Franzen's Purity Has Dirt Stains

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PURITY  (2015)

Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 563 pages

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Americans don't read much, but that doesn't stop them from tossing the occasional writer into the celebrity hype and buzz machine. Jonathan Franzen is the literary equivalent of a rock star. This means reviewers generally decamp in one of two tents: sycophants who praise everything he types, or iconoclasts seeking to knock Humpty Dumpty from the wall. The Guardian dubbed Purity—Franzen's first novel in five years–"brilliant," and the New Republic speculated that Franzen might be the nation's greatest living novelist. By contrast, Gawker slammed Purity as high school prose, sniffed as its "placid gutlessness," and dismissed it as a buzz-driven "piece of shit."

Few embody buzz, excrement, and overwrought as well as Gawker, but though I'm tempted to agree with Gawker's takes-one-to-know-one assessment, I'd judge Purity  neither masterpiece nor bovine exhaust. It has occasional insights, but it's mostly just mediocre. It surprises me more, though, that almost no one has picked up on the book's most-intriguing aspect, its title and Franzen's musings upon it. Most reviewers stop with the observation that Purity is the given name of the book's central character, 23-year-old "Pip" Tyler. They miss that every character suffers from existential crises resulting from the pull between purity and grime. These are expressed in ways such as: morality versus desire, character versus celebrity, principle versus pragmatism, prudence versus urgency, and fidelity versus lust.

Our titular character Pip/Purity is the cog of the novel. She's a 23-year-old recent college grad living with a band of misfits in Oakland, and stuck in a revolving door of dead-end jobs that won't make a dent in her college debt. She has good intentions and tries to care for her housemates, a few of which are scarred physically or psychologically, but she also suffers from Millennial self-absorption and doesn't understand why she can't sleep with anyone she wishes, or why somebody won't just give her $130,000 to pay off her student debt. It sure won't be her mother, Anabel Laird, a recluse in the Santa Cruz Mountains who lives like a cross between an ageing hippie and a survivalist. Pip can't even get her mother to stop calling her "Pussycat," tell her who her father is, or reveal a single detail of her life before she had Pip. The out-of-sort Pip is thus intrigued when another housemate, Annagret, an oddball German-born eco activist, recruits her for The Sunshine Project. This, we discover, is a Bolivia-based Wikileaks-like organization run by an East German ex-pat, Andreas Wolf. Like Julian Assange, Wolf is famous, infamous, and wanted; hence the Bolivian address. (We know Andreas is like Assange because Franzen constantly makes that very analogy!)    

All of the major characters' stories overlap. We first meet Andreas in East Berlin two years before the Wall came down, where he's torn between his earnestness as a street angel/church youth counselor for troubled teens, and his libidinous desire to bed them. Annagret, though, is special and he helps her in a way that put both in danger. Before Andreas makes his way to the West, he enlists the aid of a visiting American journalist, Tom Aberant, the one person other than Annagret who knows Andreas' dark secret. Decades later, Andreas has assumed the mantle of a social justice crusader and uses his Svengali-like magnetism to draw idealists to his Web projects. Will Pip also fall to his charms?

Purity leaves opens itself to charges of packing way too many implausible coincidences into one story. Tom reappears–along with an absurd and superfluous back-story involving his father–and with a life partner named Leila, whose purity is compromised by her simultaneous roles as Tom's colleague/lover and her live-in status as the caregiver for a paraplegic husband she was on the verge of leaving before his accident. Through even more bizarre circumstances, all of the characters are connected through Pip. Gawker's overwrought tag has merit, especially in Franzen's deus ex machina approach to resolving dilemmas. 

Add overlong to the book's problems. Must we equate being a "weighty" writer with the quantity of pages churned out? Purity could lose half its bulk and be no worse for it. The central premise is a compelling one. How does one maintain integrity in a world whose stronger currents run the other way? We don't, however, need another long book on this theme–Donna Tartt already wrote and collected a Pulitzer for it. Her Goldfinch also had characters less whiny than Pip, more deliciously Machiavellian than Andreas, more convincingly bohemian than Anabel, more conflicted than anyone in Purity, and with considerably more trust in the readers to connect the dots. I didn't hate this book, but as purity goes, it's more beige than white.

