Nowhere Is a Place - Bernice L. McFadden

Bernice L. McFadden’s Nowhere Is a Place was an unexpected gem. I hadn’t a clue what it was really about when I picked it up, and it wound up being quite moving. A story within a story, an African-American woman and her mother drive cross-country to a family reunion in Georgia, but the narrative about the lives of their ancestors that springs forth from this road trip becomes the heart of the novel.

The thirtysomething daughter, Sherry, has long puzzled and frustrated her mother, known to family and friends as Dumpling, with her travels, her searches for meaning, and her relationships with white men (and men of other colors). In a loving relationship and newly pregnant, Sherry decides it is time to finally understand an event from her childhood: a violent and unexplained slap from her mother when she was six years old. She comes to find that slap was generations in the making.

Sherry and Dumpling are both readers and writers in the story, Dumpling presenting an oral history of their family’s roots and Sherry, after “reading” this history, novelizing it and presenting it for Dumpling to read. While I find the idea of Sherry writing this polished work during a few stops at motels and other spots along the trip a bit weak (that aspect of the plot becomes thankfully easy to overlook after awhile), Sherry and Dumpling’s roles as readers and writers are central to their eventual mutual understanding. Further, it is only after Dumpling comes to know her own story from an older family friend, giving Sherry the final pieces of the puzzle regarding that slap, that Sherry is able to overcome her reticence and let Dumpling in on her current story, allowing her mother to speak to the—white—father of her child on the phone.

In some ways, Sherry is the reader of this story along with us. Sherry’s open-mindedness on race and philosophy is in line with the “color-blind” way many of us think we see the world, or want to see it. Dumpling, meanwhile, sees the world in black and white. Reading their family history, we and Sherry come to understand just why that is. By the end, we have met in the middle, but not before being confronted with the brutal truths we conveniently like to forget about our country’s history and like to ignore regarding the reasons our racial divide is still so wide.

I must say that McFadden’s poetic prose, while sometimes gorgeous, is often just too much. This first printing of the book is also irritatingly in need of a proofreader. But McFadden is incredibly gifted in the art of creating vivid characters. Lou, Buena, Brother, Suce, Lovey, and Dumpling leave indelible marks, and I missed them when I was finished reading. The lost childhood of Nayeli, the Native American girl who is sold into slavery, named “Lou” after a dead family dog, and becomes the family’s matriarch, is tragic, and her choices and sorrows are shocking. Brother, Suce, Willie, and the others’ mundane but terrifying existence in the shadow of the big house and their crazed, bedridden master, unaware of their own freedom and then struggling for a way to claim it, is riveting. The sheer amount of this family’s history that is packed into the novel’s 280 pages—in the form of an engrossing plot—is stunning. McFadden has talents for both emotional punch and narrative structure. The book began slow for me—the first twenty-five pages were okay but not thrilling—but once Lou’s, and the family’s, story began, the work became a page-turner.

Nowhere Is a Place came out in 2006; McFadden has five other novels, and I definitely plan to check them out.

Grade: A

OK Go - Double Door, Chicago 4/23/09

I went to this late show at the Double Door to hear the new songs OK Go are playing from their upcoming album (to be released this summer), and I left wanting the new album now. Having been a fan for years and having seen them play a gazillion times, I was sure as heck hoping the new stuff wouldn’t feel like a rerun. New stuff did not disappoint.

From the arrival of a big ol’ drum (I wish I knew the name of this particular piece of percussion, but I don’t—timpani perhaps?) in the middle of the tiny, tiny stage, I knew something different—or, at the very least, interesting from a performance standpoint—would be happening. It wasn’t the big, bouncing, banging “Do What You Want, Pt. 2” it could have been. Score! It was an entrancing, refreshingly acoustic-guitar-fueled little number that had me from the get-go. Bassist Tim Nordwind provided the steady drum booms. (Listen to a 3/27/09 live performance from Portland, OR, below.)

The band played seven new songs in total, and they’re all keepers. That’s only half of what’s to come on the new album, to be titled either Help Is On the Way or The Influence of the Blue Ray of the Sunlight and of the Blue Color of the Sky (I prefer the latter), and between those and the b-sides the boys have apparently recently been recording, OK Go fans have a lot coming their way, and hopefully it will all taste as good as these first pieces have.

Some of it is dancey and slinky—“I Want U So Bad” is a sexy little funk song and “White Knuckles” sounds a lot like Prince and his protegees, the Time—but other songs like “Back From Katmandu” are gloriously melancholy and driven by messy guitars. (Listen to a live 3/25/09 “Back From Katmandu”--I’ll trust this title only when I see it on the album--from San Francisco below.) "I Want U So Bad" does include an unexpectedly rock-y guitar solo from Andy Ross alongside its dance groove.

