Woody Allen still has the brilliant absurdist-essayist touch

When I was younger, I frequently turned to Woody Allen’s comedy collections Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects (I haven’t read 2007’s Mere Anarchy) for comedic and writing inspiration. These are admittedly more complicated to turn to since the film legend’s personal controversies, but I was interested to at least see if he still has the same sociologically insightful magic, so I dug into his latest collection - from 2022 - called Zero Gravity.

Daphne Merkin, a writer for The New Yorker, offers an introduction that takes us down the memory lane of some of the “cerebral jokester’s” best lines. She notes that the collection includes 19 pieces, one of which is a 50-page short story called “Growing Up in New York” that is appearing for the first time. To see if I want to read the entire collection, let’s start with a report on the first four stories.

“You Can’t Go Home Again - And Here’s Why:” The narrator, a big-time mineral trader, gets a letter that a movie company would like to film at his house. The housekeeper and wife are excited by this prospect but the trader doesn’t want to endanger any of his beloved things - first-edition books and Chinese vases and whatnot. He gives in when the director promises him a major part. Away the production goes and, although they have promised not to disturb his shrine, they indeed massively transform it into a Muslim brothel, with the couple's furniture “stacked haphazardly outside on the curb despite some rather heavy rain.” Sure enough, playing a character named Grimalkin, the trader appears in the movie, but as a dead body, then the crew quickly wraps up and assures the trader that he and the housekeeper can put the house back in order nicely. There are lots of improbable laughs in this one, but be sure to have a dictionary handy. Not far from classic Allen. 4 out of 5 stars

“Udder Madness:” This story leads off with an excerpt from the newspaper about how 20 people are killed each year by cows, with most of them happening when the cow purposely kills the person. The story is then told from a cow’s perspective. The lyricist of a Broadway musical comes to his New Jersey farm to relax. The narrator cow comes to despise the man and decides he will kill him. He’s just about to do so when his tail is caught in a closet door. The man looks up at the sound of "moo" and tries to spray the cow with his mace, but the mace sprays into his own face. The man does not die but he is taken away to be institutionalized, as he endlessly babbles “something about attempted homicide by a Hereford.” This one is not Earth-shaking, but it is creative and so darn ridiculous that it at least gets 4 out of 5 stars

“Park Avenue, High Floor, Must Sell - Or Jump:” This one I just don’t get. It seems to be an inside joke for rich people and their real-estate agents trying to sell properties. Not good at all. 1 out of 5 stars

“Buffalo Wings, Woncha Come Out Tonight:” This story brings Allen back to the animals. Actor Harvey Grossweiner gets a call from his agent about a job entertaining chickens at “a poultry farm a good three hours from Rodeo Drive. The owner, Al Capon, a small-time egg baron whose fortunes rose and fell with every new study on cholesterol” hires Harvey to entertain his chickens, who don’t produce enough eggs if they’re bored. Lots of fowl jokes ensue as Harvey just can’t get the chickens to care, but finally he has the idea to teach them to type. At first everything is gibberish, but soon they are writing award-winning scripts and Harvey quits acting to be the leader of the Broadway Hen House. I still haven’t found anything in new Woody Allen to match some of his master classes in essay writing deom the 1960s and 1970s, but this is an absurd blast. 4 out of 5 stars

Despite "Park Avenue," the verdict is in that this is a collection - when you're in need of total intellectual wackiness - worth reading in full.

Dashiell Hammett gets extra pulpy in his short stories

Ernest Hemingway is largely credited with moving popular U.S. fiction out of the flourishing Henry James/Victorian style of writing into a leaner, more conversational one. And that is certainly true, but Dashiell Hammett doesn't get enough credit in this department.

His pulpy detective stories began their string of popular publication in 1923, while Hemingway's first book In Our Time was published in Europe in 1924 and not in the U.S. until late 1925. Hemingway may not have ever admited it, but he was under the influence of Hammett. 

