional boot in the butt. She’s a bit what you’d get if you blended Lori McKenna, Emmylou Harris, and Dolly Parton.

 

You want attitude? Try “What Were You Thinking?” It’s about a jilted woman, but not one who’s about to lick her wounds: I was up making a list of all the things I had lost and it turns out that losing you only slightly decreases what I’ve got. Not angry enough for you? There’s this: … all I need is a lighter, your clothes and a gasoline can. Dunbar enhances the pugnacious mood by soaring with and above her fine backing band. “Dog Like You” gives a swampy blues treatment to another better-off-without-him song. One can easily imagine Dolly singing this one, an impish smile upon her face.

 

Sometimes it pays to have a little mileage behind you. Her song “More” is one example of that, with its mix of dreams and being grateful for what she has: And what more could I possibly want? I’ve got blessings in spades/I’ve got full sun in winter and in the summer I got shade/But I look out the window and I envy the bird/And’s I’m thinking more, more more/Ain’t a four-letter word. When we hear Dunbar sing “Woman Like Me,” it’s simply impossible to imagine an innocent young Nashville newbie credibly covering it. McKenna comparisons spring immediately to mind, especially with its edgy ambiguity. Is Dunbar accepting her lot, lamenting it, or just telling it like it is. One thing is clear: It might be a good idea for Dunbar to be on the road more, as I can’t imagine the roof of her husband’s church could sustain the force of her voice. Speaking of force, Dunbar lives in tornado alley. “Evacuate” is a clarion call not to mess with warnings, and she doesn’t. She sings it with dead earnest, as she should.

 

It’s hard not to love “John Prine,” Dunbar’s tribute to the late, great Illinois-bred troubadour who perished from Covid. She absolutely nails Prine’s sensibilities, especially his uncanny ability to pick up mundane things and hurl them back at us wrapped in meaning and tied up with a silly ribbon. Plus, if you’ve ever wielded a pen and tried to write a tune of your own, you can surely appreciate Dunbar’s line: John Prine, John Prine, I wish your songs were mine/Wish I could steal one of your lines and no one would know.

With that thought, I’ll end this review by saying that it’s time for the music industry to pay attention to a Nebraska preacher’s wife who writes and sings like few can. Can country music handle a mature woman who gives us both roses and thorns?

 

Rob Weir

Beach Read: Reading Material or Litter?

 

BEACH READ (2020)

By Emily Henry

Penguin Publishing Group, 374 pages.

★

 

 

You’d think I would know better by now. Back in the late 1980s, the academic world went gaga over Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance. Radway insisted there is a complex relationship between romance novel readers, content, and publishers. She’s probably right, but the suggestion that such works are serious literature felt implausible. But what did I know? I’m male and didn’t read that stuff. In an effort to stretch myself, every few years or so I’d plough through a buzzy work from the best-seller list. The lessons didn’t take, but I nonetheless decided to give the genre one last old college try. Emily Henry is the latest to vie for the queen of romance novels crown and has a new best-seller, so I picked up her last book, which sold roughly 3.5 trillion copies from what I infer from the hype.

 

I owe Henry a debt. After reading the waste of perfectly good trees titled Beach Read, I will never again have to pretend that romance novels are literature. Here’s the skinny. January Andrews is a Brooklyn-based romance writer. (How original!) After her father dies, she finds that he had a lover when January’s mother was battling cancer. He kept her at a beach house at North Bear Shores on Lake Michigan, which January has inherited, though she plans to offload it ASAP. She nonetheless goes there to pound out her new book, Pride and Prejudice–sorry, I made up that title–and sells stuff from the house to raise needed cash; her French boyfriend has recently dumped her and she’s in-between residences. We never meet Jacques, but he’s easily the most intelligent character in the book for having the sense to float away on the airstream released from January’s vacuous head.

 

Poor January. Though her mom survived, she’s mad at her late father, her annoying cheerleader agent, her best friend’s decision to move to Chicago, and her next-door neighbor Gus Everett, a guy she sort of knew when they were both at the University of Michigan. He was arrogant then, is now a celebrated non-fiction writer, and has added cynicism to his repertoire. Whew. Got it? Oh, did I forget to mention that her lesbian aunt “Pete” is her only real contact in North Bear Shores and that her father’s mistress lives in the area? Or that she gets roped into a book discussion at a local bookstore? (Would such a tiny place even have a bookstore?)  Guess who else is also drafted to show up for what turns out to be the discussion group from Dante’s 8^th layer of blue-haired hell?

 

Gus seems to think romance novels are garbage, so we initially like him, and he is outwardly disdainful of January, another potential point in his favor. The only thing they have in common is that both are suffering from writer’s block. They hit upon what might be charitably called a unique way to get unblocked. Gus agrees that he will try to write a romance novel and January will try her hand at non-fiction. This plan entails January taking Gus to places the exude romantic ambience, while he takes her to the remains of a commune-turned-death cult. And, of course, they will fall in love, because there’s nothing like a horrible tragedy to get the old love juices flowing. As it transpires, Gus isn’t cynical; he’s damaged from his failing marriage and just never had it in him to tell January that he’s always been intimidated by her talent. (Now we hate Gus.) What other schmaltz can we dump into this soup? How about a stash of letters from January’s father, revelations from the mistress, a boat, a visit from January’s best friend, and an offer from Gus’s soon-to-be ex-wife to try to resurrect their relationship? If that’s not enough for you, how about references to the Bing Crosby song “It’s June in January/Because I'm in love?" Will there be a happy ending? Well, duh!

 

Beach Read invites adjectival outbursts. Here are several that occurred to me: insipid, trashy, overwrought, obvious. Is Emily Henry playing with the romance genre? Hmmm… a romance involving a romance writer. Meta or schlock? Smart money is on the later. I’m cured. While I’m at it, Radway’s book is postmodernist gobbledygook. I think I’ll break that habit as well.

 

Rob Weir

 

  

Ashley Riley, Dana Sipos, Gessami Boada, Steven Keene, Sierra Hull: June 2021 Music

 

 

 

Name that Category

 

Ashley Riley is one of those Venn diagram performers who gets labeled “Americana” because she’s not quite country, folk, or pop. Listen to a few tracks from Set You Free and you’ll know what I mean. “Close to Me,” an earnest pleading for a restoration of intimacy, finds Riley on acoustic guitar, but is sung country chanteuse style and is backed by some indie rock atmospheric electric instrumentation and studio backing vocals. Although Riley doesn’t have a big voice, she’s not afraid to air it. The title track finds her drifting up to an approximation of a pop diva performance, though the fact that she builds to instead of going full leather lung from the start it is an indication that’s not cut from that cloth. “Cut My Losses” also has pop chops, though the song–about a woman about to set herself free–could easily be taken from the studio and performed as unplugged folk or country. A YouTube clip of Riley performing “Make Me” demonstrates the ease with which Riley can simplify and go full acoustic. As faithful readers know, I am a fan of keeping things real.

 

Canadian singer/songwriter Dana Sipos is another artist who is hard to peg. Her new project The Astral Plane might conjure expectations of swirling Grateful Dead-like sonics, but hers is a different sort of experimentation. Sipos lives her explorations; she dwells amidst old-growth forests on Vancouver Island. Her songs often depart from surface implications. One might, for instance, assume that “Skinny Legs ” is self-referential for the willowy Sipos, but the song is actually about her grandmother. The sentiments echo bluegrass themes, but she performs it as you see in the video–as if it’s part performance art. “Breathing Barrel” is a moody, enigmatic piano- and hand drums-shaped offering that’s where cool jazz meets mysticism: Be the Breathing barrel with its pomegranate throat/And your mouth wide open the shape of the ocean. Barrel breathing is a yoga term, but this song seems to be more about discovering the divine within nature than anything one could do on a mat. “Daniel” is a reflection on the tale of its Old Testament namesake, and “Hoodoo” an amalgam of Badlands landscape and the Kaddish. It’s that kind of album, whatever that might be. I simply surrendered to its stark beauty.      

 

Gessami Boada is a Spanish artist who often gets slapped with a jazz label. On començo jo fits, yet it doesn’t. “Com is no fossis ningú” could be considered jazz, but it also has big vocal rises more in keeping with commercial pop. “Oh What a Night” is a fragile little song that, once one subtracts the vibes, sounds as if it’s a poignant moment from a musical. “Los Dos” opens with jazzy guitar runs, but eventually sashays and sways–another mashup. Much of the categorical ambiguity is due to Boada’s voice, which is supple enough to cross genres but sounds as if it’s best fitted for hook-laden songs. “In the Shadows of Your Mind” is instrumentally sparse, but Boada’s vocals are playful and take us to places that are definitely better suited for the age of YouTube.

