I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE DEAD MILKMEN-Metaphysical Graffiti (1990).

You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar if I were to say to you I didn’t set your house on fire.

You don’t have to be a philosopher to appreciate the joke of this album title (actually that may hurt the joke a little). But the “runes” that accompany the disc are quite amusing.

I haven’t listened to this disc in ages, and it turns out that I remembered about half of these songs really well.  And that’s because half of the songs are really good.  And the other half are, well, okay.

It opens with a children’s chorus which morphs into one of their heaviest rocking (although fairly uninspired) songs, “Beige Sunshine.”  The disc comes into focus with track two: “Do the Brown Nose” a funny song that outlines exactly how to do the titular dance (although at nearly 5 minutes, it’s a bit long).

The single (!) “Methodist Coloring Book”: features Joe Jack Talcum singing (clearly his success with “Punk Rock Girl” had an impact on that decision).  But on this track, he sings with a dark and distorted voice (which pales to Rodney’s dark voice) and is less interesting than his whiny normal singing voice. It’s a good song (and amusing) although as a single it’s less than successful.

I’ve always enjoyed the premise of “I Tripped Over the Ottoman” although I’m not sure it’s a very good song.  While “If You Love Somebody Set them on Fire” is funny and catchy (and astonishingly irritating with the screechier higher register notes in the chorus).

“In Praise of Sha Na Na” makes the valid point that they played at Woodstock and aren’t dead.

Joe Jack’s other songs are the very slow ballad “Dollar Signs in Her Eyes” and the rollicking (and more distorted singing) of “I Hate You, I Love You.”  But the ending tracks “Now Everybody’s Me” and “Little Man in My Head” (which is musically quite a good reggae track) just don’t have a lot of oomph.

However, the final track, “Anderson Walkmen, Buttholes and Howl!” (which parodies a short-lived but much talked about prog rock band) is delightfully twisted.

The problem with the disc overall is the four or five “improv pieces”  They all feature the same bassline, and by the end of the disc you start to cringe when you hear it (especially since the last one is 6 minutes long).  Each one is a mildly funny rant (along the lines of “Stuart” from Beelzebubba, but less focused and less interesting).  Some of them are certainly funny (Earl’s maggots and the “chills me to this day” refrain is pretty good), but they feel like comedy skits that you only want to hear once.

Erlenmeyer Flask!

[READ: April 3, 2010] By Night in Chile

In continuing with my Bolaño obsession, I moved onto yet another of his short books (144 pages).  Interestingly, By Night in Chile is written in a complete different style than the other two titles I’ve recently read (Bolaño is nothing if not diverse).

This is a stream of consciousness reminiscence told by Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix.  The entire book is one paragraph (actually that’s not true, the final line of the book is its own paragraph).

As the book opens, Father Urrutia is dying.  But worse than that, he has been disparaged by a wizened youth.  And his entire memory/rant is a response to the accusations of this (unseen by us) wizened youth.

And Father Urrutia uses this opportunity to describe the highlights of his life.  When he was very young he decided to join the priesthood against his family’s objections. There’s a running joke about people calling him “father,” I especially enjoyed the scene where his mother calls him father.

He had initially wanted to be a poet, but through the mentorship of a critic named Farewell, he moves his focus towards criticism rather than poetry.  Under Farewell’s tutelage, Urrutia meets all manner of famous literary people, not the least of which is Pablo Neruda (who at one point calls Farewell a dickhead).

After some time with Farewell, Urrutia is invited by Opus Dei to tour Europe to study the disintegration of churches.  This entire section morphs into a look at how many of these European priests are using falcons to get rid of the pigeons. The pigeons shit all over the churches, so they must be gotten rid of; however, what does it say about the priests that they are slaughtering a dove–the symbol of the church?

This section was particularly weird for me as the two shadowy figures from Opus Dei are named Mr Reaf and Mr Etah.  The names are so transparently obvious, that I can’t decide if that was a weird choice by the translator or if they are that obvious and therefore funny in the original (or some mix of the two).  Speaking of the translator, once again Chris Andrews does an amazing job.

Soon thereafter, Allende takes over the government of Chile and Father Urrutia spends the entire administration holed up reading the ancient Greeks.  As the end of that administration nears, Father Urrutia is given the extra secret duty of teaching Pinochet and his men a crash course in Marxism (so they can learn about their enemy).

During the Pinochet regime, María Cancales has all night parties at her house and all of  Chile’s literary folks come, drink, talk and generally avoid the curfew (they all head home at 6AM).  Father Urrutia attends these parties as well.  Eventually it is revealed that there is a torture chamber in the basement of her beautiful house: her husband had been torturing on behalf of Pinochet.

It took me a while to realize that the wizened youth is a metaphor for his own youth, objection to his selling out.  I think I may read it again with this knowledge, to see how it changes things.  But even without this knowledge, the story was rich and powerful.  Bolaño’s brevity (even if the one paragraph is 130 pages long) is really effective.  He addresses so many aspects of history, religion and literature within just these few pages.

I admit (and I’m going to actually have to do some research into this because it’s becoming embarrassing) that my knowledge of Chile is not very good.  I’m sure I missed a ton of things in this story (although I did look up the dates of the Allende/Pinochet crossover to get more of a sense of this transition.  Clearly the more versed you are in South American politics, the more you will get out of this book.  But even my limited knowledge did not hold back the wondrousness  of this story.

I do admit that there were times when I got lost in the proceedings (a 130-page stream of consciousness dreamscape can do that to you), and the fact that there are no natural resting/pausing/stopping areas makes the book  a little more challenging, but I still enjoyed it very much.

I am growing more and more impressed with Bolaño’s skills, and yes, I’m reading more right now.

For ease of searching I include: Bolano.