Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale is a music memoir about Jennifer Trynin's mid-'90s brush with major label rock stardom. One of the reviews on the dust cover recommends, "To anyone with her own dreams of hitting it big in the scene: First read this book." But really, anyone with dreams of any kind, anyone who's seen This is Spinal Tap more than once, and anyone who enjoys a good read and more than a few good laughs should read this book.

A year after a magical, chance meeting with Joni Mitchell at age eight, Jen Tryinin loses her family as she has known it when her father leaves. When she takes up guitar at age eleven, she vows to become a "real singer, like Joni Mitchell--beautiful, fearless, sauntering through strange cities, tossing lovers over my shoulder like salt."

Eighteen years later, she's an Oberlin creative writing graduate with a gift for lyrics, living in Boston. Having continued to write songs, she enters the open mic circuit and soon finds herself trapped in the "Sunday-to-Wednesday night folk/acoustic-chick-band-wasteland," of Boston's famed coffeehouse scene, where,"Nobody even remotely cool ever shows up, and these gigs aren't leading to anything besides more crappy gigs at these same crappy clubs where the audiences drink tea and stare at their shoes."

She quickly vows to jettison herself from the folk scene by methodically studying the ingredients for rock cred. Her producer boyfriend, Guy, explains that her songs are too complicated and that they don't "move" like rock songs. He makes her a cassette entitled "Great Pop Rock Songs," and Jen sets about paring down her lyrics and tweaking her image.

As her transformation takes places, you can see the pages flying off the calendar while she figures out, bit by bit, how to get rock gigs. It's "a tricky business having to do with where you work and what you drink and where you rehearse and who you're sleeping with or used to sleep with or who you might be sleeping with really soon."

I stop cutting my hair with nail scissors and go to a salon for the first time since high school. I get my hair cut straight across at my shoulders, leaving long bangs covering the left half of my face. I chuck my black jeans, ankle cowboy boots, and brown suede jackets and go to the cool thrift stores, where I find myself an old blue corduroy jeans jacket, a pair of big black-laced shoes, and three ugly print polyester shirts.

The finishing touch is repackaging her work. She takes one song off her "earnestly wrought twelve-song cassette," entitled, "Don't Make Me Beg," and shortens the title to "Beg" (because "cool bands use one-word titles"). For the cover, she chooses a picture of a "weird cat" she saw in a newspaper "because cool bands usually have weird nonsensical artwork," and, in a stroke of marketing genius, has it manufactured as a 45 and sends it out to all of the cool local radio stations.

To her surprise, it takes off. She then makes a full-length CD called Cockamamie with the help of Guy and her friend Aimee Mann, who happens to be one of Guy's clients. The CD lands steady rotation at all the hip local radio stations, and Tryinin finds herself playing to packed houses around Boston.

She soon becomes the subject of music industry buzz, climaxing in a record label "sharkfest" that takes place in New York, when she and her band perform at a trendy rock club called Brownies.

The rest of the book is the story of how Trynin's star rapidly rises and then steadily fades back into the atmosphere. It's a gripping read, and a hilarious drawing room comedy of rock-and-roll "manners."

Trynan has a winning combination of self-deprecating honesty, impeccable comic timing, and perfect pitch for the nuances of music biz posturing. At the Brownie's gig she meets promoter Freddy, who doesn't recognize her as the singer-songwriter who's been trying to get him to return her calls for past three years. Freddy turns out to be a short guy with dirty fingers and long black hair, who's "clacking the lollipop around in his mouth a mile a minute." When he casually tosses the lollipop against the side of the band's van, Jen protests:"'Hey, man, that's our van,' I say, not giving in to my fear of people like Freddy."

Later that night she observes a pack of music-industry personnages who have come to check her out:

Against the opposite wall, a small group is gathered around a tall guy in a suit with a heavy black beard. He's pointing at his ear and talking fast. Then he makes like he's shooting himself in the head. Everyone laughs, shaking their heads or grabbing their noses like this is the funniest fucking story they've every heard. Hovering on the outskirts of the group is Mr. Skivvy, laughing along, until he turns away and his smile disappears. He rubs his temples with the tips of his fingers, then pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes it across his mouth. He looks up and catches me staring at him, then waves and smiles. He walks over and introduces himself.

Trynin thankfully chooses to "show, not tell" and with deft strokes paints pictures that speak a thousand unsaid words. As she waits for a label photo shoot to begin, "...a woman appears in red sweatpants, an oversized baseball shirt, and two long ponytails sprouting from her head like huge dog ears. She introduces herself as 'Patty, Makeup Momma.'"

Trynin also has the narrative gift of sprinkling 'plot forwards' - hints at what lies ahead - that keep the reader turning pages. If you are already reading the book, though, you probably know that it is the story of her career's demise. What draws you in is wanting to know how and why.

