needs more demons? no.

I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, by the eddies formed by the ball’s stitches* as it shoves its way through the air.

And to me, the knuckleball is emblematic of baseball’s appeal. As much as fans love to describe the game with statistics, the game is interesting because statistics can’t accurately predict what happens next. And nothing embodies that like the knuckleball. As the pitch leaves Wake’s hand** he has scarcely a better idea of its trajectory than anyone else.

No one personifies the knuckleball for me like Tim Wakefield, perhaps the last of baseball’s greats to throw the pitch. As I’ve learned about the game over the past 8 years or so, he’s been the constant inconstant: sometimes brilliant, sometimes terrible — often both in the same game, or even the same frame. I dearly love to see him win, but I admire him most in the grim losses where he grinds through out after painful out, sabotaging his stats and saving the bullpen’s arms. There’s an equanimity to him in these innings, a grace and lack of ego that seems very rare in professional sports. Then again, it’s awe-inspiring to see a guy pitch one of the best games of his career in his forties.

Massarotti’s book*** opens with some historical context on the knuckleball, outlining the careers of pitchers whose careers ended before I became a fan of the game, and describing the pitch in relation to the rest of baseball’s arsenal. Then he dives into Wake’s career, wich mirrors many of his games: improbable comebacks against long odds, devastating setbacks. Longtime Boston Herald writer Massarotti offers some interesting insights throughout. His analysis of what it costs a team for a pitcher to record each out uses some suspect math, but still makes a convincing case that Wake has been quite a bargain for the Sox. It’s also fascinating to see well-documented history through Wake-colored-glasses; Schilling’s bloody sock performance in game 6 of the 2004 ALCS is a mere aside, primarily relevant to the state of the rotation and how many days of rest Wakefield has going into the World Series.

The book is marred by some copy editing gaffes, with a score going from 5-0 to 4-1 to 5-2 in the 2003 ALCS perhaps the worst. And it’s written as if Wake’s career was effectively over in 2010, with no opportunity to contribute significantly to the 2011 season. That’s not quite how it worked out, but of course, most folks had written him off in 1994, too.

needs more demons? Despite some flaws I found it both entertaining and illuminating.

* or, in baseball parlance, “the stitches of the ball.”
** i.e., “the hand of Wake”
*** Massarotti and Wakefield confusing refer to themselves as author and writer, a fallacy I won’t perpetuate. The book is written in the third person; Wake’s voice is present as an interview subject.

My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I felt special.

A little later, I placed an even bigger order, and it happened to be while CD Baby was moving across the country. It was delayed long enough that I eventually contacted support, and I promptly got a very nice and apologetic email from Derek Sivers himself (along with the discs, in short order). Again, I felt special.

Later on I learned that everyone got the crazy shipment notice, even for ordering a single disc, and that at the time Derek emailed me, he was one of just two people in the CD Baby “organization.”

And for a little while I felt less special. But eventually I realized that a key part of CD Baby’s value proposition for customers — artists and purchasers alike — was making everyone feel special.

Which, when you think about it, is no small trick.

Reading Sivers’ story of how and why he started, grew, and sold CD Baby, I was strongly reminded of interviews with Dischord’s Ian MacKaye. Partly because they say some of the same things, particularly about not having business growth as a goal. Both describe awkward conversations with “suits” who really can’t grasp this.

But both also display an element of self-contradiction. Sivers says the money didn’t matter — an easy thing to say when your life is not severely constrained by the lack of it — but he did, after all, build a music store, not a music give-away service. Perhaps more tellingly, some of his biggest regrets are about decisions with significant cost impacts. And although Sivers repeatedly says that growth wasn’t a goal, but not only did he consistently make decisions that furthered growth, one of his most provocative epigrammatic guidelines is explicitly about facilitating growth. (It’s to try to make your business practices support double your current volume, which sounds very smart. If you, you know, want to grow the business.)

These cavils aside, this is a pretty great book. Sivers is unusually candid about his mistakes as well as what he did right, and he’s lucid and entertaining. (He says he learned to prize clarity and brevity when crafting emails to CD Baby’s subscriber list, and demonstrates mastery of both here.) You’ll probably be thinking about the contents of this brief book for much longer than the time it takes to read it.

needs more demons? no.

