Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/07/20

Fay Victor, Blackity Black Black Is Beautiful (Northern Spy Records)

This record is definitely in the same church if not the same pew as most slam poetry, and while I’m at this, if you’ve had the slightest interest in the ongoing saga involving my attending a Slam Free Or Die slam poetry event here in Manchester, I’m happy to say that the show’s organizer, Christopher Clauss, contacted me the other day and I’m hoping to get to their next show on Aug. 3, which will feature Chicago veteran slam poet Billy Tuggle. As for this album, it’s the Brooklyn-based composer’s first solo record in a thus-far 30-year career whose highlights have included distinguished prize awards, lots of performances in museums, jazz festivals and the like. Her trip is layering her own spoken word poetry and melodic soul/gospel vocalizations over techno, glitch, acid jazz, more glitch and various other beats, her lyrics intended to raise awareness about the things and public figures she holds dear (“Governorship/Senate” is dedicated to Stacey Abrams; the spooky-bizarre “Trust The Universe” to Sun Ra). Fascinating urban art piece, all told. A

Bloodstrings, Heartache Radio (Dackelton Records)

This one had me at “horror psychobilly” but even more so when I noticed they’re Germans. If anyone knows how to conjure drunken, boneheaded American-style punk aggression, it’s Europeans, especially when they’re from countries that aren’t France. This lot have been around since 2009 and mostly did a lusty Ramones-goth thing until the present, which finds the poor dears feeling reflective after losing a few friends to depression and such, which is always horrible, and so, instead of singing about cartoonish fantasy demons, the demons examined in this record are the real ones, for instance the demons of addiction in “The Bottle Talking,” a great little punker that sounds like No Doubt-era Gwen Stefani fronting Hole. The production here is absolutely sparkling, totally pro level, which makes the deranged thrasher “Colorblind” sound like the Runaways on a Green Day budget. Not a lot of punkabilly here, just nicely rendered hardcore for the most part, but there’s nothing wrong with that of course. A

Playlist

• Ack, I hate it, look, the next CD-release Friday is July 21, summer’s already more than half gone, where’s my confounded snowshoes? Ack, but it’s even worse, because look fam, it’s depleted-soil Led Zeppelin wannabes Greta Van Fleet, with their latest album of Zeppelin IV ripoff songs, Starcatcher! I saw a recent YouTube “reaction-style” video where some 20-year-old dude was, he swore, listening to Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love” for the first time, and he was surprised at how much he liked it. Like all olds, it’s impossible for me to believe that someone’s never heard that boring old tune before, but remember, fellow olds, these kids today aren’t listening to 50-year-old songs when they make out in their moms’ Toyota Camrys, they’ve got all kinds of commercial hip-hop and K-pop and Weeknd and Kings Of Leon songs on little thumb drives, and because of that, they don’t tune mom’s car radio away from NPR’s Marketplace or Sirius’s 80s On 8, and because of that, mom has no idea how vacuous and wimpy and empty their preferred music is, and that’s good, because you know what that is? It’s teenage rebellion, folks, kids exercising their right not to listen to Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard until they’re older, saving up all that “good stuff” until they’re old enough to appreciate it, so they can make reaction YouTubes and then immediately go back to listening to their Bruno Mars and Lorde “oldies records” and never have to listen to that old blues-metal nonsense again. See, kids today are smart; they know that Led Zeppelin is actual devil music, direct from H-E-double-toothpicks, and if they’re not careful, they’ll get sucked into the same Evil Dead time-space vortex that the guys in Greta Van Fleet did, which caused those dummies to try to rewrite Zep’s “Black Dog” every album until they get it sounding better than the original, which they obviously can’t, but look how hard they try! Anyway meanwhile, back at the column, the Fleets have graced us with a new song called “Meeting The Master,” and it’s basically Zep’s “The Rain Song” turned inside out and made into a quirky hat. I have no more time to discuss this, thank goodness.