While The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are well-known Hammett novels, I wanted to explore his lesser-known short stories a bit.

"The Creeping Siamese" (1926): In the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco branch, a tall, leathery man named Rounds, in town from New York, walks in and collapses dead from a fresh knife wound. The employees can't find anything amiss in their hallway or the rest of their building. The wound has a sarong stuffed into it, which leads the detective on a hunt for the killer. He ends up at the apartment of a local movie-theater owner and a woman he claims to be his wife. Through a very sharp eye for detail, the detective determines the woman had actually been married to the dead man and had accidentally stabbed him after he had located her lover. The story gets its name because the guilty and racist couple had tried to blame everything on a mysterious "siamese" who had supposedly broken into their apartment and shot her beau's leg. A minor story but a good glimpse into Hammett's world of crime, and a nice semi-subtle dig against racism. 3.5 out of 5 stars

"Faith" (appeared for the first time in 2007's compilation The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps): This is the tale of a homeless encampment of people in Maryland, A nomad named Feach tells everyone there that everywhere he's gone, something has gone tremendously wrong. He is a religious fellow and thinks it's God's will for him. But when a block of houses burns nearby, it's discovered that Feach was the one who set the fire, leading the reader to believe it's not God but Feach that is the evil one. Interesting conceptually, and thankfully short, but far from essential.  And being overly wordy, it's not very Hemingway-like. 2 out of 5 stars

“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (1924): This is a bit of a the sequel to another popular Hammett short story published earlier in that year called “The House in Turk Street,” which I would like to read as well. The author practically invented the feline-like, cold-bloody temptress that would be a feature of just about every pulp story by every pulp author to follow. A “fat little” P.I. from the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco - a running enterprise of much Hammett fiction - is called upon to check on a poet who has given his girlfriend $20,000 right before she had left temporarily and suddenly for Baltimore, writes letters back and forth to him for several days, and then seems to vanish completely. Turns out the money had been stolen from the poet’s wealthy brother-in-law, who tells the detective to find the poet and the money discreetly, without his wife finding out. The poet soon also disappears and the detective tracks him and the girl to a bootlegging operation in Half Moon Bay. Bloodshed follows and, although the woman seems to nearly be working her attraction magic on him, in the end, he deposits her to the Redwood City jail. Before she is locked up for likely a very long time (she had a streak of other killings and also had been disguised as a dangerous redhead in the previous story), she whispers “the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable” into the detective’s ear. It's a very fun, and very pulpy, read. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Great Magazine Reads: Lenny Kravitz examines his life and I name my 35 favorite LK songs

It’s no wonder that it seems Lenny Kravitz has always been around. His awesome debut album was released a whopping 35 years ago. MOJO Magazine's April issue featured him in "The MOJO Interview." 

Here are the highlights of that interview as well as my 35 favorite LK songs (overwhelmingly populated by tunes from his first two releases).

• Lenny is now 59.
• He grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn until he was 10 then moved to L.A.
• His dad was a Ukrainian Jew and TV producer while his mom was African-American-Bahamian and known the world over from her role as the neighbor on The Jeffersons.
• Seeing The Jackson 5 at Madison Square Garden at the age of six was transformative.
• When Lenny started his music career, he was known as Romeo Blue (he thought his name was “the most un-rock’n’roll name ever”) before releasing his debut Let Love Rule, an homage to his then-wife Lisa Bonet from The Cosby Show. Their daughter is actor Zoe.
• Actor Cicely Tyson was his mom’s best friend and she was married to Miles Davis, so young Lenny had quite the musical mentor growing up, even though their friendship wasn’t necessarily all about music.
• After Let Love Rule, he wrote “Justify My Love,” which he didn’t feel was quite right for him so he gave it to Madonna.
• On his second album, the perfect Mama Said, Slash rocked the guitar solo on “Always on the Run” and Sean Lennon developed the structure of “All I Ever Wanted.”
• His 12th album, Blue Electric Light, is releasing soon. From the one song I’ve heard, “Human,” it sounds like it could be a fun listen.
• This one and his previous two albums were recorded in the Bahamas. He says he works when inspiration hits him rather than waking up, drinking a coffee, and getting to work. “I wait until I hear something, which can come in a dream, or sitting, or walking around and the Bahamas is great for that.”
• He made what could someday turn into about four albums during the pandemic.
• Kravitz has lots of other hobbies, including his design firm Kravitz Design, which has made the Architectural Digest Top 100 in each of the past three years.