“Last Leaf” is a touching love song that makes you want to reach out and squeeze the one you’re with. [An aside: It shows just how much of a snot-nosed smartass Damian Kulash always is onstage that he had to state plainly that the upcoming tune was an earnest love song.]

“Skyscrapers,” the studio version of which is available now on a compilation album from Banana Republic of all places, is an impressive tune for its moody depth and its inclusion of tubular bells alongside a dance beat. Some people are comparing this song to Prince, but it owes much more to Cheap Trick than the Purple One, as the song somehow, and not unpleasantly, morphs into CT’s “Gonna Raise Hell” in its second half. Singer Damian Kulash’s successful falsetto invites Prince comparisons, but his all-out screams in the middle sound more like an attempt to be Robin Zander than the Artist Formerly, and regardless of whom he might be aping, lemme be clear on this point: it doesn’t work. I’m not sure if I rolled my eyes at the show or just cringed, but my eyes have been rolling every time that section comes in my listens at home. (Hear the 3/27/09 live version from Portland, OR, for yourself below.)

Dan Konopka’s drums at the beginning of “This Too Shall Pass” (check it out from the 3/27/09 Portland, OR, show, below) sound bizarrely like U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky,” but the rest of the song, whose title tricks you into thinking there’s a ballad on the way, doesn’t—it’s one of the upbeat, hooky numbers. But its hook is of a rocking variety rather than candy-coated pop (more toward Oh No than their self-titled debut), which is just fine by me. Damian's repetitive, spit-out vocals toward the end are fabulous, and the song actually sounds a lot like their pre-debut track “Unrequited Orchestra of Locomotion,” and you can’t go wrong with that.

Overall, the new stuff is heavy on the rhythm section, guitars, experimental instrumentation, and straightforward, emotional lyrics, making the whole endeavor feel much more organic than the band’s last two albums. My personal hope is that the melancholy bits outweigh the dance bits this time around, but we shall wait and see.

As for the other songs they played, “Get Over It” and “Oh, Lately It’s So Quiet” could go away at this point without me raising a peep. “Don’t Ask Me” and “Invincible” don’t seem to have lost their punch, however. “Do What You Want” felt like just another song rather than the rousing showstopper it once was—I think it has run its course. “It’s a Disaster” is floating around in my head as unmemorable. Some people are sick to death of “Here It Goes Again”; I’m not, so I enjoyed it. “A Good Idea at the Time” still has its swaggering appeal, but it became more humorous than swaggery when Damian sang the same verse three times. “A Million Ways” was fun to hear live because I think I’ve only seen it played live one other time; all other times, I saw it danced. And then there’s “What to Do.” The boys have put together another performance piece to boggle the minds of audience members: OK Go as a handbell choir. When I watched this YouTube vid weeks before the show,



I sat in stunned silence alternating between a jawdrop and a stupid grin, filled with warm, fuzzy amazement similar to what I remember from watching the “Here It Goes Again” treadmill video for the first time. The boys can still floor you. Unfortunately, when I saw it live only a couple weeks later, without spastic, repeated watchings of the YouTube video in the meantime, mind you, it already felt like a gimmick. The tricks have come to the point of diminishing returns; it may be time to leave them in the backyard.

The band also went extremely heavy on the confetti gun, to the point of comical and the edge of annoying. I lost count of the confetti blasts, and in that small venue, each one counted. One fan hilariously referred to the three-inch layer of fallout as “confetti carnage.” I wish I had taken a picture of the floor.

I wish badly that Oh No's “No Sign of Life” had stayed on the set list, but what are you gonna do. The wallpaper slideshow backdrop has gotta go, though; it’s been around since 2005. Having not seen them live in a year and a half, I was shocked to see it appear at the start of their set.

Overall, the group was tight and showed what a good live band you can become, musically, when you tour for years on end. But as a show itself? So-so. As an album preview? A+.

Openers U.S. Royalty gave a good performance despite the cramped confines (with both their and OK Go’s gear up there, the stage looked like a storage closet—in size and contents) and terrible sound that was so extremely heavy on the bass it was shifting my internal organs and likely could have caused a spontaneous bowel movement. Very hairy singer John Thornley has charisma and rocks an organ. Their standout song had some connection to New Orleans in a voodoo kind of way—I of course cannot remember the song’s title or find it anywhere online. Black … something? “Spell”? Anyway, it was a rocker. I don’t foresee these guys taking over the airwaves, but they’ve got some good songs and are a worthwhile live band.