Why can't indie bands stay on the soundtrack -- and off the stage -- of trendy TV teen shows?
Death Cab for Cutie’s performance Thursday night on Fox’s teen drama “The OC”should have been a dream date for my television and me. I’m a devotee of the band and an “OC” loyalist; I relish any opportunity for an uninterrupted one-on-one with my old Magnavox. But the event was more like a setup with a friend’s friend than an intimate evening with the one I love. I’ll be honest: For the short time Death Cab graced the stage of the Bait Shop, I was holding my breath, waiting for frontman Ben Gibbard to call out to the stiff, overstyled, underage crowd, “Good night, OC!” so the show could resume its regular, tumultuous, completely contrived course.
I suspected this might happen. My expectations for the show were low. Like blind dates, setups like this one have never panned out particularly well. Watching bands I love play to indifferent audiences of slim, styled Abercrombie-wearing TV teens plunges me into despair. Inevitably, the bands look old and, often, fat; the sets are brightly lit and unconvincing; the sound is, if not completely dubbed in, terrible. Last year, I made my news junkie friend Laura turn off a White House press conference on Iraq to watch the Shins perform on “Gilmore Girls” — what a mistake! When Aimee Mann made a forced, awkward appearance on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” a few years ago, she was shown walking offstage muttering, “I hate playing vampire towns” — a memorably bad line in a memorably well-written show. Modest Mouse — a band that’s been around for 12 years and started out with tiny K Records — on teen prime time? Don’t ask.
I don’t blame the musicians for the lack of chemistry. They’re there to serve as backdrop for an unfurling plot rather than connect with their fans. Most of the time the music isn’t even live. With Death Cab, their three songs were clearly dubbed in; the sound of “Title and Registration” as it faded in and out to allow for Summer and Marisa’s bantering, was pristine, right down to its very un-live synthetic beats. I admire that “OC” creator Josh Schwartz (whose tastes in music have been passed on to lead character Seth Cohen) and his music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas are bringing the music they love into their hit shows; they’ve helped fuel the recent revival of indie rock. Seth’s well-known adoration of Death Cab is, I suspect, in no small part responsible for the fact that the band signed a major-label deal last year. But these performances can’t be doing much of anything for these bands that the various “OC” and WB soundtracks haven’t done already. Watching a bunch of guys pushing 30 perform in front of a crowd of kids who look like they’d rather be at the mall, or checking out “The Amityville Horror,” would only seem to raise doubt about their mass appeal — not strengthen it.
Around the time the Shins performed on “Gilmore Girls” last year, I had just seen the band play two sold-out nights in a row at Irving Plaza here in New York. (I know, dorky, especially for a gal who’s pushing 30 herself.) Those crowds — mostly college-age girls and their messy-haired boyfriends — danced and sang along like they were at a Beatles show in 1964. “So Says I,” the first single from their second record “Chutes Too Narrow,” came off like a club hit; the girls shook their bobbed hair and twisted to the floor while the boys engaged in some seriously earnest head-nodding. It was thrilling, especially since the Shins aren’t exactly the Beatles. Meaning: Their lead singer is a small, thin-haired sweetheart with little stage presence; their keyboard player (and default frontman) is a chubby goofball; the other two band members are not particularly charismatic. In other words, teen idols The Shins are not.
When it’s live, who cares? The music is what matters; the too-loud sound connects you to the band. It’s what transforms Shins singer/songwriter/genius James Mercer from a modest every-boy to the most beautiful man you have ever seen hold a guitar. But on TV, in these unconvincing clubs that mysteriously allow teenagers, these great bands look flat and lame; instead of rock gods, they devolve into throwaway garage bands begging for prom gigs. On “Gilmore Girls,” Mercer looked so paranoid and out of context, and the crowd (with the noted exception of Rory) appeared so mismatched, you’d have thought the Shins were a last minute fill-in for N’SYNC. Last night on “The OC,” Ben Gibbard was the only one of the Death Cab quartet to get any real face time, and that which he did was terrible. During “Sound of Settling” he looked absolutely spastic, there were so many jump cuts. And the lovable Gibbard — who, like Mercer, doesn’t have the looks your average female fan would dream up to go with his agile and warming voice — was shot from the side, so that the only sense you got of him was a blur of black, Clark Kent-style glasses and a mole on his cheek.
But it’s good marketing, right? All the kids watching “The OC” spend money on CDs and legal downloads after seeing the band on the show? But what was so wrong with keeping the music to the soundtrack, in the background? I’d rather associate a song with a kiss between Seth and Summer, or a fight between Ryan and some water polo player, than a limp hangout scene in the Bait Shop. On the stage, there’s no drama. A band is nothing more than a prop, a song is never loud enough, the very cute guitar player is never visible. The setup takes all the joy out of a live performance, and all the excitement out of a truly dramatic moment. It’s a waste.