For a solo artist to have 35 songs I like is pretty darn good. There isn't too much of Kravitz's genre-hopping rock that I dislike, although not a lot has drawn mean in over his past 7 or 8 releases. Here are 35 songs that would make a killer compilation in my book:

35. American Woman (5)
34. Johnny Cash (Raise Vibration)
33. I’ll Be Waiting (It’s Time for a Love Revolution)
32. Ride (Raise Vibration)
31. My Love (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
30. My Precious Love (Let Love Rule)
29. Fly Away (5)
28. Can’t Get You Off My Mind (Circus)
27. Sugar (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
26. Rosemary (Let Love Rule)
25. Stand (Black and White America)
24. Stop Draggin’ Around (Mama Said)
23. Butterfly (Mama Said)
22. More Than Anything in This World (Mama Said)
21. Spinning Around Over You (Reality Bites Soundtrack)
20. Blues for Sister Someone (Let Love Rule)
19. What the * Are We Saying (Mama Said)
18. Again (Again)
17. Be (Let Love Rule)
16. Does Anybody Out There Even Care (Let Love Rule)
15. Sittin’ on Top of the World (Let Love Rule)
14. All I Ever Wanted (Mama Said)
13. What Goes Around Comes Around (Mama Said)
12. Are You Gonna Go My Way (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
11. Black Girl (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
10. The Difference is Why (Mama Said)
09. Believe (Are You Gonna Go My Way)
08. Fields of Joy (Mama Said)
07. Flowers for Zoe (Mama Said) 
06. I Build This Garden for Us (Let Love Rule)
05. Always on the Run (Mama Said)
04. Stand by My Woman (Mama Said)
03. Let Love Rule (Let Love Rule)
02. Mr. Cab Driver (Let Love Rule)
01. It Ain’t Over ‘til It’s Over (Mama Said)

How Steve Martin became (and stayed) a titan of comedy

Steve Martin was around 10 when he realized that, even though he didn’t have a talent, he wanted to be on stage. His workaround was to learn magic tricks and say “welcome ladies and gentlemen.” Voila, that put him in show business, and the rest is history ... at least as told in Apple TV+'s new, three-hour documentary STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces.

About that same time, young Steve started a job at Disneyland and his childhood from there was as happy as could be, at least outside his house. His dad was a jerk, and Martin came to the realization later in life that his dad had just not been that good of a person. 

Anyway, he eventually realized that magic was a bit of a dead end but comedy might not be. He met a girl who helped convince him to find the meaning of life and to find himself, and he started going to Long Beach State to study philosophy. 

He discovered he wanted to find “real laughter … like the kind you have with your friends.” Bob Hope and others built up the tension then released it with punchlines. but Martin thought real laughter could come more from building up the tension and not releasing it. The audience would have to pick their own places that made them laugh. 

He transferred to UCLA and took advanced logic then began having new experiences: travelling across the country and also dating a girl whose family was fun-loving in all the ways his own family wasn’t. 

As he aged a little more, he looked like someone from the Eagles then decided to shave his beard, lose his country outfits, and create a new look for a new future. He began opening for his friends in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, as well as lots of other bands, from The Carpenters to Black Oak Arkansas. 

