I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: KING’S X-Please Come Home Mr Bulbous (2000).

I’ve always loved the silly side of King’s X, especially when it comes to titles.  And here we have yet another bizarro album title.  And King’s X’s 8th disc actually lives up to the title.  Well, sort of.  But it is one of the band’s most unusual records musically.  They experiment with many different sounds and textures.  There’s a lot of really spare sections, where Doug’s bass is not the heavy, smooth sound we’ve become used to, but rather, single notes (or sometimes two notes at once) played staccato.  There’s also a lot of different styles within one song–King’s X have always experimented with sounds, but it was usually one style per song.  This one mixes things up tremendously.

“Fishbowl Man” has the rather unique distinction of being a chunky heavy guitar riff with vocals by Doug, a pretty, softish chorus sung by Ty and, even weirder, a spoken word center.  “Julia” follows with several different parts: a rather mellow opening, with a harmony-filled chorus, a suddenly heavy heavy post-chorus, and a little psychedelia thrown in for good measure.  “She’s Gone Away”‘s catchy chorus sounds an awful lot like one of King’s X catchy Ty ballads, but musically it’s quite different. There’s some two-notes-at-once bass playing, and–despite the soaring harmonies of the chorus–the guitar work is much heavier and darker for a Ty-sung song.  The solo also has an unusual part in which the bass and drums are very sparse while Ty noodles away.

“Marsh Mellow Field” sounds like a typical King’s X song, but there’s new stuff added: Doug singing a call and response chorus to himself, Ty and Doug splitting vocals in the verse, but it all comes back to a catchy chorus.  “When You’re Scared” has a really weird (for King’s X) recording sound that sounds like they’re in a huge, empty field.  But it works really well with the gentle harmonious chorus.

Consistently the highlight for most listeners is “Charlie Sheen.”  It is upbeat and pretty and what the hell it has to do with Charlie Sheen no one knows.  There’s great vocal interplay on this, and it ranks pretty high on the Ty ballad list.  And, somewhat unusually for this disc, there’s nothing unusual about it.

“Smudge” contains some of the darkest lyrics I can think of for King’s X.  Doug even sings of breaking a rosary.  Evidently the backlash from the Christian community was pretty strong.  “Bitter Sweet” has a loping bass that plays nicely over this tender, short ballad.  And the disc ends with 11 minutes of the sweet “Move Me (Parts 1 and 2)”.  Despite the oddities at the beginning of the album, the bulk of the disc is pretty conventional King’s X.  And they’ve still got it.

One other unusual thing: between some tracks on the CD there are tongue twisters in Dutch and Japanese. (I lifted this from Wikipedia, by the way)

* At the end of track 1: Acht-en-Tachtig-Prachtige-Grachten
This is Dutch for “88 (achtentachtig) beautiful (prachtige) canals (grachten).”
* At the end of track 3: Tonari no kyaku wa yoku kaki kuu kyaku da
This is a Japanese tongue twister (hayakuchi kotoba) meaning “The adjacent (tonari) customer (kyaku) eats (kuu) persimmons (kaki) often (yoku).”
* At the end of track 4: Zes-en-Zestig-Sinaas-Appel-Schillen
This is again Dutch and means “66 (zesenzestig) orange (sinaasappel) peels (schillen).”
* At the end of track 5: Hottentotten-Tenten-Tentoonstellingen
Dutch tongue twister meaning “(an) exhibition of tents made by the Hottentots.”
* At the end of track 6: Chikushō, nante hidee sandoicchi da
Japanese meaning “Damn (chikushō)! How awful (hidee) this sandwich (sandoicchi) is!”
* At the end of track 10: Acht-en-Tachtig-Prachtige-Grachten
See first tongue twister.

[READ: October 1, 2008] Vacation

I received this book in the mail as part of my McSweeney’s Book Club.  I tend to put new books at the bottom of my pile, but I decided to break it up and read this one right away.  It sounded really interesting, I liked Unferth’s flash fiction, and it was fairly short itself (216 pages).  I would say that aside from Harry Potter, this may be my fastest turnaround on a book coming out and me reading it.

But enough about me.  This book is about Myers and his wife, Gray and his daughter, Claire and the Untrainer, and Spoke and Sexy Woman in Bikini.

The set up of the book caught my attention right away.  It begins with Claire’s story.  She sees a man on her train.  He looks familiar, but his head is oddly misshapen.  She finds it very unsettling.  The man walks off the train and out of her life.  And then we follow the man.  It reminded me of Slacker, where people’s lives intersect briefly and we follow the next person.