 

Steven Keene is an artist with a social conscience whose music toggles between protest and acoustic blues. An album titled Them & Us pretty much tells you which side he’s on. He’s topped by a black chapeau on the album cover, but a listen to the title cut suggests he ought to be wearing a white one. If you are wondering where protest music has gone, you’ve not been hanging out in Keene’s neighborhood. It opens with a line that’s obviously cribbed from Dylan and uses it to questions about all manner of social injustices, beginning with the inanity of border walls broadly defined. You’ll also hear echoes of Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John,” weaves several other protest songs into the mix, updates them musically, and leaves us shattered by how relevant they remain. “On “Save Yourself,” Keene turns to electric blues to explore other current issues and deliver the message: Before you save the word/Save yourself. Like all great troubadours, Keene has his requisite love song, though his “I Can’t Have You” has a twisty core of regret. Mostly, though, Keene is both a righteous and upbeat guy. “We’ll Find a Way” defines his outlook–name the obstacles and figure out how to overcome them. Kudos to Keene for an album that’s simultaneously retro and as relevant as the morning news.

 

If you need a refuge break from heaviness, Sierra Hull will do the trick. Check out “Beautifully Out of Place” to see why she’s one of the meteors streaking across the bluegrass skies. Think that’s a fluke? Listen to her give old Johann a workout on Bach’s “Sonata No. 3 in C Major.” And she was just goofing off! She serves up a meaty mando-based cover of “People Get Ready,” and, yeah, she can kick butt on guitar too. She does Bill Monroe proud on “Old Ebenezer Scrooge.” Check out her other videos to see how far she’s come in just a few short years. I swear there can’t be any bones in her hands. Hull’s just 25, so I have a feeling this meteor will get brighter still.   

 

Rob Weir 

Minari Mildly Overhyped, but Sweet

 

MINARI (2020)

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung

A24 Films, 115 minutes, PG-13

In English and Korean (with subtitles)

★★★

 

 

Minari is director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical remembrance of his boyhood. Set in 1983, it follows the Korean-born Yi family, which moves from California to Arkansas so that paterfamilias Jacob (Steven Yeun) can pursue his dream of farming his own land. Another reason is to provide his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) with a slower pace of life so she won’t lose her job. Both need the income from their unglamorous job of sexing chicks.

 

Jacob promises that the land will soon Monica and their children: 7-year-old David (Alan Kim) and pre-adolescent Anne (Noel Kate Cho). Suffice it say that Minari is not a Korean version of The Biggest Little Farm. Steven fancies himself a savvy Americanized immigrant, but his confidence is greater than his understanding of how hard it is to find water, till long-dormant land, or generate enough money to escape the chick-sexing line. He bungles a few essential things, like money conversion. He nearly loses $100 to a church collection plate. In 1983, there were more than 2,200 Korean won to a U.S. dollar, so you definitely don’t want your Korean mind to kick in at such a moment!

 

Culture clash moments are among the film’s more memorable moments. The Yi family has left a Korean enclave in California to enter a world of trailer home living, the polite smiles of locals who (at best) see them as exotic, and charismatic Christianity. Hired man Paul (Will Paton) is so religious that he casts out demons and each Sunday shoulders a wooden cross on wheels down dusty roads.  

 

It’s all too much for Monica, who threatens to return to California. Instead, Steven sends for her mother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) to come live with them. She is a pistol and not necessarily the best role model for kids. Soon-ja sees no harm in teaching children adult card games or letting loose with Korean swears. She terrifies David, not to mention that he must share his bedroom with his crazy grandmother.

 

Much of the film focuses on Soon-ja’s relationship with the kids, especially David. She helps him overcome his shyness, thinks his weak heart is nonsense, and prescribes vigorous outdoor life. The two share a secret minari garden deep in the woods by a creek bed. (Minari is an edible member of the water dropwort family sometimes called Chinese celery, though it looks more like parsley.) 