He thought the 500-person venues were too hostile and started headlining his own shows in front of 40 people or so, and it worked. He was killing it with college audience but fell flat to older adults in a week-long run at the Playboy Club in San Francisco. He decided his comedy needed to appear in weird places. 

By 1975, Martin was in his early 30s and thought he was flying the flag for the new world of comedy. Then he saw something come onto TV called Saturday Night Live and worried. But fortunately he became a regular guest on SNL and by the time he retired what could be called his 1970s classic standup act, in 1980, he had become the biggest standup comedian in history.

There isn’t much about 1979’s The Jerk in the documentary, other than that his dad didn’t give it the time of day. I would’ve liked more focus on that (The Jerk is my 21st favorite comedy movie of all-time) and his other best films The Man With Two Brains and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (my 49th favorite). 

Perhaps he doesn't include much about any one of his movies because he says his stand-up career had a beginning, middle, and end, but with movies, they are each like little anecdotes rather than full chapters of a book. In fact, one of his hobbies detailed in the doc is creating dialogue for comic strips that a friend then draws. Many of those are about the anecdotes from and of his films.

There are also stories about his other hobbies, which include having dogs and collecting paintings. And finally, the doc covers his relationship with comedy buddy Martin Short and his wife Anne Stringfield, whom he met when she was fact checking his writing for The New Yorker.

I especially enjoyed the stories in the documentary from his childhood and coming of age in the comedy scene. Listening to his records, reading his short-essay collections, and seeing Martin on SNL were among my fondest childhood memories. His life was long overdue for a telling in this format, although the documentary could have been tightened up just a little bit.

4 out of 5 stars

Misinformation is a running theme when some non-Jews attempt to tell the Jewish story

While Austria and Serbia began fighting in World War I, and while many other countries began to join into the fighting, a series of frenzied negotiations and conflicting agreements took place. One was the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that “promised to reestablish an independent national home for the Jewish people in the backwater former Ottoman province of Palestine.” 

By the end of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Allies had divided the former Ottoman Empire, a broad, wide-open, and not divided landscape, “into new and invented states based on colonial interests rather than natural borders, tribal affiliation, family connections, or a desire for self-determination” and “to secure the establishment of the national Jewish home.”

A few years' later, in 1924, Noa Tishby’s grandmother was living in Russia and realized - or thought she realized - she was part of and in a good free society. But while seemingly good, a dark underbelly of that society was simultaneously “trying to break down the Jews. It occured to her grandmother that she wanted “a new movement to rebuild the old homeland based on communal ideas, shared living, shared ownership of all personal possessions, and self-sufficiency.” Luckily she escaped before being sent to Siberian work camps, but unluckily her family “left Russia penniless and embarked on a boat, infested with rodents and thieves, from Odessa to the promised land” - also known as the harsh and barren landscape of Jaffa (what is now part of Tel Aviv). Tishby’s grandmother was living at the very tipping point of “Zionism.”

As Tishby continues with fascinating story after fascinating story in 2021's Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (and she has a new one as well called Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew, which she wrote with ex-NFL player Emmanuel Acho and discussed with him recently on the CBS Morning Show - pictured), she notes, “After thousands of conversations with highly educated people, I have come to realize that most don’t know” what Zionism means.

Jews, a minuscule portion (less than 1 percent) of the global population, have long been discriminated against, with the Russian tsars being particularly heinous and continuous offenders. In 1903, the tsar’s secret police force created “one of the first pieces of viral fake news” called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which “claimed Jews were part of a global conspiracy to take over the world.” Henry Ford went on and on about it in his babblings for the paper he owned called the Dearborn Independent. Partly because of that, the book was a huge bestseller, contributing to the slaughter and banishment of millions of Jews the world over. “Cue the Zionist movement,” which was basically all about finding a safe harbor and being able to practice self determination like everyone else.

