I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE VIOLET ARCHERS-Sunshine at Night (2008).

This is the second Violet Archers CD.  It’s a fantastic collection of mellow songs.   “You and I” is a delightful acoustic guitar and vocals song (and Vesely’s voice sounds great: soft and delicate without being whiny).  “Insecure” features the vocals of Ida Nilsen (a great voice which works wonderfully with Vesely’s songs).  It also has a wonderful trumpet solo (!) (which consists of only a few notes repeated but which is totally great).  It sounds a bit too similar to Siberry’s “The Speckless Sky” but it wins out with its own identity by the end.

“Transporter” is an electric track (still mellow though).  Vesely’s delivery is great on this, with unexpected delays making it just off the beat.  Although “Tired” (we can tell by the titles that Vesely is not a “Party On” kind of guy) rocks much harder than you’d expect for the title, it’s still nothing like a hard rock song.  “Sunshine at Night” continues in this louder vein, but again, Vesely’s voice is soft, so even a louder song doesn’t rock hard.  This has some great harmony vocals.

“Suffocates” returns to the upbeat acoustic style while “Truth” is its cool minor chord downbeat companion.  “Themesong” is a cute, more upbeat track that finally mentions a violet archer.  “Don’t Talk” is the only song that builds from a standstill (as opposed to just starting) and the drums and power chords make it feel like it’s a bid for commercial viability.  And the disc ends with “Listening,” a quiet lullaby of a song that showcases’s Vesely’s falsetto.

The Violet Archers still tour and there are some downloadable shows available on the Rheostatics live website.  And, of course, Tim was super nice, so let’s hope for a left field smash hit on their next disc.

[READ: September 29, 2010] “Anti-Climax”

This piece is from The Critic at Large section of the New Yorker and it seems to be a kind of Books redux section.

I enjoyed this piece more than I had a right to enjoy a thirteen year old article about sex books.  Strangely enough it begins with a comment about televisions in airports (which I agree with JF that they are the devil and are unavoidable and make it really hard to read).  And I cannot even imagine that 89% of air travelers believe that the TVs make “time spent in an airport more worthwhile” (although you know that is one of the more nebulous survey questions)

But this topic segues into the matter at hand: sex books.  He notes how he is also at odds with the norm when Men’s Health says that lingerie is the US male’s favorite erotic aid.  And I can’t believe how in tune I am with JF Franzen’s comment:

What I feel when I hear that the mainstream actually buys this stuff is the same garden-variety alienation I feel on learning that Hootie & the Blowfish sold 13 million copies of their first record, or that the American male’s dream date is Cindy Crawford.

Adjust pop culture references accordingly and I still feel this way in 2010.

So, yes, Franzen is a strangely, if not prudish, then at least non-prurient reader to review a slew of sex books.  And yet he does, with more than a little humor.  Some of the books he mentions are The Rules, Sex: A Man’s Guide, Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving (by the wonderfully amusing Betty Dodson).

Again, Franzen offers a quote that I found perfect:

The last thing I want is to be reminded of the vaguely icky fact that across the country millions of people are having sex.  This is the conundrum of the individual confronting masses about which he can’t help knowing more than he’d like to know.

The books tell us to talk dirty, dress sexy and do all manner of things to highlight our sex lives.  But the most obvious thing that these books do is to try to get you to buy more, well, things: books, TV shows, movies, gadgets, props, etc.

Franzen applauds the sexual revolution as anyone would, but as he quite rightly points out, we hardly live in a repressed society today (despite claims  from most of these authors we still live in a narrow sex shaming culture).  Just turn on the TV.  Franzen’s reaction though is a good one:

Sex in a time of ostensible repression at least had the benefit of carving out a space of privacy.  Lovers defined themselves in opposition to the official culture, which had the effect of making ever discovery personal.  There’s something profoundly boring about…a long life of vigorous, non-stop, “fulfilling” sex and the identical story in every household

Not to mention the truth that:

Just as every generation needs to feel that it has invented sex…we all deserve our own dry spells and our own revolutions

(and to revolutions I’ll add revelations).

The end of the article discusses The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers.  This book excerpts lots of sex scenes (including many from the author herself) and discusses and enumerates them.  And the only good he finds from this is that he imagines that the sex scenes are removed from their original novels (since as a rule most sex scenes suck).

He cites as an example the then recent Nick Hornby book High Fidelity, which he describes as flawed but beguiling.  Anyhow, he feels great affinity for and with Hornby because, when the inevitable sex scene approaches, Hornby writes “I’m not going into all that other stuff, the who-did-what-to-whom stuff.”  (And knowing Hornby’s writing as I do, this was not an exception to the rule.)  I don’t really have an opinion of sex scenes in books, but I’ve read so many times that people are really averse to them that I feel like I’ll be very aware of the next one I read.

I really enjoyed this piece.  I empathized and laughed quite a lot.  Oh, and hey, Nick Hornby has a new CD recorded with Ben Folds.