Rob Weir

 

Caroloyn Chute and the Other Maine in Treat Us Like Dogs

TREAT US LIKE DOGS AND WE WILL BECOME WOLVES (2014)

Carolyn Chute

Grove Press, 671 pages

* * *

Most visitors to Maine wax rhapsodic over postcard cute towns like Ogunquit, Wiscasset, and Camden, or indulge in retail therapy in Kittery or Freeport. The nose-in-the-air set eschews the hoi polloi for the obscene wealth enclaves of Kennebunkport or Northeast Harbor. Neither group drives more than a few miles inland, though both wonder how Maine ended up with a nut-job like Paul LePage as governor. They've never seen Carolyn Chute's Maine–the postindustrial hopelessness of towns like Lewiston, the lumber mills of Bangor and Lincoln that Global Capital deems "noncompetitive," the empty quadrants that bear only township numbers, or Canadian border whistle stops like Calais that redefine the word dire.  

Chute lives in the "other" Maine. Though she's a renowned author, she and her illiterate second husband live on the poverty line, make do with an outhouse, belong to a militia group, and live among folks who think the Tea Party is a bunch of prissy suburbanites whose ideas of survivalism comes from bad reality TV shows. Not that she's seen such a show; Chute doesn't have a TV, phone, or computer. She also knows that the American class struggle isn't between the haute and petite bourgeoisie, and her view of those who disparage the other Maine is summed by the title of her latest novel.

It's also the book's simmering theme. Chute sets her novels in the semi-fictional town of Egypt, Maine. This one revolves loosely around bearish 39-year-old Gordon St. Onge, known as "The Prophet" to those living in The Settlement. What is The Settlement? Call it where free thinkers-meet-the-frontier. There are loads of women bearing the last name of St. Onge and lots of home-schooled kids, many of whom look like Gordon. Is Gordon a Northeast David Koresh, a pre-reform Mormon, a randy satyr, or just an unorthodox backwoodsman who rails against Peak Oil and Corporate America? Does he even run The Settlement, or is it Claire, the rotund, older Indian woman who was once Gordon's only legal wife? Most of Gordon's neighbors are also poor as church mice; they mostly see him as a little off, but an affable guy who operates sawmills, helps out, and takes in troubled kids who don't spell very well, but know more about the science of solar and wind power than most engineers.

Everything about The Settlement and Gordon is off the grid by polite society's standards, including a manifesto declaring itself "no wing" on the left/right scale. Residents are pro-democracy and anti-government, pro-equality but anti-feminist, pro-gun but anti-NRA, live in poverty yet eat heartily, are self-sufficient but don't isolate themselves, hate banks but watch the cash flow carefully, and hate most technology but in the name of environmentalism. They are serious about freedom–the only non-negotiable rule is no TVs or computers.

In other words, they scare the hell out of "respectable" Mainers for whom any whiff of anarchy means there must be must be something sinister going on. Soon allegations swirl that The Settlement harbors everything from incest and child abuse to Satanism and gun stockpiling. This puts reporter Ivy Morelli, a quirky but spoiled Millennial, on the investigative trail. Will Ivy expose the evils lurking in the woods or succumb to Gordon's magnetism? Her efforts to reveal the "truth" put me in mind of the bungled Island Pond, Vermont religious commune scandal from the 1970s. There are parallels, but much more is afoot in Chute's novel.

Treat us Like Dogs is a sprawling, sometimes clunky novel filled with unusual characters, including several personified forces and objects. How would Television, History, or Mammon speak if they were people? Chute imagines it. There are lots of "secret agents" in the book as well, including a six-year-old black girl and the mysterious "Grays," that might be aliens, or a self-aware collective unconscious, or something akin to Emerson's Over-Soul. A particularly compelling character is 15-year-old Bree Vandermast, a wildly inventive red-tressed artist with an attractive body and a deformed face. Another is feminist professor Catherine, who also orbits around Gordon and makes us wonder if she is the snake in the Garden. And, yes, there are militias.

Chute wisely set the novel in 1999-2000, just before the crooked fall election and 9/11 confirmed a lot of what Gordon said about the world. Treat Us Like Dogs has so many characters that even Chute claims not to know how many. This makes for a parade of intrigue, but a tougher editor would have demanded better flow. (There are parts that probably made more sense in Chute's head than on the page.) Yet this book is unlike anything else you'll read and its fascinations more than compensate for its frustrations. A final thing: the New York Review of Books called its humor "propulsive." Oh dear! There are funny passages, but the humor is black, not haw! haw! (The reference is to Ivy's cloying laugh.) Only a tourist who has never been ten miles from the coast would call it "propulsive."  

