In today’s LA Times we read that Powell’s Books in Portland has had to close all its locations and lay off its employees due to the effects of the Trumpvirus which is destroying everything everywhere.
When I read about Powell’s, I recalled an incident that had occurred when we played Portland during our 2015 tour. Or so I thought.
When I jumped into my archives, I found that I my less-agile-than-previously brain had gotten it all wrong. It was 2015 all right, but it happened in Denver, not Portland. And it wasn’t Powell’s Books at all, it was the Tattered Cover. The Tattered Cover is another distinguished bookstore, one which is also forced to become an online vendor for the nonce, and could probably use a little mention here.
And since the story was pretty good, I’ll decided to tell it anyway, even though the reason for telling it is no longer valid.
While I was looking around in an aisle of the Tattered Cover, a woman on an adjoining aisle was attempting to return a book she had been browsing to its proper place on a shelf. In the process of doing that, she somehow pushed the book into place in s way that created a domino effect, resulting in a lot of books tumbling, in a minor literary avalanche, into the aisle where I was standing. As it fell, one book hit me on its way down, not painfully but certainly noticeably. As I picked up the book up to return it to its former location. I noticed that its title was Assholes. This triggered enough curiosity for me to warrant further examination.
Assholes turned out to be a philosophy book by Mr. Aaron James, one which deals with exactly what you might think: it’s about what causes certain people to become the way they turn out to be, and how the rest of us can deal with them, when we have to.
I wondered if my being bonked by such a book was some kind of omen, sending me a message. I decided I should buy that book.
Being a Hollywood kind of guy, my way of considering a book purchase is first to open the back cover and turn to the index, to see whether my name is mentioned. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. But Assholes turned out to be quite a great read. There was a particularly fascinating chapter about Kanye West, as you might expect. His chapter included the following:
It is instructive to compare West to asshole artists such as Pablo Picasso or Ernest Hemingway or Miles Davis. None were mistaken about their greatness. All were wrong about what their greatness entitled them to by way of special treatment from others.
In a footnote, he adds, A particularly stark example is Buddy Rich, whose greatness as a drummer is nearly matched by his rudeness, justified in the name of his own artistic perfection. Observe his rancid eloquence in addressing those not quite up to snuff here. (This is a link to the famous bus tape of Mr. Rich, and if you haven’t heard it, you should give it a listen.)
Assholes’ final chapter is titled Letter to an asshole, and is written "in the spirit of Horace's epistles." Hopefully, studying the rest of the book enabled me to be a bit less of an asshole by the time we moved on to Germany, a land which has a history of producing a few assholes of its own.
If you decide seek out the book under discussion—online, of course, since both Tattered Cover and Powell’s (and many other book vendors) are strictly online right now—make sure to read the chapter about Phil Spector, a gentleman I worked for now and then, and stories about whom I’ve dined on for many years since.
Sadly, dining on old stories is not such a fruitful endeavor at the moment, so I’m telling them to you instead. Hey, are you going to finish those fries?