I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE-Something About Airplanes (1999) & We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes (2000) & The Photo Album(2001) & Transatlanticism (2003) & Plans (2005).

I first heard about Death Cab for Cutie on a Believer Magazine’s free CD. The song was “Title and Registration” from Transatlanticism. At the time, I was enjoying the collection, but not really planning on delving into any of the artists. And yet, this song just kept coming back to haunt me. The lyrics were great. And the melody was superb. There’s a part where the voices all sing “colli-i-i-ide” that is really just sublime. So, I bought the record and immediately fell in love with it. There’s really not a bad song on it. From the beautiful opening of “The New Year” to the ba-bah’s of “The Sound of Settling,” to the vivid description of teenagers skipping their classes and seeing how their bodies work. The whole thing made me go back and get the rest of their records. And I wasn’t disappointed.

From the get-go, Ben Gibbard’s songwriting was fantastic. On the first album, Something About Airplanes, the real beauty comes in the intricate guitar melodies. The albums sound nearly free of bass, but not tinny. They are simply overcome by these great guitar lines that are really explicit and catchy. My only regret is that I don’t really know the names of any of the songs. Looking at the track listing I’m not even sure which ones are which. And this is a fault of not having enough time like I did as a youngster to sit an pore over records from back to front. I just know that from start to finish, I enjoyed this one.

The next album, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, continues in this same vein. Yet it is more. A somewhat fuller sound, atmospherically building and growing. Whereas Airplanes seemed almost singular in its construction, Facts, seems to just be a bigger group making this beautiful music.

The next one, The Photo Album has a great title, of course, and it continues in the vein of Facts. Not as many standout songs, but the overall album feels just as good. Transatlanticism fits in here, and as you see the progression you notice an even fuller sound. The songwriting hasn’t changed dramatically, yet you can see that it is no longer the guitar that necessarily carries the melodies. Sometimes it is the bass. And the bass is gaining more prominence with each album. It gives these songs a bottom end that they didn’t have before. And what’s nice about that is that it doesn’t detract in any way from the songwriting or send the focus elsewhere, it is just a new component added to the mix.

It was at this point that the latest album was due to come out, and so I got to be nervous about an indie band that I was falling in love with signing to a major label. But Plans did not disappoint. The sound of the album is pure DCFC, and yet it sounds somehow lighter. There are some keyboards that fit in on some of the poppier songs, but they hold their melody and really accentuate what is being done. As is typical for a move to a major, the band doesn’t reach for anything too dramatic, or too different from what got them to the majors, but at the same time, they don’t play it so safe that it’s boring. The songs are still catchy and wonderful, and I rank this album just as highly as the rest. You really can’t go wrong with any DCFC album.

Even You Can Play These Songs with Chords, (yet another great album title!) which is a collection of rarities and unreleased tracks. It’s neat to hear some variants of earlier tracks, although some of the more experimental songs like “Flustered/Hey Tomcat” are simply silly and not of much value. Nevertheless their cover of “This Charming Man” is pretty great.

[READ: July 2007] On Beauty.

First a correction from my last post. Kiki and Howard met in New York, not England.

So I just finished the book and wow, this was a good one. A major keeper. The characters really resonate. The scenery is totally vivid, and the setting is very true to what I recall of the Boston area. When I left off, all hell was breaking loose for the Belsleys. And it really just gets worse from there.

While reading this story of family dissolution, you sit back and root for the family to pull through, and you try to imagine how they can reconcile their differences. Yet as you try to imagine this you realize that a happy resolution will be trite and not believable. So, you then wonder how the book can end at all. This one ends with hurt and betrayal and compassion and understanding.

I found several things very intriguing about the story.

First, Howard is clearly an intellectual, a thinker. And yet all of the actions that lead to his downfall are completely thoughtless. Not in the general sense of thoughtlessness, but simple unthinnkingness. True, both instances involve succumbing to sexual urges, but neither instance is described with any sense of thought or desire involved. The events just sort of happen around Howard and he becomes something of a half-willing participant.

The second, cataclysmic betrayal, is described in such a way that you almost feel like Howard doesn’t have a choice in the matter. Objectively, this is complete crap, of course, and when his daughter reads him the riot act, you know that Howard was, simply, an ass. Yet Smith writes the incidents in a way that do not lay the blame at Howard’s feet. It is only fitting that the end of the book shows Howard unable to think at all about the only thing that he was capable of lucid thought before: his work.

Second, Smith makes clear from the outset that she is fond of E.M. Forster and Howard’s End in particular. I found myself musing about how Smith’s story focuses on Howard (Belsley’s) end as a husband, professor and all around stable individual.

Third, there are a few places towards the end of the book where meetings of individuals seem almost too coincidental. Smith foreshadows this somewhat by the coincidental meeting of the siblings on a street corner in Boston. If this earlier scene were pivotal, you could almost cry foul, as the coincidence is pretty great. However, it is a chance meeting that does not precipitate any real action, so you allow serendipity to take its course. Later, in the more climactic scenes, the foreshadowing of coincidental meetings somewhat alleviates the “chanceness” of these meetings. However, since Smith has very cleverly put the setting of the book in a small insular college, it is not only reasonable, but entirely likely that you would run into people by chance, in fact, nearly all the time, and certainly at a popular party. Her choice of setting for the book could not have been more perfect, even if she was not writing about a professor.

Fourth, I have not read Howard’s End, but I read a synopsis of the book, and it is clear that there are several parallels between the two. But from what I know of literature of the period, the way she has constructed the book really falls into the patterns of the Forster-era work. Having incidental characters become involved with other incidental characters to ultimately have a huge impact on the main characters is not only similar to pieces of the time, it is the mark of great writing, period.

Fifth, I hope this doesn’t sound weird coming from a white reader, but I was delighted at how race was always an issue of the book, but that it didn’t become an explicit issue. There is a subplot involving Levi and Haitian immigrants which threatens to turn the book into an exercise in race baiting. However, she deftly avoids going in that direction. Not because the issue isn’t there. It is. Clearly it is. But she lets it simmer underneath all of the talk and frustrations of the characters. The fact that their father is white obviously plays into their lives constantly. But we are spared any kind of “race war” between family members: a confrontation that could really only devolve into movie-of-the-week territory. I guess what I’m saying is that the writing is smart and sophisticated, and perhaps surprisingly given that set up, it’s really really enjoyable!

I suppose all of this Zadie Smith love leads to why the end was slightly disappointing. But only slightly. Through the whole book, Smith never held back with what the characters were feeling, saying or doing. And as the book fades at the end, it sort of blurs to an end, much like Howard’s PowerPoint slide grows larger and less focused. And, of course, this is very poetic, but it was really somewhat nebulous for an ending. True, it is clear what is going to happen and we don’t want her to spell out what happens to each character or anything like that. It just lacks a little of the punch of the rest of the novel. Ending with a whimper, much like Howard’s career.

It’s funny the more I think of these comparisons, the more I think the ending was actually quite brilliant. I just missed the visceral punch that the rest of the book had.

Speaking of visceral punches, I was quite surprised by the explicit descriptions of Howard’s second infidelity. Again, I’m no prude, but coming in the middle of a fairly chaste book, the seduction scene is really jarring!

So overall, Zadie Smith’s book is fantastic. I will certainly be reading her other books, and will most likely be checking out Howard’s End to see what inspired this excellent book.