I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BROKEN BELLS-Broken Bells (2010).

When I first played this disc I was really disappointed by it.  I’ve grown to expect crazy magic from Danger Mouse, and I assumed that this collaboration with James Mercer of The Shins would be crazy awesome.  But it seemed very mellow to me.  Mellow in a way that just kind of sat there.  So I put it aside for a while.

Then I listened to it again a little later and I found that I really liked it this time.  In fact, it rapidly grew into one of my favorite releases of 2010.

The disc is a wonderfully paced mixture of acoustic guitars, interesting keyboard sounds and, often, downright bizarre electronic choices (subtle, yet bizarre).  The weird sounds that open the disc, a kind of backwards keyboard, are disorienting but also very catchy.  And the song itself is instantly familiar.  It’s followed by “Vaporize” a simple acoustic number that bursts out with some great organ and (very) distorted drums.  It also features a fascinating horn solo!

“Your Head is on Fire” settles things down a bit with a mellow track which, after some cool introduction, sounds like a  pretty typical sounding Shins track (ie, very nice indeed–and more on this in a moment).

“The Ghost Inside” feels like a ubiquitous single.  I’m not sure if it is or if it’s just so catchy (with dancey bits and hand claps and a great falsetto) that it should be everywhere.  “Sailing to Nowhere” reminds me, I think, of Air.  And the great weird drums/cymbals that punctuate each verse are weird and cool.

One of the best songs is “Mongrel Heart” it opens with a western-inspired sound, but quickly shifts to a quiet verse.  The bridge picks up the electronics to add a sinister air (and all of this is accompanied by nice backing vocals, too).  But it’s the mid section of the song that’s really a surprise: it suddenly breaks into a Western movie soundtrack (ala Morricone) with a lone trumpet playing a melancholy solo.  And this surprise is, paradoxically, somewhat typical of the disc: lots of songs have quirky surprises in them, which is pretty cool.

Having said all this, there are a few tracks where it feels like the two aren’t so much collaborating as just playing with each other.  And that may have been my initial disappointment.  I was expecting a great work from a combined powerhouse, and I think what we get is two artists writing great stuff while seemingly respecting each other too much to step on each others toes.

There is another Broken Bells disc in the works.  And I have to assume that they’ll feel more comfortable with each other and simply knock our socks off next time.  But in the meantime we have this really wonderful disc to enjoy.

[READ: October 21, 2010] The Broom of the System

It dawned on me sometime last summer that I had never read DFW’s first novel.  I bought it not long after reading Infinite Jest and then for some reason, never read it.  And by around this time I had a not very convincing reason for not reading it.  DFW seemed to dismiss his “earlier work” as not very good.  I now assume that he’s referring to his pre-Broom writings, but I was a little nervous that maybe this book was just not very good.

Well I need not have worried.

It’s hard not to talk about this book in the context of his other books, but I’m going to try.  Broom is set in the (then) future of 1990.  But the past of the book is not the same past that we inhabited.  While the world that we know is not radically different, there is one huge difference in the United States: the Great Ohio Desert.  The scene in which the desert comes about (in 1972) is one of the many outstanding set pieces of the book, so I’ll refrain from revealing the details of it.  Suffice it to say that the desert is important for many reasons in the book, and its origin is fascinating and rather funny.

But that is in no way the focus of the book.  The book opens in 1981 at a women’s college.  Lenore Beadsman is visiting her older sister who attends the college.  Lenore seems somewhat awkward, but she starts loosening up around the other women in the dorm room.  While the women decide if they should go to the mixer downstairs, there’s a knock on the door.  Two men from the nearby college have come seeking women (and another type of conquest).   And this incident, which grows very tense, shapes Lenore in many ways.

The book then jumps to the “present” where Lenore is a receptionist at a company within a company.   Bombardini owns the smaller company Frequent & Vigorous for which Lenore works.  (Norman Bombardini is also a character in the book who is absurdly and metaphorically large all at once).  Lenore is dating Rick Vigorous, the Vigorous of Frequent & Vigorous.  The phone lines are corrupted in the building and that they are fielding calls for several of the (amusingly named) businesses in the Cleveland area.

Rick’s real passion is literature, and he wishes to publish a fantastic literary journal.  He receives unsolicited short stories all the time, and as part of their relationship, Lenore asks Rick to read these stories to her (Rick dismisses most of the stories as an indictment of the state of mind of contemporary college students since they all seem so over the top in their violence).  For the most part he summarizes them to Lenore, but he does so in great detail.  These stories tend to comment on the main story itself in often less than obvious ways.  At the same time, Rick himself is writing a short story and this impacts the story quite profoundly.

Lenore and Rick are also seeking the professional counsel of Dr Jay, a psychiatrist who is obsessed with hygiene, (he basically convinces Lenore to bathe seven or eight times a day–this is long before Seinfeld made “germophobe” a household version of Mysophobia).  Dr Jay is extremely unprofessional in many ways, not the least of which is that he tells Rick everything that Lenore says during her sessions (Rick is extremely insecure about his relationship with Lenore).

