My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. I just wrapped up posting his 50 Best Albums. But I figured I’d keep “Music Monday” going with more of the stuff Bren wrote about music.
His writing is part music-critique, part memoir, part cultural snapshot. A reminder that many of these pieces were written a decade ago, in some cases more. Melody is now my brother’s wife (and like a sister to me), and they have two sons, whom I love dearly. And Bren’s son Cashel is now a college student. WTF.
I have always loved Bren’s writing, so I am happy to share it with you!
Hollywood Bowl, Pt. 3: Indiana Star Jones Close Encounter Wars!
My son is still at the age when most music bores him. Sitting still long enough to take in a piece of music is just not important. There are some exceptions.
He knows Green Day’s American Idiot album by heart. I highly approve of this mania and we have spent many a moment in the traffic of LA singing along to “Holiday”, “Jesus of Suburbia”, and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”. The next time they tour, Cashel and I will be in attendance.
He’s always loved The Beatles, who I believe to be the first/best children’s music artists.
He shook his little diapered rump to the Billy Bragg/Wilco/Woody Guthrie Mermaid Avenue album just as he was starting to walk.
He called music “doo-doo wa-doo” after a bit of nonsense singing on Dr. Mars first album. The song “Then She Says” has those syllables and Cash would say “doo-doo wa-doo” when he wanted to listen to music.
But Cashel’s musical hero is of course a product of the movies. John Williams. He has all the soundtracks to the Star Wars films, he prefers Williams’ work on the Harry Potter films to his successors, and he can identify a Williams’ piece immediately.
For his first piano recital he played the “Death Star” theme. He also entered the stage with his arms thrust in the air in triumph as if he were a lead singer addressing an arena of adoring fans, but that is another story.
Every year in the fall, John Williams comes to The Hollywood Bowl and performs music from the films that he has worked on and also music from the film composers who most influenced him. I bought tickets and decided to surprise Cash.
I’d forgotten, however, that surprises do not fill him with excitement. They make him grumpy. Poor kid gets control freak genes from both sides.
You would have thought I was taking him to the dentist. I had gone too far along on the surprise bit to break and it became a test of will. He sat in the back seat mumbling and asking pointed questions about how long it was going to be and why couldn’t we just go to the movies instead. And it better not be too loud whatever it was and what if he couldn’t see over the people in front of him. By the time we pulled into the parking lot he was about to have a Close Encounter with my temper.
For those of you who haven’t been to The Hollywood Bowl, you sometimes wind up parking a good ways away. Down a hill.
Mr. Grumbly-pants kept up an incessant monologue about how tired his legs were and how far we had to go. He was like Sam and Frodo climbing Mt. Doom.
There on the marquee in front of us were the words “John Williams At The Movies” or something to that effect.
To Cashel’s credit, he began to positively gush with excitement. I shifted gears along with him even though he’d been a royal pain in the butt.
We got to our little section of bench and snuggled up against the chill.
What followed was pure entertainment. I had been concentrating on what this would be like for Cash, seeing music from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc. But as the orchestra wove its way through all of this music, I realized it was like a soundtrack of my past.
All of a sudden I was back seeing Empire Strikes Back at a drive-in with all of my cousins on my mother’s side. I was seeing that text scroll across the stars. I was gasping at the size of the space ship. I was pretending to be Han Solo in the backyard. Hell, I was 10 again.
And so the surprise that I’d sprung on Cash was actually on me. And, just like Cash, it wiped my grumpiness away. There was John Williams, in his 80’s, waving that baton and bringing all those stories to life through his music.
On the walk back to the car, Cash didn’t even notice how far he’d gone.
— Brendan O’Malley
– by Janice S. Robinson. This is FASCINATING. H.D., one of those who launched Modernism, and certainly the driving force and – Muse of many others – behind Imagism (Ezra Pound started “his” movement by promoting her work.) Here’s my 
, by Clive James. I can’t believe I’ve never read this TOME before. I started it before I quarantined myself, reading a little chapter a day: each chapter is on another figure, arranged alphabetically (I love the structure, you never know who is coming next), and I have already added to my reading list based on this book. He’s also a wondrous writer. 
