Big Table

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political turmoil and violence of 1980s and ’90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother’s fortune-telling clients, not much surprised her as a child. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero–a community healer gifted with what the family called “the secrets”, or the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. As the first woman to inherit those secrets, Rojas Contreras’ mother was just as powerful.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to them, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that resulted in amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family told her that this had happened before. Decades ago, her mother had suffered a fall that left her with amnesia too. When she recovered, she had gained access to the secrets.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, as well as resurrected Colombian history and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the seemingly incomprehensible. The Man Who Could Move Clouds is a testament to the healing power of storytelling and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.

Here’s my conversation with Ingrid, discussing her new memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds (Doubleday, 2022).

Reading by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Music composed by Ennio Morricone

The Interview:

In the eyes of 18-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he isexactlylike everyone else.Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream. For Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to his memories—all that was left of one of his closest friends—Hua turned to writing.Stay True (Doubleday, 2022) is the book he’s been working on ever since—for over 20 years by Hua’s estimation. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary,Stay Trueis a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging. It is also a book about friendship, race, grieving and recovery.

I first came to know Hua’s work through his music writing—first in the hip-hop column he wrote for The Wire, the British experimental music magazine, and more recently, in The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer. Hua teaches at Bard College, and lives in Brooklyn. He grew up in the Bay Area, where most of the book takes place while he is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hua and I have known each other loosely for many years—we have many mutual friends and are roughly the same age. I’ve always admired his work, and his beautifully written second book is a highpoint, jam-packed as it is with descriptive detail, a light and easy spare prose, and a meaningful account of an unlikely friendship.

Here’s my conversation with Hua Hsu, discussing his new memoir, Stay True.

The Reading:

Hua Hsu reads from Stay True, which was part of an audio zine he made to accompany the book’s release.

Music by Mobb Deep

Nick Drnaso, acclaimed author ofSabrina, is back with Acting Class, his third book on Drawn & Quarterly. A tapestry of disconnect, distrust, and manipulation, Acting Class brings together 10 strangers under the tutelage of John Smith, a mysterious and morally questionable leader. The group of social misfits and restless searchers have one thing in common: They are all out of step with their surroundings and desperate for a change.

With mounting unease, the class sinks deeper into Smith’s lessons, even as he demands increasing devotion. When the line between real life and imagination begins to blur, the group’s fears and desires are laid bare. Exploring the tension between who we are and how we present, Drnaso cracks open his characters’ masks and takes us through an unsettling American journey.

Like Sabrina—the first graphic novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize—Drnaso’s latest offering is an extremely sharp study of our everyday existence and how we live. His minimalist comic-drawing style is nevertheless awash in a cinematic haze of melancholy and the color palette is hued in a realism that is uniquely his.

A friend handed me Sabrina, several years ago, knowing I was somewhat of an outsider in the realm of underground comic culture, telling me, “You will love the book in the same way you love certain novels.” And he was right.

While Drnaso is revered all over the world for his bleak honestness and sly, dark humor, he grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Although we are of different generations, the subtlety of his style is familiar to me as a fellow Midwesterner and Chicagoan.

Notably, this is Big Table’s first episode centered around a graphic novel. It’s certainly a change from our focus on nonfiction books, but Drnaso’s storytelling pulls so effortlessly from real life that one feels his characters are meta comics versions of people encountered in our everyday lives.

Here's my conversation with Nick Drnaso discussing his new book, Acting Class.

Music by Japan

In her latest book, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Atlantic, 2022), Ada Calhoun traces her fraught relationship with her father, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, and their shared obsession with the poet Frank O’Hara. The book features exclusive material from archival recordings of literary and art world legends, living and dead.

Having stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father had conducted for his never-completed biography of O’Hara, Calhoun set out to finish the book he had started 40 years earlier.

As a lifelong O’Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, she thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more difficult it became: Calhoun had to confront not just O’Hara’s past, but also her father’s and her own.

The result is a kaleidoscopic memoir that weaves compelling literary history with the moving, honest, and tender story of a complicated father-daughter bond. In reckoning with her unique heritage, as well as providing new insights into the life of one of our most important poets, Calhoun has offered a brave and hopeful meditation on parents and children, artistic ambition, and the complexities of what we leave behind.

For the Reading, Ada Calhoun reads from Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me.