COINCIDENCE: I was reading a piece in the Walrus by a woman who moves from Toronto to Austin for six months and how it felt straight out of Slacker (where the movie was filmed).  I can’t say I’ve heard anything about that film in years.

We don’t actually hear from Claire again for quite some time, and I thought that if we hadn’t it would have been a fantastic framing device for a story.  But she does come back, and her story is quite interesting.

But back to the misshapen head man.  (The story behind his misshapen head is explained and is quite profound). This is Myers.  By and large he is the protagonist of the story (although the points of view change often enough that that he doesn’t always seem like it).  Myers was recently married to a woman who makes him incredibly happy.  And yet, soon after they are married she starts staying late at work (even though her job is not the kind of job that requires people to stay at work late).  He decides to find out what’s going on, so he leaves work early and follows her.  This is address in one of the many interesting bits of “dialogue” (which is more of the book asking questions and answering them for us:

He used to follow her.
Around the house?
Outside on the street.
Where?
Wherever.
Like a stalker?
Not like a stalker. She’s his wife.
People stalk wives. No wonder she thre him out.
She didn’t throw him out, for God’s sake.  Did you see him back there?  He left, he woke up and  said he was leaving.  Besides, she didn’t know.  She never knew about the following.
She might have known.
No.

During this “following,” he learns that she is following someone else.  He is a man, and Myers realizes that he knows the man.  Myers is so infuriated by all of this, in part because he can’t figure out why she is doing it, and in part because he can’t confront her with the news without her realizing that he was spying on her.  Their marriage quickly falls apart.

The man is Gray, and old college acquaintance of Myers’.  Gray felt the need to get away from his own wife and his life in Syracuse, so he up and left for New York City.   Eventually, Myers finds out that Gray has returned to Syracuse, and that his wife is no longer following him.  Much later in the book, we learn, from his wife’s point of view, why she was following him, although Myers himself never learns why.  Myers can’t decide if their life should return to normal.  It doesn’t.  His wife is a basket case until she eventually decides to move out.  Rather than have her do that, Myers gets on a train and heads to Syracuse to confront Gray. (Violent images abound in his head, and we are party to all the details).

When he gets to Syracuse, he finds that Gray is no longer there.  He is on vacation in Nicaragua. (Meyers and Gray are in email contact).  Myers decides to follow him there (despite the fact that he has no vacation time from his work).  He hops on a plane and lands in Nicaragua.  Gray’s emails get weirder and weirder, and ultimately he tells Myers that he is on Corn Island.

Myers’ path through Central America is long and arduous.  He loses his luggage, gets his credit cards stolen, breaks his arm and generally makes a mess of himself.   And…

This is where her runs into Spoke.  Spoke is a former Nicaraguan who has returned to his homeland after twenty years.  He comes into Myers’ periphery, but Myers’ trials are so great that he doesn’t seem to really register Spoke’s existence.  (But Spoke has many sections in which he tells his version of things).

The other characters that populate the story also sort of intersect with each other, but not really.  Claire, it turns out is seeking her father.  (Her back story is just as interesting).  There’s also the story of the Untrainer, who used to train dolphins but then decides to set them free and “untrain” them.

As you may be able to tell, the story is fairly convoluted, with farcical elements overlapping incredibly sad ones.  Even the writing style is convoluted.  But just because the paragraphs don’t make sense chronologically or even logically, once you get into the flow of the story, it all makes sense.  And, even though the story is convoluted, it’s not difficult, once you catch up.  Different narrators talk to each other, emails are sent through thin air, character POV changes with each paragraph at times, and there are even opening lines to paragraphs that break the narrating style.  One hates to use the word Joycean to describe the book, but at times it’s quite apt.

The story seems to be about never giving up even when things seem hopeless, but really I think the book is more about giving up hope.  It’s a very sad story overall without actually being very sad in the page by page details.  In fact, there is much in the book that is funny, both absurdly funny and genuinely funny.

And the writing is top notch.  Unferth has done a lot of work with flash fiction.  As such, she knows how to pack a lot of information into a tiny space.  She also knows just the right word to move the story along comically and plot-wise.

There’s a very funny trailer for the book here (scroll all the way to the bottom).

I read this just before our recent vacation.  The end of the book, where Myers travels on divergent and increasingly smaller transportation resonated very nicely with me as on our trip we took:

Our Car to the Airport and flew on a
Large Jet to Puerto Rico where we then flew on an
8 person Cessna to St Thomas and then an
Airport Van to the dock where we rode a
Boat to St John, and then were transferred to our hotel via
Golf Cart.

My three-year-old was thrilled by all of this, of course.  And I was thrilled by Vacation.