, by Marcel Proust. Finally tackling this. I finished Part 1 in January. Nobody told me this book was funny. Often laugh-out-loud funny. The insanity and despair of a teenage crush. A couple pages a day. This is gonna take me forever. But I’ve got time. 
– compiled by the man himself: a lifetime of writing. One of my favorite writers of all-time, for his prose filled with incandescence and darkness, back to back. Light and dark, not so much competing as co-existent. Very few people can even bear it. He could. His writing makes me want to faint. Or go to church. 
: the Library of America volume. For years now, I start off my day reading poetry. It’s a thing. It started with the year I worked my way through Stephen Booth’s extraordinary edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets (
, by Robert Kolker. Excellent true crime book written by a man who has done his homework. Intensely researched. I believe this has been turned into a Netflix series, which I’ll get into once I finish my Babylon Berlin re-watch. 
– it’s just extraordinary, this lifelong correspondence between two poets, lifelong friends. Lowell’s yearly hospitalizations for mania are quite frightening, and you can feel it ratcheting up in his letters, and it goes on such a pattern I find myself thinking, “He’s headed for a crash.” Because Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil for so long, while Lowell lived in Boston/New York – they wrote constantly. If Bishop had moved to New York, we wouldn’t have had this correspondence. It’s quite long, this book, so it’s been taking me forever to get through it. I read a couple pages before going to bed. 
, by Scott Shane. Slightly amazed I haven’t run across this book before, since Russia, Stalin, Communism, Brainwashing, Tyranny, etc. have been overriding obsession ever since I read 1984 in high school. At any rate, Clive James recommended it in a throwaway line in the book listed above and I bought it immediately. We learn about the present from knowing about the past, even if it is a lesson of what NOT to do (especially if that’s the lesson). Eventually, we will need to dismantle the utopias fogging the minds of our fellow citizens. And since we now, apparently, are way beyond the possibility of a 
, by Heda Kovaly. Look at those dates. Ominous dates. (Side note: I am so relieved that I, through sheer osmosis and reading and listening to people who are older than I am, have the timeline of the 20th century in my head. Automatically. I don’t know everything, far from it, but I know the basic chronology. I had an exchange with a younger critic on Twitter, who theorized that a certain Surrealist filmmaker’s films had such an impact because they happened during a “sunnier time.” #1: There is literally no such thing in history as a “sunnier time.” What was “sunny” for one group was “cloudy” for another. Politically, historically, “sunny” doesn’t exist. This woman makes money writing about film. Sunnier time? When exactly would that be in the TWENTIETH CENTURY? Are you kidding me? Generations were lost in unimaginable carnage from start to finish. Two World Wars? A worldwide economic depression? The rise of fascism overtaking democracies? The destruction of Europe? Twice in 20 years? The Holocaust? I’m sorry. This woman may be smart about some things, but she’s also an idiot. I went easy on her in my response. She said, “I guess things are so bad now every other time seems sunnier.” I get it. She’s young. When I was young I knew not to call the 1930s and 1940s a “sunnier time”, though. What the fuck is going on. So now I know what I’m dealing with when I deal with her). At any rate: this is another recommendation from Clive James’ book. He spoke about it so strongly I bought it immediately. But it’s not exactly readily available. It took weeks to get to me. I read the first paragraph and it was so intense I had to put it down. She was decimated by the Holocaust. And then decimated again by the Communist regime following. It’s a slim little volume. I … “look forward” to reading it (if you can look forward to reading one long howl of anguish). 
, by Jozef Czapski, a writer and painter who did a series of lectures on Proust while he was in a Soviet prison camp during the Second World War. Since I’m reading Proust right now, I thought this might be a good accompanying book. Humans are amazing. You’re in the gulag, and to keep you sane, you give lectures to other prisoners about Proust’s 6-volume book, and of course you’re doing it all from memory, because you don’t have your books in the gulag. 
, by the monumental Stefan Zweig. A man who watched his world vanish. Watched the rise of brutality. Killed himself with his wife after fleeing Vienna post Anschluss to Argentina. Devastating. (His book Beware of Pity is one of the great novels of the 20th century. 