And I’d rather keep my dates predictable. If “The OC” and its WB cousins keep trying to set me and my television up for some kind of crazy minage-a-quatre, I might have to break up with someone. And I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to be the band.
Cohen’s maternal grandfather, a former short-order cook, invented the sugar packet and Sweet ‘n’ Low, the artificial sweetener that made him a millionaire. Cohen’s mother was disinherited by her own mother, and his Uncle “Marvelous” Marvin, who took over the company, got into trouble with the FBI — a little thing they call tax evasion and criminal conspiracy. Then there’s Aunt Gladys, who hasn’t stepped out of the family home in Midwood, Queens since the Nixon administration, yet still manages to pull all the strings. With this book, Cohen aims to nail down what really happened in his clan’s highly mythologized saga. His digressions on the history of, say, Brooklyn or sugar or the Walburg banking dynasty, might strike some as padding, but he describes it all with an economical, pugnacious wit that never falters. The heart of the book, though, is a long, complicated and darkly funny family feud encompassing intrigues, sabotage and widely divergent stories about what really happened and when, and of course, who it can all be blamed on. 
A tiny protein that works in mysterious ways is the villain at the center of this elegantly spun tale of the quest to find out what elusive agent lies behind Mad Cow disease, scrapie and the brain disorder that has caused the descendants of one16th-century Venetian doctor to die of terminal sleeplessness. The story glides effortlessly from a canalside palazzo to Scottish sheep farms to the depths of the New Guinean jungles, where the members of a cannibal tribe succumbed to a plague called “the “laughing death.” Spotlight-hogging doctors battle, backstab and misbehave but eventually the culprits — christened “prions” by one media-savvy researcher — are identified. And, man, are they scary: unkillable by most conventional antibiotic and antiviral tactics — mostly because they aren’t even alive to begin with. Max writes so lucidly you hardly notice how much you’re learning, and the book’s suspenseful narrative never flags. This is science writing at its best. 
When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, he would walk into family gatherings and find that the mere sight of him would move his older relatives to tears. “Oh, he looks just like Shmiel!,” they would cry, in Yiddish. All Mendelsohn knew of Shmiel was that he, the oldest brother of his grandfather, had been killed, along with this wife and four daughters, by Nazis during the war. That crumb of information was tantalizing enough to inspire long-lasting curiosity and, as its subtitle makes plain — “The Lost” is Mendelsohn’s attempt to find out who these relatives were, and what exactly happened to them. After traveling thousands of miles, visiting the Ukraine, Israel and any place else where someone might have known someone else who knew his uncle, Mendelsohn discovers that the truth of what happened to his relatives was quite a bit more complicated — and surprising — than anyone had known. The story is gripping, but along the way “The Lost” reveals itself to be so much more than a Holocaust family memoir: it’s also a page-turning mystery, a lesson on how history is written and a work of religious scholarship. This is a book that you start and think: I have never read a book like this one before. 
Alice Sheldon had many selves. As a child in the 1920s, she went on safari through Africa with her socialite parents. She could fly planes and shoot guns. During World War II, she worked for military intelligence and after it, for the CIA. She was a clinical psychologist, and published a short story in the New Yorker. But her most daring and successful adventure in self-creation was posing for several years as a man, the innovative science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who carried on many intense correspondences with such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Phillip K. Dick, until her real name and gender were discovered by tenacious fans. Everyone who knew “Tiptree” was flabbergasted to learn “he” was really a woman, but whether anyone really knew Sheldon — even her husband of decades, with whom she died in a suicide pact — is the question Julie Phillips pursues in this astute, sensitive and always fascinating biography. The life was remarkable, and so is the telling of it. 
If most food writing seems like an covert form of narcissism, Pollan explodes the genre out of its navel-gazing constraints and offers a rare, expansive view of what and how we eat. Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a formerly obscure South American grass that has manipulated humanity into making it one of the most successful plants on earth: King Corn — it’s in nearly every processed food. He highlights an obscure scientist without whose great invention — the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer — billions of people could not have been born (or at least, not have been fed), and he explains just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel). There’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — the sections on “industrial organic” farming and an entirely foraged meal are also revelatory — about this most basic of human needs. 