• Ack, wait what, not a new Guided by Voices album, this cannot be, will Robert Pollard ever take a break from writing five boring new songs every 10 minutes and insisting on recording them? Ever see the end of the 1970s version of Planet Of The Apes, when Charlton Heston is pounding sand and cursing at the sky? Well, that’s me every 15 minutes, when I read that a new GBV album is coming out in time for mention in this column. If you’re keeping count, we’re now at eight GBV albums in three years, and this one’s titled Welshpool Frillies. The single, “Seedling,” is like an angular art-rock version of Yardbirds. It’s not totally bad, but you can tell Pollard wrote it on the potty in 10 minutes, like all his other songs. What-ever.

• Nils Lofgren is in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, which isn’t necessarily a reason to hate him. In between making Bruuuce albums he makes his own albums, like the forthcoming new Mountains, which is on the way to your pirate music feeds as we speak. In the leadoff single, “Nothin’s Easy (For Amy),” Nils sings like a cross between Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and the refried Americana-bluegrass underneath his voice is even worse. Enjoy, fans of Bruuuce!

• We’ll end the week with not particularly funny comedian/musician Jaboukie Young-White’s new album, All Who Can’t Hear Must Feel, featuring the single “Goner,” whose haunted-house-meets-industrial beat is, I must admit, pretty gosh-darn above-average.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper

Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper (Random House, 282 pages)

“Writing a memoir is akin to taking off one’s clothes in public” is how Christian Cooper begins his acknowledgments, wherein he thanks everyone who made his memoir possible, with one extremely notable exception: the Central Park “Karen” who vaulted him to fame.

Cooper is the bird enthusiast who was out early on Memorial Day 2020 looking at birds when an unleashed dog came running in his direction. He politely asked the dog’s owner to leash her dog, as the law requires in the part of the park called the Ramble. When she said she wouldn’t — that her dog needed exercise — he started filming their exchange, which later went viral because the woman called the police, falsely reporting that Cooper, who is Black, was threatening her.

The incident was bad enough on its own, but was magnified because of something else that happened that day — the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And within days Cooper had become something of a folk hero, an example of the ordinary dangers of being Black while driving, while jogging, while birding or doing any number of ordinary activities. He became famous while the dog walker, Amy Cooper, became infamous. And he has leveraged that fame into an enchanting memoir that has surprisingly little to do with what happened that day, but instead is an ode to the natural world and an account of growing up Black, gay and intellectual in 1970s America.

The first sign of how well-crafted this memoir is comes in the first chapter, “An Incident in Central Park.” He describes running through the park alone and says, “I know what this looks like.”

“My sneakers are old and muddy, my jeans in need of a good washing, and my shirt, though collared, could at best be described as unkempt. I am a Black man on the run. And I have binoculars.” As it turns out, the “incident” is not what we think, but something entirely different, related to birding. It is a smart, charming entry into Cooper’s story, which has a mystery at its heart: How, exactly, does an otherwise normal person get so rabidly obsessed with birds?

In Cooper’s case, birds were, like science fiction and comic books, a mental sanctuary as he was growing up on Long Island in a lower-middle class family where intellectual pursuits were prized. When he was 9 he attended a summer woodworking class, where he was given a choice of making a footstool or a bird feeder. He picked the bird feeder, and the first bird to come to that feeder, a red-winged blackbird, became his “spark bird,” the creature that began his birding obsession.

After carefully navigating high school while keeping his sexuality secret, Cooper went to Harvard on a scholarship, where he finally was able to come out as gay. (When he told his father, the father asked if he wanted to see a psychiatrist, he said.) But it wasn’t until he spent time in South America, on a post-graduation fellowship funded by Harvard, that he really began to embrace his sexuality and see that being a Black man in other countries was a vastly different experience from being a Black man in America. “In Buenos Aires,” he writes, “I had found myself in a city full of white folks who desire me because of my Blackness, not in spite of it. … I’d spent my whole life being told that as Black person I was not quite as worthy as a white person, and on an unconscious level, I had internalized that proposition.”

Even then, there were the birds, and Cooper writes beautifully about their migrations, their habitats and his searches for them, from the Blackburnian warbler to the alarmingly named Ovenbird. This man is really, really into birds, and he wants us all to be. While the narrative meanders through Cooper’s work and relationships, it is interspersed with birding tips and interludes about the “pleasures of birding” — for example, “the joy of hunting, without the bloodshed.”