What I was after was simple: the end of the record industry as we knew it. I wanted to see the collapse of the major labels’ stronghold on music . . . since we despised the way they did business, we figured we’d be only too happy to stand by and watch it happen.

Benatar’s co-writer Patsi Bale Cox remains very unobtrusive throughout, the book feels very much like sitting down for a long and engaging conversation (well, monologue) with Benatar.

needs more demons? no.

Arguably, AC/DC’s story — certainly since 1980 — doesn’t afford many opportunities to dive deep. There’ve been the expected substance-abuse-related departures, some with eventual triumphant sober returns. The band earned a bit of Moral Majority outrage (although not as much as, say, Judas Priest). They’ve continued to release workmanlike albums, about which many of you can sense the contributors struggling to find good things to say. The still-living band members have a reputation for avoiding groupie shenanigans and don’t slag each other off in the press. Compared to the likes of Metallica or Pink Floyd, they offer little drama.

In 1980, of course, they lost Bon Scott, the frontman and lyricist behind all their classic seventies releases to “misadventure” (straight-up alcohol poisoning, Sutcliffe establishes, no vomit involved). After scant weeks they were in the studio with new singer Brian Johnson, recording Back in Black, an unassailable classic (not the best hard rock album, nor even the best AC/DC album, but if you’re only going to ever hear one hard rock album in your life, still the one you should chose). Sutcliffe gives no credence to longstanding rumors that Scott wrote some of Back in Black’s lyrics; Johnson credits Scott’s spiritual presence with helping him craft songs like the mighty title track and “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Those two songs have always seemed closer to me to Scott’s cheerful “gutter poetry” than anything else I ever heard with Johnson’s credits on it. (Confession: I’m pretty sure I bought Flick of the Switch in college, but it was the last AC/DC record I owned, so there are still Johnson-penned lyrics I haven’t heard.)

This is the thing about AC/DC that’s struck me as a bit sad for the past three decades. Johnson’s a capable singer and front man, but for me the enduring magic of AC/DC is split roughly half between those miraculously simple, dense, and catchy riffs, and Scott’s demented, puckish, persona. I can’t imagine Johnson ever coming up with anything as off-handedly brilliant as “Problem Child”’s slurred aside, “even my mother hates me,” or making violence as funny (or alliterative) as “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” does. I think it’s telling that the nicest thing the essayists find to say about the several “comeback” albums is that some of the songs have a spirit similar to one of Scott’s songs (or something from Back in Black).

The book definitely delivers on the “ultimate illustrated” score, with plenty of album sleeves, tour ads, backstage passes, ticket stubs, and promo items to accompany the many, many live shots of Angus Young grimacing, and of the rest of the band too. (You might wonder if there’s a Dorian Gray-styled picture of Angus Young squirreled away somewhere, although excluding his hair.)

needs more demons?

Given this, I spent most of time in the book looking for the places where the wool was being drawn over my eyes. When Irving mentioned that the records of a gallery which allegedly purchased some of de Hory’s fakes are no longer extant, it rang the same alarm bells in my head as the clumsy conman trying to derail suspicion by airing first. When a car rolled down a hill and burst into flame, I was tempted to cry aloud, “Aha! Fiction!”

Unfortunately, the meta-textual aspects of the book were perhaps its most consistently compelling. Elmyr de Hory’s story might’ve made a great long article for The New Yorker or Harper’s, but there’s not quite enough there there to sustain a whole book. The catalogue of de Hory arriving in some city, peddling his wares, wearing his welcome out, and moving on is too repetitive, and Irving’s approach — working hard to convince us that this is fact, not fiction — is too flat, too reportorial.

Irving only flirts with concepts that could have given his book weight beyond de Hory’s personal tragedy. He never suggests complicity on the part of any of the gallery owners who bought de Hory’s forgeries — he only provides circumstantial evidence, alleged queries as to whether the “small, private collection” which de Hory is allegedly liquidating might “happen to have” a work matching the interest of a specific potential buyer. And Irving observes but doesn’t analyze (or even judge) the strange climate that briefly allows de Hory to prosper: new money trying to legitimize itself by purchasing works of art it knows nothing about.

