Some pictures I took in Gravesend and Bensonhurst, January 2015. 
Author Archives: William Boyle
“Take ten paces out across the stark black earth.”
Wow. Lost Amalgamated Sons of Rest song – Jason Molina, Will Oldham, & Alasdair Roberts – written & recorded on 9/11/01.
And some lines by Roberts on the circumstances of the recording: http://bit.ly/jms11_blog
My Favorite Movies of 2014
Still catching up on movies from 2014. Updating this as I go. Really want to see Memphis, Birdman, A Most Violent Year, Actress, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Goodbye to Language, The Babadook, and Maps to the Stars. I’m ashamed that I still haven’t watched 20,000 Days on Earth. Oh well. Life and death slow down dumb movie addictions. Anyhow, here are my favorite movies of 2014 that I’ve seen so far:
1. Inherent Vice
2. Calvary
3. Boyhood
4. Nightcrawler
5. The Immigrant
6. Go for Sisters
7. Blue Ruin
8. Only Lovers Left Alive
9. Enemy
10. The Grand Budapest Hotel
11. Cold in July
12. Life Itself
13. Snowpiercer
14. Ida
15. Jodorowsky’s Dune
16. Under the Skin
17. Joe
18. Night Moves
19. Foxcatcher
20. Happy Christmas/The One I Love
*updated 1/26/15
My Favorite Songs of 2014
List-making is a victimless crime. Forgive me my transgressions.
My favorite songs of 2014:
15. “Eyes to the Wind,” The War on Drugs
14. “Mahogany Dread,” Hiss Golden Messenger
13. “I Won’t Come Back Again,” Jim Mize
12. “Do It For Johnny,” Tyler Keith
11. “Stateline,” The Delines
10. “Dirty Cigarettes,” Beach Slang
9. “Tarifa,” Sharon Van Etten
8. “Windows,” Angel Olsen
7. “My Wrecking Ball,” Ryan Adams
6. “Head,” Lydia Loveless
5. “The Promise,” Sturgill Simpson
4. “My Little Man” and “Razor of Love,” Sean Rowe
3. “Swannanoa,” Water Liars
2. “JM,” Strand of Oaks
1. “Dogs,” Sun Kil Moon
My Favorite Music of 2014
1. Sun Kil Moon, Benji
2. Sharon Van Etten, Are We There
3. Jim Mize, s/t
4. Strand of Oaks, Heal
5. Angel Olsen, Burn Your Fire for No Witness
6. Water Liars, s/t
7. Beach Slang, Who Would Ever Want Anything So Broken? and Cheap Thrills on Dead End Street
8. Tyler Keith, Alias Kid Twist
9. The Delines, Colfax
10. Hiss Golden Messenger, Lateness of Dancers
11. Sean Rowe, Madman
12. The War on Drugs, Lost in the Dream
13. Hail Mary Mallon, Bestiary
14. Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music
15. Hallelujah the Hills, Have You Ever Done Something Evil?
Other stuff I loved:
Mark Kozelek, Sings Christmas Carols; Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 2; William Tyler, Blue Ash Montgomery and Lost Colony; Ryan Adams, s/t + 1984 7”; Grouper, Ruins; Marianne Faithfull, Give My Love to London; Bob Mould, Beauty & Ruin; Moonface, City Wrecker; Damien Jurado, Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son; J Mascis, Tied to a Star; Doug Paisley, Strong Feelings; The Afghan Whigs, Do the Beast; Christopher Denny, If the Roses Don’t Kill Us; Centro-Matic, Take Pride in Your Long Odds; Wussy, Attica; Lydia Loveless, Something Else; Steve Gunn, Way Out Weather; Wooden Wand, Farmer’s Corner and Azag-toth; Talbot Adams, s/t; Lana Del Rey, Ultraviolence; Tweedy, Sukierae; Bass Drum of Death, Rip This; Leonard Cohen, Popular Problems; Hurray for the Riff Raff, Small Town Heroes; First Aid Kit, Stay Gold; Reigning Sound, Shattered; Neil Young, A Letter Home; Bonnie Prince Billy, Singer’s Grave a Sea of Tongues; David Bazan, 7” series
Other stuff I liked:
Bitchin’ Bahas, s/t; Sylvie Simmons, Sylvie; D’Angelo and the Vanguard, Black Messiah; Cloud Nothings, Here and Nowhere Else; The Hold Steady, Teeth Dreams; Shovels & Rope, Swimmin’ Time; Daniel Lanois, Flesh and Machine; Spoon, They Want My Soul; Mirah, Changing Light; Myriam Gendron, Not So Deep as a Well; The Felice Brothers, Favorite Waitress; Jessica Lea Mayfield, Make My Head Sing; Dex Romweber Duo, Images 13; John Frusciante, Enclosure; Scott H. Biram, Nothin’ But Blood; Wovenhand, Refractory Obdurate; Thurston Moore, The Best Day; David Kilgour and the Heavy 8s, End Times Undone; The Men, Tomorrow’s Hits; Nude Beach, 77; Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Band, Intensity Ghost; Daniel Bachman, Orange Co. Serenade; The Smashing Pumpkins, Monuments to an Elegy; Jenny Lewis, The Voyager; Lucinda Williams, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone
Reissues/Live/Soundtracks/etc.:
1. Bob Dylan and The Band, The Basement Tapes Complete
2. Songs: Ohia, Didn’t It Rain and Journey On: Collected Singles
3. Bedhead, 1992-1998
4. The Rock*A*Teens, Sweet Bird of Youth
