Respectfully, I Say To Thee, I Enjoyed What I Was Reading

Now I don't particularly get into memoirs and I'd really have to rack my mind to remember how many I've ever read, period (OK, fine, I exaggerate: the Mötley Crüe multi-memoir The Dirt is one of the most entertaining things I've ever read), but Nile Rodgers' Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny was pretty good, and in retrospect, there are good reasons why it was good.

One of the main reasons is that Rodgers is perhaps the most famous person you wouldn't recognize. I feel like I'm a fairly literate music fan and you'd still have to cue me about who he is. But if you've ever been to a school dance, wedding or bar or bat mitzvah you totally know his work; the most powerful man in America is able to get not only you and your spouse or squeeze on the dance floor but also three generations of uncles and aunts knocking into you while you're out there.

Who wrote "We Are Family"? This guy. Who wrote that weird song that goes "Awwwwwww Freak Out"? This guy. Who did like all these disco songs you have fully internalized without knowing how? Yup. Whose "Good Times" is like the ur sample for all of hip-hop? Same guy. Then there's like every single gigantic album he produced. David Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like a Virgin, that boffo-gigantic Diana Ross album that you totally, unaccountably know by heart.

All that and to you he's just a name in block letters underneath the song listing on the tail of a cassette tape J-card. It's kind of crazy. Which is also to say, while the memoir genre is thoroughly ate up, there are some memoirs like this that you're curious to read.

The other great thing about Le Freak is that while Rodgers may be a big enough figure to merit a ghost writer, he doesn't use one, and the effect is awesome — it's polished writing, but not too polished, and there are enough weird parts, rookie flourishes, borderline grammatical mistakes and outright typos to make it feel real. A girlfriend mentioned in the text is revealed as an interpreter in a photo caption in the glossy-paged middle insert. An entire part of the book is titled "Roam If You Want To" after the B-52s song he worked on, yet the B-52s are only mentioned twice in the book, both times in a long list of other artists. I love it. [Taking a moment to Google "ghostwritten autobiographies" . . .] It seems like it's the exception when someone actually writes something him- or herself. That seems sad. Fucking Kennedy.

The other other great thing about Le Freak is that — and I don't know if he's like this in real life, but he definitely comes off this way in his autobiography — Rodgers seems pretty humble about his success. And remember, this isn't success like he opened a successful pizza chainlet success but rather success like he guided pop music for thirty years or so there.

Maybe part of that humble effect is the role of the producer — i.e., subordinate to the performers themselves rather than out in front. There are a few moments in Le Freak where Rodgers admits he felt slighted — when David Bowie found it difficult to mention his contributions in interviews, or when he focused less on Let's Dance and more on his older recordings. It grounds Rodgers (for the reader) and makes him seem sympathetic.

Of course, if you remember Let's Dance — and that was a big album when I was a single-digit-aged youth, so it sticks out in my mind — you might think that it's kind of lesser Bowie. Or at least the preppy-era Bowie was less compelling than Ziggy Stardust. I'm not a Bowie fan (and I definitely wouldn't name my fucking kid after him, that's for sure), but "Suffragette City" compared to "China Girl"? It's no contest. On the one hand you have "Wham bam thank you ma'am!" On the other you have "Just you shut your mouse." Right?

And the Duran Duran remixes — I mean I could take or leave those. "Reflex" is so much lesser than "Hungry Like the Wolf." But take his career as a whole and you soon realize that anyone who makes you dance with your great aunt at a bar mitzvah — year after year after year — will forever and always have scoreboard, case closed.

The other humbling experience in Rodgers' life and career was being at the top of the charts as a disco band, only to see people turn on disco so quickly and thoroughly that for a time there at least the idea of a second act probably seemed absurd. He writes, and I buy it, that there was something disturbing about how mainstream America acted so viciously toward this music played and enjoyed by minorities, gays and associated outsiders. It's a perspective I hadn't appreciated, mostly because I think disco does suck, except that disco is 500 times more organic sounding and catchy and structurally sound than the soulless dance music that came later. As for that second act, he had a pretty good second act, didn't he?