Theodore Herzl really coined the term Zionism in the 1890s when he realized Jews could never really “shake off the Jewishness” around other people and that a homeland to return to as needed was a pretty good idea. Jewish people were spread out all over the world, mostly persecuted in ghetto-ish areas, and the idea of going off to this far-off place was foreign and not seriously considered by the vast majority, but Herzl’s rallying began to slowly take affect. His writing, beginning with The Jewish State, was laughed at, not covered by the media, and called silly and desperate. The Russian Jewry were the ones who accepted it the most and that’s how it got to Tishby’a grandmother and her family. 

Herzl got Jews to meet in 1897 in Switzerland for the First Zionist Congress, and while the attendees had trouble agreeing on much of anything, they did end up agreeing that Israel should be the home base, "aliyah" or migration to Israel could connect the diaspora, the Hebrew language would be restored, and all Jews should join in solidarity against antisemitism. It would take about 50 years, and a little after Herzl’s death, but the newly formed United Nations established a Jewish state in Israel.

Herzl's subsequent writings about the topic as the 1900s began sounded like John Lennon and ahead of his time, with a slogan of “man, you are my brother!” Right on, Theo! He tried to get the support of leaders from around the world but it would take the Holocaust for there to be enough support for the Jews to finally have a little home, to have Israel. Those who stayed behind in Europe perished in World War II, but those who had made it to Israel survived. 

Tishby, the author, grew up in Israel and, well into her teens, didn’t realize there was such a thing as anti-Zionism until she was having a romantic moment with a hot guy from Germany who told her there possibly wasn’t really such a thing as the Holocaust. For someone whose grandmother had written so much of the her history down, it was clear that not only would this boy get no more of her time that night, but Tishby’s goal in life would be to start to undue the misinformation that dangerously exists around the Jewish story.

I'm really enjoying this book and it's as important as ever, as antisemitism puzzlingly marches on and seemingly progressive students at colleges all over the U.S. appear to be propagating the misinformation of those long-ago terror-mongering and evil Russian tsars.

Anyone But You offers the rare opportunity to watch a worthy rom-com

I must be getting warmed up for Challengers (a tennis rom-com with Zendaya that I'm very excited about) because - on the plane from Washington, D.C. to St. Louis - I had just enough time to watch Anyone But You. The flick does the genre relatively proud in a day and age when rom-coms have been stumbling along to find any footing. 

Bea, played by Sydney Sweeney with slapstick body language, is a law student who bumps into debonaire Ben (Top Gun: Maverick's Glen Powell) at a Boston coffee shop. The two hit it off and have a magical night together, which goes wrong when some pedestrian (it would have been better to be outrageous Three's Company-style) miscommunication occurs the next morning. This sets them on a course to despising each other, even after they randomly meet again months later and are forced into spending time together at a wedding in Sydney, Australia. 

The whole thing is like a ridiculous beach-read novel that you can't put down even though you know you probably should. It's also painfully far-fetched, but that's another reason to enjoy it some time when you have 90 minutes to put your brain on autopilot.

Here are a few interesting things about Anyone But You (not spoilers):

• Sweeney was excellent in the first season of The White Lotus and has been one of the hottest actors since then.
• The story is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
• Darren Barnet from Never Have I Ever plays one of Bea's love interests.
• Dermot Mulroney stars as Bea’s father and Director Will Gluck made the cast watch Mulroney's 1997 rom-com classic My Best Friend’s Wedding before filming.
• Este Haim of the band Haim was in charge of music.
• Production had some tribulations, including a spider biting Sweeney and a helicopter having to make an emergency landing.
• Anyone But You caught word-of-mouth fire and made more money at the box office in week 2 of its release than it did in week 1 and more in week 3 than in week 2.
• Part of the reason for the film's popularity was that Powell and Sweeney hung out together in real life and leaned into selling their chemistry as a reason for the masses to check them out on the big screen.
• It has become huge overseas, with nearly $220 million in global box-office gross.

