Big Table

The Episode

J Dilla—aka James Dewitt Yancey or Jaydee as he was previously known—was a musical genius who was hardly known to mainstream audiences during his brief life. 

In Dilla Time—equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history—hip hop historian and NYU professor Dan Charnas chronicles this musical outlier who changed popular music behind the scenes, working with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influencing the music of superstars like Michael and Janet Jackson.

Dilla died at the age of 32, and in his lifetime never had a pop hit. Since his death, however, he has become a demigod of sorts: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel he created on a drum machine, one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play.
 

Charnas echoes the life of James DeWitt Yancey from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Charnas also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla’s own “Motown,” to funk, techno, and disco.

Dilla Time (MCD/FSG, 2022) is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to “see” and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way. It’s the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years, Dilla Time is a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla’s music itself.

Filling in for interviewing duties this episode is Charnas’ NYU professor colleague and Hat & Beard Press editor Vivien Goldman, who is the author, most recently, of Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot.

Here is Vivien’s conversation with Dan Charnas, discussing the life and times of J Dilla.

Reading by Dan Charnas from Dilla Time.

music by J Dilla

The Interview
It’s not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years.

Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when I was working for the indie record label Drag City. Keene had done the cover art for the Silver Jews’ Arizona Record as well as Pavement’s Wowee Zowee on Matador. He had gone to college with David Berman (Silver Jews) and Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) in the 1980s, and they remained friends and collaborators afterward.

Although he is known to many for his indie rock album covers, he has a much bigger audience today outside of the music scene of downtown NY from another era. Not only is he now collected in museums but he is still lovingly known for making affordable art: most of Keene’s work retails for under $70; in the 1990s heyday, it was only $5 or $10 a piece. Steve continues to crank out 50 paintings at a time, day-in and day-out, from his converted auto body shop home/studio in Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked with his architect wife and family for decades.

The Steve Keene Art Book—originally conceived during his sold out show at Shepard Fairey’s LA Gallery Subliminal Projects in 2016—is the first art book dedicated exclusively to his work as a fine artist. For this episode, I spoke with the book’s editor Daniel Efram, a photographer, producer, and long-time manager of the Apples in Stereo—for whom Keene also created the cover art on Fun Trick Noise Maker 25 years ago—about Steve Keene and his lifelong artistic journey.

I’ve been a long-time fan and collector of Keene’s work. Twenty years ago, I spent a day with him, profiling him in the pages of Stop Smiling, “The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes,” which I published from 1995 to 2009 from Chicago and New York. Hence, this was a nice circle of life moment. 

The Steve Keene Art Book is published through Hat & Beard Press and Tractor Beam, Efram's New York City-based press. 

The Reading

Editor Daniel Efram reads from his essay in The Steve Keene Art Book.

Music by The Apples in Stereo

Adam Clair was barely out of undergrad when he began the manuscript for Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery (Hachette Books, 2022).

The book is a definitive history of the 1990s underground musical movement known as the Elephant 6 Collective. Founded by Robert Schneider, Bill Doss, Will Cullen Hart, and Jeff Mangum, who grew up as friends in the small town of Ruston, Louisiana, the Elephant 6 was initially centered around three bands—the Apples in Stereo, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Olivia Tremor Control—whose records were expertly produced in home studios in Denver and Athens, Georgia, by Robert Schneider, who wouldn’t mind being referred to as the Brian Wilson-like engineer extraordinaire of the collective. (Schneider is currently a professor of math in Georgia, having earned a PhD in his post-rocker years.)

By the late-1990s, the Elephant 6 had exploded onto the musical scene in a way that hasn’t really been felt since—their ’60s psychedelia-inspired, almost utopian mindset of a better world with their music as the soundtrack was as intoxicating then as it is now.

Rock ‘n’ Roll stardom was something that seemed to frighten and elude the collective’s founders, however, who were more focused on the art of the music than on the business side.