Rob Weir

  

Circling the Sun McLain's Latest Triumph

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CIRCLING THE SUN: A NOVEL (2015)

Paula McLain

Ballantine Books

* * * *

Do women have to die to be considered heroines? I’ve long wondered why there’s been such intense fascination over Amelia Earhart, when Beryl Markham (1902-1986) remains a relative unknown whose remarkable autobiography was decades out of print when it was republished in 1983. She appeared only as a composite character in Isak Dinesen’s 1937 autobiography Out of Africa (and in the 1985 film), though Beryl and Karen Blixen (Dinesen is a nom de plume) were friends in life, as well as rivals for the affections of Denys Finch Hatton. Markham made history in 1936, the year before Earhart’s doomed flight, by becoming the first aviatrix to cross the Atlantic solo from east to west. If that doesn’t sound like such a big deal to you, consider that her plane had to carry all its fuel with it, and the working tank had to drain completely before allowing fuel from the auxiliary storage to flow into it. Still not impressed? Markham also had to turn off the engine while doing all of this, lest a spark blow up the plane. This meant the aircraft went into free fall, and Markham had seconds to restart the engine or she would have met Earhart's fate.

Paula McLain finds Markham a compelling subject for a novel, and I couldn’t agree more. McLain–who earlier dazzled with The Paris Wife–begins and ends her novel in the sky, but she focuses more on Beryl’s African youth. What a fascinating tale it is–one that makes Markham a thoroughly modern woman long before it was fashionable or safe to be one. Along the way she took the word “no” as a personal challenge and smashed every gender expectation her society threw at her.  For Beryl the words “Well behaved women seldom make history” wasn’t a slogan; it was her de facto mantra. This made her a “difficult” person by respectable standards. She was a tomboy who married three times and kept her vows in none of those attachments; count King George V’s son as among her probable lovers. Finch Hatton was definitely in that company, but he bedded just about every available woman in British East Africa.

McLain presents British East Africa (today’s Kenya) as the liberating antidote to the stultifying British society into which Beryl was born. She was the daughter of a horse trainer, Charles Baldwin Clutterback, and a mother so English that when the family moved to Kenya (when Beryl was just four), she spent little time in locating a lover with whom she could flee back to England. This was probably all for the best for Beryl, who grew up with dreams on becoming a Kipsigis warrior. Beryl’s long friendship with an African local is among McLain’s subplots.  Because her father provided love but little structure, Beryl became something of a wild colt who adapted to whatever came her way, including repeated cycles of wealth and poverty. Quite logically, the wild colt followed her father’s footsteps into what was then the exclusive male domain of training prize racehorses and was so good at it that British aristocrats like Lord Delamere were willing to act as patrons, social convention be damned. In McLain’s book, Delamere acts as a more effective second father figure–another very interesting relationship. But the dynamics between Finch Hatton, Karen Blixen, and Beryl make for the book’s most complex triad. Both women bedded the free-spirited Finch Hatton, but given that Blixen was 17 years Beryl’s senior, she sometimes acted as a surrogate older sister, almost as if she were the superego between two out-of-control ids.

McLain excels at probing the interiors of complex people placed in unusual situations. We soon understand the attraction between Finch Hatton and (still gangly) Beryl–they are among the few Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa who were at home amidst the wildness rather than dreaming of sedate domestication in England or Denmark. McLain is equally adroit at making Africa come alive–with all of its horrors and beauties. Beryl’s world was one in which you could rid yourself of an unwanted governess by putting a dead black mamba in her room; it was also one of knowing what to do when thrown from a horse within venom-spitting distance of a coiled cobra, or having a clear head when attacked by a lion. If this doesn’t sound like a place you’d ever wish to be, read McLain’s gorgeous description of staring into the Great Rift Valley before closing your mind.

This is a fascinating treatment of a remarkable–and, yes, pigheaded–young woman that take us just until she is 28 and floating in the clouds. Once you read about Markham’s formative years, her flight will seem like the most logical thing in the world for her to do. Amelia Earhart crashed; Beryl Markham soared.