In the end, Sweeny and Powell truly do sell what would have been an average movie into a highly watchable one.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Teenage Fanclub returns for another great appearance at the 9:30 Club

Friday night marked the fourth time I’ve seen the band from Glasgow that I'm sure I would rank among my top 15 bands of all time. Teenage Fanclub played a tight 90-minute set that was - as to be expected from such harmonious songsmiths, who have never been capable of writing a band tune - as glorious as any self-respecting indie-rocker who came of age in the 1990s would expect.

One-third of the classic songwriting trio, Gerard Love, has retired, so his songs such as “Star Sign” were sadly missing from the setlist. But Stephen Black from Wales filled in ably on bass and also opened the night with a solo performance under the name Sweet Baboo. (I'm not sure why he was the bassist, as I thought the regular band member was still Dave McGowan, who doubles on bass for Belle and Sebastian.) Euros Childs is also an excellent addition to the band, as I've been a fan of his weirdo band Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci for a long time and his harmonies and keyboard work adds plenty to the Fanclub.

Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley are in a severly underrated league of their own as the band's now-primary songwriters and guitarists.

The show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. was loaded with numbers from their latest release, 2023's Nothing Lasts Forever, which wasn't such a bad thing since I ranked that my 18th favorite album of 2023. Classic 1990s-era highlights included "Alcoholiday," "The Concept," "What You Do to Me," and "Metal Baby" from 1991's Bandwagonesque; "Your Love is the Place Where I Come From" off 1997's Songs From Northern Britain; and of course the closer and highlight, "Everything Flows" from 1990's A Catholic Education.

My only minor complaint was the lack of any songs from 1993's Thirteen or 1995's Grand Prix, but getting a 20-song set means there really wasn't much wrong on this night. It was also a blast getting to hang out with my neighbor buddies Brian and Brian (not Bryan, as we reiterated throughout the night), Scott, and Linda and eating delicious pizza-by-the-slice at Andy's Pizza across the street.

4.5 out of 5 stars

Earth's hot spots can blow just about anytime and anyplace

Nebraska used to be like the Serengeti plains in Africa, which is now where much of the world goes when they want to have the very best safaris. Starting in 1971, animal bones such as those found in Africa were discovered there buried under volcanic ash, which was odd, since volcanoes have never been in Nebraska. Through more scientific discovery, the source of the ash that killed all the animals in the state was present-day Yellowstone National Park, about 1,600 miles away. 

The park is the source of such a cataclysmic hot spot on earth that the ash in Nebraska was about 10 feet deep. And those massive volcanoes at Yellowstone happen every six hundred thousand years. Oh, and by the way, it’s been six hundred thousand years since Yellowstone blew hard.

If that’s not bleak enough for you, then consider that we know lots more about the sun’s core than we do the middle of the Earth. “If the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken through the skin,” via our various mining operations, writes Bill Bryson in his classic A Short History of Nearly Everything. (I also wrote about the geology section of the book back in 2022.)

We hear a lot about the Richter scale, which is less an actual scale and more an idea about the power of individual earthquakes. It’s named after Charles Richter who was at Caltech the 1930s. Since that time, the two largest quakes measured were both in the low 9s, centered in Alaska in 1964 and in the ocean near Chile in 1960. Just a little less powerful was the one in 1755 that destroyed Lisbon, Portugal. Sixty-thousand people died and virtually all the buildings there crumbled.

Tokyo could consider a new marketing slogan as “the city waiting to die” because it sits on three tectonic plates. It suffered a big quake in 1923 that killed 200,000 people. If that happened today, the economic cost would exceed $7 trillion, which, give or take, is about one-tenth of all the money that exists in the world.

Less understood are earthquakes called intraplate quakes, which aren’t close to plate boundaries, come from much deeper underground, and are completely unpredictable. The three worst of this kind all happened in the winter of 1811-1812 in New Madrid, Missouri (yes, the place Uncle Tupelo sang about). These quakes caused chimneys to fall in Cincinnati, wrecked boats docked on the East Coast, and toppled scaffolding on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Such quakes “are as random as lightning” and “have never been known to happen in the same place twice.”