5. Richard Buckner, Bloomed
6. Lucero, Live from Atlanta
7. Roland S. Howard, Pop Crimes
8. Richard Thompson, Acoustic Classics
9. Harry Dean Stanton, Partly Fiction
10. The Afghan Whigs, Gentlemen at 21
Bob Mould, Workbook 25; Mike Cooper, Trout Steel; The Velvet Underground, s/t 45th Anniversary Deluxe Edition; The Brothers and Sisters, Dylan’s Gospel; Kaki King, Everybody Glows: B-Sides & Rarities; Jozef Van Wissem & SQÜRL, Only Lovers Left Alive soundtrack; Jeff Grace, Cold in July soundtrack; Mark Lanegan, Has God Seen My Shadow?: An Anthology, 1989-2011; The Smashing Pumpkins, Adore Super Deluxe Edition; Bob Carpenter, Silent Passage; Hiss Golden Messenger, Bad Debt; Pixies, Doolittle 25: B-Sides, Peel Sessions, and Demos; John Doe, The Best of John Doe: This Far; Emmylou Harris, Wrecking Ball Deluxe Edition; Lavender Country, s/t; Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947-1959; David Bazan + Passenger String Quartet, Volume 1; The Soul of Designer Records; Bob Dylan in the ‘80s
Eulogy for My Grandfather
Joseph Giannini, 3/18/25-12/2/14
I look at the ages that some of my writer and musician heroes died—in their 30s or younger, maybe 51 or 67 or 71. Some who didn’t get nearly enough, some who got just the right amount—but is there such a thing? My grandfather, my biggest hero, made 89. That’s pretty good. And very healthy most of it, even if he worried too much the last ten years. Part of that worry was knowing that the road was running out, I guess.
My love of my grandfather is enormous—I don’t have a bad memory of him. Nothing mean ever passed between us. Maybe a minor frustration here or there—him trying to teach me something about being a good fix-it guy and me being incapable of learning. I don’t think he ever read a book but my love of stories comes straight from him. He never said a commonplace thing, never told a boring story. Everyone got a nickname and these nicknames were always beautiful, sometimes random and strange, and they ignited my love of naming. I modeled my speech on him. When I was 14, quiet, most of what I said was what he would’ve said. That carried me through college, became my language, so now my voice is his voice. I scoured his closet and wore his old mechanics jackets. I called him for stories—tell me about the Cockroach Inn again, tell me about insulating the kitchen walls with beer cans, what happened that time at Peggy’s Runway, give me some good Atlantic City details. I tape-recorded and filmed him constantly as a kid, out on the porch, where he always looked like the captain of the neighborhood.
He was obsessed with the parking situation in front of the house, rattled whenever someone blocked the driveway. He was hilarious when he drank scotch—my first drink was Johnnie Walker in imitation. He liked movies, The Frog That Ate Tokyo, Death Wish. He loved Benny Hill. I remember watching TV with him on Friday nights—he’d have a bowl of potato chips or some small snack and he’d look so happy. I loved to watch him cut pastries. Everything he did, he did all the way. When he fixed things, he made them better. I loved his voice. I loved his pauses. I loved his green cup. I loved the way he’d stop to feel if the heat was coming up in the kitchen. I loved watching him pray the rosary before Mass, the way the beads dangled over his fingers. His was a quiet and humble faith. My favorite thing about Mass as a kid was watching him as an usher—he did it so proudly that his pride was contagious. Late in life, his hand shook from the Parkinson’s—I loved that shake. I loved that he and my grandmother were married so long, sixty-three years, and I loved them together. I loved how he worried about my mother, how he loved her. I loved the advice he gave me when I really needed it, some broken heart, some melancholy I couldn’t shake, and he was always there with some choice line I won’t share now—I’m saving them. Never a cliché, never the same thing everyone else said. Being around (or even just hearing about) my kids made him smile, right up to the end when I played him a video of our newest, Connolly Jean, and his tired eyes lit up. A million things I loved, too many to name here—I’ll spend my life loving all the things I loved about him, writing about them, carrying them with me. But one more: he was funny all the time. When I was home in November, he looked good, the best he’d looked in a while, and he was having a late bowl of cereal. He held up the box and smiled wide and said, “You got Honey Nut Cheerios in Mississippi?”
