Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/11/16

Sick Boss, Businessless (Drip Audio Records)

Brandishing not just post-rock but indeed post-apocalyptic sound adventures a la That F-king Tank, the meanderings of this Vancouver, B.C., six-piece outfit are mostly loud and sinister, nicking from Jimi Hendrix, 1970s-spaghetti-crime flicks, Primus and really anything they can wrap their instruments around. Slotted into the fusion jazz category for reasons of convenience, this bunch is led by guitarist Cole Schmidt and includes trumpeter JP Carter (who’s collaborated with Destroyer), as well as a violin guy and a cellist; all six of them are terrific improvisers when they’re called upon to put in two cents toward realizing the noise-stomp-meets-Ennio Morricone ideas put forth. Par for the course for any outstanding group of this sort, static-noise jams give way to passages of beauty and vice versa; there are hard riffs, proto-emo chill-outs (“CJ Blues”) and other related-or-not things that complete a picture of a very interesting instrumental group that’ll be around a while with any modicum of luck. A+

Art Feynman, Be Good The Crazy Boys (Western Vinyl Records)

Art Feynman is an alter ego of producer Luke Temple, and it’s a lucky thing I even found that out when I skimmed the press release for this LP; anyone who reads this column knows that I’ve had a soft spot for the Salem, Mass., native since I first heard him years ago and likened him to another artist you’ve never heard of, one Winston Giles (I’m waiting for just one reader to finally get into Giles and express their eternal gratitude in sonnet form in my Facebook messages). This one was recorded live in the studio with a full band, a first for Temple; the record’s nervous but basically carefree feel recalls Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which was a touchstone in the writing process. The tunes are meant to touch on “the part of the modern collective consciousness that’s struggling to maintain balance in a toxic, chaotic world,” but it’s a lot lighter-hearted than that; “In CD” feels like a Vampire Weekend demo intended for approval by B-52s. Infectious, massively accessible, genius-level stuff. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 17 will be a day of new CD releases, try to stay calm, with regard to all the new music! It’s almost Thanksgiving, fam, and in order to honor that pumpkin-spiced holiday in the most appropriate way possible, Hollywood released a movie named after it, and the soundtrack was done by one Brandon Roberts, who handled the soundtracking for a bunch of other nonsense-horror movies, including A Quiet Place and The Woman in Black. At present the soundtrack isn’t available, probably because no one would buy a CD of a soundtrack about serial-killer turkeys or whatever it is, but, just saying, I did look into it for you. In fact, I’m a little surprised that there was an actual professional soundtrack for that movie, but you just never know what’ll happen when those Hollywood guys start drinking at Spago’s, you know?

• If you spend a lot of time on Twitter or basically any other social media site that isn’t Facebook and is thus possessed of a little bit of street credibility, you know that Dolly Parton is now Taken Seriously by Serious Internet Posters because she’s rattled off a few virtue-signaling posts about something or other, which resulted in a noticeable uptick in her cred! Yes, her coolness factor is now at Tom Jones level, and all sorts of younger musical artists are hopping on the gravy train, like when Lady Gaga recorded the duet with Tony Bennett for no rational reason whatsoever, but good for her! Yikes, just look at the roster of rockers who contributed to her fast-approaching new album, Rockstar: her version of “Let It Be” features the last two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Magoo or whatever his name is; it basically just sounds like Dolly Parton doing a Vegas version of that tune, in case you ever wanted to hear such a thing. But wait, folks, there’s more, Rob Halford from Judas Priest and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue appear on the third single, “Bygones,” and it’s pretty funny but serious, like you end up thinking “why did they let Dolly Parton start randomly singing on a disposable heavy metal song,” not that she doesn’t do as good a job as you could ever hope for with it; she sounds wildly out of place, but yes, she does keep pace, singing fast over the metallic riffing, boy did I land on the wrong planet.