By the turn of the century, relentless touring and recording schedules led Neutral Milk Hotel’s front man Jeff Mangum to retreat from performing—and even from doing interviews. The Olivia’s disbanded for a time, the Apples changed line ups, and the second-generation bands, like Of Montreal and Beulah, began to build their own audiences. In 2013, the original members of Neutral Milk Hotel reunited for a year or two of touring. Then Bill Doss from Olivia Tremor Control passed away suddenly, thwarting their comeback.

All the while, Adam Clair was gathering reportage. He conducted over 100 interviews over 13 years to complete Endless Endless. Although the reclusive Jeff Mangum did not speak to him for the book, Clair was able to carve in Mangum’s voice from past interviews (more than I remember taking place, having been around to see it unfold in real time the first time around). 

Clair and I spoke recently about Endless Endless and how it came to be. Tune in for all the details.

For the Reading this episode, Adam Clair reads from his introduction to Endless Endless.

Music by The Olivia Tremor Control

José Vadi grew up in California’s Inland Empire, but his roots go back to Puerto Rico and Mexico. His abuelo, or grandfather, was an Okie who hopped freight trains west to Nebraska and then on to California, the promised land. 

Like many immigrants, he worked for a time as a migrant worker in the salad bowl of California’s agriculturally rich central valley, before settling down in the San Bernardino Valley to raise a family. 

Vadi’s second book, Inter State: Essays from California (Soft Skull Press), is an innovative collection of interconnected essays. Each piece appeared elsewhere previously, in slightly different form, but together, they create a prismatic picture of California’s sprawling nooks and crannies—from the agricultural lands to the gentrifying urban culture of the bay area. 

Vadi’s routines, including commuting to his old job in San Francisco, are a common thread that weave these essays together. Although they were all written between 2015 and early 2020, as Vadi notes in the afterword, “connecting California, then the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, and 2020’s record-breaking fire season grabbed and pulled at the seams as hard, quickly and destructively as possible.” 

Inter State is a valuable book in understanding the California of today, a state rife with stubborn issues: neo-liberal fantasy-land economics, a housing crisis, an ill-prepared bureaucracy for managing climate change and natural disasters, and largely tone-deaf leaders who may say the right things but who are just as compromised as some of the swamp creatures in Washington, DC. 

And yet… Vadi’s book is hopeful. He left the Bay Area for Sacramento and now has more time to write poems, essays, plays, take photos, and skateboard (another undercurrent in the book). He seems to have successfully removed late capitalism as a hinderance to his life, at least for now. His new surroundings in Sacramento have renewed his creativity and purpose. We caught up recently to discuss Inter State and what he’s up to next.

The Reading: 

Jose Vadi reads from his title essay, "Inter State."

Music by Pharaohs

The Interview:

Although he did experience some fanfare in his lifetime, German writer, academic, and novelist W.G. Sebald—Max to his friends and colleagues—died 20 years ago in a car crash near his adoptive home in Norwich, England. He was only 58.

His postmodern novels—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—were written in quick succession in a period of less than 10 years, and they were all published in English translations in less than five years, making him one of Germany’s biggest authors, almost overnight. 

Before his death, Sebald had taught in the British university system for decades, mainly at the University of East Anglia, where he helped found the literary translation department. He really did not begin writing in his signature style—a mix of travelogue, memoir, historical fiction with embedded pictures and ephemera—until middle age, however. Walter Benjamin famously opined that any great writer creates their own genre; Sebald accomplished this with just a brief collection of books. 

Through his unique, poetic prose style of writing, his books grab hold and immerse readers in a world of memory and loss like no other novelist. Trauma runs through his work and his characters seem so real because, like most fictional creations—at least in part—they are based on real people. Sebald’s distinctive style got him into trouble, both when he was alive and certainly posthumously. Some readers have taken issue with his re-purposing of Jewish folks’ true-life stories. He has been accused, in some cases, of exploiting these stories for personal gain through novelization. 

