SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH-Murray Street (2002).
After NYC Ghosts and Flowers, I put off getting this disc. I was getting a little bored by the meandering, somewhat glacial pace of the last two discs, and figured that was the trend they’d be continuing (especially since there are only seven songs on here!).
And yet when my friend Lar told me I absolutely had to pick it up, I consented, as he’s rarely wrong. And he was not wrong here either. Murray Street continues in a vein similar to the last few discs, but it includes what the others were missing: amazing melodies!
It opens with “The Empty Page,” a reasonably upbeat sounding song with some wild choruses. “Disconnection Notice” is one of their slower pieces, also cooly catchy, which doesn’t meander as it gets to where it’s going.
“Karen Revisited” is an eleven minute piece from Lee. It begins, typically, as a beautiful Lee song. However, the last six or so minutes are taken up with a deconstructing noise mess. (There’s cheering at the end of the song leading me to suspect it was recorded live). I don’t so much mind the noisy end part, but it’s so disparate from the first part that I wish they were two separate songs.
“Radical Adult Lick Godhead Style” is an absurd free form piece of lyrical nonsense which rocks tightly. “Plastic Sun” stands out for being sung by Kim, by being very dissonant, and by being only two minutes long.
The album closer, “Sympathy for the Strawberry” is another long, slow, expansive piece, and yet the melody grabs you right from the start and won’t let you go. Fantastic.
This reigning in of styles forecasts good things ahead on their next few discs as well.
[READ: September 13, 2009] “The Dreaming Jaw, The Salivating Ear”
This short story is quite short and quite surreal. And I am amazed at how much time I spent with it.
As it opens, there is a weird an unsettling scene about a man who has killed someone in his blog. I felt that the story was trying to be deliberately surreal by having this person get killed online, and yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. The story remains weird and deliberately confusing until you get about 2/3 of the way through. Then it all becomes clear and warrants a second read through.
This is the first story I have read this is just about blogs and blogging (and now it’s meta because I’m blogging about it too, right?). The only thing that I found weird about the story is that the it’s often unclear whether what we’re reading is part of the blog or a discussion to us about the blog (suffice it to say that the proposed blog is not the kind of blog I would read intentionally, so I’m a little lost by the author’s tone). But aside from that, the story was rewarding and fun (and, as I said, quite short).
The quirks come in as the story reaches its end, and it upends what you’ve been reading. For a slight piece, it packs a lot in.
Read this a few days back, made me wonder if I spend too much time blogging. It should have been incoherent, but surprisingly wasn’t. It was about finding shelter, about responsibility, about [I forget what they’re called, as in “don’t feed the …”], and the creation of a blog as a space, a geometry, in inhabitation. Not a perfect story, or really a complete one, but a neat experiment.
Oh, yeah, don’t feed the trolls.
Did I really use “neat” as an adjective? Sheesh, sorry.
In superficial ways it reminded me of Memento. At first I wanted to really not like it, but it kept sucking me back in (perhaps I’ve been working to hard looking for clues in IJ?). And yes, I did wonder about my excessive blogging lately (good thing I had a slow summer at work!)
Your use of neat makes me think of Mad Men and that they say “swell” all the time, which is really an adjective that is underutilized, frankly.