I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SUPERCHUNK Hello Hawk (1999).

Hello Hawk is another of my favorite Superchunk songs (and it’s vastly different from “Hyper Enough”).  It opens with some really interesting guitar noodling.  And then after a bridge that promises a noisy chorus, the chorus backs down into another gentle section (followed by the loud and heavy post chorus…a neat trick).  This song is also laden with strings (!).  And it’s catchy as heck.

The second song, “Sexy Ankles” sounds (recording style-wise) like early 60s rock and roll.  It’s quite odd for Superchunk, although it rocks nicely at the end.

The final three tracks are acoustic version of songs from the Come Pick Me Up album.  The paradox: as the original songs grow less heavy and rocking, these acoustic versions become less dramatic as interpretations of them.  And yet, since the originals are growing more complex, these acoustic versions sound even better than previous acoustic versions of their older songs.

[READ: October 10, 2010] “Party of One”

Antonya Nelson is another of the 1999 New Yorker 20 Under 40 writers.  I’d never heard of her before seeing this story, but I enjoyed it enough to want to check out more of her stuff.  This is the story of a broken love affair.  And yet it has so many different angles, and so many wonderful observations (and disarming frankness), that it struck me as a wonderfully original and enjoyable story.  Even the way she used the title was clever.

First the breakup.  It is not the main character who is breaking up, but rather her sister.  The main character is meeting her sister’s lover, who is married.   He is getting cold feet and her sister is despondent.  What is wonderfully twisted about the story is that the sister has a had a previous affair with a married man and when that affair ended, she tried to kill herself.  I hate to reveal this tasty piece of information, but it really highlights the interesting angles of this story–the affair was with her the narrator’s husband.  [Woah].

The narrator found out (in a wonderfully observant way) and punished her husband (in a wonderfully delicious way), although she never let her sister know that she knew.  In fact, when her sister tried to kill herself it was she who took care of her, and had the attention deflected from herself.  But what I liked most about the story was the great lines.  Like: “She thought what she always thought when she shook a man’s hand: the last thing that hand had gripped, an in just this way, was his own dick at a urinal”  I’ve never heard that observation before and it’s great (and will make me thing twice every time I shake someone’s hand).

But the really shocking thing about the story is the amazing callousness of the married man.  His eleven and a half month old daughter at home–and what she has to do with his wanting to break up the affair (!); his telling the narrator about what he loved about her sister in bed.  It was really shocking, and perhaps more shocking was the narrator’s reaction.

The end of the story was interesting.  I don’t think she could have neatly wrapped up the story as exotically exciting as the story, but she pulled out an interesting angle that made the story believable and dark without being over the top.

Highly recommended.