I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: TINDERSTICKS-Tindersticks [the red one] (1993).

Tindersticks are a fascinating band.  The first distinctive thing about them is Stuart Staples’ voice: a deep rich bass that he uses almost like a whisper.  The second thing you notice is the music.  It’s an orchestral/chamber pop collection of dark rockers with fantastic moodiness to it.  And then you notice the lyrics: dark songs of lost (and decayed) love.

Yet despite the description of chamber pop, the nad is really much darker than chamber pop suggests.  The band has a very noir sound: organs that penetrate through walls of sound, tinkling pianos suring hushed moments.  The horns and strings add dark atmospherics (strings zing like a Hitchcock movie).  And the minor key chords are rich and loud.

You also get a song like “Whisky and Water” which genuinely rocks hard (loud guitars are featured).  Or a simple acoustic guitar driven song like “Blood.”  Throughout the disk you get these fantastic melodies that play off of Staples’ voice and the twisted lyrics.  “City Sickness” and “Patchwork” are just two of the tracks that are very catchy.

And then there’s the fantastic “Jism” with its awesome noir organ.  Or “Raindrops” with its accents of vibes and the beautiful piano trilling at the end (and the detailed and emotional lyrics: What we got here is a lazy love / It mooches around the house / Can’t wait to go out / What it needs, it just grabs / It never asks / We sit and watch the divide widen / We sit and listen to our hearts crumble”).  “Her” follows up with a wonderfully flamenco-infused spaghetti western number.

And lets not forget “Drunk Tank” a propulsive song that is as sinister as it is catchy.  Oh heck, I could just keep raving.  But there’s 22 songs!   Four songs are about a minute each, and the disc is about 75 minutes (not bad for a debut!).  And the disc never loses momentum or its sense of purpose.

What really distinguishes this disk is the mood of the music.  Like the best soundtracks, you can feel the emotions and imagery with the music alone, but when you add Staples’ evocative lyrics and powerful voice, it’s a deadly potent combination.

The disc was reissued a few years ago with a bonus disc of demo tracks.  The demos are surprisingly rich (they’re not at-home recordings or done without accompaniment) so they don’t differ that dramatically from the originals.  But they have a slightly less polished feel, which doesn’t hurt the band at all. There’s also a demo of the fantastic “For Those…” which doesn’t appear on the original disc.

I have to thank my friend Lar for getting me into this band. (Thanks Lar).

[READ: October 19, 2009] McSweeney’s #32

The concept for this issue is this: McSweeney’s asked several authors to “travel somewhere in the world–Budapest, Cape Town, Houston, any sleepy or sleepless outpost they could find–and send back a story set in that spot fifteen years from now, in the year 2024.”

And so, all of the stories are vaguely sci-fi-ish in that they are future related, but they are all grounded very heavily in reality, in particular, the reality of individuals trying to live in this future world.

ANTHONY DOERR-“Memory Wall”
This is the longest story in the collection.  And I thought to myself, I don’t think I care all that much about an old white woman in South Africa.  But I have to say, I was utterly engaged by this story.  It was fantastic.  The premise is that in the future, you are able to retrieve and then store your memories on little cards.  You can then re-watch them at any time.  Obviously a black market in other people’s memories quickly develops.

The story features an old woman who is slowly losing her memory.  She uses these memory card treatments to try to retain any sense of her life with her now-deceased husband.  Her husband happened upon a fantastic discovery just before he died.  She doesn’t care about this, she just wants to remember their life.  But when word of his discovery leaks out (the discovery was pretty monumental, and rumors about it spread quickly), an opportunist tries to piece together this discovery by watching her old memories.

What is so cool about this story is that with memories floating in different people’s heads, the story is able to follow different characters around the story.  The old woman , the young opportunist, even the older black man who was her servant (and the man’s son) all have their lives in the spotlight.  And as we get each of their perspectives, the story grows in depth.

The ending scene features generosity from an unexpected source which is unabashedly touching.  This was a truly wonderful story.

WELLS TOWER-“Raw Water”
This story is set in the American desert.  And it offers a water solution that seems like a good idea and a plausible solution.  Pipe water from the  Pacific ocean into a newly created lake in the desert.  This provides a body of water to build towns around; when some of the water evaporates, the clouds will rain the evaporated water onto the dry land.  It’s a great idea.

Except when it doesn’t work.  As it doesn’t here.

Rodney and Cora are traveling across country from Boston to this desert so that Cora can photograph the lake.  The lake is now bright red (because of the plankton and other organisms that thrive in this water body).  The new landscape has a complicated effect on Rodney and Cora, where this vast expanse gets Rodney a little stir crazy.

I enjoyed this story a lot (Wells Tower is becoming a favorite short story writer of mine).  The ending section of the story got a little creepy, and so the story wound up gong in a direction I did not expect, but it was not altogether implausible.  I admit that I missed Cora in the last few pages, which I think is a bit of a flaw, and yet overall the story was very satisfying.

CHRIS BACHELDER-“Eighth Wonder”
This story is set in, I think, Houston (lots of references to Sam Houston, so I assume that’s the locale).  It is set in (what I assume is) the Astrodome.  At any rate, it is set in a dome.  The city has flooded and people are taking refuge there.  People are trying their best to make do with what they have.  But one man, who has been reading the fliers about the dome, decides to make things better.  This is a story of the human spirit and it was quite moving.  Despite the obvious sadness (and parallels to Hurricane Katrina), it was still uplifting.

CHRIS ADRIAN-“The Black Square”
A black square has appeared on Nantucket Island.  If anything enters the square, it never comes back.  And so, people are choosing it as a way to end their current life.  (No one knows for certain what happens when they go into the Square, so they aren’t necessarily committing suicide).  Henry (and his former lover’s dog, Hobart) travel to Nantucket (where he grew up).  Henry is planning to enter the square (there’s a back up plan for Hobart, yes).

