ARTS The Michigan Doily William Kennedy's Albany: A unique city of dreams Tuesday, April 24, 1990 Page 5 .. 6y Mark Swartz WILLIAM Kennedy, guest lecturer at this year's Hopwood Awards, has written five novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ironweed and last year's Quinn's Book. If he had wanted, he could have saved himself some trouble and given them all the charmingly cumbersome title of his single non-fiction work: O Albany! Improbable City of Political Wiz- ards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies and Underrated Scoundrels. Kennedy's stories can take place in any year; he's even considering penning a pre-revolutionary novel. But they all take place in one city. As he explains it, Albany, New York "is a place where I've found a great deal of material on which the imagination can work. I know the place. I know its history. And I find there's a strength in that that I wouldn't have if I were to write about, say, Ann Arbor." 0 That is Ann Arbor's loss, be- cause Albany has become, say crit- ics, Kennedy's Dublin, his Yoknap- atawpha, having consistently borne fruitful literature the same way those two places did for Joyce and Faulkner earlier this century. "The whole principle of place from those two writers meant a lot to me," says Kennedy, "seeing how they would use their own home and environment to tell a universal story that wouldn't be out of place in any- pne's bookshelf." "My roots are deep here," he htates. "My family goes back all the way. My grandparents moved here from Ireland. And I've studied the 'today's weather Today will be partly sunny with * a high all the way up around 80 and the low tonight will only go down to around 50 degrees. Tomorrow's temps should hit 80 again. Fuck studying, fuck exams, fuck classes! history so that my imagination goes all the way back to the very begin- ning of the city." Truly, he is a wellspring of knowledge about the history of the city where he was born in 1928. If you plan on asking William Kennedy about Albany, you had bet- ter pack a lunch, because he is ca- pable of launching into an endless - and endlessly fascinating - monologue about the capital city's "Political Wizards." "Nobody alive can remember Al- bany when it wasn't a boss machine city," he begins, "first by a wasp boss named Billy Barnes, a Republi- can who ran the city from 1899 to 1921. And from 1921 to 1983, it was the 0' Connell-Corning ma- chine. That probably was the most powerful machine of any city that has ever existed in the country in terms of longevity, and supremacy of power in every realm. A lot of other Irish boss machines have flour- ished: Jersey City, New York, Chicago. But not with the quality of endurance that Albany's had. It really does hold a record, as the mayor does as well, uninterrupted for l l straight terms..." There is no doubt that Albany has given William Kennedy a great deal. Now, he is in the happy situa- tion of being able to return the fa- vor. After winning the coveted MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; - also called the "genius grant" - Kennedy founded the Albany Writer's Institute at the State Uni- versity of New York. "The Writers Institute is something I started in 1983 when I got the MacArthur grant," he explains. "There were 15 thousand dollars which I had as an ancillary grant from the MacArthur people to give away. We now bring For author Willam Kennedy, Albany, New York is the equivalent of Joyce's Dublin: a city where the seemingly mundane becomes fantastic. in about 60 writers a year. It's quite an operation. It has changed the cul- tural attitude of the city consider- ably. People who come here from the outside don't feel like it's a wasteland anymore." Quinn's Book is a marked depar- ture for Kennedy by for once not fo- cusing on the seamier elements of the city: the alcoholics of Ironweed or the gangsters of Legs. It is an impressive novel that chronicles the life of Quinn, the "formidable folk- lorist," as he pursues the love of one Maud Fallon. Quinn serves as the idiosyncratic, romantic hero of the novel. His no- bility comes from a quixotic world view that extends even to practices that, in another writer's hands, might seem mundane. Shaving, for instance. As Kennedy reports it, Quinn aspires to true greatness as a shaver: "He concluded that he would have to shave regularly from now on, a relentless obligation. He would, in spite of all, develop an awesome talent for shaving himself. He could feel that. He would be very good at what he did. Maud had pre- dicted that." Though Quinn lived a hundred years before Kennedy, the author admits to similarities in their experi- ences. "Being Irish, being a newspa- per man, being in love, being in trouble, witnessing theater, witness- ing war" are all parts of Kennedy's life that he assimilated into Quinn's. As an experiment, writing about the 19th century paid off, Kennedy believes. "The consequence was a surprise of language and a surprise that thel9th century had such an ap- peal for me," he says. "A writer's job is to see what he can do that suprises him and will surprise the reader, that tells the reader what it means to be alive." WILLIAM KENNEDY will deliver the Hopwood Lecture at 3:30 pm in Rackham Auditorium. This is a lecture, not a reading of his work. Afterward, the Hopwood Award winners, as well as the recipients of the Kasdan Scholarship, the Jeffrey L. Weisberg Award and the Arthur Miller Award, will be presented with their loot. Sinead O'Connor I Do Not Want What 1 Haven't Got Ensign It's been nine hours and 25 days since the new Sinead O'Connor record started to seep into this re- viewer. I Do Not Want... presents a much more sober, subdued woman than the hit LP The Lion and the Cobra. O'Connor's voice isn't as keen to indulge in vocal pyrotech- nics. The moody contemplativeness he-e mirrors the concerns in her own life; there are some very directly au- tobiographical songs, some of which in their open confession have you wincing slightly. In "The Emperor's New Clothes" O'Connor remarks on "how preg- nancy can change you." The rest of the song smacks a little of self-justi- fication as she tells her lover to piss off. The album's title track, sung a capella, sounds like Clannad, and with its echoey production comes off as too contrived a showcase for O'Connor's voice. She should be wary of oversinging. "Jump on the River" is a lumpen piece of rock that ruins the effect of some very physi- cal lyrics. In its title, "Black Boys on Mopeds" has a crisp image that encapsulates English racism and po- lice brutality. O'Connor proceeds to rail against Mrs. Thatcher and the Room With a View/Brideshead Re- visited mythical picture of England that people in North America love to believe. It's all a little naive lyri- cally, but forgivable as O'Connor sings it with grace. Taken as a whole, the lyrics on the album are carried off by some glorious singing and lush string ar- rangements; Sinead could sing "My Way" and it would sound ace. Espe- cially terrific is "I am Stretched On Your Grave," in which O'Connor sings a ballad in the ancient Irish tradition over the sparse beat -of James Brown's "Funky Drummer." Pop psychoanalysis would reveal that this is the best Catholic album since Madonna's Like a Prayer. O'Connor sings about death, babis, her mother, the land and love as well as breaking up in the cover version of a Prince song (recorded by his proteg6s The Family); "Nothifig compares 2 U" is miles and away the strongest track on the album. By now, you've all heard it on the radio and seen O'Connor cry those big Sad tears on the video. It's going to be- come one of the venerated pop cla- sics of all time, one of those songs that couples have as "their very spe- cial tune" for many years to comie; one of those songs that makes you want to lick the lonely teardrops off Sindad's cheeks. Awesome "big" production by Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul plays up the best qualities in O'Connor's incredible range. "Nothing Compares 2 U" is sad and life affirming in the same way as Roy Orbison's lyrical wells of lone- liness. Such songs are rare these days. -Nabeel Zuberi Big Chief Get Down and Double Check Get Hip In the world of you-know-what, a few things take top priority. Long hair - an immediate requisite to thrashing. You shake it all about. Oh, and bigness. Bigness helps. The bigger the impetus, the bolder the See RECORDS, page 9 DAILY CLASSIFIEDS The Final Hours Open Early \ Open Late 1220 S. 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