I’ll also spend my life with some regrets—I didn’t see him as much as I could’ve and should’ve since we moved south six years ago, I lost my old tapes of him, I didn’t write down certain stories that demanded documentation. But what is loss without regret? I’ll never lose the feeling of having been around him, of having been raised by him.
My grandfather hated to say goodbye. He didn’t go to funerals. People might’ve taken that the wrong way, I don’t know—I always took it as a quality that made him the most beautiful of all. He was incapable of being phony. He hated when the people he loved would leave. He’d duck away before we could get to him if he knew he wasn’t going to see us for a few months. I’ll miss him more than I’ve ever missed anyone or anything, but I won’t say goodbye. I’ll say what he would’ve said: “See you when the weather gets better.”
The last picture I took of my grandfather a few weeks before he passed away.
My grandfather and my grandmother, late ’40s.
My grandfather (center) when he worked at Kinney Motors on Coney Island Avenue.
My grandfather, late ’40s.
With my grandfather, 1980.
Review of GRAVESEND at Dead End Follies
“Every reader remembers his first. The first novel that swept him off his feet and sent him stumbling into a parallel universe. It’s like a first girlfriend, it’s hard to get over, yet the very reason why you’re reading is to reproduce that feeling again. I’ve been lucky in 2014, because it happened a couple times. It wasn’t EXACTLY that feeling, but it was close. The last time it happened, I was reading Gravesend, by William Boyle. It’s a wonderful, sad, elegiac and understated novel about a community of people at the crossroads. Truth is, I felt a very particular sense of satisfaction when I’ve read Gravesend, because finding novels like that is the reason why I read.”
Floored by this really wonderful Dead End Follies review of Gravesend. Thanks so much, Benoit!
A Good Time For Pie
There’s a great piece up at Grantland today about Pulp Fiction on its twentieth anniversary.
Twenty years. Man. Can’t remember how many times I saw it in the theater – the old Loew’s Oriental on 86th Street where the screen was crooked and rats raced under the seats – a few times in the first couple of weeks, I think. It lit everything up. I was 16. The world was Pulp Fiction. Got into Hemingway a couple of years later, when I first read The Sun Also Rises as a freshman in college. The influence of Hemingway on QT is something I never really thought about, but it makes a lot of sense, especially in terms of Hem’s role as the “stylistic and philosophical headmaster” of the hard-boiled tradition (I think it was Foster Hirsch who said that).
My Uncle Joe
My Uncle Joe passed away. He died too young. But he died the way he lived, on his own terms. He was a great guy—someone who lived on the edge of things. He got out of the neighborhood young, played stand-up bass in jazz bands, worked at food carts in the Village. Some of my friends knew him well—he’d come up and hang out when we were in Cochecton. He was my earliest model for an artist and thinker. He could fix anything. He was a caretaker. He was full of love and goodness. He knew how much of this racket is bullshit. I learned something from him every time we talked. The worst thing right now is thinking about my grandmother walking into his old bedroom and looking at pictures of him as a kid. I keep breaking down thinking about that. I also keep thinking about all the times—back when I lived in New Paltz—that I didn’t drive across the river to see him play in Beacon. Last time we were home in July—I think he must have known things could get really bad for him—he wanted to take me, my wife, and our son out for Chinese food in the city. We decided we couldn’t do it because it was our last day in Brooklyn with my grandparents. He’d been down a few days before to see us, we took solace in that. He’d insisted on mowing the grass until he couldn’t anymore. I took over after a few minutes and then we drove to Home Depot to get a part for something that needed repairing in my grandparents’ house. He was having trouble breathing. He wanted an Orange Crush. I’d never seen him drink a soda. That made me worried, and I never shook that worry. My mother and grandparents worried about him constantly. They tried to get him to go see a doctor, but he wouldn’t. He wanted no part of it. He’d covered his belly button when he came to visit my grandmother in the hospital last winter, saying that was how bad spirits got in. My mother and grandparents gave him space just as they always had—they respected his wishes. I don’t know what to say. I loved him. I’m so sorry he’s gone. My daughter will be in the world soon, and I hope she carries a big piece of him with her. Here he is with my son Eamon a few years ago. Rest easy, man.
William Boyle 