I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: PAVEMENT-Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1993).

Now this album, Pavement’s second (after the Watery, Domestic EP, which I’ve never heard) is my idea of perfect Pavement.  Some might complain that this album is too commercial (although it hardly is) but to me is shows a consolidation of the talents into actual songs.

It opens with “Silence Kit” which sounds like a twisted take on a Buddy Holly song–disconcerting and familiar at the same time.  The second track “Elevate Me Later” ups the ante a bit with a noisy raucous chorus.

“Stop Breathin'” is a dark song, a sort of minor ballad that sounds even more disconsolate with the slightly out of tune guitar work.   But the lengthy instrumental at the end is (although simple) quite pretty.

And then there is the sublime nonsense of “Cut Your Hair.”  This was the first Pavement song I’d ever heard all those years ago.  And from the silly “oo oos” at the beginning to the crazy screaming guitar solo and crunchy “NO BIG HAIR” line I fell in love immediately. It was a wonderful left field hit (not unlike “She Don’t Use Jelly”) that brought a great band some attention.

It’s followed by “Newark Wilder,” a slow track that fits wonderfully after “Hair.”  One might even call it a ballad.  But it is definitely not standard fare, when the bass (or baritone guitar) plays a riff instead of a bridge.

The album picks up the rocking vibe again with, “Unfair” which I noticed is like a rough precursor to Weezer’s “Beverly Hills.”  It’s a fairly conventional song but it’s made unconventional by Malkmus’ delivery and guitar style (and would probably be a hit if it was released today).

I recently mentioned “Gold Soundz”.  (And it’s amazing how much the live version sounds just like the studio–as if everything was intentional).  It’s followed by the goofy Dave Brubeck parody/tribute “5-4=Unity.”  And of course, “Range Life” is just an awesome slacker anthem.  It’s got everything.

The last three songs offer a lot of diversity.  “Heaven is a Truck” is a piano based, drunken-sounding ballad.  “Hit the Plane Down” is a rambling wonderful shambles that devolves into a complete chaos, and “Fillmore Jive” is a 6 minute “epic.”  It opens slowly, and then builds into a fairly conventional sounding (drunken, sloppy, end of the concert) rock song.

I feel that Pavement peaked with this disc.  It’s really fantastic.

[READ: September 23, 2010] “Lost in the Mail”

As I am wont to do, I have gotten a little obsessed with an author. Recently it was Wells Tower (there’s still a few Harper’s pieces by him I haven’t read yet). And right now its Jonathan Franzen (even though I haven’t read any of his novels yet).  After reading the previous New Yorker piece, I wanted to see what else he had written for them.  Seeing his entire list at the New Yorker site is daunting and it makes it seem like he was constantly writing quite long pieces for them.  And yet, parsing it out, it comes out to about one article a year.  And yet some of these article, whoo boy, are 12 or 13 pages…quite lengthy for the New Yorker.

And so, I’m going to read these pieces over the next few weeks–I thought about reading each year’s piece during a different week, but that seems too regimented.  And since the majority of these pieces are non fiction (there are about 5 short stories in the mix) I’m going to be reading them with an eye towards these questions: Can a good writer make a story that I don’t care interesting?  Would I enjoy this same piece if it were written by someone else?  As a reporter (at large) does Franzen bring some kind of personality to the way the piece is constructed that someone else may not have?

This questions are unanswerable of course, because no one else wrote the piece in a different way.  But, when scanning the titles, some of the subjects interest me but others do not.  And those will be the real test.

This piece, about the Chicago Post Office is something that I didn’t care about specifically.  However, I have a certain love of the Postal System, and so I found this story heartbreaking and something of an illusion-shatterer.

The gist of the story is that the Chicago postal workers (circa 1994) sucked big time.  investigators found bags and bags and bags of undelivered mail (one worker had over 3,000 undelivered letters in his apartment, another worker was caught trying to burn an enormous pile of mail and there were countless complaints from people who hadn’t received any mail for weeks).  Investigators uncovered systemic cover ups and blind eyes turned towards the problems.

One of the problems that they faced (aside from terrible personnel) was an overabundance of mail.  And this was fascinating to read  sixteen years later when the post office has the absolute opposite problem.  (The burgeoning rise of Email is addressed at the end of the article).

When I was working freelance, I took the civil service test with the intention of becoming a summer postal carrier.  I have always loved many things about the USPS: the little trucks are awesome, and I’ve always wanted to buy one at auction and make it my own.  The shoes that the postal workers get are outstanding (my friend Tony scored some once and they are phenomenal), and I thought it would be great exercise to walk around delivering mail.

The civil service test was harder than I expected it to be.  I didn’t study for it and I passed easily but it wasn’t a walk in the park by any means.  And that led me to wonder how so many people who were clearly not very smart were able to pass the test.  This article furthers that question for me because in Chicago at any rate, people were drinking and getting high on their routes (true that doesn’t mean they’re not smart, but it shows a basic lack of sense that might hurt your chances of passing the test).  And of course, we’ve all been to the Post Office and wondered how anyone could be as dim-witted as that person there.  (Actually, that’s not entirely true for me, usually it’s laziness, not incompetence that pisses me off at the P.O.).

The article also talks about the very negative attitude that postal workers in Chicago had and how those who did their work on time were rewarded with the work that the lazy bastards didn’t finish.  Some workers would just sit in their trucks all day and then put in for overtime.

It was very dispiriting, especially since in my experience I think the post office is amazing: put a letter in a metal box and it arrives somewhere else in the world for less than 50 cents.  That’s pretty amazing.  (and Franzen does talk in glowing terms of the USPS in general).  And my new local Post Office is great.  I like everyone who works there (even if our carrier if off by one house and gives everyone their neighbor’s mail about 4 times a year).  But it turns out that cities in a particular are hindered by terrible attitudes and terrible performance.

I was really engrossed by this article.  And that’s pretty amazing given tha it is about a problem that had no impact on me in a city I’ve never been to and was sixteen years old.  The only bad part is that I have no idea if anything was ever done about it for those poor Chicagoans.  And I wonder if they ever achieved their goal of being “not the worst” Post Office in the country.

I attribute quite a lot of my enjoyment of the article to Franzen’s writing.  He chose interesting people to follow and wrote about them with a great sense of purpose.  This is quite an auspicious first New Yorker article for Mr Franzen.  I’m only bummed that evidently in 1994 the New Yorker did not provide contributor biographies, as I would have liked to have seen what it said about him back then.