Eventually he returns to the other “incident in Central Park” and offers a much fuller understanding of what happened that day.

To his everlasting credit, Cooper has been remarkably chill about the exchange that enraged millions of Americans and effectively canceled the dog walker for life. He wasn’t even responsible for the video going viral; he had shared it with a small group of friends on Facebook, where he normally shared what notable bird he had just sighted, and his sister asked permission to post it on Twitter. He agreed — “after all, how much attention could it get?”

The tweet landed in the feed of comedian Kathy Griffin, who retweeted it, and within hours the media were calling. (Interestingly, he found out about the George Floyd video during an interview with “Inside Edition.”)

Although Cooper was pressured by the district attorney’s office, and many people in the public, he declined to participate in any charges related to the incident. He said what the dog walker did and said was “incredibly racist” but passes no judgment on Amy Cooper herself. But he has also made clear that he had no interest in any sort of kumbaya-esque reunion with her and says she never reached out to him personally to apologize for that day. “It’s not about Amy Cooper,” he writes. “What’s important is what her actions revealed: how deeply and widely racial bias runs in the United States. (Ironically, she was born in Canada, yet she still tapped into that dark vein that carries its poison to every part of this land.)”

Fame that erupts on social media is often fleeting and unearned. Christian Cooper is the rare exception — his is a story worth telling, and in this memoir he does so exceptionally well. A

Album Reviews 23/07/13

Craving, Call Of The Sirens (Massacre Records)

I’m barely doing Facebook at all lately because I’m trying to finish a new book, but one thing I did notice in my recent drop-ins to that hell-site was the descent of local author and Hippo co-founder-or-whatnot Dan Szczesny into the ranks of epic metal fanboys; in other words, he really likes bands like Nightwish and Visions Of Atlantis, which, basically translated, means bands that are basically like Trans Siberian Orchestra except there’s a lot more opera and all that stuff. Usually he’s a Springsteen-head, but it’s a free country, so here’s an album I can recommend to Dan and whoever else might dig “epic metal as defined as ‘melodic black metal and melodic death metal,’” mainly because the drummer of this German trio broke the “unofficial world record in playing blast beats at 250 bpm for over 20 minutes straight,” why aren’t you buying this album right now? OK, maybe you shouldn’t; it’s big into old-school black metal, going by opening tune “Mich Packt Die Wut” and much of the rest of this stuff, but it is indeed epic, fusing Scandinavian hardcore grog-oi to the dulcet caterwauling of Deafheaven. It’s fine. A

Cut Worms, Cut Worms (Jagjaguwar Records)

This is as good a time as any to let all you local bands in on a secret: If you’re paying for studio time to make a record, don’t hire a producer. Do. Not. Unless they’ve cut an actual Top 10 album, the producer is as lost as you are. You want a certain sound, just tell the engineer to get it for you. I bring this up because this follow-up to Brooklyn indie dude Max Clarke’s 2020 album Nobody Lives Here Anymore is better than that one because he took the helm himself: It nails the happy-go-lucky Beatles-meets-Ben Kweller vibe he wants. It’s retro ’70 radio pop at its best (there are moments in opener “Don’t Fade Out” that evoke Todd Rundgren for sure, Let It Be-era Beatles in “Take It and Smile,” etc.). These tunes just want you to feel good, and they go a long way toward that without any forced awkwardness or lonely precarity like so many of his peers are into. Nice stuff here. A

Playlist

• Ahoy, mateys, looky yonder, hard a-larboard (which means “to the right” in Moby Dick language), it’s a whole fleet of new albums coming this way, sure to delight the senses and such and so, when they all go on sale this Friday, July 14! OK, let’s do this, you trolls, the first thing to get out of the way is the inevitable “too soon” album to appear after the recent death of Canadian folk-pop genius Gordon Lightfoot! This one is a live album, titled Gordon Lightfoot At Royal Albert Hall, featuring all his greatest hits and more, from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” to “Sundown,” which was a really great song indeed. The only real tangent I can offer as far as Gordon Lightfoot stories is the time I was a rising young business executroid doing phone sales stuff for IBM. I was on a call with some software company and suddenly I was talking to his actual daughter, and no, I’ve totally forgotten her name, but she was nice. Anyway, that’s it, gang, that’s it, Gordon Lightfoot everyone, go buy this new album so his nice daughter can quit her software job.