• Ah yes, Smoke Fairies, we’ve dealt with them before, to a most pleasant outcome in spite of the fact that the indie-folk ladies rose to fame mostly owing to the fact that famous hamburger-gobbling person Jack White decided they were cute and he simply had to have them on his record label! Who cares, either way, yes, they’re cute, toward an Emily Perkins I-am-the-world’s-weirdest-dorm-mate fashion, so I welcome the chance to hear them sing new songs about ghosts or whatever it is. Carried In Sound, their new album, is on the trucks headed to the stores as we speak, and it will feature a new single, called “Vanishing Line,” a haunting tune that combines Loreena McKennitt’s ren-fair shtick with Enya’s multi-tracked technique. You know, if you’re a pale-skinned goth who’s never listened to these gals, do yourself a favor and check ‘em out; they’re completely crazy but don’t let that stop you.

• We’ll end the week with Salvage Enterprise, the new album from The Polyphonic Spree, a huge-ass “choral rock band” from Dallas, Texas! On Nov. 17, they released the single, “Shadows On The Hillside,” a really pleasant tune that’s pure ’70s acid-AOR, recalling Nilsson and, quite frankly, The Who’s Tommy album. It’s pretty deep and wide, well worth checking out.

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press, 448 pages)

Besides buying Twitter and normalizing electric cars, Elon Musk is known for his belief that human beings need to get off this planet and in particular colonize Mars. “It’s a little cold, but we can warm it up,” his SpaceX website says, adding that because gravity on Mars is 38 percent that of Earth’s, “you would be able to lift heavy things and bounce around.”

That sounds like an argument you would make to a 5-year-old. Also, a little cold? The average temperature is -80 Fahrenheit.

The optimism about populating an inhospitable planet has been long overdue for a reality check, and Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist, and her husband, Zach, a cartoonist, have stepped up to the plate.

The Weinersmiths are self-described “space geeks” who have studied the subject for four years, longer if you count the research they did for their 2017 book Soonish.

“We love visionary plans for a glorious future. We also are very skeptical people,” they write.

The Weinersmiths say the current conversation about Mars colonization centers around the specifics of getting there and settling in, while larger, stickier questions — such as ethical air rationing — are swept aside. They accept the noble intentions of the “space billionaires” — namely Musk and Jeff Bezos — but think that done right, colonizing space should be something that takes us centuries, not decades.

A City on Mars — subtitled “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” — comprises six parts, liberally punctuated with cartoons. The first section addresses the biological costs to spacefarers and the psychology of space settlement (i.e., how to go to Mars without losing your mind), as well as the logistical nightmare that is “space sex.” The people we’ve sent to space thus far are the best humankind has to offer; they go through gauntlets of testing to ensure they’re in peak condition. Even then, encapsulated in all their high-tech gear, they suffer the physical insults of living outside Earth’s gravity, including muscle and bone loss and eye damage. They’re exposed to higher levels of radiation in a place where medical facilities are in short supply. We don’t know what will be the physical effects of a longer period in space, much farther away than we’ve gone.

And there are the “morally dicey” issues that come with conceiving a child (should one be conceived) as basically an experiment. For example, “What we know about human bones in space today comes entirely from fully developed adults,” the authors write. “We have no knowledge about how altered gravity regimes will affect, say, a twelve-year-old girl having a growth spurt.”

The second and third sections of the book focus on living arrangements, including housing, food and waste disposal. You’d think anyone who signed up for a trip to Mars wouldn’t care about food beyond sustenance, but the Weinersmiths write, “People who study space psychology report good food as one of the most important factors in day-to-day well-being — an idea also found in books from the era of polar exploration.” (Fun fact: NASA prohibits adult beverages on the International Space Station, but on other trips, astronauts have taken cognac, whiskey and wine.)

