I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ATTACK ATTACK!-“Stick Stickly” (2010).

I discovered this video (again, considerably later than the controversy for it) because my friend Rich said he didn’t know there was a genre called “crabcore.”  A search for crabcore suggests that it is a goof “genre” named specifically for this band and the goofy way they dance around.

This song starts with very heavy riffing and some growls and screaming and then jumps quickly into an auto-tuned very catchy chorus (they sound like a more polished and poppy version of Alexisonfire).

Then comes the verses which are screamed very loudly and heavily followed by a bridge (?) that is even more cookie monster-vocals like (with a strange cartoon effect thrown at the end of each line of the chorus).  It’s almost like commercial death metal, and I kind of liked it.  They’re pushing boundaries

Then there’s more chugga chugga heavy riffing and the song is reaching the end and then WHAT? the songs shifts gears into a keyboard fueled discoey dance song.  First it’s hi energy and then it slows into a mellow auto-tuned bit that proceeds to the end.

What the hell?  I’m all for a band pushing the boundaries of genres, but holy cow.  And just to add one more gimmick, they’re a Christian band as well (although you’d never know from the lyrics, whatever the hell he’s singing about).  This is no “Jesus is My Friend,” let me tell you.

So yea, I don’t really know what to make of it. The video makes me laugh with their all black outfits and synchronized everything–and that may be why they have replaced it with a new video which is much more boring.  I assume they’re just anther trendy band that will disappear soon enough (there’s a lot of snarky fun at their expense at this definition of “crabcore“).

I don’t have a clue what the title is supposed to mean, nor half of their other titles on the album: “Fumbles O’Brian” “Renob, Nevada.”  I listened to some samples of the other songs and they seem far more dancey/discoey than death metal, so I’m not really sure what’s up with the rest of the record.

But whatever.  In the meantime, enjoy the silly video

[READ: July–September 10, 2010] K Blows Top

I heard about this book through a great interview on NPR in June of 2009.  It sounded like a really funny book and I was seriously considering reading it.  Of course, then I forgot about it.

About 8 months later, the library received a huge donation of books, and this was right on top, just begging me to read it.  So, I saved it for myself and decided it was about time to crack it open.  Several months after that I finally opened it and was totally hooked.

I didn’t know much about Khrushchev before reading this.  I knew vaguely about “the shoe” incident, but that was it.  In fact, the whole beginning of the cold war era was a bit of a mystery to me.  Since I lived through Reagan, I never felt compelled to find out what had caused the 80s.

But I’m super glad that I read this.  The book follows Khrushchev’s visits to the United States when he was premiere of  the Soviet Union. Carlson combed through tons of newspaper reports about his visit here (ostensibly to visit with Eisenhower, but more just to enjoy himself in the American heartland), and pulls together a fascinating story from a number of sources.

But more than just an interesting look at history, this book is very funny.It turns out that Khrushchev (or K as the Daily News called him) loved the spotlight that was on him all day, every day.  He hammed it up for the camera as often as he could.  And even though the country was deep in anti-Communist propaganda, the citizenry turned out in droves to see this fascinating specimen: a genuine, actual commie who had control over The Button.

And what they saw was a commie who turned out to be funny and charming and witty until he got angry at which time he would, yes, blow his top.

There are many examples of him blowing his top (the headline where the book comes from was: “Denied Tour of Disneyland, K Blows Top.”  One of the places that Khrushchev and his wife wanted to visit was Disneyland.  But as the zero hour drew near, the mayor and the police felt it was not safe for him to go to such a public place, and Khrushchev freaked out.

Khrushchev was always bragging about the number of missiles that Russia was producing (“like sausages”) and how he could easily wipe out the United States if need be.  So every time that he freaked out about something (like people asking him questions he didn’t like) danger was certainly looming.

And yet, Carlson was able to interview Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, for the book.  Sergei admits that most of what K was doing was posturing.   K enjoyed the attention and the more he acted up, the more attention was given to him.  He imagined that he was bugged (he was) so he made a huge deal out of everything that went wrong, mostly just to mess with the CIA.  And that’s pretty funny.

Because it turns out that for the most part Khrushchev was a decent guy.  And for all of his claiming that Russia was better, he enjoyed middle America.  He enjoyed San Francisco.  He was nice to children and farmers and he told many, many funny jokes.  (He didn’t enjoy the Hollywood movie he watched the filming of–although he did enjoy was Marilyn Monroe).  He was quite the character and often quite the charmer.  And the experience of housing a real live Communist leader for two weeks was an educational for all Americans.

There are simply so many great anecdotes of bad behavior and silly behavior and comical shenanigans in this book.  I’m sure at the time, this was a tense situation, but retrospectively, it sounds like a blast.  Carlson divides the book into a ton of short chapters, one for each anecdote and it makes the story simply fly by.

The final third of the book covers Khrushchev’s final visit to New York.  This one came about through much less pleasant circumstances.  All along, Ike had been sending spy planes over Russia to see if they were really building missiles.  Khrushchev knew this but wouldn’t mention it because he had nothing that could counter them.  So each side pretended that it wasn’t happening.

But then one of these U-2 planes was brought down in Russian territory.  The pilot survived and was captured.  Khrushchev said they had shot down a plane, but said nothing about the pilot.  So when Ike went on record saying that the U-2 was just a weather plane collecting data–busted!

And here’s the thing.  I wasn’t alive during this crisis.  I’m not even sure how it was covered here, but it seems to me that we were totally wrong.   Kruschev blew a gasket about all of this and it seems utterly justified: both sides had secrets to hold, but it seemed like there was meant to be progress towards reconciliation (whether truthful or not, Kruschev talked a great deal about disarmament).   And yet despite these promises, and even promises straight from Ike that he would halt the spying, he still sent this plane into Soviet space.

By sending out this U-2 plane, the US reneged on their promises.  Kruschev freaks out, demands and apology and never gets one.  From that moment on, he became far more belligerent to the US, canceling summit plans, calling Ike every name in the book and retracting his invitation for the Eisenhower family to visit his dacha.  Sure he overreacted, and cooler heads may have acted differently.  I’m not saying that Kruschev was right for what he did, but it sounds like he was really pushed to the limit (at a time when tensions were high all around).

So on his final visit to the States (as the self-appointed Russian delegate to the UN), we finally get to see the shoe banging theatrics for which he is so well known.

Of course, even the shoe banging was an overreaction and a misguided way to act.   Overreacting is never a good thing, and it turns out that his reactions eventually cost him his position as premiere (and seems to have almost erased him from history).

This book was a fascinating look at an era that remains shrouded in mystery for me, and I’m thrilled that someone left this book for me to find, almost as if it had been planted there.

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to relive this bizarre time in history or just see what the fuss was about (and see pictures of K and his shoe).