I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: MARS VOLTA-The Bedlam in Goliath (2008).

I’ve liked Mars Volta more in theory than in actuality for their first few albums. I enjoyed them, but they didn’t make me want to listen all the time. I had heard good things about this new one, so I gave it a shot and WOW. The Bedlam in Goliath is off the charts in its craziness and its masterfulness.

Bedlam has most of the same components of a Mars Volta disc: chaos, noise, fantastic instrumentation, bizarre lyrics, jazz-like elements and metal, sweet metal. But for some reason, Bedlam seems to cohere into a masterful project. I haven’t listened to the first two discs in a while (but I’m sure going to check them out again), and I never got the third one, so I can’t really compare them. This one just seems to have something special to it.

The overall sound makes me think of someone tuning in a radio. Some parts are (deliberately) fuzzy, some are crystal clear. As the sound of one segment fades out a new, entirely different section blares in. Anyone who channel surfs can appreciate the sound of this.

All of the literature about this record talks about their use of a Ouija board during their tour and while recording. They bought it in Jerusalem and they say it had a horrible impact on the recording process. (Check out this NPR story…yeah, that’s right, I said NPR.) And, in many respects, rather than a radio, you could think of the album as the voices and sounds from the Ouija board coming through. Some are crystal clear and other are mechanized and ghostly. Spooky, eh?

But what of the music? It is fast, fast, fast. Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s voice is a powerhouse of high-pitched, operatic notes. And the music keeps pace. And yet, despite the speed the album isn’t thrash metal or speed metal necessarily. It doesn’t all have that heaviness, it just has a lot of speed. It lets up once in a while, but for the most part in every song something is going fast: drums, bass, voice, something.

One of the perplexing things about the record is how each song seems to have multiple parts that are unrelated to each other…some songs even have longer breaks within the track than between them. For instance, tracks one and two, the nearly 6 minute “Abernikula” and the over 8 minute “Metatron” blend seamlessly into one long track. However, midway through “Metatron” the song stops for a good second or two and then begins with a brand new, wonderfully catchy riff, which runs through the rest of the song. Truly masterful, and yet impossible to know what track you’re on, half the time.

The album is about an hour long, and it’s such a roller coaster of rocking guitars and high speed chases.  And yet it doesn’t wear out it’s welcome, because the catchy bits are so incredibly catchy. I was amused to see that there is a “single” on the record called “Wax Simulacra.”  It’s the shortest song, possibly that MV has ever done at under 3 minutes, which makes it an ideal single.  Except that the last twenty or thirty seconds are taken up with a mind blowing saxophone solo that could be lifted from Ornette Coleman or John Zorn (and this is a single?).  In fact, the horns come into play a lot on the record.  There’s one or two motifs that sound like they could be taken from a Zappa piece (the Zappa song “Sofa” kept popping into my head during this record. And you can’t ask more from a record than to make you enjoy it while it makes you think of other great music too.

[READ: July 20, 2008] Do the Windows Open?

I read an interview with Julie Hecht in The Believer (some of which is available here). And boy did she come across as an unlikable person. She seemed to just despise everyone and everything in contemporary society. Now I can relate to that at times, but she just seemed so reclusive and awful…exactly the kind of person you wouldn’t want to befriend. But as she talked about her writing, and as the interviewer brought up different aspects, it sounded like she was a very meticulous, very exacting type of writer. And I thought: even if she’s a horrible individual, her writing sounds like it would be very good.

And so it was.

This collection of short stories reads like a novel, in that the main character is the same, and each story is like an episode in her life. The only thing that prevents it from being a novel is there is no overall “plot” to her life, just a series of incidents. Hence: short stories. All of these stories were originally published in the New Yorker, which should give some indication of their quality.

The main character is never named, although what we know about her is that she is Jewish, and her last name can be pronounced one of two ways (German or not). She is a vegan, afraid of highways, and basically thinks the world has gone to hell. She is very critical of pretty much every person she encounters, whether he is on the bus, or in line around her.  In fact, given the interview, I would assume that the author and the main character are very similar.

Each story presents itself as a snapshot of her life. The first is a letter to her sister. It is a long drawn out tale about how she is convinced that the man who makes their eyeglasses is a Nazi, or at least a sympathizer, and she should keep that in mind when she goes to buy a pair next. But it’s the rest of the stories that create the bulk of her life. She is a photographer, and she is bent on getting a great shot of “world famous physician” Dr. Loquesto  and his dog. She also imagines the various series of great photos she could be taking…physicians and their dogs, photos from Walden Pond, and the houses the Anne Sexton has lived in, among others. The doctor, ( a reproductive surgeon) who was previously her own physician, and is remarkably insulting and demeaning to her, never “feels” like posing. Even when she goes all the way to his house (in unbearable heat, where his windows are closed) he just watches TV and won’t let her shoot him.

Every story mentions this physician, and his world famous nature. Every story also mentions the fact that she eats only macrobiotic food (upon hearing this the doctor says, “Well, that explains it”) and that she believes everybody else should as well. So, when she goes to a Swedish friend’s house (where all they eat is, basically meat and dairy) she brings her own salad to eat (which no one else touches).

And every story seems to go like this. She is offended/confused by someone or something. In one story she lives in fear of her bus ride on the highway. It goes into great detail about the bus ride and everyone on it.  The bus ride also leads to the title of the collection, as she wonders if the windows on the bus open.  She typically believes that the other person or situation is wrong. She is often on the verge of telling them so, but she never musters the courage. We hear all of her innermost thoughts, in which we realize how outside of society she must be. This tends to make her simultaneously the most naive and the most offensive character I’ve read in a long time. She really is quite unpleasant in her attitudes.

Sarah asked me why I would continue to read stories about a person that I disliked so much. And the answer is that, despite her unlikability, the stories are quite funny. Either because of what she thinks but doesn’t say or what happens at her expense. But it is a very dry humor.  Plus, they are written very very well. In the interview, Hecht says she does nothing but edit, edit, edit, and when she submits them and sees them in print, she wishes she could edit some more. And that’s how the stories are: tight, fully packed and sardonically funny.

I’m intrigued enough to want to read more by her, but I think I need to take a little break first. Although now I see she only has two other works: The Unprofessionals (a novel) and a brand new collection of short stories called Happy Trails to You.  Evidently, both works all feature the same narrator.  I can’t tell if this is limiting or if it will just strengthen her writing and make these other stories even better.  I’ll soon find out.

Table of contents:

• “Perfect Vision”
• “Do the Windows Open?”
• “A Lovely Day”
• “That’s No Fun”
• “Were the Ornaments Lovely?”
• “The Thrill Is Gone”
• “I Couldn’t See a Thing”
• “The World of Ideas”
• “Who Knows Why”