Sections 4, 5 and 6 explore big-picture challenges: space laws, space states, space politics and of course the potential for space wars (which strikes down the argument for getting off this planet to escape the tumult here). The basis of space law was the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which in English was only about 2,500 words and basically said no weapons of mass destruction or military exercises in space. It also said all space activity should be carried out “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.” That treaty and the Moon Agreement of 1979, however, do little to mitigate the kind of conflicts a greater human presence in space will raise, both in international politics and in the minutiae of spacecraft law such as whether starving astronauts can legally eat one of their crew. (There’s a scientific paper on space cannibalism titled “Survival and Sacrifice in Mars Exploration.”)

Mars, which has 24-hour days similar to ours, could possibly be “terraformed,” its climate made more hospitable by detonating nuclear weapons at its poles, eventually making it warmer and wetter, and it’s easy enough to get to compared to other sites, but it’s far enough away that if something goes wrong you’re on your own. And the Weinersmiths envision everything, concrete and fanciful, that can go wrong, right up to war breaking out between the factions of Bezostralia and Muskow. They leave no moon rock uncovered.

Even a dystopian Earth is still better than Mars, the Weinersmiths argue: “That Earth still has a breathable atmosphere, a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and quite possibly still has McDonald’s breakfast. It is not a world we would like to inhabit, but it is the one world in the solar system where you can run around naked for ten minutes and still be alive at the end.”

They’re not saying we should never go to Mars, just that we should do so slowly, after having worked some things out, like how to establish a short-term research station and how to make babies in space. B+

Album Reviews 23/11/09

Newmoon, “Fading Phase” (self-released)

Funnily enough I was just watching a long documentary about shoegaze bands for no real reason, luckily for me. Newmoon, based in Antwerp, Belgium, has already released a couple of albums to “critical acclaim” (which, let’s be honest, in some cases may pretty much mean that one of the band’s friends said “it’s awesome” on Instagram), and this single will lead off their third when it drops in March 2024; it’s mastered by Simon Scott of shoegaze legends Slowdive. That last bit is important, because if there ain’t no plasma-blob immersiveness to the guitars it simply ain’t shoegaze. Toward that, the guitars are pretty bright and, well, tropical as the tune rolls out, until of course the inevitable noise-chaos appears two-thirds of the way through. I’m definitely more of a My Bloody Valentine guy than a Glasvegas fan, but all the ingredients fit, from the sexless faraway Q Lazzarus-like vocals to the ludicrous reverb level. It’s fine. A-

Dokken, Heaven Comes Down (Silver Lining Music)

Once you little Zoomer rascals get off my lawn, I’ll tell you the story of way back in the 1980s, when I completely ignored this Los Angeles-based glam/hair-metal band, mostly because my guitarist at the time thought they were awesome; he and I shared a strained, awkward mutual respect. I preferred bands that had a pulse and obvious brain damage, like Slade, Wasp and Alcatrazz, where Dokken had a weird rep as some sort of borderline prog-rock thingamajig but was really just about getting dates, which is of course the only reason anyone starts a metal band in the first place (raises hand). OK whatever, the LP kicks off with “Fugitive,” a decent speedster that’s decorated with either a 12-string or sitar that makes it sound important, and then the main riff kicks in and yep, it’s good, making the listener want to punch someone in the face out of adrenaline overload. Singer Don Dokken is as boring as ever, which really drags things down during obligato lonesome-male filler tune “Is It Me Or You.” The band’s the same as ever, folks, pseudo-epic slow-burn tunes (“I’ll Never Give Up”) yadda yadda. A-

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 10 will be a day marked by the release of many new albums, because Friday is the traditional day of the week when all the bands and artistes release their new records in the hope that people will buy them! Hello to all the new readers out there, I’m your host for this journalistic exercise, in which, every week, I try my darnedest to find something nice to say about albums that should never have seen the light of day. Just so’s you know, I actually do try to wax positive about all the bands and sonically creative types that send things to my physical and virtual mailboxes in the usually misplaced hope that I’ll be in good enough of a mood to say something positive, which, my longtime readers know, is like expecting the famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil to neither confirm nor deny that he saw his shadow but instead to start singing “Vesti la giubba” from the classic opera Pagliacci in such a perfect tenor that people begin weeping uncontrollably on the spot. No, kidding, I’m usually really nice to bands, especially local ones, not that that ever gets me anywhere.

Yow, here we go, look at that, I had all but forgotten the the early Aughts had ever even happened (I’d need 50 pages of space in this paper to list all the reasons), so it was quite a trip when I noticed that the Cold War Kids have a new album coming out. The LP is self-titled, which is such a late-Aughts thing to do, but I liked those guys; they had Spoon-level songwriting, even if they were too catchy and commercial-sounding for the snobs at Pitchfork Media (which is actually a selling point in the opinion of most people, let’s be honest). Anyhow, the Kids have a new single, of course, and it’s called “Run Away With Me,” let’s listen to its YouTube version. Wow, it’s energetic and bouncy and poppy, Pitchfork would hate it, and at the moment I’m trying to find a reason not to do the same. It’s disco-y and works a Weeknd/LMFAO angle, but — OK, here’s the chorus. Right, it’s cool, try to picture the Strokes having a Some Girls period, that’s what this is. I physically can’t hate these guys.

• Pinkpantheress is a British 22-year-old who had viral success on TikTok; when our civilization is gone, TikTok success will be something that will puzzle archaeologists. She’s into bedroom pop and two-step garage, and thus her new single, “Capable of Love,” is a lot more listenable than Ariana Grande, there, I said it.

• We’ll end with Beirut’s new one, Hadsel, because why not. The band is led by trumpet/ukulele dude Zach Condon, and the new single “So Many Plans” is a plodding weird-beard tune that crosses Sigur Ros with Carolina Chocolate Drops; it’s liveable.

Mr. Texas, by Lawrence Wright

Mr. Texas, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 336 pages)

Sonny Lamb is a rancher who lives with his wife, Lola, in the middle of nowhere, Texas. It takes them 45 minutes to get to the nearest Dollar General. He is a kind-hearted man, the sort who, when he takes a prized bull to the livestock auction, can’t stomach it when the animal is about to go to a slaughterhouse, so he buys his bull back, even though the animal was only at auction because he was so broke.

This could explain why Lamb is just getting by in life, and suffering a bit of an early midlife crisis, sensing that “his life was ebbing, inevitably, pointlessly.” His wife loves him, but her large, fertile extended family exacerbates her husband’s feeling of everlasting mediocrity: The family “all carried themselves with an air of importance that Sonny could never hope to achieve.”
Then one day Lamb gets himself on the map when he saves a young girl and her horse from a barn fire. This happens around the time that a Texas state legislator dies mid-term, and a political mover-and-shaker is seeking a replacement in line with his interests. He’s looking for “Someone who stands for good, conservative values. Someone who commands the respect of all who know him. Someone with ideas. A patriot. A hero. A Republican.”
Sonny Lamb is none of these things, really. He’s adrift in a red state with “blue measles.” But someone had taken a photo of him riding a terrified horse out of a burning barn, and he’s hero enough.

Such is the beginning of Mr. Texas, a rollicking novel by New Yorker writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright. A Dallas native who lives in Austin, Wright has said he came up with the character of Sonny Lamb more than two decades ago, and what is now Mr. Texas had earlier lives as a failed screenplay, a failed HBO pilot and even a failed musical. Which is fine, because it’s now a first-rate novel.

The person who plucks Sonny Lamb from obscurity is a lobbyist named L.D. Sparks, who at one point observes, “Funny how a person can live his whole life being good or bad, but there’s nothing on the record, nothing that you can hold in your hand and say, here, take a look, this is who I really am.”

But after Sonny’s heroics at the barn fire, he has a photograph that says exactly that, and even though Sonny also has a history of womanizing and drug abuse after a war injury in Iraq, Sparks realizes he could construct a winning candidacy around the man — with the help of a PR firm, of course. Sparks needs a legislator he can control since he is one vote short in the General Assembly to pass all the things he needs, and Sonny seems perfect, possessed of “youth, looks, good teeth, and naivete.”

