I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LULLABYE ARKESTRA-Ampgrave [CST044] (2006).

I’m not sure what’s up with the spelling of Arkestra (Sun Ra tribute, perhaps?), but “Lullabye” is certainly a misnomer.  “Ampgrave” on the other hand is a pretty good summary of the music on this record.

The band is basically a drum and bass duo.  And yet, they are so much more.  The bass runs the show, with the bass lines being loud and furious.  There are also several guests who provide horns, organ, violin and my favorite addition: “screaming.”  This complete package makes for a loud, bruising, soulful unholy mess.  And it’s really fun.

The disc won’t appeal to everyone. The opening track “Unite!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” is where the “screaming” really comes to the fore, and will certainly scare off the weak-hearted.  Which is a shame, as track 2 mellows out with some good soulful tunes (albeit utterly distorted, let’s not forget). There’s some other weird and wonderful tracks.  “Y’Make Me Shake” is a great rocking track with excellent horns to provide nice moments of melody.

The disc ends with a great one-two punch of “Bulldozer of Love” and the wonderfully titled “Ass Worship” two noisy, chaotic tracks that find a killer melody under all that distortion.

I hate to use the White Stripes as a frame of reference because it’s kind of lazy, but they are a two-piece playing soulful, distorted rock.  But the White Stripes are practically bubblegum pop when it compares to the racket these guys make.  It’s a lot of fun, if you like your fun noisy.

[READ: March 31, 2009] This Book Will Save Your Life

While it didn’t save my life, I enjoyed this book very very much.

This book follows the life of Richard Novak.  As the book starts, Richard seems like a type A workaholic who is too consumed with his work and routine to really enjoy anything.  When he gets an inexplicable yet frightening pain, he calls 911 and is taken to the hospital.   And this rather mundane opening leads to a hugely complicated back-story and a hugely complicated fore-story (?) in which all aspects of Richard’s life meet in a house in Malibu.

For, you see, Richard was something of an asshole.  Richard’s ex-wife, is another Type A personality who is as absorbed in her work as he is in his.  When he is offered a job in California, requiring him to leave New York, his wife said, go if you want to.  And he did, leaving his wife and his son Ben (seven at the time) with minimal contact and, eventually, little participation in his son’s life.

His son, now 17, is planning a cross-country trip culminating in a summer job in California, where he’ll spend the summer with Richard.  Richard is filled with trepidation about the visit; he knows he has let his son down and his son is cold and distant to him.  In fact, Richard barely knows anything about him.

The planned visit is complicated by a few factors that have since entered Richard’s life.  Before the hospital visit, Richard lived like a well oiled machine: treadmill every morning, West Coast “health food” prepared by a dietitian, and a masseuse twice a week.  After his hospital visit, Richard has a compelling need for a donut.  [Which explains this other cover of the book–I’m not sure which one I like better as the black and yellow cover has lots of little pictures that illustrate moments of the story).  And so, he stops in a random donut shop where the owner, Anhil, sees the state he is in and makes him a delightfully tasty breakfast.  He doesn’t ask for payment, only to be able to drive Richard’s beautiful Mercedes (which Richard agrees to).

This random act of generosity sets of a cavalcade of generous acts that blossom into a new found philosophy. Shortly after his donut encounter, Richard walks into a grocery store that he’s never been to before.  In the store, he sees a woman crying into produce.  Moved by this emotional display, he offers her assistance.  After calling him a freak and wondering what he wants from her, she agrees to sit with him and talk.  Cynthia is a married mother of two.  She feels unloved and underappreciated by her family and she spends much of her day crying until she gets back home to prepare another underappreciated meal. Richard offers her his number and says if she ever needs anything that she should call him.

Which she does.

Soon, a Platonic friendship forms, one in which Richard offers her everything he has.  She accepts, but insists that she is not mooching.  Their friendship blooms enough that Cynthia temporarily moves in with him while she seeks employment and a new apartment for herself.  (It sounds unbelievable to type it yet it is very believable in the story itself).

And then there’s the hole.

A sinkhole is caving in some of the ground in front of Richard’s house.  While the city investigates the occurrence, Richard moves in to a somewhat infamous house in Malibu (the owner removed the sex swing in one of the bedrooms before Richard agreed to rent it).  This gorgeous house that overlooks the ocean, is also next door to a reclusive, possibly crazy, writer who is a generational touchstone, although Richard doesn’t realize who he is.

These four utterly different people’s lives coalesce in fascinating ways as they each begin to look out for each other.  And it is into this mishmash of humanity that Ben (and Richard’s nephew Barth a filmmaker of surprising talent) arrive, full of vinegar and lots of hard questions.

The raw emotions of this book are quite remarkable.  The fear of the unknown, the fear of the known, and the fear of losing everything sit side by side with the love for your fellow man, the love for your family and the love of doing good.  And yet, all of this emotion is tempered by the wonderfully idiosyncratic and often humorous events that happen to Richard.  Two of them are so surreal (yet within the realm of possibility) that I was not sure if they were really happening or if Richard had finally tuned out of reality altogether.  They include lifting a horse out of a sinkhole and a car’s breaklights communicating to him in morse code.

There’s also the fact that his new doctor, a man whose techniques are unusual and beneficial, may not be who he says he is.

During the few weeks of the story, Richard establishes contact with all of the lost members of his family, for better or worse, and he slowly sheds his shell of workaholism.  As his humanity comes forward, we begin to forgive him for his running out on his family, and for his greed-filled unhappy existence.   And during these few weeks, Richard affects change for the better for more than just his new circle of friends.  The ending of the book is just as surreal as the horse and morse code incidents, and yet it’s an apt ending to a book in which nothing really happens except that a man totally changes his life.

I was so absorbed by this story that I couldn’t put it down.  I thought about things that happened to the characters long after I put the book down, and I was really moved by pretty much the whole book.

I had said recently that I hadn’t read anything by A.M. Homes in quite some time, and I feel like she really outdid herself with this book.  I’m going to be going back and reading her books I haven’t yet and probably even re-reading the ones I did.

As I said, the book didn’t save my life, but it really affected me.