Rock On: An Office Power Ballad, by Dan Kennedy

So I'm going to pick up where Anna left off with that last review:

"I wanted her to extrapolate the fates of similarly flailing brainy and talented NYC 30-pushers (a group to which I squarely belong) from her own."

That's a nice place to start because while Anna was finishing Julie and Julia, I was rounding the corner of another book purportedly pertinent to the talented NYC 30-pushing set: Rock On, by Dan Kennedy.

Rock On looked like a novel to me at first when I picked it out of the book stack at work. I picked it out because I'm interested in how people write about work: we spend so much of our lives working for money, doing all the activities and feeling all the feelings that we lump under the word "work," and yet most books and movies gently sidestep this territory. Anyway, Rock On turned out to be a memoir, not a novel, but it's still about working a job so, basically, this paragraph is a poorly constructed excuse for me to be able to say that one thing about how there aren't a lot of books about work.

Moving on. Sometime during the early mid '00s, Dan Kennedy, then in his mid-thirties, after some years spent pulling his way up a few rungs of the New York City advertising-writer/P.R.-guy ladder, landed a job at big, fancy Atlantic Records: a dream come true for a lifelong rock 'n' roll afficionado. The job was in the marketing department, or something. Writing publicity campaigns, or something like that. The vagueness of his job description is part of the book's ongoing joke.

Rock On is a really quick read, at just a hair over 200 pages. The prose is fast, furious, and very, very funny. Kennedy writes as a normal-guy rock fan, addressing the reader as another normal-guy or -gal rock fan; as far as narrative structure goes, the book mostly feels like a guided tour that could be titled "The Rock and Roll Business These Days Sure Is Fraught With Pathetic Ironies." Most of the tour takes place inside Atlantic Records' sprawling, mythically corporate-swank offices on Rockefeller Center. We've got desks that can be called real estate, stereo systems that cost more than a year at a private college, sinecured executives with seven-figure salaries, and legions of assistants and 'foot soldiers' who actually get things done.

Yes, this book is a picture of corporate excess and one smart and talented youngish man's reaction to it. Kennedy makes himself into an interesting character, a true blue rock fan who's sometimes appalled by the status-obsessed, conformist, overpaid, and strangely meek culture he finds at Atlantic, and other times wishing only to be more of a success within it. Bouncing back and forth between attraction and revulsion for his surroundings, he makes us laugh at his overindulgence in Prada sweaters and expensive picture frames and whatever else he thinks it's going to take for him to 'fit in,' without ever completely disavowing those desires.

Rock On is about the twilight of a particular age of excess in the record industry. It's about the very strange bedfellows that rock 'n' roll and the modern corporation make. And, in being about the awkward meeting point between rock's anarchy and the corporation's also egotistical but generally at least supposedly more pragmatic concerns, it's about growing up: that moment where youthful idealism turns a corner and runs smack into a want, a real want, for financial security and Prada sweaters and, you know, a place in the world.

I think Dan Kennedy's more concerned with being funny and making great observations (and he is a first-rate observationist, capturing perfectly the little details of social interactions and the little ways they can go wrong; it's not hard to imagine that he is a very good advertising writer) than he is with crafting bigger points about being a smart, talented person trying to build a career in New York. He tells teenagers to keep their dreams alive while also painting a picture of a world in which moments of "and this is what I got into this business for in the first place!" satisfaction are few and far between. If that's a problem, he lets it hang in the air.

Maybe I should leave it there and not force my own preference for everything to have a 'point' on it, but well, here are just a few thoughts that pop out of my mind, about what Rock On might say for itself if it were forced to state its thesis.

(1) Maybe nothing you could do for a living is as pure as you thought rock and roll was when you were twelve or fourteen years old. (Or, on the other hand, maybe there's something peculiarly soul-deadened about a large corporation, and if you think it's going to bother you you should try not to work in one.)

(2) No matter how many Prada sweaters you have, someone else in the world or probably even in your company will have a lot more of everything else than you do.

(3) Having a sense of humor helps greatly with items (1) and (2).

Julie & Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

Food memoirs are my personal equivalent to Candace Bushnell or Danielle Steel: trashy and forgettable, generally read in one sitting. Beach reads, if I ever went to the beach. But unlike, say, (insane professional chef) Anthony Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential or (wealthy world traveler) Bill Buford of Heat, the Julie Powell who narrates Julie & Julia and I have a lot in common: we’re both nearing 30, living in NYC’s outer boroughs (though my apartment has fewer slapstick-hilarious plumbing issues), in love with men whose unending support and patience sometimes bewilders us, and trying to figure out what to do with our lives.