• I know diddly about ’80s funk/soul-poppers Kool & The Gang except for the fact that I never really cared about them at all, so please enjoy yourselves as you watch the silly journalism man try to fill some space with random brain droppings about the group’s new album, People Just Wanna Have Fun, an album title I think would be much more fitting if the group were a death metal band, but you do you, Kool and the Whatevers! No, OK, I’m kidding, k-i-d-d-i-n-g, folks, I think they had a song on the New Jack City soundtrack, which automatically makes them relevant forever — nope, it wasn’t them, never mind, they’re still irrelevant, except no, they did that song “Celebrate,” and recorded the worst funk song ever in music history, “Emergency.” There, that all should serve as a usable intro to the Kools, and now let me just duck out of here for one second and head to YouTube to listen to the new single, “Let’s Party,” which, if I recall correctly, was named after something really gross the maintenance crew had to clean up after Aztec ritual sacrifices. It sounds like a cross between Daft Punk and the Weeknd; your puppy would probably jump around cutely to it if you played it on your phone and told the little rascal you were going to upload the video to TikTok.

• Kosovo-born electropop-singing lady Rita Ora is back, with a new album, her third, You & I, and she wants you to listen to it, because — wait, “Rita Who?” you ask? Why, just one of the most famous England-based singing ladies in the world at the moment, that’s who! Wait, let me dial it down and Americanize it for y’all, you’ve heard of the song “Black Widow featuring Rita Ora” by Iggy Azalea, right? Well that explains everything right there, because she’s the same Rita Ora! Other than that she gets hundreds of millions of views on her videos from British bots and the occasional stray human of course, but who even cares about all that, let’s just go listen to her new Fatboy Slim-produced single, “Praising You,” won’t that be coooool? Right, it’s neo-disco with a neat little U.K. garage-ish drum sound underneath. I like it fine, but you might not.

• Lastly, it’s Norwegian nu-disco producer Lindstrøm, who has gotten in line to become this year’s Steve Aoki. Everyone Else is a Stranger is his new album, and it features the tune “Syreen,” an Aoki-ized house jam that’d be fun at a beach club if there were any such thing as fun anymore.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

The In-Between, by Hadley Vlahos

The In-Between, by Hadley Vlahos (Ballantine, 259 pages)

For much of the past 50 years, most Americans died in a hospital. That was a change from the first part of the 20th century, when most people died at home. Since 2017, more people are dying at home again, in large part because of the expansion of hospice care.

Hospice provides in-home support for a dying person and their caregivers, administering pain medication to the patient and providing other services. A new memoir from a hospice nurse provides a surprisingly upbeat look into hospice care and what people can expect at the end of life.

Hadley Vlahos was a single mom in her early 20s when she became a registered nurse, and then began working in hospice. She looked so young that families sometimes mistook her for a nurse’s assistant (and in one funny case, a stripper), but her youthfulness was also an asset, as when a dying man decided his new purpose in life was teaching this young woman everything she didn’t know about sports and current events.

But the main thing that Vlahos learned from her patients is that there is a liminal state between being alive and being dead, a state she calls “the in-between.” Her memoir is built around a series of stories about what past patients experienced during this time, from seemingly interacting with long-dead relatives to having a premonition about a future event.

She tells these stories matter-of-factly; there is no mysticism or religious proselytizing in the book; in fact, Vlahos was raised in a religious home, but turned away from her childhood faith after the death of a friend. And she doesn’t speculate on anything that happens after she pronounces the time of death of the patient aloud (which is part of her job). She is simply relating the “in-between” experiences of dying people, to which her work makes her a witness. And those experiences are, put simply, rather riveting.

There was, for example, Carl, a bed-ridden patient whom one day Vllahos found walking around his house with a flashlight, looking under furniture and behind curtains. When asked what he was doing, he said that he was playing hide-and-seek with Anna, his 2-year-old daughter who had drowned decades before. Vlahos, who had been trained to “meet patients where they are,” accepted this calmly.

