I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MOTHERHEAD BUG-Zambodia (1993).

Motherhead Bug is the creation of David Ouimet. David was my boss at Tower Records way back when. He has been in some other influential NYC bands like Swans and Cop Shoot Cop, and he’s worked with Foetus as well. He has since moved on to bigger and better things, including doing wonderfully creepy illustrations for YA books (like Cat in Glass and Double-Dare to Be Scared).

David was a founding member of Cop Shoot Cop, and then left to do other things. What I find most interesting about Zambodia is that it sounds fairly comparable to the band Firewater, a band that was created by Tod A, one of the other founders of Cop Shoot Cop. No idea if there was something in their collective water but it’s interetsing that they both pursued this bizarre hybrid of punk/industrial/klezmer/gypsy/circus rock.

If you know Firewater (and you should, they’re very good), Motherhead Bug would be something like a slightly more indie version of them (if you can imagine that). The unconventional aspects of the songs are more to the fore, and the instrumentataion is a little more peculiar. This is probably due to the fact that Ouimet is a trombonist and samplist (is that what you call a sampler player?). It is clear that his love of the horn section and freedom of samples allowed his creativity to run amock.

Ouimet’s vocals work in a gravelley context similar to Tom Waits, but less drunken-bluesman and more gothic spooky storyteller. The whole shebang sounds something like a Kurt Weillian nightmare. And yet, there is a great deal of humor involved. Having said all that, for all of its unconventiality, the songs are pretty standard verse chorus verse, 4 minutes long. It’s just what he does within those limits is pretty outlandish!

For a genre that has so many tentacles, Motherhead Bug fills a fun niche of industrial carnival music. If you like a chaotic noisy band, and you’re interested in unconventional instrumentation, then check out Motherhead Bug.

Hi David.

[READ: November 20, 2007] One Hundred and Forty-five Stories in a Small Box.

The format of these books is three books in a small box. Each book is a volume of short short stories or flash fiction. The books themselves are also small in size: slightly smaller than a mass paperback. So, when I say that a story is a page long, it is in fact, about a typical paragraph length. One of the tropes of the flash fiction movement is that you try and write a fully realized story in as short a space as possible. It is amazing how complete many of these stories turn out to be. Even though they are devoid of most of the trappings of a conventional story, they often convey a full range of emotion, and even some details. According to the Wikipedia entry, most flash-fiction pieces are between 250 and 1,000 words long. This should all give a sense for what’s in the box.

As for the works themselves, there are three volumes by the three authors listed. Despite the fact that they are all writing flash fiction, it is amazing to see how different the styles can be. It also became apparent very quickly which author I liked best.

DAVE EGGERS–How the Water Feels to the Fishes

This was the first of the three that I read and, despite his suggestion in the intro that his work is the least interesting of the three, I enjoyed it the most. I often wonder if, because I really enjoyed Eggers’ first two books, and since he is the ostensible creator of McSweeney’s and all of its spinoffs, I am unable to have real criticism of him. Well, in this case, I was able to be objective.

His stories were diverse and very interesting. Some of them had already appeared on the inside cover of the jacket of McSweeney’s 23, but I feel they worked better (or were at least easier to read) in this format. Obviously, I’m not going to review all of the stories individually, but what I will say is that the diversity in his collection was tremendous: there are serious stories, thoughtful stories, humorous stories, and of course, downright bizarre ones.

The title story is a thoughtful piece, specifically addressing the issue of how water feels to the fish. The fish are asked the question, and they turn it on us, to ask how air feels to humans. There is a very funny follow up story later on about how air feels to the birds. And, the placement of it several stories later in the volume allows for a great payoff.

Eggers also runs the gamut from short short works (3 sentences) to longer pieces (I think about 3 pages). I don’t know if it’s the format, but after reading several really short works, a three page story seems really long! Regardless, I was really impressed with the amount of emotion Eggers could put into these short fictions.

SARAH MANGUSO–Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape

This collection, the title of which is a very good summary of the works within, was enjoyable to start with, but quickly wore out its welcome. The good part for me was that all of the stories were, indeed, really short. None was longer than a page.

One of the stories (and none had titles so I can’t say which one) I even found very moving (although my wife didn’t). It was about building a fire in a cabin and the room filling with smoke.

Overall, what I found was that the whole 80 or so stories read like diary entries–very well written and highly polished diary entries–but diary entries nonetheless. They were all first person, and were all examples of “incidents” that happened and her reflections upon them. Now, in the Eggers volume, I found the diversity to be the compelling aspect of the work, so in this one, the similarity seemed to really wear on me. Perhaps this is a volume best read in more than one or two sittings. The incidents also seemed to focus on a limited palette of events in the narrator’s life. It seemed as if the author decided to write stories and culled on maybe a dozen events in her life and drew various incidents from those events. Nothing wrong with that per se, and as I mentioned, in the beginning I enjoyed it, I just found it somewhat limiting after an entire volume.

DEB OLIN UNFERTH–Minor Robberies

One of Unferth’s (Olin Unferth’s?) stories in this collection appeared in McSweeney’s 18. I enjoyed that story devoid of the context of a volume of her work because it seemed so weird and fresh coming admist other works. Unferth’s volume is the largest of the three, and indeed, most of her works are longer than the others’. One story in particular, “Sickos,” runs over 10 pages. Not exactly a novel, but quite large by the standards set out by the other two.

I found Unferth’s work to be overall solid, but something of a mixed bag. There were some really outstanding pieces like “Minute Lives of Great Composers” and “Deb Olin Unferth.” Plus, there were a great number of stories which tied in very well to the overall theme of minor robberies–both actual and emotional losses. But there were also some that seemed a bit too self-involved (which I guess could be said of a lot of flash fiction, right?) By the end I lost interest in the stories, which was either the author’s fault, or perhaps I had just overdosed on too many short short stories at this point. Maybe it should have been One Hundred and Twenty-five Stories in a Small Box