Irving doesn’t even go so far as to shoehorn de Hory into one of the classic plot arcs: de Hory rises, but not very far, and falls, but not very far. Irving brings the curtain down on his book before (but not much before) de Hory brings his own curtain down, after several previous botched attempts. Perhaps Irving even has some slight complicity in that, as the notoriety accompanying Irving’s book must have destroyed the only livelihood de Hory had ever known.

I learned about de Hory and Irving watching Orson Welles’ odd, fascinating/infuriating pseudo-documentary F for Fake, and I wonder if Welles’ interest might have been sparkled by this phrase in the book:

One must imagine swift cuts between shots, rapid pans of the camera and certain herky-jerky quality in the movements of the two heroes

Ironically, if sadly predictably, there is now enough interest in de Hory’s forgeries that they themselves are forged.

needs more demons? a bit.

Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book is literally culled from Joyce Linehan’s twitter stream, mostly focusing on communication to and from Joe, about the business of being in a touring/recording band (although Massachusetts residents might note a few poignant moments not directly related to Ashmont Records).

I read Pernice to Me compulsively in a single sitting — not hard to do, it’s short — and while it certainly entertained me, it left me a little sad.

Pernice to Me has a mean side in more than one sense of the word. I couldn’t help but be reminded of seeing excerpts of Johan Sebastian Bach’s correspondence with the great composer whinging about shillings and farthings. And if you’d have a mental image of Pernice as a “gentle, fragile sad sack”, that you want to keep intact, you should avoid Pernice to Me, because that’s the perception that Linehan explicitly sets out to destroy. She presents Pernice as epically grumpy, a quintessentially high-maintenance and self-involved artist.

But the format of Pernice to Me dramatically reinforces its artificiality. It may be generally acknowledged that reality show editors can paint any cast member as either the villain or the long-suffering hero, but when the stuff from which a work is assembled is exclusively 140-character-or-less soundbites, it really hammers home how very much the selection of exactly which tweets to include or exclude affects the shape of the work as a whole. I was also keenly aware how much I was lacking anything that might put the tweets in context: how long Pernice had been on the road, how much sleep Linehan had, what tone of voice the words were spoken in (many of the tweets are transcribed telephone exchanges).

It also implicitly makes the point that the music industry wasn’t wrong back in the days of Napster: the sky really is falling. Something is wrong with the picture if an artist with all of Pernice’s gifts finds it difficult to eke out a living. And if releasing one of the first books based on a Twitter stream helps Ashmont get some media attention and helps Pernice sell a few more records, more power to them.

needs more demons? not exactly.

• half-page half-tone snapshots
• a purported multi-page e-mail* thread between Handler and her siblings
• a purported multi-page letter of complaint from a tenant of her father’s rental property
• whining (in multiple chapters) about the need to write another “stupid book.”

Otherwise it was sometimes amusing and often offensive. And of course it’s been solidly lodged in the bestseller lists since its release.

* I live in Boston.

needs more demons? here’s what’s needed: if I show signs of reading another one of these, I need somebody to stage an intervention.

I liked My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands much better than the other one, partly because it’s raunchier, but mostly there’s something approaching character development. I also thought it was funnier.

needs more demons? I do find it kind of amusing to imagine a smallish demon horde materializing at one of Chelsea’s parties and giving her more significant challenges to overcome than a shortage of Ketel One vodka*. And you know what? I think she might think it was funny, too. That is, if it happened to somebody else.

Hopefully she got some free cases for all the product placement.

Klausner also seems to feel compelled to imbue I Don’t Care About Your Band with some sort of social relevance. Sometimes I think she hits on a genuine insight, but scattered throughout are cringe-inducing bits of armchair sociology derived from from observing a small population with an intrinsic selection bias. Few things get my dander up like sweeping generalizations about gender and sex role behavior, e.g., the “only women can be bisexual, men can only be in the process of turning gay” trope, which gets aired here.

* some versions of this pull-quote substitute Cat Power, which would have made me somewhat less likely to read the book.

needs more demons? just a few