There's a little bit of a Shakespeare in Love feel to the book — which, come to think of it, is of a piece with the book's self-effacing tone — where Rodgers lifts veils and tells stories about the genesis of certain songs. The kernel for that Diana Ross multi-gazillion hit song "Upside Down," for example, was a comment she made to Rodgers and his writing partner when they sat down with her to meet for the first time — like, "What's been going on?" "Well, I just moved to the east coast and things are upside down for me."

Now I don't know how you go from that innocent comment to the coke-blubber-blabber staccato of "Respectfully, I say to thee, I'm aware that you're cheating but no one makes me feel like you do," but I suppose that's the magic of songwriting. Speaking of which, that line always made me laugh — at some point in America cheating went from being a nuisance to a dealbreaker, and apparently that happened sometime after Diana Ross' "Upside Down" was released (1980). Were that line written today, I think it might have to be updated to something along the lines of, "Respectfully, I say to thee, you smell like a hobo, but no one makes me feel like you do"; women have higher standards for guys who are able to deliver much less than they used to; bathing semi-regularly is at least a start.

The song "Le Freak" — you know it, it goes something along the lines of, "AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW, FREAK OUT!!" — has a good story, too. The original lyric, written after getting turned away when trying to see Grace Jones play at Studio 54, was "Awwww, fuck off — fuck Studio 54 — fuck off." Thirty years later, we have Cee Lo.

I always say that I know I shouldn't read something thinking it could be a movie, but this could be a great period piece; Rodgers the character has seen most of rock and roll music history firsthand; I suppose the music rights would be prohibitive though. I read later that he wants to do a musical version. Maybe, but a movie would be better.

Another impressive thing, I should add, is the amount of cocaine that once existed in the world. According to the book, Rodgers used it until 1994 (!), when the Sugarhill Gang finally caught up to him and he found himself with nary a machete in sight with which to defend himself. It makes it difficult to look at the pictures in the inserted section without assuming that everyone has been up for hours snorting coke. There's also a confusing caption in a picture featuring Jaye Davidson.

But ultimately, I think the very best thing about Le Freak is the bombshell it drops in the waning paragraphs of the epilogue. Talk about "burying ledes" — things are humming along great and you feel pretty good about the world until Rodgers reveals he has cancer, and not just any cancer but an unnamed aggressive form of cancer (which I later Googled was prostate cancer and apparently he's now cancer free). A lesser writer would have started with this tidbit, or foreshadowed it, or something grotesque and impertinent. Not Rodgers, which is, again, part of what makes Le Freak so refreshing to read.

Sometimes Being Overweight Can Also Lead To Knee Problems

The other day I either meant to say and forgot or hadn't yet mulled over the idea that the "big idea" in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is that modern lives (or recently modern, or at least in the last ten years) are so mediated that — do I need a spoiler alert here? I'll try not to have to — the, uh, main character makes the surprising and somewhat unbelievable decision that the, uh, trying not to use a pronoun, main character decides that this person can't live without the other person.

If you look at the characters that inhabit Gone you realize that they all interact in the story through the mediated world — from the groupie using the cable show to get 15 minutes of fame to the former magazine writer protagonist to the side characters who are on Facebook. Flynn makes a point of circling back to these details and in the end (and this is a spoiler), it only makes sense that the logical end of the story is to create a reality television show. There's some stuff in the end about spinning and controlling narratives that makes sense in retrospect this way.

As a sort of aside, it's funny that even in the definition of "cipher" they use the sentence "She was nothing more than a cipher" — I think that's the only way I've ever heard the word used! Specifically, the "nothing more than a" construction . . .

Something I really did forget to mention was that it was a smart move on Flynn's part to make the characters writers. This is something Meg Wolitzer does really well (in my opinion) in The Wife: A Novel. As an aside, I wonder if the colonic appendage of "A Novel" in titles is ever done sincerely or if it's always supposed to sound ironically pretentious and ridiculous. Anyway, (and this is also a spoiler — a real one this time) by making her first-person protagonist a writer, Wolitzer lets herself indulge in fun perceptive writing; Flynn does the same — it's a great strategy because writers seem to default to "writing really perceptive fun prose" and so often it sounds fucking asinine to have, say, a nine-year-old protagonist spout wonderfully perceptive ideas about the world. Maybe it's a personal failing of mine, but I find it absurd, reprehensible, vile and several other outsized, inappropriate terms when characters are, uh, ciphers for a pretentious writer's "wonderfully big ideas." Might as well go with your strengths and just make your characters writers. Call spades spades and whatnot.

Also, one more thing I forgot — and this came to me while washing dishes and I just spaced — was that I really wanted to title the original post "If You Seek Amy." If I wrote headlines in the Book Review section, this is what I would have chosen.

You Had Me At "Chicken-Frito Casserole"

There's something funny about the e-book version of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, where, instead of a neat Tony Kushner epigraph, as one would find in the paper version, there's a sort of table of contents that gives away significant spoilers in the book.

Owning a physical copy of the book, we didn't have that experience, but I think I'd be pissed, because while I kept trying to register my ideas about how the story would unfold to Jen, who had read it first (a macho I'll-figure-this-out thing), I would feel cheated seeing any clues in advance.

At book club today, Goober wondered how and why people feel so excited about "figuring out" a story in advance. To an extent, I think it's part and parcel of a mystery-type of book — what's the fun of a mystery if you can't try to figure out how Encyclopedia Brown knew that Colonel Mustard hit Asta in the head with a candlestick? But he has a point: People just love to let other people know that they know things. And it's almost hardwired in us: Just try to watch Jeopardy! without wanting to blurt out the question to the answer. It's a sickness.

That said, Gone Girl wants you to try to figure it out. And so you try.

By Way Of A Spoiler Alert, Feel Free Not To Read Past Here If You Have Not Read Past Part One

So there's a point in the book on page 11 where Amy, one of the main characters, talks about a specific song in a diary entry dated January 8, 2005. Your first reaction might be to wonder why one would include such a specific meaningless detail, and, more important, why weigh down a book with that kind of specific meaningless detail so as to make it meaningless to a reader years from now.

By Way Of A Spoiler Alert, Feel Free Not To Read Past Here If You Have Not Read Past Part Two

Which is to say, that when I complained to Jen about reading specific meaningless details and wondered why someone would weigh down a book with that kind of specific meaningless detail so as to make it meaningless to a reader years from now, Jen got prickly: "Just keep reading." And when you keep reading you finally learn why parts of the book are littered with seemingly meaningless details and dates.

It's a really fun, smart enjoyable book — kind of like the treasure hunts that Amy sets up for her husband that figure so prominently in the story — really detailed and clever and brilliant and kind of scary smart.

By Way Of A Spoiler Alert, Feel Free Not To Read Past Here If You Have Not Read Past Part Three

Which is why the ending is a little disappointing. Or at least, the ending doesn't feel commensurate with the big, beefy, balls-out set up. It feels heady and literary and not at all satisfying in the way something like Thelma and Louise was satisfying. Not that I wanted Amy to drive off a cliff, but I think Flynn misses an opportunity in the end, which is that she succeeds so well in creating an unlikeable character (Nick) that you want to root for to succeed. And let's be clear — it's not like you're rooting for a "flawed" character like Tony Soprano or Omar Little but rather an all-American dickhead that deserves to have his up comed. So when Nick just kind of throws up his hands and admits that he actually likes all the drama, you're kind of baffled, partly because it's kind of unbelievable and partly because you're like, dude, you could have made me want to root for a defense attorney in a way that Alan Dershowitz lies awake at night fantasizing about. Disappointing.

I'll leave out the strange side character who is Amy's main obstacle preventing her from returning home that I'm still not sure I buy or understand. All of us were kind of like, "hrm." Maybe that'll be ironed out in the screenplay?

But that's not that big a deal in the end, because Gone Girl has sucked you in so thoroughly and completely and made you stay up way past a decent hour reading.

You Can Actually Probably Read This Part Because It Doesn't Really Give Away Anything In Particular

Unless you're incapable of enjoying reading — and I am almost incapable of enjoying reading, it mostly being a chore that I usually end up "enjoying," but just not in the way I "enjoy" something like, say, sports bloopers — you're probably tearing through Gone Girl. And if you're speeding through it, the novel's "smart" parts might make your head hurt if you perseverate on them too long. Specifically, there's a lot of stuff in there about "narratives," writing, writers, mediated experiences, "true selves," "reliability," media hoozie-whatzit and related stuff. It would take a while to unpack it all and I'm not sure where you'd be. I think probably her main point as it relates to this stuff is that somewhere along the way, between, say, 2005 and today, everyone got real stupid in the way they present themselves to the world in the unprivate way each of us are public and in the public way we live privately. Or whatever. Like I said, there's something in there but it's hard to say what it is because you're too wrapped up in wanting to see how this really compelling story unfolds.

Related, you might read the Acknowledgements section at the end (do all works of fiction have acknowledgements now?) and get kind of creeped out because Flynn sort of kind of maybe a little sounds like crazy fucking Amy — I mean only in the way she is kind of exuberant in her thanks and uses a lot of exclamation points! Which is similar to how Amy sounded in her diary parts in the book. That makes you realize that writers writing a well-written book — especially in the thriller-mystery genre — aim for a tightly wound pitch-perfect exemplar of internal logic. You can see Flynn with all the pieces around her just piecing them together in exactly the way Amy constructed this shitshow the book revolves around. Which makes the whole enterprise kind of "meta." Which then makes my head hurt, just a little. Better to remark that it was wonderfully copacetic that each of the male protagonist's three names said something: Lance Nick Dunne, for reasons you'll ponder as you turn the page after the end of a chapter. Smart!

Feed

OK, so the other thing I like to do for book club is cook a meal that folks enjoy, because I like to do that but also because I know that for some people it's a pain in the butt to get out to Queens on a Sunday. For Gone Girl, the obvious choice was to make Chicken Frito Casserole. I consulted a couple of online recipes which, frankly, sounded disgusting, mostly because they seemed to rely on canned cream of chicken soup. I wanted to try to do a little more of it from scratch. Not the Frito part, obviously, but just aiming a little higher than canned cream of chicken soup. Which, it turns out, isn't hard to do.

So basically, this recipe is a cross between this and this or maybe this. There doesn't seem to be a "real" recipe for Chicken Frito Casserole, just a collection of boasts that go something along the lines of, "Dump in a can of cream of chicken soup, chicken parts, cheese and Fritos and bake at 400 degrees for 75 minutes."

Funny: I assumed you could get Fritos anywhere. I don't know if it's a good thing that I had to go to three stores to find them, but it at least said something positive to me about our neighborhood. I ended up with two lousy snack pouches of Fritos for $1 each. But that was enough.

Here's what you'll need:

Cooked chicken pieces — about four breasts' worth
Whatever spices or herbs you use when you cook chicken
Butter
1 medium onion
Spices and herbs for glop
1/2 cup flour
2 cups chicken broth
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
Hunk of supermarket cheese (a half-pound? I can't remember, though you can add as much or as little as you want)
1 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes
1 small can of green chiles
2 little bags of Fritos

So here's what I did:

First, cook the chicken. I did this in advance, using four breasts on the bone. It shouldn't matter what parts you use, just don't overcook them. Dice and set aside.

Second, make the creamy glop that you cook the stuff in. I sauteed a medium onion in butter for five minutes, then added a teaspoon or so of garlic powder and a teaspoon or so of salt. Add stuff like rosemary, oregano, thyme at this point and mix in a half-cup of flour. Add two cups of chicken broth and 1 1/2 cups of heavy cream and let it reduce slightly and cool. While it's cooling, grate a hunk of cheese of some sort — probably cheddar or something similar — those hunks they sell at the store.

Next, add one 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes and one small can of green chiles to the glop. This will help the mixture cool further. Add the chicken at this point and one small bag of Fritos.

Next, grease a 9-by-13-inch pan (or thereabouts) and spoon the chicken-glop mixture into the bottom, then a layer of cheese and alternate until you're out of glop. Reserve some cheese for the top, add a bag of Fritos on the top and sprinkle the remaining cheese on top of that. Bake at 375 degrees for 40 minutes.

This turned out pretty good. You can tweak the recipe, clearly, but as a starting point, there it is. Now you can strumpet around the Find Amy Dunne Headquarters with your can't-miss Chicken Frito Casserole . . .