“But where was Carl?” she wondered. “It seemed as if he was in two places at once. Physically, he was in the room with Mary and me; emotionally and mentally, he seemed very much to be somewhere else, with Anna.” Carl also said to Vlahos that he’d had a conversation with his mother. He seemed otherwise rational and consented to go back to bed.

Consulting with a physician, Vlahos learned it wasn’t unusual for dying people to have a spurt of physical energy, similar to the flash of cognition called terminal lucidity that sometimes occurs shortly before death. The phenomenon that caused Carl to get out of bed is called “the surge” by medical professionals, and it often fools family members into thinking their loved one is recovering, when actually it’s a sign that they will likely die within a few days. And indeed, Carl went downhill the next day.

This is the sort of practical information that is useful for any family considering hospice, especially since so many of us have been far removed from the physical processes of death as it was relegated to hospitals and nursing homes. But the book is also surprisingly hopeful, given that it involves the last day of the terminally ill, some of whom are dying in what should have been their prime.

There is, for example, the story of Elizabeth, a 40-year-old woman who is dying of lung cancer despite having never smoked and having no family history, and Reggie, the 58-year-old who is dying from advanced liver disease brought on by alcoholism. (Reggie’s story has additional poignancy from the reaction of his devoted dog to his death.) Elizabeth is a beautiful woman who had clearly been athletic before she got sick; in one of her conversations with Vlahos, she tells her that she regrets she had spent so much of her life working on a treadmill and confides that she avoided being with friends on her birthday because she didn’t want to eat cake. “I wish I’d just eaten the damn cake,” Elizabeth said.

Vlahos, who has struggled with disordered eating because of something her father said in her childhood, takes Elizabeth’s advice to heart. In fact it is because of the wisdom that so many of these patients impart in their final day that she sincerely enjoys her work, despite the reaction she gets from others when they learn what she does. (That revulsion clearly doesn’t carry over to the general public; she has more than a million followers on TikTok and Instagram, where she goes by NurseHadley.)

The work takes Vlahos everywhere from elegant homes in beach communities to a homeless camp, and she interperses the stories of her patients with the timeline of her own life — growing up with a father who appears to have been emotionally abusive, having a child out of wedlock at age 20, finding love with a physical therapist and navigating the terminal illness of her new mother-in-law.

While her writing is best described as workmanlike — there are no soaring passages of prose — the book is memorable for the stories and the remarkable pattern of dying people reporting conversations with loved ones (who sometimes tell them — accurately, as it turns out — when they are going to pass). These experiences take place whether people are religious or staunch atheists. These are usually people on morphine, of course, and the experiences can easily be written off hallucinations or delusions caused by the medicine or the body gradually shutting down. And most of us know of the dying experiences of people who didn’t experience anything quite so dreamy.

While Vlahos (very carefully) does seem to eventually side with those who believe in an afterlife, she clearly is open to anything as an explanation for what she has witnessed. “I don’t think we can explain everything that happens here on Earth, much less after we physically leave our bodies,” she writes. The observations of the living can neither predict or confirm the experience of the dead, but this memoir offers hope that dying may not be as terrifying as many people think — at least not with hospice care. B

Album Reviews 23/07/06

Cyclone Static, Cave Pop: Dance Songs For Primitive People (Mint 400 Records)

Wow, this isn’t the usual stuff I get from this particular public relations dude; it’s full-on throwback ’80s-rock a la Billy Idol or The Alarm or [name of angry-sounding oi-pop band] as opposed to the truckload of metal CDs he floods my mailbox with every month. But wait a minute, a few critics have tagged it as grunge stuff, and yup, it is, on the dumb, bonky, basically Nirvana-ish “On the Block,” but wait a minute, on “Real Sign” it makes like Weezer after way too much beer, all loud and aggressive and slow. And then they go full-on Nirvana again on “It’s Okay Now.” Wait a minute, maybe the problem is that this New Jersey (punk) band doesn’t have any idea what it’s doing (it’s actually proto-’90s-punk with too much raucousness to be counted as grunge), but whatever, a combination of Billy Idol, Weezer and Nirvana is pretty listenable, just admit it. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Andrew Hung, Deliverance (Lex Records)

OK, I liked this one right from the drop, which is a nice break from, like, every little thing going wrong for like the past two weeks straight. Deliverance is Hung’s third album, but between releases he’s been Doing Things, most importantly collaborating with folktronica princess Beth Orton. I was warned ahead of time that Hung’s voice isn’t very good, not that that’s ever stopped anyone, and besides, his hesitant, repressed baritone sounds like Ric Okasek from The Cars trying to stay barely loud enough to be picked up at all. Also weirdly, opening tune “Ocean Mouth” has the same beat and tempo and affability as the old Cars tune “Touch and Go,” but anyway Hung’s trip doesn’t really parallel anyone else’s past that. His ethos combines punk with just enough tech and a lot of serious listenability, reminding me of guys like Winston Giles. There’s a dubstep feel to a lot of this, too, but the drum sound is splashy and super nice. Well worth investigating. A

Playlist

• Our next general CD release date is July 7, the Friday after this year’s really badly placed Fourth of July day off, thanks so much for having it on a Tuesday, founding fathers, so that we get to nurse our lager hangovers for three days in a row without any random naps! Actually I could use a nap or some fetid American beer right now, because there’s no escaping it, I have to talk about the forthcoming Taylor Swift album, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), because she really could use some press, like, have any of you ever even heard of this person? No, I’d seriously rather write an essay on my favorite dentists than write about Taylor Swift, because it will involve some research on my part, given that (a) all I know is that she writes her own bad country songs and leaves the writing of all her diva hits to the two European dudes who write all the other bubble-pop hits, and (b) I couldn’t care less. I assume she’s got a bunch of drama going on, oh for cripes sake why don’t I just Google it. OK, forget it, just some 4chan-level “edgy” nonsense from her new totally-not-boyfriend/ex or whatever Matty Healy, who looks like a Spago’s busboy, I’m all set with all this, let the 11-year-olds argue about all the ins and outs. Ack, ack, listen to that new single, the title track, it is a harbinger of the ’90s grunge-chick radio-pop that’s poised to take over the world any day now. That’s right, folks, before you know it all the hip kids will be buying old Sub-Pop record albums instead of buying food or other important things, just to impress their slacker friends, and all the pop-divas will sound like Lisa Loeb and Jewel, and then everything will be horrible when all the Gen Z’ers discover Ani Di Franco. That’s what we have to look forward to, folks, mark my words. Move to Belgium while you still can before it’s too late.

• What’d I just tell you, folks, the Worthless Nineties are back! Look over there, it’s a new album from British indie-rocker PJ Harvey, titled I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first full-length since 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, which drew criticism for its political messaging because she offered no solutions, just complaints. But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing, yelling into our social media bubbles without ever being constructive? I don’t know, but whatever, she always makes me think of the Lili Taylor character in the movie Say Anything, strumming her guitar and singing angry-disaffected-angry tunes like “Joe Lies!” about whatever, but hey, maybe this time she’ll change the world with her singing; let’s go have a listen to “I Inside the Old I Dying,” eh wot? So, right, the first part is awful, like she’s singing bad on purpose over some ukulele (have we not yet had enough of stupid ukuleles yet, America, like, can we just move on to French horns or whatever’s next?) but the other half is forebode-y and gothy and dark. So it’s half-good and half-stupid, right in line with the zeitgeist.

• Chamber-pop performer Anohni is releasing a new album with her backing band, The Johnsons, titled My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross! The single, “Sliver Of Ice,” is slow and depressing and weird, I wish I hadn’t listened to it because now all I want to do is eat an entire angel food cake. All set with this.

• And finally it’s Local Natives, a vanilla-indie-rock band from Los Angeles, with their latest, Time Will Wait For No One. If you like Muse you’ll probably be down with their new tune “NYE,” but if you find Muse annoying, as most normal people do, you won’t.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

How to Survive History, by Cody Cassidy

How to Survive History, by Cody Cassidy (Penguin, 224 pages)

Until this week I never knew there was a category on Amazon called “humor history,” but I’m here for it. So is Cody Cassidy, who created for himself a cheeky publishing niche by imagining the improbable and then figuring out (with the help of experts) the answer to the question “What if…?”.