Rob Weir

Alba's Edge Finds Connections between Celtic, Latin, and Jazz

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ALBA'S EDGE

Run to Fly

Paddledoo

* * *

Celtic music fans certainly know the name Aidan O'Rourke. His latest project, though, found him twiddling dials in the studio rather than rosining up his bow. He has produced Alba's Edge, a young band that explores the connections between Celtic music, jazz, and Latin music. Please emphasize the word connections. Far too many contemporary mash-up efforts are force-fits instead of retrofits. A listen to Run to Fly finds Alba's Edge looking for logical affinity, not simply engaging in cultural splicing for the sheer sake of novelty. While I wouldn't say that every track works, I give these youngsters high marks for thoughtfulness.

Siblings Lilly and Neil Pearlman, she a Celtic-style fiddler and he a jazz pianist, anchor the quartet. They grew up in a Maine household filled with Cape Breton, Scottish, Brazilian, and Cuban music. The Pearlmans generally drive each composition, but solid cross rhythms from percussionist Jacob Cole and the versatile bass lines of Doug Berns texture the music. Don't expect cheesy cha-cha-chas appended to jigs. Alba's Edge sets the tone on the first track, "Rising," which strikes an ambient mood with its cascades of piano notes. In fact, quite a few tracks evoke high-end New Age jazz. This is certainly true of "Willard State Park," in which Neil Pearlman's keyboarding is reminiscent of that of jazz legend Vince Guaraldi, who was known for his work on Peanuts TV specials. "Willard State Park" has similar joyous piano runs, but the overlay with backswing fiddle produces a more complex result.

We don't really notice overt Latin influences until track four, the title track, which opens forlorn and foreboding, but is lightened by soft fiddle notes and keyboard chording that eases the piece into a swaying, playful bridge that allows the band to shift into a joyous higher gear. "General Jinjur/NOLA Chili" is also an interesting mix. It has decided Latin cross beats and Brazilian jazz piano running through, but the bass lines evoke some of Robby Krieger's work with The Doors, especially on Morrison Hotel. Another solid effort is "Summer Scraps," a giddy little tune that will make you grab your dance shoes. There's also a nice cover of "The Diamond," a famed whaling song popularized by Ewan MacColl. The deliberately scratchy fiddle on this one exudes bluegrass influence.

To my ear there are a few missteps. "HRK: Strength in Recovery" could use more structure and seems more like a forum for cool riffs than a cohesive piece. Ditto "The Sordid Life of Scientists," which has slices of soca, gypsy fiddling, and Latin cool jazz, but a helter-skelter binding that comes apart in places. But as I hope comes across, these folks are serious and skillful musicians. Even their not-quite-realized pieces are interesting ideas. Rob Weir

Samples found here. 

Hear My Sad Story--The History Behind the Songs

Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folksongs. By Richard Polenberg. Cornell University Press, 2015.

A version of this review originally ran on nepca.wordpress.com 

In 1966 Phil Ochs remarked, “Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music…. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.” Long before and after Ochs' remark, commentators have applied the term "musical newspapers" in reference to folk songs. Call it all the news that's fit to sing. For every folk song that springs from a writer’s fertile imagination, there is at least one that’s inspired by real events and commemorated in ballads, broadsides, song-poems, slogans, and twice-told tales. Those events are the subject of a new book by Cornell history professor emeritus Richard Polenberg, who adds a twist: the way in which folk songs “improve” upon reality and help construct legends that may or may not be close to what actually happened.

Legends are not the same as myths; they occupy a middle position on a scale with verifiable history at one pole and belief-based mythology at the other. Often, legends become so well known that a work such as Polenberg’s is necessary to replant tales in factual soil. Polenberg begins with the news—the actual Lee Shelton (“Stack Lee”), Naomi (“Omie”) Wise, Morris Slater (“Railroad Bill”), and other such characters—and links what history says of them to the songs and legends they inspired. Sometimes they match pretty well, like Vernon Dalhart’s famed “Wreck of the Old 97,” which some scholars call the first true country music recording; other times great liberties are taken­—some of the musical tales about John Hardy, for instance, could be viewed as singing with an expired poetic license. But whether the songs hew close to the truth or spin yarns of gossamer-fragile veracity, Ochs was ultimately right: those songs became traveling newspapers. They’re more than songs; they helped write history as it is perceived, whether it actually happened that way or not. In short, music is part of how legends emerge, spread, and ingrain themselves in American culture.

