Blondie’s Deborah Harry is back, and much the worse for wear. Submitted as evidence: Her new album, “Necessary Evil.” What was once a clear, clean voice and a hallmark of New Wave has been replaced by something sounding like Betty Boop on downers.

I don’t expect singers of 62 to retain the sound they had in their 20’s and 30’s (or even 50’s, when she recorded the fine single “Maria” with Blondie). But the descent of her range, coupled with an odd sing-speak choice of delivery, is a shock. Click here if you’d like to judge for yourself.

Mike Gravel is not leading in the polls. But then, I’m not sure who is “leading in the polls,” nor why it matters, polls being a mass-media creation designed to fuel a 24/7 two-year presidential race in the hopes of filling airspace and webspace for Fox, CNN, MSNBC and everyone else. This time last month Hillary and Giuliani were unstoppable; now she’s falling down a hill that Obama is ascending, while Huckabee will soon be able to say he has indeed been to the mountain. Toiling away in the scrub at the bottom of these crests is Mike Gravel, who, if he isn’t gaining any ground, has at the least proved himself to be the most entertaining major presidential candidate since Pat Paulsen. I don’t want him running the country, but I love having him running around the country saying and doing these things.

Lately I’ve been rhapsodizing here about the late, lamented Little Art Theatre, southern New Jersey’s sole oasis of outre and offbeat culture in the 1980’s. It was where I saw “Eraserhead” and “Jean de Florette” and “Withnail and I” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” — the last providing my first date with the woman who became my wife. I have fond memories indeed of this cinematic sanctuary.

So today, in response to these thoughts, good friend Paul emailed me this update:

“I drove by the Little Art Theater site a few days ago, it is now a vet’s office with dog grooming.”

Thanks. Thanks for that. Really. Now whenever I think about the place, I’ll have that to remember as well.

(And as a side note to my students at USC whom I was hectoring Monday night about comma splices, Paul’s email provides a fine example.)

Two years ago while in bucolic Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, the closest “city” to my birthplace, I made the mistake of dropping in on the former Ireland’s Newsstand, the mecca of my youth where, whenever I was so fortunate as to get someone to drive me the seemingly endless eight miles to town, I could actually peruse and purchase almost any comic book then in release. In its day, Ireland’s carried the aroma of slick paper and fresh newssprint, smells I associated with bigger thoughts and faraway places calling to me. Now it had become a grimy and foul-smelling convenience store of the post-apocalypse, staffed by a man in a dirty turban sitting beside racks that long ago had been stripped of all reading material.

Paul’s email provides more proof that you can go home again — but you shouldn’t.

In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Book Review, editor David Ulin picks apart Charles Bukowski’s poetry and finds not much there. It’s a good analysis, with several typical Bukowski poems providing corroborating evidence. Why then the reverence by so many (a reverence I share) for Bukowski?

Bukowski’s enormous impact, especially in Los Angeles, outweighs the limitations in his poetry. As Ulin notes, Bukowski was an active part of the burgeoning coffeehouse (and bar) literary scene here and a frequent contributor to even the smallest rags. He was also giving voice to a gritty Los Angeles underside unexamined by anyone else, and as such directly challenged the New York powers-that-be view of Los Angeles as all tinsel and no truth. His poetry may be weak — and I think it is — but the legacy of what one might call his “community work” is huge.

Bukowski is not alone in this. Mary Shelley is a particularly rotten writer, but “Frankenstein” spawned an entire industry (or two). Philip K. Dick is a writer I enjoy reading whose prose gets stuck between my teeth; nevertheless, I’m confident his legacy will prove him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, who birthed the detective genre and whose gothic horror remains burned into our collective consciousness (most memorably, for me, with “The Fall of the House of Usher”) is frightfully overwritten and carries the adolescent skip of a jump-rope competition. To wit:

from The Bells

Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people–ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!

And so forth, until it’s your head that is ringing like the bells, bells, bells.