Moving deeper down to the Earth’s core, scientists - basically - don’t know much:

• They know that there is liquid that causes magnetism (unlike the Moon and Mars, which don’t have magnetic fields). 
• They know that the magnetic field changes and was three times more powerful during the time of the dinosaurs than it is now. 
• They know the field reverses itself about every 500,000 years. We don’t really want to be around during one of these reversals because cosmic rays from space will do a serious number on us at that point. For now, the field protects us. I guess you could say we are one with the Force. 

In 1980, the world was captivated for two months while it appeared Mount St. Helens in Washington state was going to erupt. Finally it did and “it was the biggest landslide in human history and carried enough material to bury the whole of Manhattan” in about 400 feet of ash. Fifty-seven people died, which was lucky because it was a Sunday and many timber workers were not in the death zone. About 80 miles away, in the town of Yakima, Washington, ash turned the streets to dark in a place that had no emergency plan or emergency broadcast system because the Sunday-morning staff didn’t know how to work the equipment. Yakima was completely shut down for three days, and it had received less than an inch of ash. 

“Now bear that in mind, please," Bryson writes, "as we consider what a Yellowstone blast would do.”

Bob Pollard and Guided By Voices get the biographical treatment in Closer You Are, part 1

Considering that Guided By Voices ranks as my second-favorite band of all-time behind The Beatles, it's a quirk of life that I haven't yet read Matthew Cutter's 2018 GBV and Robert Pollard biography Closer You Are.

Here is Part 1 of a series on my favorite nuggets from the book:

• When young Bobby discovered vinyl records around 4th grade, his dad got him a Columbia House membership and he made his choices based on how cool the covers were, after noting that "in rock, you can judge a book by the cover."
• Also at that age, his teacher let him and three classmates perform in class (as I similarly did with a friend in 6th grade). The other three made the sounds of the instruments with their voices while Bobby sang the tunes. After that, girls chased them through the playground like The Beatles in A Hard Days Night.
• Bob still lived at home in Dayton, Ohio when he started at Wright State University as “a townie almost invisible amid throngs of imported East and West Coast brats.” He detected an air of “sameness.” Everyone wanted to get a job and get married and grow up. 
• He was a great three-sport athlete in high school. Now in college, he still didn’t even have to try that hard at baseball to be a standout and threw a no-hitter in 1978 for the university. He would later call baseball “a nine-man stand around” and thought he better focus on school as a backup plan. His major in elementary education and minor in physical education were harder than they would seem and made him work hard. His writing teacher encouraged his work and opened his mind further to the possibility of creativity. He had long been creating album artwork but now, not finding anyone who could play guitar, he started playing the instrument himself and had a credo of “fuck lessons.”
• Bob dabbled in some bands but nothing really stuck. Then some guys called him out of the blue to see if he would be their frontman because they had heard him singing walking through the college hallways. Future GBV legend Mitch Mitchell, who Bob had known from high-school football, would also join this band, called the Clones, on bass. The first show, in front of about 200 people, went well and Bob was instantly a dynamic performer. They soon were renamed Anacrusis. The band would try to slip a few originals into its sets but it was tricky because fans and bar owners wanted rock covers. When Bob and Mitch started getting into post-punk like Wire and XTC, the writing was on the wall that this classic-rock group was near its end. 
• Mitch and Bob kept imagining that they would soon have a new group to launch. They still couldn’t actually play music very well, but they would bang on guitars, go shirtless, jump around, and make up rules for their non-existent rock band. They were preparing themselves to look good so that whenever the other pieces would eventually fall into place, they would be ready to rock the world. 
• But first, Bob was about to embark on a 14-year career as a fourth-grade teacher.

