CAPE CRUSADERS!

If there’s anything more satisfying than embarrassing one’s own children in public, it just might be embarrassing someone else’s. One of my favorite moments in the first regard happened just a little less than a year ago when I pulled up in front of my youngest daughter’s high school—at the start of her senior year, no less—in my new eye-catching black Volvo S60 . . . sporting a Batman license plate: with a crowd of about 40 classmates hanging around the entrance of the school, my daughter was absolutely mortified to be picked up by her Dad . . . driving The Batmobile. Perfect! Then a few nights later I doubled the satisfaction when I picked up my middle daughter in the traffic circle in front of her college dorm. A cool freshman, she pretended not to notice the license plate. But as she closed the car door and buckled herself, she turned to me and spoke one word straight from her heart to mine . . . like a stiletto: “Loser.”

So . . . yesterday’s embarrassing moment involved not my children but two of the three children of Irish retro rock ’n’ roller Rocky De Valera. We had just brunched with them and their father (traveling incognito under the unlikely name of Ferdia Mac Anna) in Chatham on Cape Cod and they needed a ride back to their summer home on the outskirts of town. So we piled into The Batmobile (though without the front plate—I too sometimes travel incognito) and pulled onto crowded Main Street . . . but not before I rolled down all the windows and opened the sun roof and cranked up the volume on “Baby, Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” the current hit single of Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. Were Rocky’s kids embarrassed to have their old Dad’s vocals blaring out into one of the major thoroughfares on the Cape in the height of tourist season? You betcha!

Afterwards, I realized how (in)appropriate it would have been to play the longlost-but-recently-found recording of a tune titled “Batman and Superman,” cut by Rocky De Valera and the Rhythm Kings way back in 1982-83 when his kids were just a twinkle in his eye. Next time!

In the meantime, I’m sure that my kids are relieved that they weren’t along for the ride: they would have been utterly “scarlah” (Dublin slang: red-faced) over the coincidence that Rocky and I were wearing matching Polo golf shirts and khaki shorts . . .

POST-APOCALYPSE . . . NOW; and/or, ABOUT A BOY

A few weeks ago I found myself reading Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. This book was all the rage when it first came out in 2006, and no doubt it will be all the rage again when the movie version hits the big screen in a few months. I wasn’t sure that I would get to it this summer . . . but it sort of fell off the bookshelf into my lap, so I gave it a go.

It is a bleak novel, that’s for sure: a depiction of a post-apocalyptic world (presumably after a nuclear holocaust) sparsely populated by survivors who can be categorized unequivocally as either “good guys” (the minute minority) or “bad guys.” As its title hints, the book is a quest narrative, and it traces the route—mostly uncharted—taken through the utter wasteland of human destruction and self-destruction by a dying father and his young son in search of some vestige of human decency. Written with a minimalist precision suited to the barren landscape—physical as well as psychological/spiritual (the “quest” can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically)—the novel is equal measures relentless and riveting: McCarthy offers the reader no respite from the mere remnant of civilization that his father and son find themselves wandering through.

Obviously, one of the challenges McCarthy confronted in writing this novel involved how to ground the narrative in a world both familiar and strange. Resisting any temptation to insert obvious post-apocalyptic landmarks, such as the buried Statue of Liberty at the end of the movie Planet of the Apes, McCarthy relies instead on inscribing a landscape of such remarkable consistency (in two senses of the word) that the reader who buys into it does so completely. I think this is a perfect example of what John Gardner meant when he described, in The Art of Fiction, the “dream” that a successful novel creates in the reader’s mind:

We may observe . . . that if the effect of the dream is to be powerful, the dream must probably be vivid and continuous—vivid because if we are not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.

But if the result is clearly a cautionary tale—a frightening projection of the post-apocalyptic world that human agency could very imaginably produce—there is another dimension of the novel that I found emotionally charged in a different way. As McCarthy acknowledges in a televised interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2007, this novel of a dying father’s desperate love for a son who will soon have to place his trust in what seems to be merely vestigial human goodness reflects and refracts the 73-year-old author’s own anxiety about the future that his own young son, John Francis McCarthy—to whom The Road is dedicated—will inherit. “Is this a love story to your son?” Oprah asks. “I suppose it is,” McCarthy understates in response. His answer typifying the overall dynamic of the interview—the author’s reticence being far from an antidote to Oprah’s over-simplistic line of questioning—the poignancy of the fact that the novel is, in effect, “about a boy” pervades the entire narrative.

Yet, notwithstanding that essential dimension of The Road, the novel that I chose to serve as an antidote to its unrelenting bleakness was just coincidentally Nick Hornby’s fine comic novel titled . . . About a Boy. I’ve read three other novels by Hornby—How to Be Good, High Fidelity, and A Long Way Down—and enjoyed each of them immensely. I would have read About a Boy long ago (it was first published in 1998) except that by the time I fully tuned in to Hornby, the only copies I could find in bookstores had actor Hugh Grant on the cover—and I despise Hugh Grant! Funny, then, that as I was reading the novel over the past few days (I found a used copy with an older cover), I realized that at some point I must have sat through the film adaptation that Grant stars in (my wife and daughters love him and we probably even own the DVD of the film) . . . and so the character of Will was indelibly imprinted in my mind’s eye in the image of Grant. I could say Ouch! but I have to admit that he may have been perfectly cast. . . . One way or the other, About a Boy proved to be an altogether entertaining read—just the sort of “father and son” narrative that I needed to awaken me from Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish “dream.”

GUITAR FANCYING . . .

