Take Five: Shrine to the Dynamic Year
Taking a look back on 12 months worth of 'Take Fives' with a sort of best-of that showcases the jazz, poetry, rock, writing, and pop philosophy I have shared each week
This is usually where I explain what “Take Five” is, but this week is different. Saturday is the first anniversary of the first “Take Five,” so I thought I would look back as some of the most-interesting things I shared over the past year (and use it as a way of getting a post out while I’m on vacation). As a bonus, I’m running a sale on paid subscriptions through midnight on Aug. 2. Click above for big savings! Most everything here is free, but I do occasionally offer subscriber -only content (such as the playlist at the end of this post), and paid subscribers also have access to the entire year’s worth of “Take Fives” and everything else I have posted here. Regardless of what you choose, thanks for reading. It has been a blast.
Yes, I did title this week’s post after an obscure Guided by Voices track. One thing I have been surprised about is the lack of content here related to Robert Pollard and his band. By my count, I only posted about my favorite band twice.1 But I wanted to use a relevant song title for this week, and “Shrine to the Dynamic Years” seemed perfect (with a light edit to that ‘s’ at the end, of course). It’s perfect, because it’s a catchy song that has never been recorded properly or released on an album, creeping out on catch-all box sets and demo collections. It’s the kind of thing I love to discover and share.
Read on for more discoveries from the past year.
1. JAZZ: Jason Moran with Sam Rivers - ‘Sound It Out’
From Aug. 2, 2024
I have been slowly wading my way through the “read later” category in my RSS reader, finding occasional gems I have saved along the way. This one was embedded in a piece from 2023 about a resurgence of interest in the work of the late jazz saxophonist and composer Sam Rivers. The piece quotes pianist Jason Moran, who worked with Rivers on Moran’s breakout album, Black Stars. The real find, however, is a video from those 2001 sessions with Rivers sitting in with Moran's trio. Amid snippets of conversation and the usual studio footage is a complete take of what became the album closer, “Sound It Out.” I had always assumed the skittering piano was played by Moran, but the video shows the wildly talented Rivers is on the bench at the start, his long fingers flying across the keyboard as notes cascade forth. After a couple of minutes of this, Moran steps forward to join and then take over for Rivers, who gets up, goes to an isolation booth, takes up his flute and then plays a beautiful melody on top of the frenetic piano line. At the end he seems exultant: “You got that?” he says with a grin. They did, and the entire thing, question and all, closes Moran's second — and to these ears, still best — album.
2. POETRY: Connecting Huffman, Everett and Prine
From Sept. 27, 2024
I like to take note of the accidental connections between and among the things I consume culturally, the serendipitous, unintentional conversations you create by picking up this book at the same time you listen to that song. The latest brings together Percival Everett and Jane Huffman. My book club is reading Everett’s Half an Inch of Water, a 2015 story collection centered on ranching country in Wyoming. I expected to come across the title phrase somewhere, overtly or otherwise, in its pages. Instead, I came across something close in a poem in Huffman’s new collection, Public Abstract. In the poem “Mosquito,” Huffman begins,
Not the same thing — twice as deep, actually — but close enough when reading the two on the same day to note the coincidence. I went back to the Everett, but never found a connection to the title in the text. Reading a review, I found a plausible explanation, a quote from a John Prine song, “That's the Way the World Goes ’Round”: “That’s the way the world goes ’round / You’re up one day and the next you’re down. / It’s half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.” That fits these stories of people on the edge, who sometimes seem to imagine things being worse than they are, needing a sprinkling of magical realism to muddle through. That edge-walking seemed fitting as I returned to Huffman’s poems, their explorations of form and the fragmentary nature of some of the work — just how much is necessary for something to count as a poem? — walk their own edges. I won’t do any additional mental gymnastics to connect the third element here today, but this may all send me on a Prine jag nonetheless.
3. ROCK: Some interesting moments in “Beatles ‘64”
From Dec. 6, 2024
And here is where one of five becomes five itself, rendering this whole thing a sort of Revolution 9, if you will.
The trope that America embraced the Beatles to get over the assassination of President Kennedy runs through the new documentary, “Beatles ’64” on Disney+, of course, but amid that usual fare is plenty of context that helps to frame the endlessly dissected pop group. These smaller moments are illuminating, as they explore the way the Beatles subverted ideas of masculinity, pointed up the racism in popular culture, discussed their place in post-war Britain, acknowledged that it was the outside world that was crazy, not the band; and dismissed the idea at that early stage that what the band was doing could be considered “culture.”
-John Lennon, in conversation with media theorist Marshall McLuhan about how pop music is driven by frustration, counters that the Beatles music was instead a product of contentment: “We get rid of frustration through the music, obviously… The Beatles and their ilk were created by the vacuum of non-conscription for the army… When I was still 16, I was looking forward to hiding in Ireland because they still had conscription. And then it was all over. I just missed it in 1940. And from then on, the whole music thing burst out, and we just knew we were the army that never was. We were the generation that were allowed to live, and the music came out of that.”