Hear My Sad Song consists of twenty-one mini narratives that focus on individuals, four that deal with occupations (cotton mill workers, chain gangs, miners, and New Orleans prostitutes), and two that probe disasters (the Titanic and the boll weevil infestation of the 1920s). Folk songs share an affinity with the tabloid press in the sense that neither can resist a good murder, hence sixteen of Polenberg’s chapters deal with sensational homicide cases, sanguinary rogues, and those who may or may not have been killers (such as Joe Hill and Sacco and Vanzetti). Polenberg bookends his twenty-seven chapters with a prologue and epilogue featuring cowboy poet/songwriter Frank Maynard (“The Dying Cowboy”) as foil.

Polenberg loves folk music, but this is primarily a work of history and legends. If you do the math, you can infer that he has bitten off quite a lot for 304 pages. Each chapter is self-contained, hence Hear My Sad Story is actually a series of short stories (8 to 11 pages each) loosely held together by his musings on Maynard. It’s the kind of book that’s best read one tale at a time, preferably with a soundtrack cued. The short chapters tend to be heavy on names, investigations, and court proceedings, with music appearing as annotation rather than discussed in great depth. The book could benefit from both pruning and lengthening. There is a stylistic and organizational disconnection between his discussions of individuals and those dealing with occupational groups and disasters. Excising a few chapters would have provided more space to tell stories in more leisurely detail, a tact that would improve the book’s flow by sharpening narratives and lessening the need for chronicling. Although most of this book is illuminating, there are other things that could be cut. We don’t know, for instance, if “House of the Rising Sun” had anything at all to do with New Orleans’ Storyville red light district, thus Polenberg’s chapter, though fascinating, tells us nothing about the song. On a personal note, I’m more skeptical of Joe Hill’s innocence than Polenberg, yet way more convinced of the validity of Scott Nelson’s research into the "real" John Henry.

Book critiques have a way, though, of reflecting a reviewer’s biases just as the actual book reflects those of the author. If you’re a longtime folk music fan, you probably already know the stories behind the Tom Dula/Dooley and the Casey Jones legends. It's important, though, to imagine readers for whom the history/music/legend nexus is a recent revelation. Polenberg’s book is fine reading on its own, but it may prove invaluable for undergraduates. Check back with me; I’ll be test-driving it in my spring seminar on American folk legends.

Rob Weir

      

Anomalisa is Dreck Pretending to be Art

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ANOMALISA (2015)

Directed by Charlie Kauffman and Duke Johnson

Paramount, 90minutes, R (Language and graphic cartoon sex, really!)

*

It would unfair to call Anomalisa a bad film. Stronger terms are needed: animated atrocity, digital dreck, feculent film…. Or maybe we should use a line from The Goodbye Girl: "capital P, capital U, capital TRID."

I have adored past Charlie Kaufman efforts, even to the point of declaring his 2008 Synecdoche, New York a certified masterpiece, but Anomalisa is a one-trick pony whose singular subterfuge is stretched to 90 minutes. It feels much, much longer–as if you are plopped into a theater seat and told to stare into the sky until the sun supernovas. Here's the trick: Kauffman and 35-year-old-not-ready-for-prime-time co-director Duke Johnson use stop action technology on three live actors (David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan) and then animate them. The characters move in jerky, floppy, puppet-like ways, and their faces have scored parts like hinged puppets. That's because they are, in fact, puppets. Right away a problem emerges: Kauffman is paying homage to himself! Remember Being John Malkovich (1999)?

This is the first of numerous plagiarisms, none of which are a patch on the originals. The thin set up is that self-help customer service guru Michael Stone (Thewlis) flies to Cincinnati to give a conference keynote speech. Within five minutes we see his problem: he's incredibly lonely and perceives himself as the world's only unique being–the rest of the world literally looks like a male or androgynous female version of Tom Noonan and speaks in his voice. Add existential dread to Stone's list of worries, one compounded by a failure to rekindle a long-extinguished flame with former girlfriend Bella. Michael is a severely depressed individual, but neither he nor we are entirely sure what he is: a puppet in a cosmic game, an android in a universe of androids, insane…. Or, cliché of clichés, maybe it's all just a bad dream. Then he meets Lisa Hesselman (Leigh), a clumsy, half-bright, starry-eyed conference attendee with slight facial trauma. She's the only one other than Michael who looks and talks uniquely.  After an evening of–and this is very hard to watch without being creeped out­–rather graphic puppet sex, Michael wonders if maybe Lisa is his ticket out of whatever nightmare he's locked into.