And while Powell and I have both gravitated towards food as both comfort and solution, our approaches couldn’t be more different. But I admire Powell because, even though she calls being vegetarian “stupid,” she acknowledges that honest, homemade, laborious food is worth the effort – even if her ingredients tend toward lardons and chicken livers, while I prefer e.g. olive oil and Swiss chard. And as a skinny girl who nevertheless thrills inwardly to any weight loss, I especially admire that in her weird, frenzied adoption of her “project” – to cook (and eat) every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in a single year – Powell remains undaunted by gaining twenty pounds of “butterweight.”

But for all her lighting-out-for-the-territory bravado, Powell’s writing style is self-defeating; while I want to read Julie & Julia as the coming-of-age narrative it clearly longs to be, she never wavers from her dashed-off, blog-cultivated prose, which, while engaging and often hilarious, undermines her story’s potential gravity. This passage, responding to a turning point in Powell's self-discovery, illustrates her overly casual tone - appropriate for anecdotes, but disappointing when things get weighty:

Oh, and I also know that when you’ve gotten a night of sleep, no matter how tear-stained, and then some bolstering from people who love you – or “love” you, or whatever – even if they’re people you’ve never met, sometimes the end of the world doesn’t seem like that anymore. Like the end, I mean.

Perhaps Powell’s project is too zany to be treated otherwise, but – and I have maybe never said this about anyone ever – I found myself wishing she’d take herself more seriously. I wanted moralizing and universalizing; I wanted her to extrapolate the fates of similarly flailing brainy and talented NYC 30-pushers (a group to which I squarely belong) from her own. For all her espoused carnivorism, Powell's story wasn't meaty enough for this vegetarian.

Anna's list of 30 most significant books

Katherine and I discussed whether to include annotations in these lists. In the interest of brevity and time, we decided against it, which I initially thought would be easier. But for me, the lack of explanation or qualification made each inclusion more alarming: did I really take more from Passman's no-nonsense workman's guide to the music industry more than, say, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man? Well, yes. And without the cushioning of context and qualification ("You see, I work in the music industry..."), such an admission feels stark and unnerving. This list is imperfect - I'm sure I have missed a few things - but it is honest.

Apuleius – The Golden Ass
Austen, Jane – Pride & Prejudice
Azerrad, Michael – Our Band Could Be Your Life
Bakan, Joel – The Corporation
Bangs, Lester – Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (collected criticism)
Catullus – Poems
Cortazar, Julio – Hopscotch
De Beauvoir, Simone – Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Eagleton, Terry – Literary Theory
French, Marilyn – The Women’s Room
Gandhi – Autobiography
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Juster, Norton – The Phantom Tollbooth
Kafka, Franz – The Trial
Kaptchuk, Ted J. – The Web That Has No Weaver
Longus – Daphnis & Chloe
Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marcus, Greil – Lipstick Traces
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – 100 Years Of Solitude
Nestle, Marion – What To Eat
Passman, Donald - All You Need To Know About The Music Business
Proust, Marcel – In Search Of Lost Time
Salinger, J.D. – Raise High The Roof-Beam, Carpenters
Syme, Ronald – The Roman Revolution
Tolstoy, Leo – War & Peace
Wallace, David Foster – A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Wolf, Naomi – The Beauty Myth
Woolf, Virginia – Mrs. Dalloway
Yogananda, Paramahansa – Autobiography of a Yogi

Katherine's Book List (the O.G.)

Anna suggested that we start the blog with a list of the thirty books that were the biggest deal. For us. In an all-time kind of way.

“Besides cookbooks and reference works,” she said.

Basically I think this is like the book blog version of the band-audition montage in ‘The Commitments,’ where Jimmy sits everyone down and says "what are your influences?"

Anyway, here they are. It was hard to resist the urge to go chronological. I left out childhood because that's a whole nother ball of wax. Anna alphabetized, so I will, too.

Austen, Jane – Emma
Bourdieu, Pierre – Distinction
Derrida, Jacques – Limited Inc.
Durkheim, Emile – The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Eliot, George – Middlemarch
Fisher, MFK – How to Cook a Wolf
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, Penelope – The Blue Flower
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Goodman, Paul – Growing Up Absurd
Horney, Karen – Neurosis and Human Growth
Jacobs, Jane – The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Janson, H.W. – History of Art
Kant, Immanuel – Critique of Judgment
Kerouac, Jack – The Dharma Bums
Marx, Karl – The Communist Manifesto
Nabokov, Vladimir – Lolita
Pynchon, Thomas – Gravity’s Rainbow
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques – Confessions
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Sebald, W.G. – The Rings of Saturn
Shakespeare, William – Complete Works (cheating? eh.)
Sontag, Susan – Illness and Its Metaphors
Spark, Muriel – The Girls of Slender Means
Updike, John – Rabbit, Run (& the other ‘Rabbit’ books)
Vonnegut, Kurt – Slaughterhouse-Five
Weber, Max – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Woolf, Virginia – A Room of One’s Own
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse