Humanizing The Vacuum

6. The Mountain Goats – All Eternals Deck

Intimations of doom, boasting the clarity of a dream half-remembered. Five years after hiring rock accompaniment, John Darnielle learns to trust the tug of a bass line or when necessary to bend his voice for percussive ends, peaking on “Beautiful Gas Mask,” in which the arrangement takes its cue from Darnielle’s hysteria only to settle, like ash over the decimated landscape, on the quietest intonation of the refrain “Never sleep. Remember to breathe deep.” But he wants to he can still strum those acoustic strings until I swear they snapped (“Estate Sale Sign”).

5. Serengeti – Family and Friends

“Ever since I lost my job, I started a blog / It’s going so great / It’s about the ins and outs of the perfect date,” David Cohn raps, holding a mirror up to those like us typing this review. He’s hip-hop because that’s how his rhymes sound and beats snap, but in sensibility he’s closer to Beck than Beck is these days.

4. Britney Spears – Femme Fatale

What I wrote in April: “…so post-feminist/post-sexual/post-woman that to wonder whether she’s used or being used by the purported objects of lust she’s dancing/fucking is as beside the point as comparing ‘Libya’ and ‘Iraq.’” I also argued that her femmebot sheen darkens when a song demands more personality than her designers have programmed her with. That was April. Now I count only two rubber doughnuts in one of the most sustained contemporary examples of disco apocalypse. When the IT department wheels her away for disassembly she won’t need “Hit Me Baby One More Time” when she’s got “Till The World Ends” for an epitaph.

I saw him on the God is Not Great tour in May 2007 at a local synagogue. The set-up reads like a hoary joke: a rabbi, Catholic priest, and iman awaited their rounds with the great boxer, smiling like tetanus victims. As I recall he reduced the venerable Nathan Katz, religious studies professor at FIU, to tight-lipped rage when Hitchens attacked him for endorsing the most reactionary elements of Judaism. “How dare you? How DARE you, sir?” Hitchens thundered, like Orson Welles as Father Mapple in Moby-Dick.

At the post-lecture book signing (for which he absented himself twenty minutes and returned, emitting discreet waves of scotch and Marlboro Reds), he held up the line by talking sweetly and without condescension to old ladies who wanted book recommendations. I hadn’t bought God is Not Great yet, but I brought my copy of Paine’s Age of Reason. His face darkened when he noticed it wasn’t the canary-yellow hardcover. “I’m very sorry, sir, but my publisher [eyes roll] ordered me not to sign any book that’s not my own.” He must have seen my momentary embarrassment because he very quickly added, “But let’s keep this one between ourselves because your taste is extraordinary.” He recommended a couple of chapters for me to emphasize and signed my book “with love” from “Hitch.”

I came to Hitchens late: his name popped up in early 1999 in the waning days of the impeachment proceedings against his nemesis Bill Clinton – as I understood it at the time he and a friend, Clinton flak Sidney Blumenthal, fell out over conversations which may or may not have been on the record. Then came 9/11 and the furor with which Hitchens assailed the left for malfeasances committed by Noah Chomsky and later Gore Vidal, both of whom had been beloved mentors. But I won’t scratch this scab again. I’d wager that we’ll be reading Hitchens on Byron, Powell (about whose A Dance to the Music of Time he could not convince me deserved the considered look), Waugh, Kipling, Wilde, and a forgotten speech about Jewry and Daniel Deronda published in 1993′s For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports that is a masterpiece of probity, especially when one remembers how he discovered his own Jewishness (one of the first and best chapters in his memoir Hitch-22).

I won’t say farewell or “rest in peace” – it’s vulgar, and the man’s dead already. Read his books.