Autumn Rhythm: Musings On Time, Tide, Aging, Dying, And Such Biz
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.61 (960 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0306813815 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-07-09 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Rants on Geezerhood from Old Man Meltzer This is an uneven collection of rants and reflections on growing old from the grey area between middle and old age. Like most people who find the world changing more quickly than their ability to adjust to those changes as they grow old, Meltzer strives to make a virtue out of his inability to adapt to computers and the Internet, indiscriminately lumping them together with MTV and other, less benign, cultural excrescences. These sections are rather hackneyed and about what you'd hear from any aging 60's-survivor barfly muttering over his beer. More effective are Meltzer's unflinching descriptions of the physical decay an. He's Ba-a-ack! Jill Pole He's a curmudgeon always was, a cat with a taste for sour cream, a brilliant distressingly human type guy. Won't lie down and go to sleep on top of pedestals. Falls off roaring words, heart blazing from both barrels. He's a rock, jazz, and culture critic I first remember from the sixties. He saw through the ominous commercialization of music and culture back then, and he's been sawing through ever since.If you're aging and alive as ever, remember something huge happening in the 60's that had nothing to do with misty water-colored memories, wonder how the exhilarating changes that took place for so many of us could have b. None Better than Meltzer Look, there are hundreds of thousands of writers on Amazon. Some who try to be funny and insightful but are not honest, and -- well you get the drift. I've read Meltzer's early work; his middle stage stuff that was probably 100 times more brilliant; and now Autumn Rhythm, which presumably captures the autumn years. It falls into the 100 times brilliance categorization. You don't read Meltzer so much as hear it through your eyes. While musings about getting old are in the sloppy-joe essay crock-pot of nearly every writer who makes it to 55, this collection is a bright peony among wilted dandelions. Make friends with Meltz
"The Wisdom in Our Underwear," a far-out take on the 20th century, is both entertaining (on 1984: "Reagan had to be Prez; the Olympics had to be staged in L.A. Among these ruminations are some nuggets of truth about aging, like his football analogy that once a person hits a certain age, life's playing field gets shorter and you have to settle for "three yards and a cloud of dust" instead of "80-yard passes." The book's narrative structure supports this thought; plow through the parts that strike your fancy and for the rest throw a Hail Mary pass and hope for the best. From Publishers Weekly Meltzer (A Whore Just Like the Rest), who has pioneered rock 'n' roll criticism since the 1960s, explores the intricacies of growing old while looking
A sublime and moving collection of essays by an eloquent master writer, Autumn Rhythm is equal parts candor, courage, humor, and desperation. A true-tongued, almost joyous gallows humor permeates the book, a meditation on what it's like to be on the outer edge of "boomerhood," on the cusp of official seniority; what it's like to have been so long associated with a youth movement-rock music-yet to no longer be young.Autumn Rhythm comes from a man whose work has always been music as much as it's been about it, and who now brings his syncopation of word, sound, and sense to the subject of life itself, as lived and lost: a frank, brilliant, and ultimately poetic contemplation of physical decline, the deaths of friends and family, and the confounding, ever-accelerating changes in our culture."A rant in Meltzer's finest and funniest manner, an epic vernacular monologue with stylistic roots in nineteenth-century humorists Bill Nye, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain."