SOUNDTRACK : BLACK MOUNTAIN-Wilderness Heart (2010).
As the Tea Party showed, it’s never too late to pay tribute to Led Zeppelin. Of course in 2010, it seems really uncool. So, why not go whole hog? The opener, “The Hair Song” sounds uncannily like Led Zeppelin, from chord structure to guitar sound. And then just wait until after a verse or two and you get the guitar solo which comes straight from a Led Zep song. And, amusingly enough, the duet vocals of Stephen McBean and Amber Webber combine to sound an awful lot like Robert Plant.
It may not be fair to compare them to their forebears, but they seem so intent upon referencing them. “Old Fangs” sounds a ton like Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” (at least they’re fellow Canadians). But the wonderfully 70’s-style sound of the keyboards raise the track above any mere copycat.
“Radiant Hearts” is a gorgeous acoustic ballad where you can really appreciate the split vocals of McBean and Webber (and which should make you go back to the first two songs to really listen to how great they sound together. This is that rare ballad that doesn’t feel like a kind of sell out track.
“Rollercoaster” returns to the 70’s-lovin’ with a monster riff (and a solo) that Tony Iommi would be proud of. But rather than simply bludgeoning us, the riff stops in its tracks and then slowly builds itself back up. “Let Spirits Ride” moves out of the 70s and sounds a bit like a Dio riff circa 1983. But there’s some cool psychedelic vocal processing on the bridge (and a massive organ solo) to really mess with your retro time frame.
“Buried by the Blues” is followed by “The Way to Gone.” They’re both folkie songs (although “Gone” features a re harder edge). After the heaviness of the first half of the album , these tracks seem like a bit of surprise but they match the album’s retro feel very nicely. “The Space of Your Mind” reminds me in many ways of Moxy Fruvous’ “The Drinking Song” (you won’t see that reference too much to this album). Until the chorus comes in, when it turns into something else entirely.
But it’s not all mellow for the end. The title track has some heavy riffage (and great vocals by Webber–she reminds me of some of the guest vocalists on The Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love, although she really sounds like any number of great 70s rock vocalists). I love the way the track ends. The disc ends with “Sadie” another folk song (which makes the album half delicate folk tracks and half heavy rockers). It’s a fine song, but the album is kind of ballad heavy by the end, and the teasing drums and guitars just never bring forth the climax I was looking for.
Despite the obvious homages to classic rock bands, (if you can get past that, the album actually sounds fresh (or maybe preserved is a better word) and strangely original. Like the preposterous cover, the album is preposterous–over the top and crazy. Yet unlike the cover, the pieces all work together to form a compelling picture. Obviously it helps if you like classic rock, but there’s nothing wrong with good classic rock, now is there.
[READ: February 14, 2011] Literary Lapses
Despite the cover picture above, I actually downloaded this book from Google Books (and the cover of that one was boring).
So, obviously, reading the biography of Stephen Leacock made me want to read some of his humorous fiction. True, I also wanted to read Mordecai Richler, but his books are much longer and I wanted this done by the end of February!
So, according to Margaret MacMillan, it is this book, specifically the first story, “My Financial Career,” that solidified Leacock’s reputation as a humorist. And I can totally understand what she means (without having read the other books, of course). “My Financial Career” is indicative of the others stories: not laugh-out-loud funny, but clever, kind of silly and very smile-inducing. The gist is that the narrator is very nervous about going into a bank with his large amount of cash ($56!). He asks to speak to the manager who thinks he’s Very Important and then proceeds to embarrass himself further. And further. It’s quite amusing.
“A Christmas Letter” is one of my favorite in the book. It’s a very snarky look at a friend’s Christmas Party, with a great punchline. And stories like “How to Make a Million Dollars” or “How to be a Doctor” are wonderfully amusing tales in which the narrator mocks the wealthy and “professionals.”
There are 42 stories in this book, so there’s bound to be a few clunkers. Some were mildly amusing, some were mere trifles, and some are crazily out of date for a 2011 audience. This book turned 100 years old last year. (Neat).
And yet many of the stories despite their age, hold up very well. “The New Food” makes jokes about food coming in pill form (something Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry mined for gold 40-some years later). And his punchline is unexpected and very funny. “A New Pathology” makes a very funny extended joke about men’s clothes having medical ailments: Contractio Pantalune, or Shortening of the Legs of the Trousers; Porriggia, an affliction caused by repeated spilling of porridge (66).
“The Force of Statistics” was a very funny piece about two men arguing with each other about statistics but not having any of the details whatsoever:
“Did you know that every ton of coal burnt in an engine will drag a train of cars as long as…I forget the exact length, bu say a train f cars of such and such a length, and weighing, say so much…from…from…hum! for the moment the exact distance escapes me…drag it from…”
“From here to the moon,” suggested the other.
“Ah, very likely; yes, from here to the moon. Wonderful isn’t it?” (75).
This is funny enough, but the punchline, which comes out of nowhere, was really, really funny.
“Men Who Shaved Me” is, like many of the other occupational pieces, a mockery of barbers. How the will scald you and climb on top of you to get a really close shave. But mostly how they know more about sports than anything else. “On Collecting Things” is an amusingly truthful look at the futility of collecting anything. And “Saloonio” is a completely over the top piece about a man convinced that there is a character in the Merchant of Venice called Saloonio and the lengths he will go to show how important that character is to the story.
“Borrowing a Match” is a funny slice of life that again goes over the top about trying to find a match in your many packets. And “Self -Made Men” is another piece that mocks the rich (this actually is a kind of antecedent to the Monty Python skit “Four Yorkshiremen.” [1] The final story “A, B, and C” takes as its conceit that in math word problems, A, B, and C are actual people. He gives biographies of each letter and explains how exhausted they must be from all the digging, train pulling, swimming, etc. Especially since A does twice as much as B and four times as much as C. My favorite joke in this story and the one that made me laugh loudest in the book came in this story:
[A] has been known to walk forty-eight hours at a stretch, and to pump ninety-six. His life is arduous and full of peril. A mistake in the working of a sum may keep him digging a fortnight without sleep. A repeating decimal in an answer might kill him (240).
There is one semi-serious piece in the book. “Number Fifty-Six” is the longest story; it’s about a Chinese launderer who builds lives for his customers based on the clothes they bring in. It’s a nice story but a little sad.
The weirdest thing about the book s that Leacock, a Canadian and professor at McGill University in Montreal, writes almost exclusively about things in the U.S. The coin collecting is about U.S. coins. The trains in the various essays are driving in the States. I’m not sure if it was because this book was published there or what, but it seems just a wee bit odd. And I wonder if Canadians were put out by this.
Overall, the stories are very short and (in my version) the pages are tiny, so I really flew through the book. I never really laughed out loud at the stories but I did enjoy sharing a number of them with Sarah. And copying them out here made me laugh a little more at each one. Well done, Mr Leacock. I wonder if your other books are of equally good quality. (Many of them are available for free download as well: Nonsense Novels, Sunshine Sketches).
—
[1] Technically, this skit is not a Monty Python skit. It originated on the “At Last the 1948 Show” but two of the four men in the original skit are indeed from Python. They also recorded it for themselves on Live at the Hollywood Bowl.
Table of Contents (with links to free online copies)
- LITERARY LAPSES
- My Financial Career
- Lord Oxhead’s Secret
- Boarding-House Geometry
- The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones
- A Christmas Letter
- How to Make a Million Dollars
- How to Live to be 200
- How to Avoid Getting Married
- How to be a Doctor
- The New Food
- A New Pathology
- The Poet Answered
- The Force of Statistics
- Men Who have Shaved Me
- Getting the Thread of It
- Telling His Faults
- Winter Pastimes
- Number Fifty-Six
- Aristocratic Education
- The Conjurer’s Revenge
- Hints to Travellers
- A Manual of Education
- Hoodoo McFiggin’s Christmas
- The Life of John Smith
- On Collecting Things
- Society Chat-Chat
- Insurance up to Date
- Borrowing a Match
- A Lesson in Fiction
- Helping the Armenians
- A Study in Still Life.—The Country Hotel
- An Experiment With Policeman Hogan
- The Passing of the Poet
- Self-made Men
- A Model Dialogue
- Back to the Bush
- Reflections on Riding
- Saloonio
- Half-hours with the Poets
- PART I
- PART II
- PART III
- A, B, and C
- Acknowledgments
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