Here's a partial list of sources from which Kauffman and Johnson either borrow or steal: Blade Runner, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Ex Machina, Star Trek, I, Robot, Logorama, and nearly every other film Kauffman has ever made. Is Stone the only sentient being in the universe? Hello, Dwayne Hoover from Vonnegut. Is he an android who wants to feel something? Shake hands with Mr. Data. Is he afraid that he too is a 'droid? You know, like Deckard in Blade Runner. Has the world become so generic that nostrums and consumer goods are the most real thing left? Logorama dealt with that question in a tidy 16 minutes. To quote Vonnegut, so it goes….  The only thing original about this dud is the surface technology and a few reoccurring jokes about Cincinnati. It's too thin—visual interest wears off in about ten minutes and the humor isn't funny enough to sustain us through the remaining 80. Anomalisa is, in turns, sad without being affecting, affected without being sad, pathetic without being sympathetic, and occasionally funny in the service of nothing. As for its ideas, Kauffman and Johnson could have put everything important on a Post-It note.

This movie has won some awards at film festivals and is up for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, but only one who isn't inoculated against buzz, puffery, and surfaces without depth could be impressed. I don't care how many awards this one gets—it's the turkey of the year. Don't get me started as on whether it's a biological or robotic turkey–Blade Runner covered that turf as well.

Rob Weir

Alex Dezen: Album of the Month

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ALEX DEZEN

Alex Dezen

Rock Ridge Music

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The best album I heard in the month of January doesn't officially release until February 12–a self-titled solo affair from Alex Dezen, the lead singer of Brooklyn's The Damnwells. Among the many things I admire about Dezen's solo venture is that he made me like the kind of album that generally annoys me: a let-me-tell-you-about-me collection. An entire album of these usually makes me want to scream, "Dude! Get over yourself; you're not that interesting." It's to Dezen's credit that his self-disclosures feel bigger than that.

Call it the voice of experience; he has already gotten into the heads of others by penning songs for the likes of Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, The Dixie Chicks, Matt Hines, and the Pilobolus dance troupe. His news songs, though, are cut from non-pop cloth. You know you're in for personal stuff when a release kicks off with "Ode to Ex-Girlfriends." It's typical of the album's ten tracks in that Dezen writes in a long prose form that is heavy on narrative and short on poetry. (A lot of the lyrics don't even rhyme, let alone conform to meter or couplets.) It's also typical in that much of the material deals with relationships, usually of the doomed variety. A track titled "If You Can Say 'I Love You' on a Greeting Card, How Can it Be True?" is wordy, but poignant–the tale of a failed marriage. Boiled to its basics it's the classic cycle of abuse: violence/apology, promises/lies, guilt/betrayal, and children caught in the middle. Appropriately, Dezen puts down his acoustic guitar for an electric, as if symbolically allowing tragedy to spark and fritz. Speaking of guitars, "The Last Song I'll Ever Write (on this Guitar)" is a love song to an old D-35 Martin he was forced to sell. "Into the Hands of Hazelden" explores a different kind of regret: Dezen's musing over a college friendship and musical collaboration that fell apart in early adulthood. "I Don't Want to be Alone When I Die" suggests he's not had the best of luck in love.

The last of the above finds Dezen at the piano and in Seth-Glier-like sotto voice. He duplicates this effect on "Leonardo," in which he cleverly catalogs a doomed romance—himself presumably in the tragic male lead–by metaphorically casting his beloved as a 19^th century woman like Kate Winslet in Titanic waiting to be swept away by a suave Leonardo Di Caprio: "He was cool, so cool/Like a Dylan/So brave and confident/And I was a short Jewish kid/with long hair and green tint…" But again, Dezen adjusts his musical vibes to the mood of his songs, including an angry dance club throb to "A Little Less Like Hell," in which he refuses to fall in line with self-congratulatory victory parades like the one after Osama bin Laden's death. Instead he notes: "But what I'll never understand is why/Regardless of how hard we try/We need someone on the cross/Just to make up for the things we lost." He sings it with the kind of leave-nothing-behind abandonment of Ellis Paul. "Elephant" is filled with lots of Millennial references, and sung like it might be a Paul Simon song, though the tune was inspired by the mix of structure and looseness of The Beatles' "Blackbird."

I'd be the first to admit that there are lyrical and musical misfires on the album and hints of self-absorption. But there are enough gems on this recording to make it very worth your while. Check out www.alexdezen.com in mid-February and see what you think.

Rob Weir