Or this:

The Raven

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
” ‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore,.
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore,
Nameless here forevermore.

The cadence may be memorable, but so are all those songs by Abba. Someone, please, help me to forget.

While Bukowski’s poems bemoan the poet’s inability to offer insight, his novels are another thing entirely. “Ham on Rye” is a shattering portrayal of growing up tormented, clueless, ugly, and lower class in the shadow of Los Angeles, the land of the pretty and gifted and well-off. “Post Office” is requisite reading for anyone who wants to understand the torture of smart people trapped in a deadening circumstance; its revolutionary message is that to embrace freedom is, sometimes, to embrace the decision to be a complete fuck-up.

Bukowski was smart about the sham of Los Angeles, the citywide put-on he himself refused to don. And in print and in his readings he was funny. When he had nothing to lose, which was most of his life, he was fearlessly funny and filthy. Every Bukowski piece, however exaggerated and at times badly written, carries the comic stench of real life. There will always be a place for that.

Going to Silent Movie for this event:  The release and screening of Wholpin #5. Flavorpill.com says:

McSweeney’s DVD-based little brother Wholphin is officially one year old; the quarterly pub’s infancy included Spike Jonze’s lost 2000 Al Gore election documentary, Daily Show writers reviving the Japanese Bewitched, and a sci-fi homage by Steven Soderbergh, amongst others. Selections from Wholphin’s fifth issue are screened tonight, with rumors of a crying competition, a Consumer Service Announcement to Identify Clone-Free Products, and never-before-seen footage from Jim Jarmusch, Werner Herzog, and P.T. Anderson.

The revamped Silent Movie is quickly becoming the contemporary LA equivalent of the Little Art Theatre of yore. I wrote about both beloved screening houses here.

When my wife told me that she had agreed upon a price with our gardeners to fix the sprinkler system in the back yard, I said, “WHAT? WHY? We’re probably putting in a pool!” Then she told me the price: $500. I said, “Oh, okay then.”

Previous estimates on their generously fixing the system so ungenerously broken by the contractors who put a second story on our home but nearly ruined our family and definitely killed the lawn in the process ran in the three-thousand-dollar range. Since then, we’ve alternated between using either the sprinkler-hose-attachment system characterized here as utterly baffling me, and just saying the hell with it and watching the grass wither and die. When I recommitted to the “manual” sprinkler system a few months ago and succeeded in revitalizing the lawn — to some degree — I began to appreciate its possibilities: croquet and the like. So, until or unless we do put in a pool, I’m happy to have the “actual” underground sprinkler system repaired — and even happier not to be doing it myself.

So why the amazing discount on this repair job? My wife thinks it’s because of the writers’ strike, now in its xth week and unlikely to end soon; while it’s the writers who are striking, it’s the service-industry people who are suffering most immediately. She says the lead gardener in the family, Ismail, related that he’d discussed our project with his father and they wanted to reward our loyalty. “Others come and go, but you’ve been with us a long time.” Almost 12 years, in fact, and given what they’ve been charging us — very little, I think, especially for weekly service — I haven’t seen a reason to switch. But I think the writers’ strike is only part of it. The mortgage meltdown is hitting Los Angeles like it’s hitting the rest of the nation, although Burbank less so because of pent-up demand. So while I’m happy to get a huge discount on this job, I’m sure I’m not happy about the underlying causes, which are sure to grow worse.

I hope not, because in light of “revelations” by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan that, yes, the White House inner circle did indeed out our own covert spy Valerie Plame, that leaves plenty of time to press charges against Rove, Libby, Card, and yes, if possible, Bush and Cheney.

And, is there something we can do about McClellan as well (other than just not buy the book he’s beginning to promote with this “revelation”)? During Watergate, Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than comply with Richard Nixon’s order to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus also resigned rather than comply. McClellan sat quiet for years, finding his voice only in time for book promotion. Fealty to country comes before loyalty to a president, and the practice of conscience overrides all other considerations. Those are the principles the nation was founded on. It’s shameful that no one in the White House seems to know this. Since we can’t rely on their conscience, perhaps we should actually prosecute and punish perpetrators of treason.

