I love me some LA times festival of books. I’ve been soaking in it all day, and I think the panels will be great, the stages, the crazy big campus, the authors riding on golf carts, the nighttime events, the quiet mornings, great great great.
But then it’s over, and our literary lives in LA must go on. Mine, fortunately, will be going on at Vroman’s, where I’ll be interviewing Ben Greenman at 7pm on Tuesday, April 28.
Greenman — I can’t call him Ben yet, I haven’t met him. Although I will, at the festival, where I’ll be moderating a panel he’s on — hang on, focus. Ok. So. Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker, and he’s the author of a pile of books playing with pop culture and the brilliant booklike project “Correspondences.” I’d call his new book, “Please Step Back,” a kind of musical fable. It follows the path of Rock Foxx and the Foxes, a band which bears no small resemblance to Sly and the Family Stone.
Writing about music is insanely hard — like dancing about architecture or swimming about politics — but Greenman succeeds, I think, using resonant, uncomplicated metaphors and carefully-weighted sentences to bring the pop and soul and funk of the music of the sixties and seventies to life (but it’s WAY more fun than that sounds). It’s all through the world of a regular-enough guy who becomes a brilliant, progressively more fucked-up musician.
After blogging so much for the LA Times, it is inordinantly fun to type the word fuck in a blog post.
Did I mention we might have a boom box at Vroman’s? How can I get it to play my Sly Stone vinyl?
Ok, right, focus. Vroman’s is in Pasadena; we’ll be in the upstairs reading area. The event begins at 7pm on Tuesday night. It’ll be hot fun in the springtime. Come.
