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The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020
Rachel Kushner | 2021 | Essays
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
The Hard Crowd is a collection of essays about culture and politics. I had read Rachel Kushner's novel The Mars Room and loved it (even went on to buy it for a friend), so I was intrigued to read this collection. There really is a mix here - something for everyone.
The opening essay about Kushner’s participation in an illegal motorbike race on the Baja Peninsula was probably my favourite - it sounded terrifying and exciting all at once. She does seem to like anything to do with motors, as a later essay showed. This one wasn’t really for me, but this is a collection where there is something for everyone. The chapter on wild cat strikes was interesting, as were the ones where she describes her formative years in her hometown and the music concerts she went to (loved these too). The last essay in the book played out as though it was on a film in my head.
The essay about prison reform was really thought provoking, as was that of when Kushner visited a Palestinian refugee camp. I could easily have read more of this one - no matter how saddening it ultimately was.
Rachel Kushner really can write. As she did in The Mars Room, each of these essays really evoked a time and place and made this book pretty hard to put down.
Many thanks to Jonathan Cape for inviting me to read this via NetGalley.
  
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Colin Newman recommended Clear by Spirit in Music (curated)

 
Clear by Spirit
Clear by Spirit
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"They were in my opinion one of the best West Coast bands from the 70s. I got this album around 1970; I can't remember what year it came out, 68 or 69, something like that. It's got one or two unbelievable tracks on it: 'Ice' and the title track. Both are amazing instrumental pieces which are really like nothing I'd ever heard before. They're jazzy but they have a flavour, a rhythm of something else. Some of the songs are okay and some of the songs are a bit silly. I had a little square Dansette and a tiny room when I was a kid and the room was twice the size of the bed, and I used to lie on my bed with the speaker next to my ear. And I remember it being very hot and listening to that album and feeling like the music had captured the heat in a way that no other music that I'd heard actually did. So I always associate it with heat. And I always figure that if somebody knows about Spirit then they probably know quite a lot about music. And the guy who produced it is the guy who later went on to produce Carole King, and he was interviewed for the NME. At the time Carole King was regarded as being super unhip, and the journalist said oh, you produced the Spirit album; they were fantastic. And the guy said oh, I didn't really understand the music, which I thought was stupidly disingenuous, because actually he brought a really interesting touch to it."

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