 

Minari captured hearts at Sundance and won various film awards around the globe. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, and Yuh-jong made history by be4coming the first Korean to win a best supporting actress Oscar. She did a nice job of playing a crotchety old woman filled the brim with joie de vivre. It’s not a pathbreaking performance by any means, though it’s probably deserved recognition given her competition. (Few have seen the films in which the other four nominees appeared, though I would argue that Olivia Colman had a meatier role in The Father.) Given a choice, I might have honored two different performances from Minari. Now 9-year-old Alan Kim is a heart-stealer who expertly handled a role in which he was akin to a small bird pecking away at his entrapping shell piece by tiny piece. Will Patton is at the other end of the performance spectrum. His Paul is a tetched evangelical Don Quixote, but he’s also a lovable, kind Korean War vet trying to live his faith as he understands it.

 

Not much happens in Minari that’s out of the ordinary. It was undoubtedly Chung’s intention to spin a yarn about an “American” family that simply happens to be Korean. The film is so much about everyday life–its triumphs, challenges, and tragedies–that instead of building to a dramatic conclusion, it simply ends with the Yi family opting to take root where they are. Minari is overhyped, but there’s no harm in partaking of a sweet slice-of life film, even if the portion is thinner than advertised.

 

Rob Weir

Don't Confuse Andrew Shaffer with a Poet

 

LOOK MOM I’M A POET (and so is my cat) (2021)

By Andrew Shaffer

Dime House Press, 146 pages.

★

 

 

 

The best thing about Andrew Shaffer’s chapbook is the cover. Seriously. It’s festooned with a (vaguely) Victorian man holding an opossum. It’s all downhill from there.

 

Let's start with the title. Shaffer is not a poet. There’s a difference between doggerel and a dog’s breakfast. These days everyone who puts words into a rap or fills a screen with unorthodox spacing fancies themselves the next Amanda Gordon or Billy Collins. That's utter nonsense. Gordon is the heir to Langston Hughes, who a century ago wrote of the dangers of a dream deferred. Her poetry moves with the grace and rhythm of music and challenges America to live up to its ideals. Shaffer’s PR machine cranks out comparisons to Collins, a risible analogy. Collins is a treasure because of his wondrous mix of humor and profundity. Collins makes you laugh, then cringe; he makes you want to suck the marrow from the smallest sublime moments because life is fleeting.

 

Snark is not the same thing as the depth. Shaffer is also billed as a humorist. Silly me, I thought that actual “humor” was a prerequisite for being a humorist. Shaffer’s is the look-over-the shoulder naughtiness that stops being funny about the time an adolescent boy graduates from junior high school. Consider these lines prompted by seeing a t-shirt that reads, “I Have a Pretty Granddaughter. I Also Have a Gun, a Shovel, and an Alibi.”

 

            I thought about telling him

            that I have a shovel, too,

            and that I was going to dig up his backyard looking for his granddaughter, because what the fuck, dude.

            What the fuck?”

 

Perhaps his words appeal to pop culture addicts who think that dropping a few memes and brand names confers cultural capital. In “I Read Your Chapbook” Shaffer writes,

 

            Oh, look, just what the world needs –

            another book from an Instagram poet

            filled with more derivative tripe

            about love, whiskey, and scars.

 

            Lord Byron would have drunk wine

             from your tattooed hipster skull

            while riding his pet bear

            into the House of Lords

            before making sweet, sweet love

            to his half-sister on the parliament floor.

 

            Really makes you wonder, though:

            When did he find the time to write?

 

It says it all to note this is his best work. As a poem it’s trite. It would, though, be a good standup routine.

 

In his (failed) efforts to write droll lines, Shaffer consistently goes for the cheap rather than transforming an inspired idea into a good poem. In “All Hands on Deck,” Shaffer discusses how numerous versifiers wrote submissions for The New Yorker after 9/11. He sets a melancholic tone that he ruins with: "Six months later, we received our rejections, our metaphors as unnecessary as another Ben Stiller movie…" This is the sort of line one utters at a party. Participants nod and give it the acknowledgment it deserves: "Good line dude.” Again, good standup material.

 

He does this throughout. In “Poetry Edgelord” he has an insightful moment in which he writes, “A poem is just a short story/without proper punctuation.” So why ruin it with childish references to Walt Shitman and William Turdsworth? Shaffer can’t even follow his own dictates. Later, he tries to pass off several children’s jokes about farts and witches as poems by arranging them as such. What do we wish to make of his observation after seeing the musical Hamilton:  "If Alexander Hamilton was such bomb- ass rapper, why did he ever bother with politics?" I will give Shaffer credit for at least knowing that imagining a cloud as penis-shaped deserves the title “Stupid.”