Music by Ryuichi Sakamoto

**Other audio:

Frank O’Hara reads Ode to Joy:

Frank O'Hara Reads His Poems

In The Design of Childhood, acclaimed writer, architecture critic, and historian Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. Lange now turns her sharp eye to another subject we thoughtwe knew. Chronicling the invention of the mall by postwar architects and merchants, Lange reveals how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. Meet Me By the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall (Bloomsbury, 2022) is Lange’s perceptive account of how these shopping centers became strange and rich with contradiction. In it, Lange describes America’s malls as places of freedom and exclusion—but also as places of undeniable community, and rampant consumerism.

Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as shopping malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall’s appeal as critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era’s defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, anyway? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?

Here’s Episode 40: The Big Table conversation with architecture critic, writer, and historian Alexandra Lange, discussing Meet My by the Fountain.

Reading by Alexandra Lange

Music by OMD

A 170-plus years ago, Henry David Thoreau began his legendary hermit walks in New England. Many of these walks were published later as some of his most cherished works as a naturalist: Walden, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod.

Artist, writer and New England native Ben Shattuck does the same in Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, published by Tin House Books, which charts six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Thoreau.

With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.

After the Cape, Shattuck walks down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, he encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit.

Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.

Shattuck splits his time between Los Angeles and Coastal Massachusetts, where he also runs a Davoll’s General Store in Dartmouth.

We caught up during the Spring to discuss his first book, Thoreau and the therapeutic nature of walking.

Reading by Ben Shattuck

Music by Jürgen Müller

To write about Tony Wilson, aka Anthony H. Wilson, is to write about a number of public and private characters and personalities, a clique of unreliable narrators, constantly changing shape and form. At the helm of Factory Records and the Haçienda, Wilson unleashed landmark acts such as Joy Division and New Order into the world as he pursued myriad other creative endeavors, appointing himself a custodian of Manchester’s legacy of innovation and change.

To writer, broadcaster and cultural critic Paul Morley he was this and much more: bullshitting hustler, flashy showman, aesthetic adventurer, mean factory boss, self-deprecating chancer, intellectual celebrity, loyal friend, shrewd mentor, insatiable publicity seeker. It was Morley to whom Wilson left a daunting final request: to write this book.

From Manchester with Love, then, is the biography of a man who became one with his hometown of Manchester, England—the music he championed and the myths he made, of love and hate, of life and death. In the cultural theatre of Manchester, Tony Wilson broke in and took center-stage.

Morleyhas written about music, art and entertainment since the 1970s. He wrote for theNew Musical Expressfrom 1976 to 1983. A founding member of the Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he collaborated with Grace Jones on her memoirs and is the author of a number of books about music, includingThe Age of Bowie, his history of classical musicA Sound Mind, and a biography of Bob Dylan,You Lose Yourself, You Reappear.

Our man in London, Dermot McPartland, fills in for interviewing duties and helps Morley unpack the many minds and lives of Tony Wilson. Here’s Dermot’s conversation with Paul Morley.

Reading by Paul Morley

Music by Joy Division

Mark Rozzo’s astute and engaging new book Everybody Thought We Were Crazy: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1906s Los Angeles, published by Ecco Press, documents the lives of Hopper and Hayward in the heyday as New Hollywood’s It couple but also paints a panoramic landscape of the Los Angeles scene in the Sixties.

Rozzo poignantly captures the vivacity of the heady days in the early 1960s, just as the underground culture of the Beat Generation was about to explode into the mainstream counterculture of the latter part of the decade—the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll mantra was born in the late 1960s.

Sixties Los Angeles was a new center of gravity in culture; there was a new consciousness, a West Coast symmetry between art, underground cinema, music and civil rights that had never happened before, and has never happened since.
Hopper and Hayward were not only up-and-coming actors in the early 1960s, they were also cross-cultural connectors who brought together the best of underground Los Angeles art, music and politics, under one roof—literally—1712 N. Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills. This modest Spanish Colonial was the meeting ground, as Rozzo illustrates, for a who’s who of that time: Jane Fonda, Andy Warhol, Joan Didion, Jasper Johns, Tina Turner, Ed Ruscha, The Byrds and the Black Panthers.

Their art collection, showcased at this house on Crescent Heights, as well as the house itself, is the backdrop of Everybody Thought We Were Crazy. Rozzo tells the story in a straight-forward, dual narrative, that helps fill in large parts of Brooke’s story, which compared to Hopper’s, hasn’t been as well documented or explored in other books. Rozzo finds the right balance.