Update: Since this story broke, McClellan’s publisher has issued a statement that the book will not say that Bush knowingly misled him about the Plame leak. Evidently, it took only a few hours for forgetfulness and obfuscation to resume, no doubt prodded by threat. Here’s an update on the story, and here’s Salon’s piece, which ends with an entreaty to Congress to pursue an investigation. Good luck on that one.

Check out this new rap music video, “directed” by my Orlando’s Joint cartoon alter ego. Click here to see it.

(I swear to you I could deliver these lines better, but writer-director Terence Anthony continues to insist on “bad” acting.)

According to a report released today by the National Endowment for the Arts, reading in the U.S. is in steep decline. Here’s the story from AP:

A growing crisis in American literacy 

Fewers adults than ever report reading even one book a year, says disturbing new NEA report.

By Hillel Italie, Associated Press
November 19, 2007

NEW YORK — The latest National Endowment for the Arts report draws on a variety of sources, public and private, and essentially reaches one conclusion: Americans are reading less.

The study, “To Read or Not Read,” is being released today as a follow-up to a 2004 NEA survey, “Reading at Risk,” that found an increasing number of adult Americans were not even reading one book a year.

“To Read or Not to Read” gathers an array of government, academic and foundation data on everything from how many 9-year-olds read every day for “fun” (54%) to the percentage of high school graduates deemed by employers as “deficient” in writing in English (72%).

“I’ve done a lot of work in statistics in my career and I’ve never seen a situation where so much data was pulled from so many places and absolutely everything is so consistent,” NEA Chairman Dana Gioia said.

Among the findings in the 99-page study:

* In 2002, only 52% of Americans ages 18 to 24, the college years, read a book voluntarily, down from 59% in 1992.

* Money spent on books, after being adjusted for inflation, dropped 14% from 1985 to 2005 and has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s.

* The number of adults possessing bachelor’s degrees and “proficient in reading prose” dropped from 40% in 1992 to 31% in 2003.

An age gap

Some of the news is good, notably among 9-year-olds, whose reading comprehension scores have soared since the early 1990s. But at the same time, the number of 17-year-olds who “never or hardly ever” read for pleasure has doubled, to 19%, and their comprehension scores have fallen.

“I think there’s been an enormous investment in teaching kids to read in elementary school,” Gioia said. “Kids are doing better at 9 and at 11. At 13, they’re doing no worse, but then you see his catastrophic falloff. . . . If kids are put into this electronic culture without any counterbalancing efforts, they will stop reading.”

Publishers and booksellers have noted that teen fiction is a rapidly expanding category in an otherwise flat market, but the NEA’s director of research, Sunil Iyengar, wondered how much of that growth has been caused by the Harry Potter books, the last of which came out in July.

“It’s great that millions of kids are reading these long, intricate novels, but reading one such book every 18 months doesn’t make up for daily reading,” Gioia said.

Doug Whiteman, president of the Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA), said sales of teen books were the strongest part of his business.

But he added that a couple of factors could explain why scores were dropping: Adults are also buying the Potter books, thus making the teen market seem bigger on paper, and some sales are for non-English-language books.

“There are so many nuances,” Whiteman said. “Reading scores don’t necessarily have any relevance to today’s sales.”

The head of Simon & Schuster’s children’s publishing division, Rick Richter, saw another reason why sales could rise even as scores go down: A growing gap between those who read and those who don’t.

Richter considers it “very possible” that the market is driven by a relatively small number of young people who buy large numbers of books. Test scores, meanwhile, are lowered by the larger population of teens who don’t read. “A divide like that is really a cause for concern,” Richter said.

The report emphasizes the social benefits of reading: “Literary readers” are more likely to exercise, visit art museums, keep up with current events, vote in presidential elections and perform volunteer work.

