"Maybe The People Would Be The Times" by Luc Sante (VCP)

 

I identify with Luc Sante's writings because we seem to share an interest in urban street history and its culture and music, films, French crime books & literature. He's a superb essayist with very sharp intelligence, and I love how he approaches his subject matters by making it personal.  Born in 1954,  he was born in Belgium and moved to the United States. His sensitivity is that he's very much aware that he lives in a duo-cultural existence. He's both an American and a European. Through his writing, I get the impression that he feels like an alien in a different world. Sante approaches to culture as buying a nice winter coat in the cold. The very essence of music, art, and literature is deadly important to him. 

"Maybe The People Would Be The Times" is a compilation of Luc's writings from the 21st-century. It includes essays on music, cultural history, writers (great article on Richard Stark), Punk Rock & Reggae, and life in Manhattan during the 1970s. The book's title came from an Arthur Lee song, "Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale," a classic tune from Love's "Forever Changes" album. I can tell that Sante wrote poetry due to his dense but straight forward prose, but not a wasted word in these essays. Reading some of the chapters in this book is like a physical presence in one's conscious. I can feel Georges Simenon, Patti Smith, Ricard Stark, and others in this volume as if they are sitting across from me.