Sonny and Lola are initially taken aback when Sparks appears on their doorstep, but Sonny decides this is the chance he needs, since he’s been struggling with the fact that he’s never set an important goal and achieved it. Despite the angst, hilarity ensues. When Sonny appears on a local talk show, his mother calls in to ask why he didn’t consult her before deciding to run. “Don’t just assume you’ve got my vote,” she says.

His Democratic opponent, Valerie Nightingale, is ahead by 25 percentage points. Things are going so poorly that Sonny is starting to think that Sparks was working for Nightingale and scammed him into running. After a debate in which Nightingale mops the floor with him, however, Sparks and the other consultants decide it’s time to exchange the moral high ground for street-fighting, albeit through a political action committee, keeping Sonny’s hands clean.

Meanwhile, Lola has announced that she desperately wants children and they need to try harder. So the couple embark on a “breeding schedule” — sex twice a day, between campaign events, as they throw themselves into a new life that will upend their current one in ways neither can foresee.

While Sonny and his handlers are Republicans, Mr. Texas is partisan, but not problematically so. Wright says he is politically independent and the book skewers all of us, not just the political establishment, mocking people who loathe government while living on Social Security and food stamps, and those who see elected officials as Santa Claus, existing to grant their every wish.
Sonny’s world is our contemporary one; his state is populated by real people and places, like Ted Cruz and the McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas, although it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. A scene where legislators go pig-hunting seems made up but is based on reality, similar to an event held simply for Sonny to collect lobbyist checks.

While Mr. Texas gets a tad preachy toward the end and concludes a bit abruptly, this does not diminish the overall pleasure of the novel. This is no Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the classic 1939 film starring Jimmy Stewart, but it’s a version for our time, at least in book form. A —Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 23/11/02

E-Garbage, LLM (Dee Dee’s Picks Records)

Swiss artist & engineer Eric Nardini is more commonly known in techno circles under the pseudonym E-Garbage, which points to his penchant for the raw techno that he creates through the use of trash electronics, random objects, modular synthesis, and “the DIY ethos of the punk scene in Geneva” such as it is. The “recommended if you like” list includes Drexciya, Unit Moebius, Legowelt and Terrence Dixon, not that there’ll be a quiz later, but what it means is that you’ll encounter the usual periods of self-indulgent noise, much of it basically white, that you’re expected to relate to, and some IDM DJ stuff that’s rather pleasant, albeit not groundbreaking (as found in the track “Glitched Token E,” an unfocused joint that also fronts some pretty-much-breakbeats, a style I thought I’d never hear again, not that I mind it). “Stochastic Parrot E” is mildly industrial krautrock that at least sticks to its subject for a while. B — Eric W. Saeger

Best Ex, With A Smile (Iodine Recordings)

For being a married person, this quirk-pop indie lady sure sings about how much men suck, not that we don’t know that we do; with this she takes up post-riot-grrrl gauntlets against a lot of things, like inattentive boyfriends and the dudes who run the music business (I can’t imagine anyone being surprised to learn that those guys suck even worse than the average Joe). The overall sound here is Taylor Swift on a low-ish budget, but there are some arena-stomping Imagine Dragons-style moments if you stick around for the middle of the single “Tell Your Friends,” a tune about a breakup that’s led to zen moments in a car with the window open and blah blah blah, in other words no real lessons come of it, just B-grade disaffection. “I Promise To Ruin Your Life” lifts the basic recipe from Ingrid Michaelson’s “Be OK” and doubles down on the teen-pop attitude, not that I’m saying no one should do that. It’s catchy. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Jane, stop this crazy thing, the next general-CD-release Friday can’t be Nov. 3, it just can’t! Great, that means it’s Thanksgiving in a few minutes, so now I have to figure out which family members and friends are still classified as “the non-crazy people” by my preferred crazy family members so I can invite them to Thanksgiving, that’s if I can even find creamed onions for a Thanksgiving side dish, does anyone even know if they stopped making those forever or what? But I’m getting ahead of myself, I need to just face one nightmare at a time, so I’ll put aside Thanksgiving for now and try to see if there’s anything in this pile of new album releases that won’t get my stomach roiling and lurching and dancing the macarena! Hm, here we go, we’ll start with The Struts, an English glam-rock band that’s from Derby, in Derbyshire, U.K., a “township” located due west of East Derby in East Derbyshire, U.K., if I know my British geography, which I don’t at all. I’m sure I’ll be fine with this band’s rock ’n’ roll, because glam rock is what everyone should be listening to now, and literally nothing else; after all, Slade was/is/whatever the greatest U.K. glam band in history, so maybe these guys just sort of absorbed some of Slade’s greatness just by being from the only island in the west where the owners of the place unironically wear crowns. Pretty Vicious is whatstheirface’s new album, and it features the title track, which was made by taking the interesting parts of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” throwing them in a randomizer and coating it in British glam that isn’t even close to being as interesting as Slade’s worst song. Other than that, I am genuinely excited about this album release.

