why dave bergman is neat

This picture would be a lot better if he were holding a John Grisham novel.

No longer are Buckner's albums music to read Erskine Caldwell to.

But there still pretty lights-out good.

For another take from someone who's basked in the Buck for a while, see here.

I also saw Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices.

It was pretty bad.

It's a karma piece.

And speaking of 'independent' rock 'n roll (though all rock 'n roll is fundamentally dependent), the best example you can find in my opinion is Chamberlain's 1998 album The Moon My Saddle on Doghouse Records. I am rocking out to it right now. Musically and instrumentally it is solid, lyrically it is several rungs above most of what passes for songwriting on the pop music ladder, and the overall feel of the album is wonderful. 11 songs of joy and yearning.

The Rock Show was pretty good. Shearwater was decent, and their opening and closing numbers packed a noteworthy punch. The stuff in the middle was ok.

The second band was called Bottomless Pit. 'Nuff said.

Magnolia Electric Co. played a set of solid rock 'n roll. That's what I went to hear, and they delivered. Nothing fancy, nothing hip, nothing cutting-edge. Straightforward and foot-tap-inducing rockness. Sometimes not being cutting-edge is the best way to be cutting-edge. They did an especially killer rendition of 'Riding with a Ghost'.

In other news, the wiffle and I watched Pickup on South Street tonight. Fantastic.

Off in a few minutes to see Shearwater and Magnolia Electric Co., aka Songs:Ohia, aka whatever else they're called.

1964 : Steinbeck wins the Medal of Freedom

On this day, writer John Steinbeck was presented the U.S. Medal of Freedom. Steinbeck had already received numerous other honors and awards for his writing, including the 1962 Nobel Prize and a 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck, a native Californian, studied writing intermittently at Stanford between 1920 and 1925 but never graduated. He moved to New York and worked as a manual laborer and journalist while writing his first two novels, which were not successful. He married in 1930 and moved back to California with his wife. His father, a government official in Salinas County, gave the couple a house to live in while Steinbeck continued writing.

His first novel, Tortilla Flat, about the comic antics of several rootless drifters who share a house in California, was published in 1935. The novel became a financial success.

Steinbeck's next works, In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men, were both successful, and in 1938 his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath was published. The novel, about the struggles of an Oklahoma family who lose their farm and become fruit pickers in California, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

After World War II, Steinbeck's work became more sentimental in such novels as Cannery Row and The Pearl. He also wrote several successful films, including Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata (1952). He became interested in marine biology and published a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941. His travel memoir, Travels with Charlie, describes his trek across the United States in a camper. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in New York in 1968.

R.I.P.

1911: Guillaume Apollinaire is arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa

On this day, French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is arrested and jailed on suspicion of stealing Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris.

The 31-year-old poet was known for his radical views and support for extreme avant-garde art movements, but his origins were shrouded in mystery. Today, it is believed he was born in Rome and raised in Italy. He appeared in Paris at age 20 and quickly mixed into the city's bohemian set. His first volume of poetry, The Rotting Magician, appeared in 1909, followed by a story collection in 1910. A supporter of Cubism, he published a book about the subject, Cubist Painters, in 1913. The same year, he published his most esteemed work, Alcools, where he used a variety of poetic forms and traditions to capture everyday street speech. In 1917, his experimental play The Breasts of Tiresias was produced, for which he coined the term "surrealist."

Apollinaire's mysterious background and radical views led authorities to view him as a dangerous foreigner and prime suspect in the Mona Lisa heist, which took place August 22. No evidence surfaced, and Apollinaire was released after five days. Two years later, a former employee of the Louvre, Vincenzo Perggia, was arrested while trying to sell the famous painting to an art dealer.

I just found out this morning that Richard Buckner has a new album, Meadow, slated to be released on September 12.

Dig.

1847: Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden and moves in with the Emersons

On this day in 1847, writer Henry David Thoreau moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts, after living for two years in a shack he built himself on Walden Pond.

Thoreau graduated from Harvard and started a school with his brother. But in 1839, he decided while on a canoe trip that he wasn't cut out for teaching. Instead, he decided to devote himself to nature and poetry. Deeply influenced by his friend Emerson's poetry and essays, Thoreau started a journal and began publishing essays in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial. At age 25, Thoreau left Concord for New York, but detested city life and returned after a year. Two years later, at age 27, he decided to live by Transcendentalist principles, spending time alone with nature and supporting himself with his own work. He built his home and lived off his garden for two years while reading and writing. In 1854, his collection of essays, Walden, or Life in the Woods, was published.