Back in February—on the Sunday of Valentine’s weekend, in fact—I had my 15 minutes of notoriety when the Boston Globe Magazine published under its Coupling rubric (a weekly feature on “domestic relations”) a piece I had penned titled “Cat Fancying.” Suggesting that men who own cats might be better schooled in the ways of intimacy than men who own dogs, the piece elicited all sorts of cranky/nasty responses on the Globe website, several of which—quite clearly from dog-owning pickup-driving he-men—had me checking over my shoulder for a few days afterwards. (Seriously: there are some real crazies out there . . .) The Globe has now taken down the comments . . . but pleasingly enough, the piece continues to have shelf life. Just a couple of nights ago, I walked into the kitchen as my middle daughter was reading “Cat Fancying” off her computer screen to some of her guy friends—more than 5 months after the fact. And about a month ago I was stopped on the street by a realtor who had tried to sell our old house about 15 years ago; he not only remembered me by name (we had not crossed paths in all that time) but when he read the piece in the Globe he also remembered the vicious feline love of my life at that long-ago time—aptly, her name was Ursula, which means “little she-bear”—who had refused to let prospective buyers go up to the second floor: she positioned herself on the stairs and hissed and spat and swatted at all comers, protecting her territory!

For a while I kept fairly close track of the range of responses—and of responders—to “Cat Fancying.” Even 5 weeks after its publication, at a political fundraiser here in my town, one of our Selectmen complimented me on it. And the week before that, when I was walking the dog at 6:30 one morning, an around-the-corner neighbor pulled over in his car to comment approvingly on the piece (he has 4 cats, 2 dogs—I guess that gives him “expert” status). And in the week before that, 4 new people (including one person at my jazz combo’s gig at Ryles Jazz Club in Cambridge) remarked on it to me—that’s pretty good staying power! But that’s not all: shortly after the piece was published, someone shouted out to me (twice) at a local high school basketball game, “Hey, O’Grady . . . got your cat with you?” That 15 seconds of fame raised some eyebrows in my section of the bleachers as a number of people didn’t catch the point of the reference. But another guy at that game confided in me that his cat had lived to be 17 years old . . . and that after it died he was too heartbroken to get another. I told him that he should honor that cat’s memory by getting another one now: the cat gods would want him to and they would reward him accordingly. . . . I also had many email messages from people from all corners of my life (and beyond). One guy who works with my wife swore me to secrecy when he admitted that his favorite pet was a bunny named Thumper. A former student admitted that he is known as “Dr. Catvorkian” because he has now taken aged or ill cats belonging to 3 different friends to the vet to have them put to sleep. My furthest-back student to respond was in my first-ever class at UMass Boston, in the Fall of ’84; he hates cats but the piece gave him an occasion to drop me a line, which was nice. Another former student, from about 15 years ago, emailed to say that his mother sent him the piece in California. . . . Also, 3 or 4 of my neighbors told me that they had left the piece on their college-age daughters’ beds for when they returned home for Spring break: sweet!

Obviously, “cat fancying”—the unabashed admiration of cats which I confessed to—strikes a chord with many people; this no doubt explains the allure for ailurophiles of the long-running monthly magazine Cat Fancy. And so—very evidently—does guitar fancying, which I will also plead guilty to, strike a chord, very literally. In fact, guitar may be the only instrument that invites the same degree of fetishistic zeal that felines provoke: guitarists just love to talk about (and think about . . . and dream about) guitars. Not surprisingly, then, there’s no shortage of magazines catering to this fetish in one way or another: Guitar Player, Just Jazz Guitar, Guitar World, Flatpicking Guitar Magazine . . . the list goes on and on and on. One of my favorites is Vintage Guitar Magazine, a large format publication with well-written features on both “classic” and “unique” guitars—individual guitars as well as both popular and obscure models. Lots of “eye candy” too—color photographs detailing the wonders of these exquisite creations. (All cats are beautiful; all guitars are beautiful too . . .) The target audience for VGM comprises not only bona fide guitar collectors, guys (mostly) with a “guitar jones” that simply must be fed no matter what the cost, but also would-be collectors like yours truly—guys with (as the saying goes) “champagne taste but a beer budget.”

So I was naturally curious when, browsing the magazine rack at the local Borders a few weeks ago, I happened upon the inaugural issue of Guitar Aficionado. Interestingly, the checkout clerk was also curious, as she asked me: “So . . . what makes this magazine different from all the others?” Well, the answer to that million-dollar question might just be . . . a million dollars! For—transparently—the target audience for this new magazine is not Joe Six-Pack poking around yard sales and pawn shops and guitar show booths in search of some personal Holy Grail but a different breed of cat altogether. Celebrating not just guitars but classic automobiles, high-end fashion (including $25,000 wristwatches), exotic travel, and vintage wines and bourbons, Guitar Aficionado is aimed at guys with a “champagne budget” who are looking to cultivate a “taste” to match: in short, it’s inviting its readers to ogle not just guitars but an entire deep-pocketed lifestyle that most of us can experience only vicariously . . . or voyeuristically. I have nothing against cover-boy chef Tom Colicchio or California vintner Robert Foley owning great guitars—and apparently they play them, which is sort of the point! But to the publishers of this magazine, guitars seem little more than commodities—“blue chip investments” like stocks and bonds or vanity acquisitions like trophy wives. I truly admire Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, but the article focused on him is much more about his owning a pair of Friesian horses; they may be stunningly beautiful beasts that testify to the bumper sticker I noticed yesterday—“Horses are proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”—but I think that most true guitar “aficionados” would be more interested in hearing Perry hold forth on his passion for guitars than in catching a glimpse of “his leisure role as country squire.” As for the review of the $255,000 2009 Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Coupe that brings up the rear of Guitar Aficionado . . .

But who am I to judge the fantasy life of others? After all, I’ve got an 11-year-old tortoiseshell cat whose coloring matches the tobacco sunburst finish of my 53-year-old Gibson ES-125.