The unusual provenance of this novel — Eggers has written it in the first-person voice of a real man, Valentino Achak Deng, and all of the events in the story are true, although not all of them happened to Deng — is complicated. The result is sublime simplicity, the ego-less conveyance by Eggers of Deng’s plain-spoken, gentle, world-weary but never hopeless voice. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Deng saw his village destroyed by Arab militiamen as a little boy and fled alone into a chaotic landscape before joining a troupe of similarly dispossessed boys on an epic journey on foot to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Hunger, thirst, lions, crocodiles and soldiers on both sides of Sudan’s civil war harried all of them and killed some. Deng finally made it to the promised land of America, but we know from the start that it proved to be no paradise. The novel’s framing device — Deng imagines telling his life story to thieves who beat and bind him while robbing his house and to the jaded officials who deal with the crime’s aftermath — is inspired; instead of making him pitiful, this silent appeal emphasizes Deng’s remarkable, ineradicable dignity. 
Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories seem ready-made for this age of overcommitment. In just a few deceptively straightforward pages you get all the depth, breadth and nuance that other writers require whole novels to build. The stories in this newest collection are all tinged to one degree or another by 9/11, but the attacks don’t feature as significantly as the depredations of age, psychiatric fragility and that chronic weakness of Eisenberg characters, self-doubt. (Tellingly, the one story here that makes 9/11 its main focus — the title story, unfortunately — is the only disappointment.) What lifts Eisenberg’s work above the usual fiction in this mode is her uncanny ability, shared only with Alice Munro, to conjure an entire multifarious life in the span of a few incidents. This gives her stories an unusual suspense; you’re always waiting for the moment when the spell takes its effect and a human being materializes right before your very eyes. 
It makes perfect sense that the best novel about 9/11 — a collective memory by now encrusted in a layer of pieties — would be a biting satire. Kalfus chronicles the awful divorce of New Yorkers Joyce and Marshall; things have gotten so acrimonious that when each one suspects the other has died in the tragedy, they both secretly rejoice. Don’t mistake this for a book about how 9/11 affected our personal lives, though. Instead, it’s for every nice middle-class American who pleads astonishment at the malice and savagery of the attacks. Kalfus shows us that the far-off national conflicts we find so baffling and complicated actually work a lot like a really bad divorce — both are furious clashes between people who can’t get along but who also can’t escape each other. And let’s face it: Most of us know a lot more about divorce than we do about the Middle East. The novel’s story — rich with betrayals and outrageous antics and a couple of expertly drawn and miserable kids — never staggers under its thematic load. It remains always razor sharp, true to life, light on its feet and sneakily tragic. 
Novels about African dictatorships are supposed to be dour and educational, the literary equivalent of Brussels sprouts — good for you if not especially tasty. The great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o capsizes that formula with “Wizard of the Crow,” an outrageously entertaining, madcap political farce set in the fictional nation of Aburiria, whose despot is known only as The Ruler and has been running things for as long as anyone can remember. When the book’s educated but destitute hero, fleeing a police constable, tries to throw the cop off his trail with a sign boasting of the awesome powers of the Wizard of the Crow, he inadvertently sets himself up as the sorcerer du jour. Soon, he’s mixed up in the affairs of scheming government ministers, fatuous businessmen, a ruthless political climber and an elusive band of rebels. The novel is full of disguises, mistaken identities, tall tales, slapstick, hairs-breadth escapes and double-crosses. Ngugi’s political satire is deep enough to apply to Midwestern regional marketing managers in addition to strutting West African tyrants — aren’t all tyrants the same, after all? — because its real subject is human folly in all its many, hilarious and heartbreaking forms. 
This is not your grandfather’s Civil War novel, but who would expect that from Stephen Wright, that rare combination of literary wild man and flawless prose stylist? A Candide-like figure named Liberty Fish — child of a renegade Southern belle and the Yankee abolitionist she eloped with — joins the Union army and wends his way back to his maternal grandfather’s plantation. Along the way, he meets all sorts of people — pirates, soldiers, preachers and con men — most of them driven half (or all the way) mad by their inability to make the American dream of freedom and the American reality of race add up to anything plausible. At the end of his journey he finds the heart of the nightmare in its ultimate, florid, night-blooming manifestation: his demented grandfather, Asa, trying to create — avant Norman Mailer — a white negro. This novel is a plummet down the black rabbit hole of American utopianism, with the brakes off and the seat belts removed, and it’s one hell of a ride. 
Pakistan’s crippling turf war 
Occupy fights the law: Will the law win? 
The right’s lost causes 
Unhappy Valentine’s Day in Israel 
What a GOP cave looks like 
U.S. media takes the lead on Iran 
Interview With My Bully: When I confronted my bully about racism 
Iran’s Greens aim to rise again 
The prettiest boy in the world 
Should I donate a kidney to my friend? 
