The newest album from Paul Simon, “Surprise”, pairs the folksy rock legend with producer, Brian Eno, best known for twiddling knobs with U2 and the Talking Heads as well as recording his own albums. Although this pairing is not necessarily obvious, the question that results is: What happens when you put Simon, perhaps the most famous singer/songwriter of our parents’ generation, in the studio with Eno’s experimental, electronic and ambient genius? Oddly enough, they produce an album that sounds like a singer/songwriter being produced by someone with an affinity for ambient and electronic experimentation. “Surprise” gives Simon a new feel, updating his style to be edgier without losing his signature sound.
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In Wendy Wasserstein’s socialite New York City, as portrayed in Elements of Style, nothing changed after Sept. 11 except people’s excuses. In the first few chapters, every single page will hold some clunky reference to that day, but don’t worry, that won’t last. My personal favorite instance shows just how close to offensive Wasserstein dares step before neglecting the topic in the pursuit of more outright trivia: “Since 9/11 Judy had made few obvious changes her life. First of all she never let her nannies take her children in taxis anymore… and perhaps the biggest change was she always wore her good jewelry in the event she’d have to trade it for easy passage off Manhattan.” The author and her characters compulsively refer to the historical tragedy as casually and as often as they name-drop designers and plastic surgery procedures, to an absurd and offensive extent. I wondered while reading the new Knopf novel whether there was any purpose for the mindless, predictable melodramas of Frankie Weissman, Samantha Acton and Adrienne Strong-Rodman to be set so insistently in the wake of the terrorist attack. All I could arrive at was that that moment in time lent some supposed relevance to a plot that could otherwise have been distilled from “Sex and the City” episodes, Jane Austen novels and the tiniest droplet of imagination.
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