As a decade-ending benchmark, Hopper’s directorial debut Easy Rider became the emblematic proto-New Hollywood independent film, alongside Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool. These films help illustrate the promise and loss of that generation and that era. There isn’t a happy ending in those films or in Hopper’s marriage to Hayward, unfortunately—the couple divorced in 1969 just at Easy Rider was about to make cinematic history.

After the divorce, Brooke eventually sold the house, broke up the art collection and moved back to New York, where she still resides. Hopper died in 2010.

Rozzo’s wide view of Los Angeles in the 1960s is essential reading for anyone interested in the unvarnished history of that period.

Here’s my conversation with Mark Rozzo discussing the life and times of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward.

Reading by Mark Rozzo.

Music by Love.

The Episode

J Dilla—aka James Dewitt Yancey or Jaydee as he was previously known—was a musical genius who was hardly known to mainstream audiences during his brief life.

In Dilla Time—equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history—hip hop historian and NYU professor Dan Charnas chronicles this musical outlier who changed popular music behind the scenes, working with renowned acts like D’Angelo and Erykah Badu and influencing the music of superstars like Michael and Janet Jackson.

Dilla died at the age of 32, and in his lifetime never had a pop hit. Since his death, however, he has become a demigod of sorts: revered by jazz musicians and rap icons from Robert Glasper to Kendrick Lamar; memorialized in symphonies and taught at universities. And at the core of this adulation is innovation: a new kind of musical time-feel he created on a drum machine, one that changed the way “traditional” musicians play.

Charnas echoes the life of James DeWitt Yancey from his gifted childhood in Detroit, to his rise as a Grammy-nominated hip-hop producer, to the rare blood disease that caused his premature death. Charnas also rewinds the histories of American rhythms: from the birth of soul in Dilla’s own “Motown,” to funk, techno, and disco.

Dilla Time (MCD/FSG, 2022) is a different kind of book about music, a visual experience with graphics that build those concepts step by step for fans and novices alike, teaching us to “see” and feel rhythm in a unique and enjoyable way. It’s the story of the man and his machines, his family, friends, partners, and celebrity collaborators. Culled from more than 150 interviews about one of the most important and influential musical figures of the past hundred years,Dilla Timeis a book as delightfully detail-oriented and unique as J Dilla’s music itself.

Filling in for interviewing duties this episode is Charnas’ NYU professor colleague and Hat & Beard Press editor Vivien Goldman, who is the author, most recently, of Revenge of the She-Punks: A Feminist Music History from Poly Styrene to Pussy Riot.

Here is Vivien’s conversation with Dan Charnas, discussing the life and times of J Dilla.

Reading by Dan Charnas from Dilla Time.

music by J Dilla

The Interview
It’s not hyperbole to say that Steve Keene has produced more original artwork than most (if not all) American artists, having painted more than 300,000 works in the last 30 years.

Raised and educated in Charlottesville, Virginia, he first came to my attention in the mid-1990s, when I was working for the indie record label Drag City. Keene had done the cover art for the Silver Jews’ Arizona Record as well as Pavement’s Wowee Zowee on Matador. He had gone to college with David Berman (Silver Jews) and Stephen Malkmus (Pavement) in the 1980s, and they remained friends and collaborators afterward.

Although he is known to many for his indie rock album covers, he has a much bigger audience today outside of the music scene of downtown NY from another era. Not only is he now collected in museums but he is still lovingly known for making affordable art: most of Keene’s work retails for under $70; in the 1990s heyday, it was only $5 or $10 a piece. Steve continues to crank out 50 paintings at a time, day-in and day-out, from his converted auto body shop home/studio in Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked with his architect wife and family for decades.

The Steve Keene Art Book—originally conceivedduring his sold out show at Shepard Fairey’s LA Gallery Subliminal Projects in 2016—is the first art book dedicated exclusively to his work as a fine artist. For this episode,I spoke with the book’s editor Daniel Efram, a photographer, producer, and long-time manager of the Apples in Stereo—for whom Keene also created the cover art on Fun Trick Noise Maker 25 years ago—about Steve Keene and his lifelong artistic journey.

I’ve been a long-time fan and collector of Keene’s work. Twenty years ago, I spent a day with him, profiling him in the pages ofStop Smiling,“The Magazine for High-Minded Lowlifes,” which I published from 1995 to 2009 from Chicago and New York. Hence, this was a nice circle of life moment.

The Steve Keene Art Bookis published through Hat & Beard Press and Tractor Beam, Efram's New York City-based press.

The Reading

Editor Daniel Efram reads from his essay in The Steve Keene Art Book.

Music by The Apples in Stereo