When I first began to read his work, shortly after his death in 2001, I interpreted his work to be an homage to the Jewish lives he chronicled, written by a German who grew up in the shadow, silence, and shame of the horrors of WWII. Sebald’s father was a military man—a Nazi officer during the war and a member of the re-constituted German army in the post-war years. Sebald grew up in the beatific surroundings of Bavaria in Germany and had a deep hatred for the Nazi regime and his own family’s complicity. The fate of the Jews—and other minorities targeted by the Nazi war machine—is a mournful thread that Sebald tears at throughout all of his novels. He also wrote a nonfiction study of the bombings of German cities, entitled On the Natural History of Destruction.

Enter biographer Carole Angier, whose previous books include studies of novelist Jean Rhys and Italian physicist and writer Primo Levi. Angier, who grew up in Canada before returning to the UK, is of Viennese descent. She is also Jewish and roughly the same age Sebald would have been had he lived. It took her seven years to finish Speak, Silence (Bloomsbury, 2021). The title, of course, a nod to Nabokov’s famous memoir, Speak, Memory, one of Sebald’s favorite books. 

Angier and I caught up recently to discuss her 600-plus-page doorstopper of a book. One of the reasons I wanted to talk with her about it—apart from my longtime love of Sebald—was to ask for her thoughts on the controversy his work still seems to generate, even 20 years after his death. A great deal of the reviews of Speak, Silence, in the States at least, were hyper-critical of Sebald playing fast and loose with some facts in his fiction. But all great fiction writers pluck characteristics and facts to shape their fictional worlds and, so, while Sebald’s use of real photographs and ephemera in his work for visual effect made his narrative style offensive to some, it also made it more potent for others. In this interview, Angier speaks to this subject, and many more.

The Reading:

For the reading, we pulled audio from an event at the 92nd Street Y from 2001, where Sebald read from his then newest novel Austerlitz. He was tragically killed in a car crash later that year. 

Music by Tangerine Dream

92Y Reading link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccMCGjWLlhY&t=1620s

Interview: 

As one of the most influential book editors of his generation—first at Simon & Shuster and then, for many years, at Knopf and Random House, Robert Gottlieb has lived a charmed life.

He was also one of the few storied editors of The New Yorker  in the 1990s.

Gottlieb’s other two passions are modern dance and cinema: He helped program the George Balanchine Theatre for decades from his editor’s desk, all while acquiring and editing myriad film books during those years.

And now, at 90, he’s written a film biography himself: A definitive portrait of Swedish actress Greta Garbo, whose elusiveness, he illustrates, was something she carried with her throughout her life: from her peasant-girl days in Stockholm in the early 20th century to her Hollywood years to her reclusive life in New York for five decades after retreating from Hollywood and acting in the early 1940s, just as the US entered WWII.

Garbo, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a gorgeously illustrated hybrid book, with dozens of images helping to illustrate the enigma that Garbo created onscreen. After Gottlieb's main narrative, the book also includes a Garbo Reader of sorts, with other published work and images about her life and times, illuminating the whole picture of this mysterious yet trailblazing woman, whose own privacy was essential to her happiness and very existence.

As a child of the depression years, Garbo was omnipresent in Gottlieb’s mind as a young kid going to see films in New York. Here, his wonderful prose  captures this complicated woman who became one of the most famous faces in the world, almost overnight. And yet, she retired at age 35, after acting in only 28 films.

Garbo is an invaluable book for anyone interested in her work and film history; from the silent era to the Golden Age of cinema.

The Reading:

For the Reading this episode, we have an excerpt of the audiobook version of Garbo, read by the actress Maria Tucci, Gottlieb's wife.

Music composed by William Grant Still and performed by Mark Boozer

After seeing Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas,” writer and professor Emily Rapp Black felt an intense connection with the famous Mexican artist—maybe one of the most recognized faces in the world. 

Rapp Black has been an amputee since childhood. She grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned to hide her disability from the world. 

Kahlo, too, was an amputee, having sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash during her teenage years, eventually leading to her right leg being amputated. 

In Kahlo's life and art, Rapp Black saw her own life, from numerous operations to the compulsion to create pain silences. 