While all of this is going on, we can’t forget the plot that is actually moving the book forward: Lenore’s great-grandmother, who is also named Lenore, is in a nursing home.  Although to be specific, she is no longer in the nursing home as she and several other residents have slipped out during the night, whereabouts unknown.  Lenore contacts the facility’s owner, Mr Bloemker, who speaks in very grandiloquent manner, a manner which Lenore doesn’t understand at all.  (And we get very funny sequences where Bloemker uses very big words only to have Lenore not understand him and force him to speak like a normal person).

But Lenore is in a bind about Lenore, because she can’t tell her father that Lenore is missing.  Her father, you see, is Stonecipher Beadsman, owner of that disgusting baby food Stonecipheco, which runs second only to Gerber in industry saturation.  Both Stonecipheco and Gerber are trying to put additives in their baby food to make babies smarter faster.  And if the new Stonecipheco additive goes out to the public, well just watch out!

Lenore wants nothing to do with her father’s money or company (which is why she works as a receptionist.  And yet, no matter how much she tries to escape, she can’t literally escape because her father has literally designed the town that they live in (an aerial view shows that the town in is the shape of Jayne Mansfield’s face).

This is all just a bare bones description of the story.  I’ve left out so many little details and even massive sub plots (like her suddenly-speaking cockatiel Vlad the Impaler…this subplot is hilarious, not least of which is because Vlad mostly speaks the vulgar phrases that he hears Lenore’s roommate shouting to her lover)*, or the outrageous names of some characters: Judith Prietht, Biff Diggerence, Wanda Peahen, Wang-Dang Lang.

* One of the eulogies shows that David bird-sat for someone.  And evidently Vlad the Impaler appeared in the book as something of a tribute to that person.

I’ve even left out the rest of Lenore’s extended family, like her brother Stoney who is also trying to escape from his father’s shadow by renouncing his real name Stonecipher for his on campus name: Antichrist.  He spends most of his time talking to his prosthetic leg (and giving everyone super in-depth answers to philosophy exams).  And I’ve barely mentioned her roommate and confidant, Candy Mandible, who is pretty much the voice of reason in the book (when it comes to Lenore, although not so much for her own life).

The story is very funny throughout.  I particularly enjoyed the trope that he employed from time to time by having the narrator end a paragraph by saying that Lenore would feel a certain way and then having the next paragraph open with Lenore stating that she feels a certain away(something that would get tiring if he used it a lot but which in small doses always makes me laugh) [And if I can ever find an example, I’ll post it].  Let’s not forget the “Hi Bob” drinking game [Sarah and I have been watching The Bob Newhart Show recently and MAN that is a killer game] and the Gilligan’s Isle themed bar, where the bartender makes an egregiously clumsy mistake once an hour (Gilligan!).

Yet for all of the silliness, like the switchboard picking up calls for Bambi’s Den of Discipline and Lenore’s compact car that’s made by Mattel, there is also great depth in the story.  Lenore,’s great-grandmother was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and she carries around a copy of Philosophical Investigations with her at all times.  This knowledge leads Lenore and Antichrist to a have a deep conversation about a doodle that Lenore left them as a clue.

And then there’s the whole conceit of coincidence and connection.  All of the plot threads pay off in some way or another.  And many of them come across as crazy coincidences.  But the characters are also aware of how crazy the coincidences are (which obviates cringe worthiness).  But also, the coincidences can often be explained away as more than coincidence.

The writing is really stellar, with various texts interspersed throughout (transcripts from meetings, psychiatric sessions, excerpts of short stories, and of course, the straight ahead narrative).  DFW even seems to create neologisms, including this one: when Lenore is sleeping and people address her, her reply is “fnoof.”

I enjoyed this story so much I was actually mad at myself for not reading it sooner.  But I was also happy for me that I was able to read this story without any foreknowledge of what was going to happen in it.  And the thing that impressed me most was how quickly I read the book.  Not because I read fast but because it was such an easy, well-written read, it was a complete pleasure to finish it.

And here’s where I have to bring up Infinite Jest.  Like IJ, this story ends without a proper conclusion (even moreso).  In IJ, you can go back to the beginning of the book and try to puzzle things together.  In this book, the puzzle pieces seems slightly more obvious, yet potentially more difficult to piece together.

I found the bulk of the final section of the book to be somewhat confusing (and I believe intentionally so).  The perspective comes from a different character than we’ve seen for most of the book.  And while it seems pretty clear that what is revealed is in fact true, there is enough questioning to really make you wonder just exactly what the hell has happened.

But with DFW, the end is more or less besides the point, it’s all about the journey.  And these characters, who are full of neuroses and are (surprise) trying so desperately to communicate with each other are compelling and fascinating.  And of course, DFW’s attention to detail was in evidence even then.  His perfect encapsulation of dialogue and his eye for including all manner of things (and making them all interesting) was sharp then as well.

If you haven’t read IJ, this is a great introduction to his style (without all those footnotes and really long passages), and if you have read IJ but have been putting off reading Broom, stop waiting and start reading!

One comment on the cover of the book: There have been many covers for it over the years, but man I do not get the one at the top of the post (the cover of my copy) at all.