“This should explode the notion that reading is somehow a passive activity,” Gioia said. “Reading creates people who are more active by any measure. . . . People who don’t read, who spend more of their time watching TV or on the Internet, playing video games, seem to be significantly more passive.”

Sounding the alarm

Gioia called the decline in reading “perhaps the most important socioeconomic issue in the United States” and called for changes “in the way we’re educating kids, especially in high school and college.”

“We need to reconnect reading with pleasure and enlightenment,” he said.

” ‘To Read or Not Read’ suggests we are losing the majority of the new generation,” Gioia added. “The majority of young Americans will not realize their individual, economic or social potential.”

I read this — no pun intended — and thought, I’m not sure. In some of the disciplines I follow, such as poetry and comic books, reading is dramatically up. Given that more and more people have direct access to the internet and probably check out news sites while they’re there, I think news reading may be up as well. (Although newspaper reading is no doubt shrinking.) And I also couldn’t help bearing in mind that Chaucer had nine readers in his lifetime, all of them at court, so we’re certainly in better shape than that. And, if we’re counting raw numbers, given the explosion in population (200 million Americans when I was a boy; 260 million now), that certainly equals a net growth in readers. Finally, given that almost everyone in the known universe is writing a memoir or self-help book of some sort, they must be able to read. I say all this while maintaining my enormous respect for NEA Chair Gioia, whose goals are laudable.

Then I used the internet — and my reading skills — to locate this piece in the New York Times, which quotes a USC colleague who has similar reservations:

The new report is likely to provoke as much debate as the previous one. Stephen Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California, said that based on his analysis of other data, reading was not on the decline. He added that the endowment appeared to be exaggerating the decline in reading scores and said that according to federal education statistics, the bulk of decreases in 12th-grade reading scores had occurred in the early 1990s, and that compared with 1994 average reading scores in 2005 were only one point lower.

Something I remember from my childhood in the 1970’s was a widespread sense that children of the time were somehow dumber than our predecessors. (This is somewhat akin to the death of the theatre, which has been happening for 2000 years. Los Angeles has, at last count, 400 theatres.) I look at the astonishing proficiency in new technologies of so much of this generation and I wonder if our assumptions don’t keep us from recognizing these new achievements because they don’t correlate with past experience.

Whatever shape books come in, reading will continue. So will the emergence of new technologies and new storytelling mechanisms. I pledge to you that “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” on Xbox 360 is in some ways an amazing storytelling experience. Yes, the plotlines and characterization are crude, but this is only the start. In the new era — as we also saw foreshadowed in “Myst” and in Dick’s “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” — we will be inside the story. Will this new fiction necessarily be a lesser achievement than, say, Tolstoy’s? Or will we understand that embracing the possibilities of the new forms does not mean that we cannot continue our appreciation of Tolstoy and Chaucer?

Until that day, because of the poor track record of doomsayers, I remain suspicious of “decline and fall” theories.
—————-
Now playing: Pere Ubu – The Book Is On The Table
via FoxyTunes

The Edward Albee resurgence first begun with “Three Tall Women” continues, as recounted in this fine piece recently in the New York Times. If I do go back east to go duck hunting in January, I can try to catch “Me, Myself, and I” at the McCarter; while in Philadelphia around May for the aforementioned Bill Irwin show, I can try to add in “Occupant” at the Signature in New York. (I’m afraid to see “Peter and Jerry,” the prequel/sequel to “The Zoo Story,” afraid because I don’t want “The Zoo Story” ruined for me — it’s played too large a role in my life.)

Albee is an ongoing inspiration and I’m glad the theatre and its patrons have embraced him back. In the 1980’s he was decidedly out of fashion. I will never forget the infamous cover of New York magazine with a photo of Albee emblazoned with the legend “Edward Albee:  Should he quit?” I don’t think the Nazis treated Brecht this badly.