Serving in tennis is tough, but it can at least be a little easier with good advice

It's downright strange that serving is so difficult in tennis. I mean, I almost never miss a serve in volleyball and I almost never play volleyball. But I play tennis all the time and the serve remains at least a partial mystery and I view it as a lifetime goal to improve it.

I can rocket my first serve but it often has a low percentage, so it’s not great. I used to dink my second serve instead of swinging hard through from the 7 o’clock to the 2 o’clock positions to get good spin and action. At least I'm doing that now and realize that swinging slow is a recipe for a double fault. 

I’ve been getting coached and watching and reading a lot about serving in recent years and I think my serve is finally becoming a weapon, which is an ultimate goal for someone at the 4.0 level like myself.

Returning your opponent’s serve is also part of this equation. I tend to think I'm fairly decent at reading my opponent's body language to anticipate where the serve is going to go. But I don't think I've ever consciously watched the toss to get clued into where it will go. This article online at Feel Tennis has some good pointers along those lines. The advice is also helpful in showing where I should be tossing the ball myself depending on whether I'm serving flat, with a slice, or with a kick/topspin (see image above).

For match play, the serve begins right at the coin toss. It’s been assumed forever that if you win the toss, you elect to serve. But Ian Westermann, in his, well, essential book (and website) Essential Tennis, says electing serve is the right choice “for about 20 percent of the tennis-playing population. If your serve is a weapon and you can consistently get it in, then by all means, serve!”

He says that if you are a skill level of 3.5 or below, always let your opponent serve. Even at 4.0 and higher, let your opponent serve unless: 

• your serve is a weapon
• you’ve had a chance to fully warm up your serve, and 
• you’re “on” and feeling great before the match starts.

Also, if you lose the toss and your opponent elects to serve, choose the side for yourself that will have your opponent serving into the sun to start things off. 

In a recent scenario, I played a guy who only took six warmup serves and I had gotten there before him and taken a couple dozen warmups, so I knew he didn’t need much warmup and would just get his serve in no matter what, plus I was warmed up, so I made the easy call to serve first.

On the actual serve itself, Westermann recommends stopping trying to serve your brains out on the first serve, which, as mentioned, I’ve done most of my life. He logically says to find the serve that gives your opponent the most trouble, which will be different from player to player, but that a kick serve that the returner has to try to hit at head level may be a good option for many servers. 

For a second serve, he preaches “up and away,” meaning to keep a quickness in your motion and a slice spin (moving your racket from 7 to 2 o'clock). Slowing down your motion, even though it seems like the right thing to do, is never the answer. I’ve been working on that a lot over the past year, trying to eliminate my tendency to dink my second serve, and I can vouch that this is absolutely the right advice. It just takes a little getting used to after a lifetime of having a bad habit.

Westermann says players are only as strong as their weakest link, which is often the second serve. His recommendations for getting rid of the dink - what he calls the pattycake - second serve are:

• to practice rolling the tennis ball on your palm with your racket up above your head where you would be hitting the serve (see the photo to the right), which will in turn give you a sense of feel for how you'll be putting spin on the ball
• then nice and casually flip the ball off your hand and turn your racket so the side that was rubbing the ball is flipped to facing the wall or fence behind you and the court, and
• then continue further on and have the racket go down around in front of your legs, so that your motion has completed almost a full circle.

Westermann says that after getting comfortable with all those individual parts of the full motion in his "curve the serve" technique, try performing an actual serve with that motion. The full swing should be mostly parallel to the baseline rather than towards the opponent and that you should hear an aggressive "clicking" or "brushing" sound rather than a flat "thud" sound. Once you see that your second serve is clearing the net by 4 or 5 feet, then you can start getting more aggressive with it since you know you have so much room to work with.

Westermann also recommends playing a set with an opponent and making it a rule that you both only get one serve each time. This will help both of you to make your serves tougher to return and more accurate at the same time.