• Ack, everybody duck, here it comes, right on too-soon-time, the flood of posthumous releases from Jimmy Buffett, the first of which is Equal Strain On All Parts! Look at you, getting ready to be mad at me for saying something mean, but surprise, I will honor Mister Cheeseburger’s memory by listening closely to whatever song his agent found in 1/2-inch tape reel form in Jimmy’s trash can, whatever tune the record company’s Men In Black will front as the single from this — wait, no, I’m told this is an actual, official album, one that was completed only two months ago, no rush, amirite? Anyhow, the single, “Bubble Up,” is a basic country-pop chillout that most listeners will think is a Willie Nelson song until the accordion comes in, which, point of order, doesn’t make it an actual zydeco song, but of course whichever “music journalist” hack reviews it for Nylon or Buzzfeed or whatnot will say it’s a zydeco song. I cannot do anything about that inevitable nonsense, but yes, I would if I could.

• Irish musician Hilary Woods is a solo artist, previously the bass player of the vastly underrated jangle-grunge band JJ72, which dissolved in 2006 just to get on my nerves. Woods’ current trip is “nocturnal keyboard-based songs” largely inspired by “filmmakers, electronic artists, experimental noise, and folk music traditions.” In other words she’s kind of weird, as exemplified by her forthcoming new album Acts Of Light. This set of songs is based on “a fugue comprised of nine slow hypnotic dirges,” in other words it’s probably kind of weird, but let me go visit the YouTube machine and find out for sure. Ugh, yes, the tire-kicker single “Where The Bough Has Broken” is definitely weird, a miserable, morose ambient exercise that drags on forever, but don’t let that stop you.

• We’ll close with Little Bit Of Sun, the new full-length from Minnesota post-grunge trio Semisonic! I don’t mind the title track at all; it sounds like what would happen if Amos Lee tried to sound like Coldplay and Tom Petty at the same time. Good stuff. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured photo: E-Garbage, LLM (Dee Dee’s Picks Records) and Best Ex, With A Smile (Iodine Recordings)

Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Be Useful, Arnold Schwarzenegger (Penguin Press, 263 pages)

“Be useful,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father used to tell him, and it’s good advice. It’s also a great book title, especially when paired with the subtitle “Seven tools for life.” That’s likely a play on two books by a certain controversial Canadian psychologist, but it works, especially in the hands of a body-building movie star and former politician. Unfortunately, it’s about the only thing that works in this self-aggrandizing collection of platitudes and boasts that is sub-par even for the genre known as “self-help.”

Where to start? How about the cover? Perhaps Schwarzenegger wasn’t channeling his inner Donald Trump mugshot with this dark and unsmiling closeup, but they’ve both got the same vibe: angry men you don’t want to brush up against in an alley. Don’t judge a book by its cover and all that, but also don’t scare off the readers. That said, Schwarzenegger is 76, and looking better than some others in his Hollywood cohort, reason enough to check out his rules in case there’s anything helpful there.

