Lee Ranaldo and Leah Singer
Road Movies
New York City, USA: Soft Skull, 2004
Edition size unknown
From Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the allure of the road trip is classic fodder for poetry and freeform prose. Pop music, too, often uses driving as shorthand for escape from poverty, drudgery, or just boredom: from Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car to Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road ("It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win”).
Touring musicians spend a lot of their time driving from one gig to the next and the road can provide clarity of thought, and endless metaphorical possibilities.
As a teenager Ranaldo discovered Kerouac, and later produced and contributed several tracks to the 1997 spoken word tribute LP Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness, which also featured bandmate Thurston Moore, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, Allen Ginsberg, Lydia Lunch, Michael Stipe and many others. His first son is named Cody.
Lee will often sketch in the passenger seat of the car/van (see previous post), something he did last week when driving to various local beaches. So it makes sense that his first book took the Road as it’s subject matter/framework.
First published thirty years ago at the request of Sander Hicks, who worked at a Kinko’s and was starting up the publishing imprint Soft Skull, Road Movies was a thin volume containing twenty-seven poems and short prose pieces. This tenth anniversary reissue is supplemented with twenty-two new writings, a new afterword by Hicks, and a tipped in CD called Ambient Loop for Vancouver.
The new writings include a piece called Toronto, describing a fan reaching up onto the stage and tearing a necklace from his throat as Sonic Youth performed Kool Thing, and an obituary for Kurt Cobain, who took his life around the time of the original volume’s release.
The writings are accompanied by photographs taken by Leah Singer, who was born in Winnipeg and studied journalism and photography at Ryerson University in Toronto. She moved to New York City in the 1980’s and has been collaborating with Ranaldo since 1991. The original book (see below) features a back cover photograph she took, recreating Allen Ginsberg’s 1953 portrait Jack Kerouac on Fire Escape.
"I think I got interested in writing when I was very young, because I was an avid reader as a kid. I tried to write my first book at six or seven years old. I still have it somewhere in a box, with a cardboard cover, six or eight pages, a little tiny story with some illustrations. When I was a bit older, I went into a heavy science fiction phase and read Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick. But it was probably reading Beat literature in my late teens that really turned me on to writing. Jack Kerouac opened the door to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and all those other Beat writers. Their works sparked my interest in poetry, language, its sound, its texture, and what it could express. As well, listening to and reading rock ’n’ roll lyrics by people like Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith, who were consciously citing poetic references in their songs, made reading poetry more interesting to me.”
[...]
"After my first book, Road Movies, came out, Leah and I did a few books together. We were always really big fans of and have quite a collection of books that marry image and text, like Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message [1967], where the pages are full-bleed pictures with text in weird fonts. We wanted to do a book like that ourselves. We did one in particular with a really small press called Bookstore. It’s Leah’s images for the most part, and my text, and we played with the text on the page and the way the text and the image met and bounced off each other."
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