I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PAVEMENT-Slanted and Enchanted (1992).

I decided to go back and give a good listen to Pavement since I’ve always liked them but never loved them And, yes, they were in Central Park the other night).  So I started at the beginning.

I listened to the disc about a half-dozen time at work and I really started enjoying it a lot more by the end. It’s a difficult album, one that doesn’t actively embrace its listeners.  It’ a noisy, sloppy album (and that’s one reason why I like it), but there are hints of melody within.

Because I’m not in the moment, I can’t decide just how revolutionary this album was.  Nearly twenty years later it sounds like any number of noisy distortion fueled, lo-fi recordings of the period.  You can hear all kinds of influences on the band, Sonic Youth, The Fall, even The Replacements.  So, it’s not like they created something out of the blue.

Perhaps they were the first band to consolidate these influences into this particular stew.  No songs really stand out for me, as this seems more of an album of sounds that a collection of songs.  I rather enjoyed some of the oddball instrumentals and the use of keyboards, (which seem too polished for their sound: out of tune guitars and scratchy vocals).

It’s a fun record, and it certainly sets a tone and an agenda for the band.  I’m just not blown away by it.

[READ: September, 22, 2010] “Meet Me in St. Louis”

As I mentioned in the Franzen article the other day, I missed the whole brouhaha with Oprah and Franzen.  This article, which touches on that somewhat, gives Franzen’s perspective on what happened.  But primarily it shows (his take on) the videorecording that happened for his big Oprah TV show.

Mostly it involves Franzen driving around St. Louis.  Franzen grew up in St. Louis but spent most of his adult life in New York City–which is where he considers his home.  However on the book tour for The Corrections, he stopped in St. Louis.

The producers of Oprah wanted to film his great homecoming, even though he never felt it was one.  About two years before this event he and his brothers sold their family house after his widowed mother died.  That was the last time he had been to the house, and he had planned to never return.

The Oprah folks desperately wanted him to go in the house (they even got permission from the current occupants) but he refused.  He didn’t even want to see the house from the outside (even though he had dinner with old friends in the next door neighbor’s house).  It seems like a pretty emotional thing for him, and while he may have acted like a diva, how many of us would act the same way about something that was so important to us.  (I know people who feel the same way about the house they grew up in).

He describes, briefly, what happened that caused all of the controversy with Oprah.  While on tour, he tended to agree with whatever people said about him (evenly split between that Oprah deal was awesome or terrible).  And he agreed out loud that he didn’t really like the idea of the Oprah sticker on his book.  And when that got out, it met with disapproval from the Winfrey folks (which is probably a reasonable reaction).  Of course, from there, things got out of hand.

This article was an interesting look at someone who eschewed publicity (and reminds me in some ways of the contents of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.  A writer, divesting himself of all of his emotions in his work, is then forced to express emotions that he is trying to keep to himself.  In some ways, the idea that if you want to be a famous writer you have to play by their rules, is reasonable.  And yet at the same time, it is completely unreasonable to have to lay yourself bare just to get more people to read your books.

I’m not even sure if he was ever actually on Oprah or if they used any of his footage or even if The Corrections was stripped of her seal of approval.  And I kind of don’t want to know (I do know that she just picked Freedom, so she can’t hate his work).

But he’s not getting involved with that argument here.  Rather he is showing what he was willing to do for the folks at Oprah and what he was determined to keep to himself.  It’s a strong article, full of humor.  And it is also emotional and human enough for me to think that he is not the things he was accused of:

I’ll be called a “motherfucker” by an anonymous source in New York, a “pompous prick” in Newsweek, an “ego-blinded snob” in the Boston Globe, and a “spoiled, whiny little brat” in the Chicago Tribune. I’ll consider the possibility, and to some extent believe, that I am all of these things. I’ll repent and explain and qualify, to little avail.

It’s also getting me more excited to read The Corrections.

You can read it here.