During his time at Walden, Thoreau spent a brief time in jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the war with Mexico. He later wrote Civil Disobedience, one of his most famous essays, based on the experience. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would later be inspired by his writings. After Thoreau's time at Walden, he wrote magazine articles and became an avid abolitionist, working to smuggle escaped slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. He died in 1862.

1957: On the Road is published

One of the first novels of the Beat movement of the 1950s, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, is published on this day in 1957. The novel chronicles the cross-country wanderings of a Kerouac-like hero, Sal Paradise, and his pal Dean Moriarty, and their free-ranging encounters with drugs, free love, and the budding counterculture. The book, which Kerouac wrote in just three weeks, became an instant classic.

Although a credo of the Beat-inspired Hippie movement of the 1960s was "Never trust anyone over 30," Kerouac was 35 when the book came out. He had long been associated with the Beat movement when On the Road came out, and the novel is filled with characters based on Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

Kerouac was born in March 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The son of French-Canadian parents, he learned English as a second language. In high school, Kerouac was a football star and won a scholarship to Columbia University. In World War II, he served in the Navy but was expelled for severe personality problems. He became a merchant seaman. In the late 1940s, he wandered the United States and Mexico and wrote his first novel, The Town and the City. His later novels included The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and Lonesome Traveler (1960). Kerouac was a heavy drinker when he died in Florida from an internal hemorrhage, at the age of 47, on October 21, 1969.

1905: Historical novelist Mary Renault is born

On this day, Mary Renault, critically acclaimed author of historical novels about ancient civilizations, is born.

Born Mary Challans (Renault was a pen name), she was the daughter of a London physician. At age 8, she decided to be a writer. At Oxford, she studied medieval history and used her knowledge of the era as background for her first novel, which she destroyed after many rejections.

Renault worked as a nurse during World War I and continued to write in her off-duty hours. In 1939, her novel Promise of Love, based on her nursing experiences, was published in the United States. In 1946, her novel Return to Night won the $150,000 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Prize. Although the book became her first U.S. bestseller, it was never made into a movie.

After World War II, Renault turned her attention to historical fiction. Fascinated by ancient Greece, she traveled widely in the area and became a self-taught expert on the region's history. Her 1958 novel, The King Must Die, and its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962), retold the Greek myth of Theseus from an historically accurate point of view. All her historical novels, including The Alexander Trilogy (1984), about Alexander the Great, were widely praised both for their rich, accurate detail and lively storytelling. Renault settled in South Africa, where she lived until her death in 1983.

1946: The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill, opens on Broadway

Hailed by many critics as Eugene O'Neill's finest work, The Iceman Cometh opens at the Martin Beck Theater on this day in 1956. The play, about desperate tavern bums clinging to illusion as a remedy for despair, was the last O'Neill play to be produced on Broadway before the author's death in 1953.

Like many of his other works, the play drew on O'Neill's firsthand experiences with all-night dive bars and desperate characters. Although his actor father sent him to top prep schools and to Princeton, O'Neill dropped out of college after a year. He went to sea, searched for gold in South America, haunted the waterfront bars in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York, and married briefly. He drank heavily. In 1912, when O'Neill was nearly 30, he came down with tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium in Connecticut. While recovering, he wrote his first play and decided to devote himself to drama. He began churning out gritty, realistic plays about lives on the margins of society. He wrote nine plays from 1913 to 1914, six from 1916 to 1917, and four in 1918. In 1917, a Greenwich Village theater group, the Provincetown Players, performed his one-act play Thirst. The group became closely associated with O'Neill's future work. In 1920, his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway.

Between 1920 and 1943, O'Neill wrote 20 long plays and several short ones. His work was groundbreaking in its use of slangy, everyday dialogue, its dingy, run-down settings, and his experimental use of light, sound, and casting to set an emotional tone.

O'Neill's family life had been very unhappy. His father became rich playing just one theater role, the Count of Monte Cristo, for many years and never succeeded in becoming a more serious actor. His mother used morphine, and his beloved older brother became an alcoholic. All three died between 1920 and 1923. O'Neill wrote several autobiographical plays about his family after they died, including A Moon for the Misbegotten (produced in 1957) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (produced in 1956). Other major works include The Hairy Ape (1923) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). Although O'Neill was an outgoing host with an active social life during his second marriage, he became reclusive during his third. In the 1940s, he developed a degenerative nervous disease, and he died in Boston in 1953. Many critics call O'Neill America's first major playwright.

It's worth pointing out that this is an important day in other areas of history, too. Today was VJ day in 1945, and on this day in 1969 Ho Chi Minh died.