Schwarzenegger begins with an introduction in which he rattles off his accomplishments as if introducing himself as the keynote at a Rotary Club dinner. (As governor of California, he implemented “environmental policies that inspired the world” and passed “some of the most groundbreaking, cutting-edge policies that state government has ever seen” and so forth). He also briefly confronts some of his very public failures — the breakup of his marriage to Maria Shriver because of infidelity, and the loss of reputation and movie projects after that. To be fair, he owns it: “I blew up my family,” he wrote. “No failure has ever felt worse than that.” But a page later, he’s back to celebrating himself, writing, “If you’re ever read anything about me, though, you probably already know that I didn’t give up.”

And way too soon comes the line we knew was coming but could have done without: “Like I always tell you, I’ll be back.”

OK, then. On to the rules, each one of which comprises a chapter. We can quickly dispense with the first three, which are standard fare for the genre: “Have a clear vision,” “Never think small” and “Work your (expletive) off.” There’s not much in here that you couldn’t have written yourself, except maybe for the part about developing your clear vision by sitting in your Jacuzzi. Because, of course, that’s where inspiration comes from — not walking for hours around London at night, which is how Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol.”

“There’s something about the hot water and the steam, about the hum of the jets and the rush of the bubbles. The feeling of floating, of not being able to feel the weight of my own body, sharpens all my other senses and opens me up to everything around me. The Jacuzzi gives me twenty to thirty minutes of mental clarity. It’s where I do some of my best thinking,” Schwarzenegger writes.

This was startling to me, not that a movie star hangs out regularly in his Jacuzzi, but because suddenly I began to think I’d gotten it wrong, that this book was comedy, not self-help. Particularly when I read the next sentence: “Sitting in the Jacuzzi is where I got the idea for my speech to the American people after the events of Jan. 6, 2021.”

In that speech, which I’d completely forgotten but was easily found online, he said he wanted to help the American people in their time of distress, which is why he made the video, and that Trump would soon be as irrelevant as an old tweet, a statement that hasn’t aged well. But if you were moved by that speech, the backstory is all here.

Moving on to Rule 4, “Sell, sell, sell.” In this chapter Schwarzenegger extols the value of visualization, confidence and publicity, and why it’s helpful to let people underestimate you (they’ll be blown away when you exceed their expectations later).

Rule 5, “Shift gears,” sounds like a guide to pivoting when things aren’t going well, but is actually more of an ode to positivity, and not of the Norman Vincent Peale kind.

Schwarzenegger grew up in Thal, Austria, under conditions that many contemporary Americans might consider child abuse. His father, for example, required that he do 200 knee bends every morning to “earn” his breakfast and Schwarzenegger writes that his father would sometimes “come home drunk after work and hit us. Those times were very hard.”

But, he said, he chose to recognize that “on the vast majority of days my father was a good dad” and the difficulties he encountered in childhood helped to make him the person he is today. He also notes, however, that his brother grew up to be an alcoholic and eventually died in a drunk driving accident, so that formula for success is not one-size-fits-all. There’s a deeper, more poignant book in the brothers’ stories and how their lives turned out so differently, and the fact that it’s buried under talk about positive thinking is a bit unsettling.

The final rules are “Shut your mouth, open your mind,” and “Break your mirrors,” the latter a line that Schwarzenegger got from his former father-in-law, the late Sargent Shriver, who said in a speech in 1994 that we need to stop looking so much at ourselves and look at each other. It’s solid advice, particularly in the age of the selfie, and is an unexpectedly serious note on which to end, particularly after all the Jacuzzi nonsense.

On his way to becoming a champion bodybuilder, Schwarzegegger worked out five hours every day, and he says that as his goals evolved he took that same chunk of time and put it into whatever he was striving to be good at — first actor, then politician. That information suggests that there’s much more to this man than showmanship, and we get glimpses of depth in this book. Unfortunately too much of it dwells in the shallows, and it rises only to the level of a Dollar Store book. D

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