-Feminist author Betty Friedan is shown talking about the new crop of long-haired boys. Whether she is specifically discussing the Beatles or not, she does identify the shift in masculinity they represented: “Those boys who are wearing their hair long are saying ‘no’ to the masculine mystique, they are saying saying no to that brutal, sadistic, tight-lipped, crew cut, Prussian, big muscle, Ernest Hemingway, kill bears when there are no bears to kill and napalm all the children in Vietnam and Cambodia to prove I'm a man, and be dominant and superior to anyone concerned and never show any softness… that man who is strong enough to be gentle, that is a new man.”
-George Harrison, asked if things were crazy back in those days of the band, says, “Not within the band. I think the craziness was going on in the world. And in the band it was kind of… we were kind of normal and the rest of the world was crazy. That's how it looked to me.”
-Ron Isley of the Isley Brothers, talks about the Beatles making a hit of his group's song, “Twist and Shout,” and about the questions that raised about why more black artists weren't given the same level of exposure: “We were glad. We were so glad. It was great for us that they did our songs. Paul McCartney would often say, ‘If it wasn't for the Isley Brothers, we would still be in Liverpool.’ We were kind of wondering why couldn’t we be on some of the shows they were on. We should have been on the Ed Sullivan Show.”
-Paul McCartney, being interviewed on a train, is asked, “What place do you think this story of the Beatles is going to have in Western culture?” McCartney says, “Western culture?” and then laughs. “I don't know. You must be kidding with that question. Culture? It's not culture.” “What is it?” he is asked. He responds, “That's a good laugh.”
4. WRITING: Seymour Krim — 'For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business'
From January 10, 2025
Part of my day job involves celebrating literary Iowa City, so I’m always on the lookout for authors with local ties. I’m not sure where I came across Seymour Krim, but I jotted down the name a few months ago and finally looked him up this week. Krim was a critic, chronicler of the Beats, proponent of “New Journalism,” essayist, and teacher. That last role brought him to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1970s, where he steered the likes of Tracy Kidder toward nonfiction (with, one must admit, stunning results). He seems to have largely faded from view, but I was able to track down a well-known essay of his, “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” anthologized in Phillip Lopate's 1994 collection, The Art of the Personal Essay. Writing at age 51 — younger than I am now — he is clear-eyed about the eternal elusiveness American Dream, seemingly more content than resigned. Though written in 1973, it seems to speak to the malaise that fuels much of today’s fractured politics. He writes of “the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me… who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.” The passage that stopped me in my tracks seems to describe the half of our country with a perennial chip on its shoulder:
The handy magic of relying on the future, on tomorrow, to knit together all the parts of a self that we hoarded up for a lifetime can’t be stopped at this late date, or won’t be stopped, because our frame of mind was always that of a long-odds gambler. One day it would all pay off. But for most of us, I'm afraid that day will never come.
So many spend a lifetime creating a self, and then grow bitter when that shell doesn’t lead anywhere.
5. POP PHILOSOPHY: Brian Eno
I wrote quite a lot about Eno this year, spurred by seeing the ‘Eno’ documentary back in October. Here are a few snippets.
From Oct. 18, 2024
I had the chance to see the new movie “Eno” about musician Brian Eno recently… It’s strange to say, but I have listened to Eno for more than two decades and listened to dozens of releases, yet I wouldn’t call myself a big fan. I like his work, but I’m not obsessed despite owning and listening to much of it. With this film, I became a very big fan of the way he thinks and articulates his views about music and creativity… He doesn't let a lack of training or expertise keep him from doing what he loves. The lesson being that we should embrace what we like to do, even if we are not trained in it, even if (though this is not the case with Eno) we wouldn't be considered to be very good at it.
From January 31, 2025
Another Eno-related thing I spent time with this week is the Oblique Strategies" card set… The cards were created by Eno and his friend, the artist Peter Schmidt, who were each independently gathering phrases and thoughts designed to help spark the creative impulse. The idea is that when someone is stuck, they can draw a card and be inspired… “Define an area as ‘safe’ and use it as an anchor,” might help one over a hurdle. It isn't a tool just for musicians; I can imagine something like “Honour thy error as a hidden intention” being helpful for writers, painters, or sculptors, among others.
From April 11, 2025
What Art Does looks like one of those books you give someone as a stocking stuffer or a retirement present, a book full of platitudes and doodles. Thankfully, I was wrong… this book threatens to rewire the way I think about art and creativity. Most impactful is a short section on “fiction feelings.” Though my thoughts turn to books, obviously, he really means any sort of artistic endeavor that can be experienced that allows one to experience a feeling without needing to experience the event that normally triggers it. “You can read a novel and experience the horror of a prison or the beauty of deep love — but you don’t have to endure the real-world consequences of these things,” he writes. This is why people on the right want to ban books: they don’t want you to build empathy for those experiencing things you have not.
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