 

He has several repeating themes–“#SponsoredPost,” “Great Kentuckians of Kentucky,” and recurrent references to the Pittsburgh Steelers–that are so lightweight one expects them to fly away. They are akin to his “Carpe DM.” The entire offering reads: “Every day is a new/opportunity to say/”Fuck it all.” Ditto his observation in “Goodnight Moon” in which he offers this offbeat/off-color observation: “One person’s nightmare of being naked in public is another’s wet dream.”

 

It’s ironic that Shaffer skewers hipsters; Shaffer seeks to be one. If you don’t already hate hipsters, you will by the time you finish reading his work. Tell you what. Go ahead and preemptively hate them. I’ve saved you the trouble of reading this. Try Amanda Gordon and Billy Collins instead.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

Small Town Taxi Punks the Pioneer Valley

 

Small Town Taxi: Honey Walker Adventures Book I (2019)

By Harriet Rogers

Independently published, 317 pages.

★★★

 

 

I love Northampton, the town in which I live. It does, however, lend itself to parody, as there's a tendency for people to take themselves too seriously. That applies across the board, from college professors to construction workers. You name ‘em–feminists, musicians, LGBTQ activists, liberals, neo-cons, panhandlers, poets, social workers–when they get up a good head of steam, they can suck the oxygen out of the room. I've often dreamt of hanging a banner across Main Street with the message, “C’mon folks, lighten up.” 

 

I don't have to; Harriet Rogers has it done so in novel form. Small Town Taxi is the first of her Honey Walker series. It's a gentle lampoon of life in the 413 and a sendup of hard-boiled detective novels. Call it pulp fiction for the Pioneer Valley. Rogers knows her subjects well; she is the former owner of Skera Gallery. When you work downtown, you see the entire panoply of town characters.

 

Her protagonist, Honey Walker, was a homeless, ditzy college dropout who drifted into town when she was 21. When police Lieutenant Jon Stevens found her sleeping on a park bench, he didn’t bust her; he introduced her to the Cool Ride Cab Company. Honey took to driving her Scion XB cab like an otter takes to raw fish, even though the owner is a cheapskate and the dispatcher redefines the adjective surly. Honey lives in a small apartment–commentary on Northampton’s inflated housing market–but she's a tomboy with simple needs whose only fashion vice is shoe lust. Her take on herself is, “I am the girl who makes the phrase ‘they all look alike’ a reality,” though Stevens doesn’t think that’s true.

 

She's also the girl who trouble finds, an occupational hazard for a cabbie. Without giving away any of the plot, Small Town Taxi sports quite a cast: a trigger-happy lawyer, a highly educated plus-size black woman who occasionally works as a hooker, a Springfield crime family, a cookie-baking older woman who used to work for the FBI, several Keystone Kop-like hoodlums, and an assortment of hipsters, scrape-by residents, privileged moralists, and weirdos.

 

Rogers playfully­– if not always skillfully–satirizes testosterone-fueled writers like Mickey Spillane. She frequently resorts to stereotypes, but in order to turn the tables. For instance, it's women who are the primary horndogs; they are also the ones who are snarky and kick butt. Honey is so tough and raw that we expect her to grab her crotch and spit. The women in Rogers’ book figure things out, but usually in a bumbling fashion in order to round out her send up of detective fiction. There's plenty of colorful language and gunplay, but the body count is low.

 

Readers who know the area well have fun pulling away the veils that scarcely disguise real things. (Cool Rides, for example, is clearly modeled on Cosmic Cabs.) Some readers might get their dander up. Hampshire Heights, a public housing complex comes off badly, but Holyoke and Springfield even more so. Rogers is an equal opportunity satirist. Her very title is a dig. In a town nicknamed “Noho” it's hard to refute her observation that, “Northampton residents think of themselves as only one step from the Big Apple.” I laughed aloud at various places in the novel, even though some of my chuckles could be seen as self-deprecation.

 

At the end of the day, though, I'm not pushing the other three books to the top of my reading list. Small Town Taxi is great fun but it's also a one-trick pony, a high concept that might not be tall enough to sustain interest. This, of course, is a matter of individual taste and I’d not debate those who think “Noho” could benefit from a few more metaphorical slaps at pretense. Start with Small Town Taxi. If it makes you laugh, you might wish to hail another ride or two.

 

Rob Weir