But what happens when he meets an interesting, warm and sweet man there?  Can he really get over his former lover?  This was another really strong story.  It begins with you, the reader, not liking Henry, (he has ceased caring about niceties and is awfully rude to a number of people) but as the story progresses, he grows stronger, more complicated and very sympathetic.  A great piece.

J. ERIN SWEENEY-“Oblast”
This story conflates two interesting ideas into one story.  The first is that humanity is being contaminated by a seal virus.  This has naturally led to a wholesale slaughter of seals everywhere (especially of those in captivity).  To protect the seals, organizations have been transporting them out of aquaria and into the open sea where at least they stand a chance (however slim) of survival.

The other story concerns two boys.  Their father has recently become the brutal dictator of a newly formed country, Karabakh.  And the boys have fled to the States.  The boys’ immigration status is in question, but if they are sent back to their homeland, they will surely be killed.  The boys, like the seals, must be sent to a neutral location, where they may or may not survive.  Each boy is different, so the conflict between them only complicates their situation.  And putting them both in a confined space (with seals who may have a virus) has really exacerbated the troubles.

I didn’t know if I’d like this one when it started (there’s a lot of naval/sea talk, which is not my thing), but it proved to be a really great story.

SHEILA HETI-“There is No Time in Waterloo”
This piece is set in Waterloo.  (Although which Waterloo, I don’t know).  As of 2024, Blackberry has created The Mother of all Blackberrys which can essentially predict not your future, but your destiny.  And so everyone consults their Mothers all the time to see what they should do.  There were some interesting things going on here (especially when one of the girls breaks her Mothers and is effectively ostracized) but I couldn’t get emotionally involved in the story.

HEIDI JULAVITS-“Material Proof of the Failure of Everything”
This story is set in Hungary after the collapse of their economy.  Because Hungary had been loaned money from German banks, it transpires that a German banker effectively owns the country.  In a shady deal, he “sold” the country to a rather questionable individual, known as the Visla.  The Visla has decreed that Hungary made the wrong choice in 1989 and so he has insisted that the entire country, buildings and all, be returned to the state they were in, in 1989. This is the Deszecesszionist movement.

The protagonist of the story, Gyula is a spy for Bela (who works for the Visla).  And essentially Gyula’s job consists of listening to people in a particular hotel (whether they are guilty or not) because they have to eavesdrop on someone.  But what happens when Bela is no longer around?  How will Gyula find work?

I loved the tortured and hilarious prose that Juvalits used in this story (especially as it opens).  The turns of phrase were just slightly off, and they made the story very memorable.  It also made you have to slow down a bit to fully read the words.  Very enjoyable (and very twisted as the story reaches it end).

JIM SHEPARD-“The Netherlands Lives with Water”
Yes, this story is about flooding in the Netherlands.  The narrator  is a geologist (or some future variant of a geologist) who knows that the Netherlands is doomed.  His wife, Cato, is a media liaison whose job is to paint a happy face on the eventual doomedness of the Netherlands.  This is definitely the least hopeful story of the bunch.

It begins as rather clinical and somewhat technical, but by the end the emotions come through.  But what makes the story really compelling is the interpersonal dynamics of the main characters.  He is, basically, emotionally stunted when it comes to talking to his wife.  And watching them fight about this, yet stay close because of all of the chaos, keeps the story centered amidst the storm.

SALVADOR PLASCENCIA-“The Enduring Nature of the Bromidic”
This story covers a lot of ground, although it doesn’t appear to be set in the future.  The story focuses on Gonzalo who is studying geology but whose grant keeps getting denied because the government believes he is making too much money.  His wife Cheli is also an academic, and she is writing a paper about the enduring nature of the bromidic, and since her area of focus is television, she sums up her thesis: everyone loves reruns.

There is also a lot of discussion about the reintegration of English into California (which I guess shows that it is set in the future).

But the story really centers around this family’s attempts to thrive against the difficulties of paperwork and the social security administration.  There was even a little bit of fun with bureaucracy as the story ended.  I found the story a little difficult to follow in the beginning (I wasn’t always clear who was who, especially since names are changed on purpose) but it was definitely enjoyable by the end.

But the thing I enjoyed most about this story was saying the authors name: PlahSENceeahhh.

SESSHU FOSTER-“Sky City”
This story had such a great concept: the chaotic winds and storms in future L.A. have pulled people and cars and all manner of things into what they are calling a sky city.  Many people don’t think it exists (but how else to explain cars falling from the sky?)

Two people are going to try and fly to it.  In a homemade zeppelin.  And the set-up of the story is that their entire conversation is being broadcast over pirate radio station.

The only problem I had with the story is that the two characters in the zeppelin really aren’t very interesting.  One (the guy who makes the zeppelins) is an anarchist, the other (the woman who is learning to fly it and who has the radio transmitter) is a communist who sells communist newspapers on the street corner.  Both characters are strident and unflinching in their devotion to opposing society.  But the state of society is such that there doesn’t seem to be much left to overthrow.  Much of the beginning of the story is spent with the two characters arguing back and forth about ideology and his ex-girlfriend.

I just wanted to hear more about Sky City.

There was a lot of cool stuff about the zeppelin (and about how abandoned malls allowed him to build it in secret).  There was also some cool descriptions of flying silently over a sleeping city.  Ultimately, the payoff was rewarding, although, really, I would have liked to have seen more.

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So overall this was another enjoyable issue.  The artificial constraint on the stories led to some interesting concepts that probably wouldn’t have come out otherwise.  But despite the constraint, the authors chose to focus on the lives of the people, rather than just future events.  And so, the stories are intriguing as well as engaging.  And you can’t ask for much more than that.