I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG-IRM (2009).

Charlotte Gainsbourg is Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter.  Segre is, of course, known for his risqué songs–although Charlotte doesn’t fall into that same camp.

This is her third album.  Her first was released when she was 13.  The second was recorded with the band Air.  This album was written by and recorded with Beck.  And it’s a fantastic forum for her wonderfully complex voice and also just a great album of varying styles and textures.

IRM is the French abbreviation for MRI (she had a life threatening accident and was subject to many MRI’s). In fact, track two, called “IRM” is an electronic workout with sounds not unlike what you might hear in an MRI.  But the album is very diverse, from whispering vocals to soaring altos.  She has some scary/creepy songs as well as some sultry tracks.  Gainsbourg is also an actress and I like to think that her skills in film have allowed her to inhabit so many characters in these songs.

“Le Chat Du Café Des Artistes” (written by Jean-Pierre Ferland) is the only cover on the disc, and man is it great.   Whether it’s the French lyrics, which add a cool Stereolab-ish feel to the proceedings or the outstanding keyboards which are creepy and alluring at the same time, I don’t know, but this song alone makes the disc worthwhile.

Luckily there’s a lot more great songs here, too.  “Heaven Can Wait” is a duet with Beck (although really, Beck takes the lead).  It sounds like a great Beck track with a stomping acoustic guitar feel.

“Me and Jane Doe” follows with a sound like it belongs on the Juno soundtrack.  It gives Gainsbourg a great opportunity to show of her vocal tricks, since she sings with a flatly American accent.  “Vanities” is a beautiful string-filled track which emphasizes Gainsborugh’s voice (and has a kind of Bjorkian symphonic sound to it().

“Trick Pony” is a heavy electronic dance track, bringing an amazing sonic change to the proceedings of the disc.  And “Greenwich Mean Time” is a nasty sounding song where Gainsbourg is not afraid a to sneer at the listener.

The disc ends with “Dandelion,” a kind of slow blues, “Voyage,” a tribal track  (sung in French) and “La Collectionneuse,” which is not sung in French, but which is a piano based song that kind of creeps along on the edge of sinister.  The end of the song has spoken French words at the end and it sounds not unlike an early Sinéad O’Connor song

It’s rare that you hear an album full of so much diversity which actually holds together so well.  Gainsbourg doesn’t have an amazing voice or a voice that makes you go “wow,” but what she has is a really good voice that she can manipulate to convey a lot of styles, and I think that may be more impressive than an eight-octave range.

[READ: November 4, 2010] “Lucy Hardin’s Missing Period”

It’s hard to talk about this story as a story because of the gimmick that is attached to it.  This is a choose your own adventure story, albeit for adults.  In the magazine itself, there are two paragraphs.  You have to continue the story online here.  The technology involved is superb (you can save your story so that when you come back you can pick up where you left off) and each time you click to go to a new section, it fills in right after the section where you were reading so that the finished story looks like a complete (printable) story.

I tried two different stories and it became obvious that there are hundreds of story segments to choose from.  I’m rather amazed at the author’s ability to create what appears to be so many different stories parts out of these few characters (although I suppose realistically there can only be a half a dozen or so outcomes, no?).  And yet for all of that, I didn’t find the story all that interesting.

Unlike kids’ choose your own adventure books where exciting things happen, this is a pretty sedate affair.  When the story opens, Lucy awakens in bed with her lover.  She observes his wilted penis and realizes that she hasn’t had her period in a week.  From there you have a few choices that crop up (depending on your story line).  In the two I read, she either goes to her real job, meets her mother, hangs out with a friend or goes to work at an illegal casino dealing cards.

In both stories she worries that she might be pregnant, although in one of them she really obsesses over it.

I don’t know if it was the weirdness of clicking through options and having to “think” about what I wanted to do (although how much time could I have spent choosing between “BACK DOWN INTO THE DEEPEST SLEEP EVER | RISE TO GREET THE GLORIOUS NEW DAY”?), but I never felt engaged with the story.  And just didn’t really care all that much about Lucy.

It seems like in order to make these scenarios applicable to multiple readings (I wonder if different sections are repeated in different storylines.  I have to assume so, since there must be some sections that lead to the same place) the drama is kind of flattened out.  In one story arc a bizarre accident happens in the middle of the street which I found interesting and exciting.  But the scene ended so quickly that I didn’t feel any resonance with it.  I would have liked to have gotten into her head more, but that would have required a narrative rather than reader choices.

I applaud the effort, but unless you have an action-packed story where characters don’t really matter, I think that this choose your own type of story just doesn’t satisfy.

I recently wrote about a Jonathan Franzen article:

[Franzen’s] argument that the reader does not want to be released from the dominance of the author is a convincing one (and one I find true). The whole conceit of the choose your own adventure, while a fun diversion, just seems silly.  We read because we want the author’s authority.  If I wanted to get away from the author I’d write my own book.

And I see that, yes, I agree with myself.

For ease of searching, I include: Sinead O’Connor