Some reviews have portrayed Trynin as the innocent victim of the big, bad, music industry. She is unsparing in her account of the ruthlessness, insincerity and absurdity in which the industry is knee-deep. By far the most difficult reading in the book is her description of the byzantine shell game through which major labels actually pay recording songwriters for their work. Some of the juiciest sections of the book involve her showdown with the odious Shalaah!, a pretentious, prissy, Nellie Oleson of a singer-songwriter, with whom Jen is forced to tour toward the end of her career. (Several bloggers have wondered who this person is, since there's no evidence of Shalaah! online. I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and guess that it's Tori Amos).

But Trynin is also quite frank about her own role in her downfall. It has been said that "there's a very fine line between clever and stupid," and Jen straddles that line as she exhibits a certain contrarian streak. She writes a hit song with an out-of-the-ballpark chorus that goes, "I'm feeling good," but against all advice titles the song "Better than Nothing" ("because it's not about feeling good.") When she finally signs on with a label after a pitched and protracted bidding war, she becomes indignant when she is flown "coach" on her first tour, after having rated first class status while being wooed. She makes a petulant phone call to her manager that raises the first red flag that she may be "difficult."

By far the most self-destructive choice she makes, though, is her complicated and sexually charged relationship with her bass player, Buck.

This is one of the most implausible aspects of the book. There is nothing to like about Buck. Buck makes jokes like, "How do you get a million dollars, tax free? First make a million dollars. When the IRS comes to get it, just say, 'I forgot.'" Ok, I had that Steve Martin album when I was twelve, too. I can't figure out what he has going for him other than the fact that he possesses street cred from having played in punk and alt country bands, and occasionally rests his fingers on the back of Trynin's neck. He's forever sulking, stalking up stairs two-at-a time with his hands shoved into his pocket, saying things like, "Just doing my job, boss," when he gets pissy.

The bigger the gigs the band gets, the more self-absorbed and insufferable Buck becomes. When the band films their video and the director asks if he might try a few takes without the baseball cap (!) Buck wears at every show, he flatly replies, "Gotta have the hat." ARGGHHHH!!!!! I kept silently begging Jen, "Please, for the love of God, FIRE his ass."

But the truth is, Jen can't fire him because what she desires more than stardom is a family, a band of brothers to ride with in a van across the countryside, taking on the world together. Laced throughout the book are poignant snapshots of her actual family, who clearly care about one another but who seem to constantly just miss each other. Particularly heart-rending is her longing for a bond with her idealized brother, Tim.

A paragraph near the beginning of the book, as the band starts heating up, hints at where Trynin's heart truly lies:

This is the way I always imagined it would be. Me and my band goofing around in the van, roaming the highways. I have the feeling I used to get driving down to the Jersey shore with my family when I was maybe six....I remember wanting never to get there, wanting to always stay just like we were in that car, together and forgiving, because there was nowhere else to go.

Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be shows that, no matter what her medium, Trynin is a true writer, whose prose takes wing like a soaring lead on her shiny black '70s Les Paul with the Big Muff distortion pedal.

I can't wait for the movie.
posted by Lisa Moscatiello  # 8:52 AM | Perma Link   
3 comments

I joined Netflix just to rent this movie - (well also because I was tired of being laughed at by the clerks at my local artsy video boutique whenever I wanted something starring Ashley Judd.) I had read a review of it about three years ago in the NYT, but couldn't remember the name of it, which turned out to be somewhat forgettable in English, "The Best of Youth." Its Italian title comes from a line from Pasolini, La Meglio Gioventu'. It's a 388-minute epic coproduced by RAI as a miniseries for tv. The story takes one family through three decades - the 60s through the 90s. It was long, but I watched it twice, in several sittings. I'm going to reprint the review I read below. All I can say is that it was incredibly moving, intimate and uplifting. All of the actors were outstanding. I've included a photo of the unbearably sexy Alessio Boni, who jumps off the screen as the troubled Matteo Carati. Jasmine Trinca is magical and heartbreaking as the mental patient Giorgia, who shares a lifelong connection with Matteo and his brother, psychiatrist Nicola. Like the reviewer below, I was sad to see it end:

"...''The Best of Youth'' was originally made as a mini-series for Italian television and was broadcast in several other European countries after being released theatrically in Italy. Its genesis as a multiepisode small-screen epic accounts for its length, but also makes it easier to take. The director, Marco Tullio Giordana, is motivated by generosity -- toward both his characters and his audience -- rather than by self-indulgence.

The story he has to tell, written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, is full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel. Yes, ''The Best of Youth'' is long. But ''War and Peace'' is long. ''Middlemarch'' is long. Life is also long, and there is so much life in these six hours -- 37 years, to the extent that you can quantify it -- that you may marvel at Mr. Giordana's economy.

The film begins in Rome in 1966, in the bustling apartment of the middle-class Carati family. There are four children, but most of the attention focuses on Nicola and Matteo, who are studying for their exams and whose contrasting temperaments structure the crowded, expansive drama that follows.

Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio), who is studying medicine, is the more cheerful, while Matteo (Alessio Boni), a would-be philosopher, is volatile and rebellious. He flunks his exams on purpose and impulsively joins the army.