He did that first in 2017’s And Then You’re Dead, in which he wondered what would really happen if you, say, got swallowed by a whale, got caught in a stampede, went over Niagara Falls in a barrel or had sundry other unpleasant adventures. Now he’s back with How to Survive History, in which he offers (hopefully not useful) advice on how we can survive extinction-level events such as asteroids or volcano explosions should some time-traveling event send us back to one. It’s fanciful, of course, and a tad silly, but Cassidy comes to the task with a surprising gravitas and the right mix of “yes, this is kind of crazy” but also “this is serious stuff, pay attention.”

The serious stuff is the history behind the events, which include the strike of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, the sinking of the Titanic and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Most of us learned in childhood about the asteroid that hit Earth some 66 million years ago, and we may have even retained some specifics about the planet-altering event, such as the size of the rock, believed to be between 8 and 9 miles wide.

But reading Cassidy’s description of what happened in the aftermath was the first time I really understood the scope of the destruction and the chain of events it triggered. “If this asteroid hit in the same spot today, the blast wave would kill you in Texas, deafen you in New York and blow out your window panes in Buenos Aires,” he writes. “The rock rang Earth like a bell.”

And there were so many ways that it could have killed you, had humans been around then, from the skyscraper-high tsunamis, to raining debris the size of school buses, to the fires caused by thermal radiation, to raging snowstorms in which 10 feet of snow fell each day. Unless you were a turtle or other aquatic creature that could take relative shelter under water, it seems impossible to survive this sort of destruction, but in talking to experts Cassidy comes up with a plan — it just involves getting to Madagascar or Indonesia. (As I said previously, this is fanciful stuff.)

Similarly, Cassidy has suggestions on how we can survive the sack of Rome, a voyage with the pirate Blackbeard, the stranding of the Donner party on their doomed trek to California, and the devastating San Francisco earthquake in 1906. In these and other catastrophes, he colorfully provides the history while breezily inserting the reader into the event. An example from his chapter on Titanic: “you’re a frugal time traveler, so you elect to travel third class … That buys you a bunk on F deck, six levels below the top. It’s about the size of a prison cell, only it’s occupied by four people rather than just two. But who cares! All you do is sleep in it anyway, and this ship offers world-class amenities to its third-class passengers, who in this era would typically have to stuff themselves into one large, poorly ventilated and inadequately converted cargo hold.”

Cassidy’s survival plan when the ship hits the iceberg (with only enough lifeboats for a third of its passengers) involves calmly dressing in finery (to make it seem that you are a first-class passenger), using ladders that you’re not supposed to access, and going to the starboard side instead of port. Stay out of the water if you can — it’s 27 degrees Fahrenheit — but if you have to enter it, slip in rather than jumping, to give your body time to absorb the shock. Then swim hard for 10 to 15 minutes to build body heat. That could buy you time for passengers on a lifeboat to take pity and pull you in.

Yes, we’ve all seen the movie, but Cassidy gives us a wholly different experience with fascinating detail that James Cameron didn’t provide.

When he takes us to the port of Pompeii, 6 miles from Mount Vesuvius, he describes our plight as challenging but not hopeless. The Pompeiians who survived were the ones who took off immediately instead of taking shelter as the ash fell. The volcano erupted on Aug. 24, but it wasn’t until the next day that the entire village was wiped out, meaning that many people went to sleep that night thinking wrongly that they had survived. Where to go? Cassidy says there were two options: running north toward Naples or south toward Stabiae — fast. Both routes presented danger, but none that involved being consumed by a river of lava.

Will any of this information help you navigate life in the 21st century? Probably not. But is it more useful than anything you will find in the typical summer beach read? Absolutely.

That’s why anything by Cassidy is the perfect book for summer. It’s airy enough to not feel dreadfully important (you don’t have to retain information about how to survive the fall of Constantinople) but engaging enough that you will constantly want to quote from the book to people sitting beside you at the lake or beach. Plus, How to Survive History solves a problem of beach reads that has always irritated me — most often they’re romance novels written for women, a la Elin Hilderbrand.

It’s paperback and won’t be shortlisted for any elite prize, but Cassidy owns “humor history” and it’s top-notch for the genre. A

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