Rock, Paper, Scissors
"As the truism goes: Every writer wants to be a rock star. Could be because a lot of us are captive to solitude, shy and undersexed, and self-hating to a degree that wants to be paraded onstage, but can't. Or maybe it's just that the writer-rocker combination is hot."
--Fiona Maazel, in the liner notes to One Ring Zero's As Smart as We Are
Because it's hot and because they are fairly antiquated and largely embarrassing and way too often dull, I've been going to fewer readings lately--though I did go see Jonathan Ames last week. In general, it's not that I oppose being read to, but I do oppose, in the early, mind-wandering evening, being expected to react. Everyone's so serious, and I can never follow the narrative as well as everyone else seems to, so I wind up resenting myself when the rest of the audience responds to something that I can barely sustain the concentration to follow. More and more I understand the atomized, unintelligent allure of rock shows--and, as it happens, a rock show is where my night eventually ended. (It was, unfortunately, the Scissor Sisters show, speaking of atomized and unintelligent, to say nothing of sweltering and shrill.)
What the Ames reading had going for it was that it wasn't much of a reading. Introducing the event, an Elliott Bay staffer called what was about to happen "a one-two punch of literary and musical shenanigans." The Brooklyn-based band One Ring Zero (led by Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp) played two songs, then Ames read for 15 minutes, then One Ring Zero played three more songs (concluding with a song Ames had written the lyrics to). As Smart as We Are, One Ring Zero's recent album, features 17 songs cowritten by 17 novelists--Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, and Denis Johnson among them. (Rejected titles for the project, according to the liner notes, include Some of Our Friends Are Famous and Books Are Boring.) Camp wore an orange shirt and played an orange accordion, Hearst wore a claviola (a kind of mini piano that you hang around your neck and blow into), and they sang, in harmony, lyrics like, "If I had a radio for every time you loved me so, I wouldn't have a radio at all."
As they played a sweet, frenzied set of songs from the album, and Ames read some disgusting passages about nose fetishists and female armpits from his book, Wake Up, Sir!, it occurred to me that all readings should be like this. Normally my feelings toward readings could be described as a confusion of love and pity, but a reading with music? Charming. And entertainingly contentious: "It's always tough to follow music," Ames himself said, taking the stage after the boys had played the first half of their set. "Especially with a reading."