There is something quintessentially Italian about the way ''The Best of Youth'' uses the lives of the brothers to reflect the schisms and tensions within the larger society. A similar motif informs movies like Lucchino Visconti's ''Rocco and His Brothers,'' Francesco Rosi's ''Three Brothers'' and Bernardo Bertolucci's ''1900'' (as well as, for that matter, ''The Godfather'' Parts 1 and 2.)

While Nicola and Matteo never waver in their love for each other, their lives take radically different paths. After Nicola's hippie sojourn in Norway (which coincides with Matteo's basic training), they meet in Florence during the terrible winter floods of 1966, when young people from all over Italy converged on the city to rescue its artistic and historic treasures -- their common cultural patrimony -- from the mud.

But the blissful, selfless unity of this moment, in which Nicola falls in love with a beautiful music student named Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), is short-lived. He impulsively transfers to the University of Turin, the northern industrial city that became a center of late-1960's labor militancy, which he eagerly joins. There he and Matteo cross paths again, but they are on opposite sides, since Matteo is part of a police unit charged with suppressing the violent demonstrations.

All of this may sound a bit schematic, like that horrendous American mini-series ''The Sixties'' a few years ago. But what is most arresting about ''The Best of Youth'' is how gracefully it enfolds its characters within their historical context, and how fully it respects their individuality.

Mr. Giordana's sympathetic gaze seems to fall, with mellow radiance, on all generations and ideological persuasions, much as Nicola himself is able to love both his angry, sometimes brutal brother and Giulia, whose political ideals lead her toward the abyss of radical nihilism.

She and Matteo, though they cannot stand each other, have in common a kind of moral allergy to their own feelings and to the messy bonds that connect them to their lovers and families. Every time such a connection seems to be forming, they tear away from it, with tragic results.

Despite its unblinking attention to the destructive forces at large in Italian society -- from the Red Brigades terror and the political scandals of the 1970's to the anti-Mafia campaigns (and further political scandals) of more recent years -- the spirit of ''The Best of Youth'' is quietly, wryly optimistic. Its political point of view turns out to be precisely the tolerant, middle-class humanism, with its belief in human goodness and the possibility of social progress, that the postwar generation claimed to rebel against.

These values are embodied first by the elder Caratis, and then, in the next generation, by Nicola and his older sister, Giovanna, a magistrate. Nicola's professional life, which occasionally drifts into the foreground of the story, involves him in efforts to improve the treatment of the mentally ill, and this rather specialized cause is the clearest statement of the film's central idea, which is that a commitment to human dignity is ideology enough.

Mr. Giordana's is a humanism without limits, and toward the end of ''The Best of Youth,'' he seems unable to let go of the extended family he has made, lingering in the Tuscan sun while you check your watch in the dark. But the extended denouement is very much in keeping with the capaciousness and warmth of this wonderful film. Long as it is, you hate to see it end." A.O. Scott, New York Times
posted by Lisa Moscatiello  # 7:41 AM | Perma Link   
0 comments

I don't get why everyone seems to hate Katie Couric so much. I like her! She's well-spoken, professional, prepared, intelligent, ambitious and stylish. I like the fact that she bombed the first time she went on national TV (the president of the network reportedly said he "never wanted to see her" doing national news again) and then went to some elocution coach to make her voice sound less peepy and juvenile. (If only every white woman in America under the age of 50 would do that.) She's from my home town of Arlington, VA and is SO ARLINGTON (sensible, not "too" this or "too" that, civic, responsible, M.O.R.)So maybe I'm a bit biased. But how many women would have a colonoscopy on national TV? Huh? I stopped watching her on Today because it just got so fluffy. I couldn't stand that bimbo Matt Lauer, and I found extremely offensive the ambulance-chasing, shoving microphones in grieving parents' faces that they were so fond of. Maybe she left the show to get away from that. I am looking forward to seeing her in the big chair - maybe I'll start watching the news again.
posted by Lisa Moscatiello  # 9:29 AM | Perma Link   
0 comments

Everyone should go to the Washington Folk Festival. It's a long-standing tradition, a free music festival at one of the area's funkiest landmarks, the art-deco era former amusement park, Glen Echo. There's dancing, crafts, storytelling, and living dinosaurs - I mean esteemed legendary folk musicians. I went today and had a wonderful time. WETA grande dame Mary Cliff was the MC at the stage I played on, which is always exciting, and the weather was beautiful. I'll be back tomorrow with the Ocean Orchestra.

Two caveats - Bring your own food. There are concessions, but lines are usually long and choices are limited. And by all means, stay away from the pretentious, overpriced "Irish Inn"
behind the festival grounds (formerly the biker bar Trav's Inn). The food isn't good enough to justify the sticker shock and bad vibes.

Also, be wary of the Park Police. They do a great job keeping the traffic flowing, but if you end up accidentally parking in the wrong place you may regret it. I had my head bitten off by a short, chubby, red-faced ranger for innocently driving somewhere "off limits". Yikes! Dial back the aggression a few notches, please!!

See you tomorrow! Bring your sunscreen.
posted by Lisa Moscatiello  # 11:56 AM | Perma Link   
1 comments