Rapp Black—an award-winning memoirist—tells the story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs disease, giving birth to her healthy daughter, and learning to accept her body—and how along her path in life, Frida inspired her to find a way forward when all else seemed lost.  

Frida is the subject of Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Notting Hill Editions, 2021), Rapp Black’s fourth and most recent book. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the School of Medicine.

Music by Stereolab

Jason Jules is a writer, blogger, stylist, brand consultant, and devotee of the Ivy look, albeit in a quite subverted form. 

The face of Drakes of London and writer of the John Simons documentary film A Modernist, Jules is widely recognized as the most stylish man in London media and culture.

Described by Complex magazine as having a style akin to a “living, breathing jazz song,” he is also the creator of the online and real-world style brand Garmsville.

His latest book, Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style, published by Reel Art Press, charts a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted a clothing style seen largely as the preserve of a privileged elite, and remade it for themselves. The Oxford button-down shirt, the hand-stitched loafer, the repp ties—these otherwise conventional clothes are donned with an approach so revolutionary, you won’t be able to see them the same way again.

Black Ivy is an art book about clothes, but it’s also about freedom—both individual and collective. From the most avant-garde jazz musicians, visual artists, and poets to the more influential architects, philosophers, political leaders, and writers, Black Ivy explores, for the first time, the major role this period of aspiration—and upheaval—played, and what these clothes said about the people who wore them.

Dermot McPartland, our Man in London, handled interviewing duties for this episode.

The Reading

Jason Jules reads from the introduction to Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style.

Music by Pharoah Sanders

The Interview: 

Los Angeles is a hundred suburbs in search of a city, or so it’s been said.

In his new book about Los Angeles, novelist and nonfiction writer Rosecrans Baldwin—a somewhat recent transplant to Los Angeles from the East Coast—tackles the famous quip and expands on it. His premise in Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (MCD/FSG, 2021) is spot-on: “Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, it is an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny—this is the city-state of Los Angeles,” as a concept. 

Baldwin spent years reporting on this book before finally finishing it during the pandemic last year. He looks at the city through so many prisms and angles, it’s impossible to finish reading Everything Now without acquiring a deep (or deeper) fondness for L.A. The book is an exploration of the city, its people, and its culture. And as stated on the sell copy of the book, in Los Angeles, “you have no better plan that exists to watch the United States’ past, and its possible futures play themselves out.” Like Thom Andersen’s magnum opus, the documentary film Los Angeles Plays Itself, Everything Now is a deeply researched, and well-argued street-level view of the city—the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Baldwin and I caught up this past fall to discuss how his latest book came to be. 

The Reading:

Rosecrans Baldwin reads from his latest book, Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles.

Music by Flying Lotus

The Interview:

Dave Hickey was an inspirational character—a writer of essays and songs, an astute art and literary critic, a one-time gallerist and, certainly, an art-world provocateur.

Hickey published his two most famous books in the 1990s, The Invisible Dragon—a call to reconsider beauty in art—and Air Guitar, a cult classic essay collection that exposed the more personal and venerable style of cultural criticism.

Dave passed away at the age of 82, a few weeks after we recorded this interview with his biographer, Daniel Oppenheimer. Hickey's pariah status had by then waned, but he was the last of a certain school of rebel writers of the 1960s and 1970s who could still churn out consistently good work.

Based in Austin, Texas, where Dave got his start as a gallerist—having opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in 1967—writer and now biographer Daniel Oppenheimer charts Hickey’s life and times in Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art, a smart, compact biography published by the University of Texas Press.

Drawing from first-person interviews with Hickey, his wife and friends, comrades and critics, Oppenheimer helps explain Why Dave Hickey Matters and why we should read him, particularly his essay collections Air Guitar and Pirates and Farmers.

With Hickey’s passing, this episode has become a tribute to the great Dave Hickey, as much as it was a good conversation with his biographer. He will be missed. But his writing will live on. 

The Reading: 
Artist and professor Joel Ross reads a part of “Dealing” from Dave Hickey’s essay collection Air Guitar.

Music by Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno