Bryan Charles

I know what it's like to have this kind of response to an album, and how closely music is tied up with memory. For me, I got into Pavement in the cataclysmic summer of 1994 when they were still a functioning band. I bought this album the following summer when I was living in a frat house and trying to figure out women.

It's hard to overstate what Pavement meant to me in those stupid years. I had slight connections to the band - college dj at UVA, bus driver (like Nastanovich), hung out at the house on 14th street next to the Ectoslavia house . . .

But what it came down to is I grew to understand that one response to social anxiety and awkwardness and college foolishness is to be arty and oblique and diffident.

Bryan Charles captures these feelings for me, the way an album can hit you the right way and make you feel better about life.

The narrative unravels a bit at the end: thus, the four stars.… (meer)

Yes, I read this partly because I will be responding to Bloomsbury's open call for proposals for the 33 1/3 series, which I have long admired. I probably would have read it at some point because I'm on a Pavement kick. But anyway… Bryan Charles is a passionate and eloquent writer, plus he's from Kalamazoo! Represent! He's smart and funny and soulful and his book is too. Charles "gets" Pavement. Especially charming is his mildly revisionist case for them being secret romantics rather than the slacker-jaded ironist robots they are so often made out to be. Favorite moment: Charles works up the courage to ask Stephen Malkmus what the lyrics to his favorite song -- can't remember which one -- are about. Malkmus: "Uh, I don't really remember."… (meer)

This is set in 1992 and following the life of Vincent "Vim" Sweeney. Vim is an eighteen-year-old who falls for his friend and bandmate's girlfriend, loses his virginity in a one-night stand and falls into heavy drinking. He lives with his mom and step-dad and feels estranged from his father, who was largely absent while he was growing up. This is an angst-y coming of age novel. Bryan Charles writes some of these like stream of consciousness and the effect is you feel like you are in Vim's head. Unfortunately, Vim is a shallow eighteen year old with delusions of grandeur and pretended depth. I did not find him a particularly likely protagonist. Vim sexualizes his interaction with women throughout this book and drinks way too much. I didn't think he grew much through the novel, though he does learn to express his anger to his dad and let go of some bitterness. He is still a punk kid and I found the pop-culture references a little cliche.… (meer)